Jay, Phil, Gordon, and others,
I'm enjoying this discussion about microgenesis and speech because of my
work in math and science classrooms. So it doesn't feel like a closed forum
to me at all.
Ellice Forman
--On Thursday, October 03, 2002 9:36 AM +0700 Phil Chappell
<phil_chappell@access.inet.co.th> wrote:r
> Jay,
>
> "...that SFL consider more dynamical models, i.e. ones in which
> linguistic meaning, in the sense of "texts" (spoken or written, singly
> or interactively with others), is made in real time"
>
> In my context of language education, many have taken the notion of genre
> as being stable text types - constituency representations of the stages
> of a text. This often results in frustrations at the classroom level due
> to an almost transmission style pedagogy being implemented. Learners'
> texts are compared with the model genre and debited according to their
> structural differences as well as their differences at the level of
> register. In terms of being able to assess and support language
> development (I am mainly interested in spoken texts), it seems to me that
> using genre as systems of dynamic social processes that are realised
> through language choices at the level of field, tenor and mode in real
> time allows a way in for the instructor and the learner to focus on how
> each move (or discourse unit, or meaning section as you called it) is
> working at the lexicogrammatical level to express desired meaning. As you
> say, "[how] the probabilities of next meanings-to-be-made
> changed as a function of the prior meanings-already-made..." This was my
> initial question to the group - can this logogenesis be likened to
> microgenesis, which I think I am now beginning to understand (though I'll
> need a lot more time to bring it together).
>
> Reading your ideas about the notion of topology of genre has helped me to
> reconcile the problem of using SFL in the above way. I have often had a
> problem with the way that SFL classifies grammatical units as either-or's
> (a problem that Jim Martin discusses when introducing your notion of
> topology complementing typology of genres). This has allowed me to view
> texts as more fluid and overlapping rather than simply types of social
> processes (this is probably not what you intended, but it works for me).
> It also seems to fit with Bakhtin's claim of the heterogeneity of speech
> genres and the lack of understanding of their linguistic characteristics.
>
> Thanks so much for the references, and apologies to all for turning this
> discussion forum into an SFL forum.
>
> Phil
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Jay Lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
> To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2002 8:33 AM
> Subject: Re: Logogenesis and Microgenesis
>
>
>
> I am gradually emerging from several weeks of "transitioning" to my new
> home, office, and position at the U of Michigan. A big change! ... but a
> very welcome one.
>
> Like Gordon, I am another person who lives around the intersection of
> AT/Vygotskyan perspectives and Halliday's social-functional linguistics.
>
> Notions of multiple timescales are not very well developed in Halliday's
> approach, or in SFL (systemic-functional linguistics, the formal name for
> it) generally. This is an area I am very interested in at the moment.
>
> Logogenesis is an idea of considerable interest, but not much developed in
> the theory. It is an attempt, partly in response to some questions and
> suggestions I made to Halliday and others in the 80s, that SFL consider
> more dynamical models, i.e. ones in which linguistic meaning, in the sense
> of "texts" (spoken or written, singly or interactively with others), is
> made in real time. We imagined a process in which after each meaning
> selection, or some group of such selections, say enough to determine or
> generate a phrase or clause, the probabilities of next meanings-to-be-made
> changed as a function of the prior meanings-already-made. Halliday
> developed this idea a bit as an extension of his model of system
> probabilities (the likelihood of various alternatives being selected, e.g.
> present tense vs. any other tense; active voice vs. passive voice, etc.,
> either in the language as such, or in some particular specialized register
> or subject area). These were conditional probabilities (depending on other
> "simultaneous" meaning choices), and he then added the idea of sequential
> or dynamic probabilities as I just described.
>
> About the same time I wrote a paper on dynamic textproduction that also
> developed the basic notion. The term logogenesis I think arose in later
> conversations Halliday had with his then student, Christian Matthiessen,
> around computer implementations of the idea. There was some awareness of
> the relations of semogenesis, an older idea in SFL (how new meaning
> possibilities evolve in the language), and logogenesis (how a text
> "evolves" or develops in conversational or compositional time), as on
> longer and shorter timescales. Both of these were seen as on shorter
> timescales than longterm language evolution (i.e. over centuries or
> millennia). Jim Martin I think has written a bit about these relations.
>
> I think the best exposition is in Halliday & Matthiessen, _Construing
> Experience through Meaning_, Continuum Press, 1999/2000. Here there is an
> explicit contrast of phylogenetic (evolutionary), ontogenetic
> (developmental), and logogenetic (textproduction) timescales, but not too
> much about how they actually interact, though there is one interesting
> section on this.
>
> My original paper is: Text Production and Dynamic Text Semantics." In E.
> Ventola, Ed. Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and Uses.
> [pp. 23-38]. Berlin: Mouton/deGruyter (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and
> Monographs 55). 1991.
>
> JAY.
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> Educational Studies
> University of Michigan
> 610 East University
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
> ---------------------------
>
Ellice Ann Forman
Department of Psychology in Education
University of Pittsburgh
5C01 WWPH
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
(412) 648-7022
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