[Xmca-l] Re: The Social and the Semiotic

[Andy Blunden]

The inclusion of "historical" is quite loaded, James, 
marking the Soviet heritage of CHAT, and rejected by those 
who regard the inclusion of "historical" as a modern 
arrogance based on notions of social progress. Personally, I 
like "historical" while I reject the notion of cultural 
totalities which can be ordered unproblematically, whether 
chronologically or otherwise.

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://home.mira.net/~andy
http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making 

On 26/06/2017 6:19 PM, James Ma wrote:
> Hello David, I have an applied linguistics background too. My first
> acquaintance with the term "sociocultural" was in the work of H Stern who
> described sociocultural factors in language learning and teaching. I do
> feel a bit strange that "sociocultural" appears to be interchangeable
> with "cultural-historical" when people talk about Vygotsky and his
> followers.
>
> James
>
>
> *_________________________________________________________*
>
> *James Ma*  *https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa
> <https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa>*
>
>
>
> On 25 June 2017 at 23:09, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A few years ago there was a minor theoretical kerfuffle at the
>> International Congress of Systemic Functional Linguistics in Vancouver.
>> Systemic Functional Linguists tend to be gentle, ruminant creatures, who
>> frown on intellectual prize fighting (building "vertical" intellectual
>> structures, like building chemistry on physics and biology on chemistry, is
>> the goal rather than building "horizontal" knowledge structures like
>> competing fields of sociology, psychology, cognitive science). But they
>> also prize delicacy and like to make fine distinctions that account
>> exhaustively for data (e.g. vocabulary is treated as nothing but most
>> delicate grammar, and grammar as most general forms of vocabulary, hence
>> the use of "words" for the latter and "wording" for the former).
>>
>> Accounting exhaustively for language as a social-semiotic phenomenon
>> usually involves a delicate distinction between the social and the
>> semiotic, something like the distinction between physics and chemistry on
>> the one hand and biology on the other. But Jim Martin argued that semiotic
>> activity does not occur independent of social activity and vice versa, so,
>> by Occam's razor, the terms are redundant and the hyphen superfluous.
>> Surely the distinction between social behavior and meaningful behavior is
>> nothing like the distinction between animate and inanimate, sentient and
>> non-sentient, carbon-based self-replicating matter and inorganic compounds.
>>
>> Yesterday, we went whale watching out of Sydney Harbour. The Southwest
>> Pacitic humpback community, which numbers between thirty and forty
>> thousand, spends the summer (that is, your winter) months in Antarctica
>> feeding on krill and small fish; they have an ingenious method of feeding
>> called bubble-netting which takes about 27 years for a whale to learn. It's
>> a lot like Leontiev's description of a primitive hunt: twelve whales work
>> together to emit a circle of small bubbles encircling the prey, and
>> gradually shaping it into a tall cylinder about thirty metres in diameter.
>> When the krill kill is shaped in this way, the dinner table is set. The
>> whales just sluice up and down through the cylinder with their baleen
>> plates agape, raking in thousands of fish and/or tiny crustaceans with each
>> pass.
>>
>> But then they embark on the road trip which brings them past Sydney Harbour
>> and to points further north. The migration lasts many months, during which
>> the whales do not eat at all. Even mothers, who have to produce about 40
>> litres of whale milk daily, fast the whole six months. I noticed that the
>> whales we saw were always in groups of two or three and I wondered to the
>> marine biologist on board if whales worked in small communities in
>> Antarctica but then went on holidays in nuclear families. She pointed out
>> that these dyads and triads were all the same size and gender. "They're
>> just mates," she said.
>>
>> She also said that the study of whale songs is being "de-anthropmorphized":
>> it was previously believed that since they vary much like languages, with
>> regional dialects and some "multilingualism", they must have an economic
>> function in feeding, a sexual function in mating, or a political function
>> in establishing male dominance (no easy feat, because females are
>> polyandrous and rather larger than males). None of this is the case: whales
>> sing when they aren't feeding, when they aren't mating, and when they
>> aren't fighting: they just like to sing. And in fact the four-tone songs
>> vary more like pop-tunes than like regional dialects or functional
>> registers.
>>
>> Now, when the kerfuffle broke out between Halliday and Martin in Vancouver,
>> Halliday pointed to ants as a species who were social but not semiotic
>> (there is no reason to believe that "meaning" as distinct from molecular
>> biology is at stake). You might think the Southwest Pacific humpback
>> community is a good counter example, since they clearly have both social
>> and semiotic activity. But it seems to me exactly the opposite: they are a
>> clear example that social activity is goal oriented in one way, and
>> semiotic activity is goal oriented in quite a different way. I have never
>> liked using the term socio-cultural to describe Vygotsky's theory (it is
>> the term generally used in my own field of applied linguistics) because I
>> thought it was redundant; now I am not so sure.
>>
>> --
>> David Kellogg
>> Macquarie University
>>
>> "The Great Globe and All Who It Inherit:
>> Narrative and Dialogue in Story-telling with
>> Vygotsky, Halliday, and Shakespeare"
>>
>> Free Chapters Downloadable at:
>>
>> https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/2096-the-great-
>> globe-and-all-who-it-inherit.pdf
>>
>> Recent Article: Thinking of feeling: Hasan, Vygotsky, and Some Ruminations
>> on the Development of Narrative in Korean Children
>>
>> Free E-print Downloadable at:
>>
>> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8Vaq4HpJMi55DzsAyFCf/full
>>
>