Re: [xmca] The Ubiquity of Unicorns: conversation

Peter, it is very interesting to me to discuss something I
know nothing about. How else can we subject our fundamentals
to test?

Firstly, Peter, I think it is incoherent for you to talk of
"conversation" as an "irreducible functional unit."
"Conversation" is the whole animal not the cell. And in any
case, it's not actually a conversation, though you might
conceive of it as a limit case of a conversation if you
wanted to. But you could also conceptualise what is going on
as a performance, and a performance requires a script,
scenes and stage directions; it *can* have an audience but
doesn't have to have an audience (addressee).

Also, I don't think being a long monologue is any bar to
being an utterance. Luther's 95 theses was an utterance in
my reading, as was the Gettysburg Address. They can be
broken down, but if they are, they cease to be an utterance
and cannot be understood in that way as "a move".

Question: is private speech always associated with practical
actions? If so, aren't these actions part of your unit of
analysis?

Andy

Peter Feigenbaum wrote:
> So we must approach the problem from both a practical and a conceptual
> perspective, and find a way to make them coincide. For Bakhtin, utterance
> unit boundaries can be concretely identified by turn-taking. For Vygotsky,
> word meaning is the irreducible unit of analysis, beneath which the
> functional integration of word and meaning ceases to exist.
> If conversation is, indeed,
> that irreducible functional unit, then what is the smallest concrete form
> conversation can take? It cannot be defined as a turn at talk, for some
> turns can be quite extensive, such as a monologue consisting of multiple
> sentences.
> But if an individual utterance is defined in terms of a single word (at
> minimum)
> or a single sentence (at maximum), and these linguistic structures are
> shown to have the functional properties of conversation (i.e., they participate
> in an initiation-response structure with other utterance units or practical
> activity),
> then this unit would meet both the practical and conceptual criteria we
> have been discussing.
>
> Of course, this does not address all of the problems associated with the
> analysis of private speech utterances, for there is still the knotty
> problem of
> *who is conversing with whom*! But that moves the problem down a different
> path, which is a whole other topic.

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Tue Nov 3 17:30:56 2009