speech and writing

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sun, 12 May 96 23:31:32 EDT

Perhaps I can add a few useful personal observations for the
discussion of speech as more than spoken writing. I think it is
very important for our understanding of the mediating, indexical
and constitutive roles of language (and other semiotic tools) in
activities that include speech and/or writing (including
dialogic-interactive ones, not just productive ones) to follow
Dale Cyphert's efforts to characterize the 'what more' beyond the
traditional emphases of our culture on a spoken rhetoric whose
principles are essentially the same as written rhetoric.

I think there are two useful approaches here. One has been
pioneered by Halliday and other functional linguists in looking
at the typical and specialized sorts of differences in _grammar-
level_ patterns as between normally spoken vs. normally written
registers. This works particularly well where there are otherwise
substantial similarities in the registers (regarding topic,
field, activity, and social relationships). For academic
expository registers, these differences are somewhat narrowed by
the normative influence of written style on spoken forms, but
still follow Halliday's original 'tendencies' (see M.A.K.
Halliday, _Spoken and Written Language_ Oxford U Press 1989).

More random comparisons, as between say a conversation and a
novel, may not as reliably index the tendencies because of the
interaction of other register differences. Not all writing is
alike, nor all speech, so one must take care with generalizations
that contrast them as categories. It would be better to speak of
the dependence of discourse forms on medium, _ceteris paribus_,
than of global differences between such heterogeneous categories.
I'm sure this was Halliday's original intention, but people
sometimes overgeneralize and then note glaring exceptions. Of
particular importance is the historical divergence within our
written traditions between the grammatical tendencies of literary
writing, including many narratives, and those of academic
('analytic' 'expository') writing. These differences, of course
evolved somewhat differently even as between, say, the English
and French or German traditions. The more specific one gets, the
more useful it becomes, I think, to use genre rather than
register as the initial unit of analysis. But this is a delicate
matter of judgment and definitions.

The second approach is the one that Dale seems most interested
in, and it is much less well developed. It looks at the
differences in qualities of social interaction in particular
cases of speech vs writing genres (the formal talk vs the written
essay or article, say), and focusses on exploiting what the
medium allows in the former cases that it does not (or not nearly
as much) in the latter. This means, inevitably, a focus on those
aspects of speech that, because they are not as much shared with
writing, have tended to get excluded from the purview of
linguistics and from the modern definitions of 'language' as a
semiotic resource system. 'Voice/presence/kairos' is Dale's gloss
for these neglected aspects of speech and more general qualities
of the semiotics of social interaction in these activities.

One can look at these, I think, partly in terms of a formal
(typological) semiotics of 'non-linguistic' resources (gesture,
gross body movement/kinesics, paralinguistic systems like voice-
quality, voice-amplitude, etc.), plus topological semiotics which
parallel these and naturally shade off into the infra-semiotic
domain: what we tend to call 'styles' of gesturing, speaking,
projecting a 'presence', where the gesture or words may count as
the same typologically, but are somehow said/performed
differently enough to make another kind of difference in meaning.
Some of these styles are indexical of historical periods, schools
of acting, social class, 'personality types', etc. Some of them
(e.g. timing in interactional synchrony) are entirely below the
threshold of conscious awareness. Many lurk at this boundary and
contribute to our sense of the individuality or 'force' or
'attractiveness' of a speaking style, to its emotional appeal.
Our affective responses are here more in focus than our
typological construals. Apart from knowing what was said, we
respond affectively to how it was said; we feel its 'sincerity',
or the 'pain' in a voice, or the 'charisma' of a speaker.

My personal observations come from people's reactions on some
occasions to my own academic talks. Something happens sometimes,
usually I find with audiences of perhaps 15 to rather less than a
hundred, somewhere well along in the talk, when I tend to get
more 'emotionally intense', usually in a relatively low-key, non-
histrionic way, and the audience seems somehow correspondingly
more fully engaged. I don't think that they are necessarily more
in agreement with the content of what I am saying, but that they
are responding rather to some sense that I really mean to
communicate with them something I evidently feel to be of great
importance at some basic human level, something with 'moral
force'. In recent years I have let myself actually speak on such
occasions in the rhetoric of moral principles and values, since
such matters seem to be sadly neglected in academic discourse
generally. But this hyper-engagement phenomenon began happening
before my 'moral turn', and is only very loosely related to the
specific ideational content of what I'm saying.

