Prelude:
The gateway between lesley's ISP (bbn! - ha!) and the POP mail server is inoperable, leaving the latter inaccessible. Left alone to my thoughts, unable to read email today, turntaking turns to soliloquy as I can still send mail through my home ISP server. The situation is akin to talking in a room with a one way mirror, mocking with a unidirectional, if not perverse, communications ecology, what I wish to expand upon!
At 7:04 PM -0400 8/15/00, Bill Barowy wrote:
>Second, when the semiotic function circle is diagrammed, lets say for a microgenetic episode, each individual occupies a unique place in it, and differences in attention, and perception, and action, appear in the diagram. One person notices something another does not, not only because of what they "know" but also because of what position he or she occupies uniquely in the semiotic ecology. Completing the function circle, what one has seen, processed, and done affects what one sees, processes and does.
In 1972 (when Barowy was still an adolescent) Cicourel wrote:
"If we view a speaker-hearer's utterances as accounts that are situated, edited versions of information that is being processed, then fragments of utterances, pauses, ellipses, auditory and visual information not verbalized, can no longer be ignored but must be incorporated into the linguist's theories. The differentials in meaning emerge within the contingencies of an interaction setting where the ethnographic context, the biographies of the participants, and subtleties of voice intonation, gestures, and body posturing all contribute to the information that is continually being processed while utterances are being produced.
Cognitive Sociology, p103 (1974)
What Circourel is describing "visual information not verbalized... subtleties of voice intonation, gestures, and body posturing" is what one could re-present in a function circle diagram with distinct ExtrO semiotic pathways, and locates the indvidual creating these pathways uniquely in the semiotic ecology, as it does also the individual upon whom these emissions impinge. It's just half of the process, say, for two people in communication with each other, the other being the concurrant meaning-making and action-taking of the "recipient". The semiotic function circle doubles, if one choses to diagram mutual meaning making of the two. Circourel's "biographies" glosses the historical conditioning of the individuals that contribute to the IntrA processes with the doubled function circle interactions, and in part contributes to the differences in meaning constructed.
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College
29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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