The author of the chapter under review (Stone) offers this definition:
>> An utterance is said to be
>>proleptic when it sets forth, in the form of a presupposition,
>>information yet not shared by the participants of a communicative
>>exchange. Thus, when the speaker provides an utterance which presupposes
>>information not shared by the listener, the listener is challenged to
>>reconstruct such information on his/he r own, thus engaging in an active
>>search after meaning.=20
Prolepsis here refers to the nature of the utterance that requires=20
a _listener_ to "search after meaning"; it suggests that
the proleptic utterance requires intentionality on the
part of the _listener_.=20
It is common in processes of successful socialization/acculturation
for the more experienced member to treat the contributions of less
experienced members as legitimate contributions - as=20
if they were more informed by the relevant context or social practice=20
than they really are. In a response to the review posted on=20
another list, Paul Prior mentions caregivers' attributing meaning to
children's babbling and other examples (perhaps the whole response
deserves re-posting here) - the one I really like is:
"When students use technical terms of the discipline in their papers,=20
professors may draw on richer intertextual networks and read into and
respond to those terms as though they bear more meanning (and more
disciplinarity) than the students possess..."=20
In Paul's example, the students may well be deliberate in their use of
terminology, while the professor may or may not _intend_ to read more
meaning into the terms than the students "had in mind" when they used
them. Intentionality, though, is not what makes the socialization
process successful. What makes the process work is the=20
treating of relative newcomers as though they were full "(or fuller)"=20
participants. What accounts for that way of treating newcomers is what Paul
referred to as "more diffuse phenomena." =20
The author of the review (Jorge), on the other hand, wants to distinguish=20
scaffolding "from a dialogue in which the adult... makes unwarranted=20
assumptions about what the listener can or cannot do..."=20
and as an exception to a speaker's _intended_ prolepsis, refers=20
to students' frequent use of conversational "rules" (strategies?)that do not
conform to classroom/teacher expectations :
>> Ellice Forman and I have conducted discourse analysis of
>>classroom interactions over the past three years, and a rather steady
>>finding is that the students, rather than the teacher, are the ones who
>>generate more frequently utterances that, according to Stone=D5s
>>perspective, would be considered proleptic.=20
In both these examples, the contributions of the novice are at issue,
and in the first example, it's the teacher's imperfections as a
_listener_ that may get in the way of the student's learning.
Thinking this through informally, it's as if it's up to the listener,
who is the more experienced member of a community of practice, to
look for and attend to signs in the (less experienced) speaker's=20
utterances of a difference in orientation, and to respond to such signs
of difference as if they were fully legitimate contributions to the=20
making of meaning within the given community of practice -- because
they _are_ legitimate, although warranted by some other meaning-making=20
system than that presupposed by the expert. The more experienced member is
"forced" to take the perspective of the relative novice.=20
This is not to deny the importance of the inverse process - where the
novice is "forced" to take up the expert perspective, in order to make
sense of what is said.=20
There's more to say here, but that's all for now from me. - Judy
Judy Diamondstone
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Rutgers University
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Eternity is in love with the productions of time. -- Wm. Blake