What happens at these moments is a sort of violation of the norms
of academic discourse. It certainly works against distancing and
objectifying strategies of interaction. It invokes a feeling-
state different from the canonically 'cool' one of most academic
style. I do not use it, I hope, to substitute for good argument,
but to enhance the way we feel about what is being argued.

Many other speakers create similar effects with their audiences,
but more commonly among preachers and gifted politicians or
community organizers, I think, than among academics. The norms
there are more favorable to these effects. Obviously most good
actors can achieve these effects, too (always noting the
necessity of a joint-production with one's listeners). I think
they are more pronounced, or at least different in quality, from
anything that is produced in dialogue. This is a
characteristically monologue form (though it need not be, in my
case I think usually is not, monological in Bakhtin's sense). I
have no idea of its long term effects; it may be a sort of
temporary mesmerism, a low-key form of mass hysteria, whose
effects quickly pass. But I think some of its 'feel' lingers as a
memory association with the content of the ideas. Content and
feeling fuse, and the feeling tone here is different from that
cooler one we are more used to (much less from the boring one
that makes us wonder if the speaker really cares at all about the
topic, or us).

As I have attended to this phenomenon more, I have noticed some
more specific features. As a speaker I feel I am getting a much
more intense gaze and attentiveness, a communicative engagement
and feedback, from my listeners, as if we were in a kind of
'trance' together (remembering Milton Erickson), though I only
become conscious of this as I begin to come out of it. Call it
'strong rapport'. This certainly influences me as much as it must
the audience. I feel more 'committed' or 'responsible' to them
for giving voice to what this feeling of the moment seems to
require. It is not a time for dispassionateness, and any
insincerity or off-handedness would seem ugly. It is a time to
say what needs most to be said, to say things that matter. It is
not a time for trivial facts, well-known cliches, ho-hum, or so-
what?.

My speech slows. My voice grows quieter. I lean forward more. My
gaze really looks at members of the audience as individuals,
meeting theirs. I smile but not broadly, except at moments of
humor or irony (which are certainly allowed, as a sort of
punctuation of the general intensity). I feel that I am really
talking to people, more as I might in a face-to-face, one-to-few
situation, rather than lecturing at an anonymous and collective
group. I am sure there are some interactional synchrony effects
here. My voice quality changes in other, subtler ways, perhaps
more tense. My rhythms change, too, becoming more regular, with
both longer and shorter cadences; at moments there is heightened
intonation, almost 'mantric', and I have a tendency also to use
more poetic diction and to produce, often spontaneously, or from
a repertory renewed for the occasion, what sound like memorable
turns of phrase. (I don't usually remember them very long after;
some of them show up in my writing on other occasions.)

Academic communities have a modern tradition that is highly
suspicious of such rhetorical performances as I have been
describing. And I in turn find such suspicions themselves
suspect. Of course it is in my interest, having some talent for
these performances, for them to be regarded positively. But there
is here something larger at stake, and I think it is closely
related to Dale's thesis that some written rhetorics have tended
to colonize academic public speaking and exclude much of its
communicative potential from legitimacy and many of its resources
even from notice. This larger issue is the question whether and
in what ways academic, scientific, scholarly discourse should be
morally and politically 'neutral', should be 'objective' and
'unemotional'. I think this issue needs much more careful
examination. There are of course real dangers from demagoguery
and extreme bias; but there are also, I think, dangers from
alienation, irrelevance, moral insensitivity, and implicit
political support of the status quo.

If we ask, with Dale, what the means and functions of academic
speaking might be that go beyond the written rhetorical
tradition, then I think we are led beyond 'language', beyond
typological semiotics, and beyond scholarly 'objectivity' and
'neutrality'. To what? JAY.

-----------------

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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