[Xmca-l] Re: Saussure vs Peirce
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Sun Mar 17 17:27:49 PDT 2019
Martin, I get the point, but any complex process is made up
of units, many of them. That's the point of using analysis
by units. The excerpt you give is a trivial one. In general
you need /all/ the numerous utterances in a conversation to
understand an extended interaction. It is like Engestrom who
thinks when two activities interact, we have to have a new
"fourth generation" unit, i.e., two activity systems
interacting. But that is only because he took the activity
system as a /system /not a /unit /in the first place.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 18/03/2019 9:14 am, Martin Packer wrote:
> Seems to me, David, that the notion that the basic unit is
> the pair is precisely what helps us understand an exchange
> such as:
>
> A. How are you?
> B. Fine, thanks, and you?
> A. XXX
>
> One pair is constituted by “How are you” and “Fine,
> thanks,” while “and you?” is the first part of a projected
> second pair. This is why one might have the intuition that
> speaker B is doing more than one thing (though I’d suggest
> 2, not 3), and that something more is expected from
> speaker A.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
>> On Mar 17, 2019, at 4:17 PM, David Kellogg
>> <dkellogg60@gmail.com <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Well, Bakhtin is full of precisely the kind of sloppiness
>> that Andy is deploring, Helena. So for example Bakhtin
>> says that a whole novel can be considered as an
>> utterance. You take down the book and open it. The
>> novelist has something to say to you. He says it. And
>> then you close the book and you put it back on the shelf.
>>
>> That's all very well, and it's very useful as a way of
>> showing that literature is not some "state within a
>> state": it is also made of language stuff, by people who
>> have a historical existence and not just an afterlife.
>> But it doesn't help Andy (or me, or my wife who studies
>> these things full time) distinguish sub-units within the
>> novel which will help us understand how novels are
>> structured, how this structure has changed with their
>> function, and how the very functions have changed as
>> literature has evolved. And these WERE the problems which
>> Bakhtin set himself (e.g. in "Novel and Epic" and elsewhere).
>>
>> We see the same problem from the other end (micro-rather
>> than macroscopic) with the minimal pair (originally, in
>> the work of Sacks, "adjacency pair"). It's all very well
>> and it's very useful as a way of understanding how
>> conversations get structured as they go along, how people
>> know when its their turn to talk and how they know when
>> the rules have been broken. But it doesn't help us to
>> understand, for example, why we all feel that when you
>> say "How are you?" and somebody says "Fine, thanks, and
>> you?" there seem to be three utterances in the second
>> pair part, and the exchange as a whole doesn't seem
>> finished, even though if we are using turns as the
>> element (pair part) of the minimal pair, it really should be.
>>
>> Craig Brandist remarks that Bakhtin uses the term
>> "dialogue" in so many different ways that he has rendered
>> it meaningless. I think the same thing is true of the way
>> he uses "utterance".
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New Article;
>>
>> David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE: VYGOTSKY’S
>> ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’, THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT AND
>> ‘INGROWING’ IN THE WEEKEND STORIES OF KOREAN CHILDREN,
>> British Journal of Educational Studies, DOI:
>> 10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
>> <https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>
>>
>> Some e-prints available at:
>>
>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 1:47 AM Helena Worthen
>> <helenaworthen@gmail.com
>> <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I find it useful to think of an utterance as bounded
>> on two ends: on one, by the utterance to which it
>> responds, on the other, by the utterance that
>> responds to it. Thus you can discern utterances
>> within utterances. Minimally, a two -part exchange,
>> as Martin says; maximally, a whole stream of briefer
>> utterances bounded by their prompt and response.
>>
>> Helena Worthen
>> helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Mar 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, Martin Packer
>>> <mpacker@cantab.net <mailto:mpacker@cantab.net>> wrote:
>>>
>>> According to conversation analysts, the minimal unit
>>> in conversation is the adjacency pair: a two-part
>>> exchange in which the second utterance is
>>> functionally dependent on the first.
>>> Question-answer; greeting-greeting; request-reply,
>>> and so on. An utterance, then, is both a turn and a
>>> move within a conversation. An utterance is *not*
>>> “complete in itself” - it is a component in a larger
>>> organization: at least a pair, and usually a much
>>> longer sequence.
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Mar 16, 2019, at 3:11 AM, Andy Blunden
>>>> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I would have appreciated a definition of some kind
>>>> of what the writer actually means by "utterance."
>>>> In absence of that "the word, as a compressed
>>>> version of the utterance" is nonsense, or at least
>>>> a step backwards because it obliterates a concept.
>>>> Otherwise, I wouldn't mind saying that the two are
>>>> together the micro- and macro-units of dialogue (or
>>>> something having that meaning). The same as
>>>> Leontyev has two units of activity: action and
>>>> activity, and Marx has two units of political
>>>> economy: commodity and capital. To theorise a
>>>> complex process you always need two units.
>>>>
>>>> The rest of what you have cited reminds me of what
>>>> Constantin Stanislavskii said about the units of an
>>>> actor's performance:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/stanislavskii.pdf
>>>>
>>>> Andy
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> Andy Blunden
>>>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>>> On 16/03/2019 5:42 pm, Arturo Escandon wrote:
>>>>> Thanks for that conceptual jewel, mate.
>>>>>
>>>>> Let me bring here Akhutina to further show their
>>>>> complementariness:
>>>>>
>>>>> The minimal holistic unit of conversation is the
>>>>> utterance. An utterance, unlike a sentence, is
>>>>> complete in itself. The utterance always carries
>>>>> within it the marks and features of who is
>>>>> speaking to whom, for what reason and in what
>>>>> situation; it is polyphonic. An utterance develops
>>>>> from a motivation, “a volitional objective” and
>>>>> progresses through inner speech to external
>>>>> speech. The prime mover of the semantic
>>>>> progression (from the inner word that is
>>>>> comprehensible to me alone to the external speech
>>>>> that he, the listener, will understand) is the
>>>>> comparison of my subjective, evanescent sense,
>>>>> which I attribute to the given word, and its
>>>>> objective (constant for both me and my listener)
>>>>> meaning.Thus, the major building material for
>>>>> speech production is the living two-voice word.
>>>>> But polyphony is a feature of the utterance as
>>>>> expressed in the word; the word carrying personal
>>>>> sense is an abbreviation of the utterance. Thus,
>>>>> the utterance and the word, as a compressed
>>>>> version of the utterance, are the units of speech
>>>>> acts, communication, and consciousness.
>>>>>
>>>>> Best
>>>>>
>>>>> Arturo
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Sent from Gmail Mobile
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> /"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman
>>> or Dr. Lowie or discuss matters with Radcliffe-Brown
>>> or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my partner
>>> does not understand anything in the matter, and I
>>> end usually with the feeling that this also applies
>>> to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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