Discourse, Misc

This paper presents a study into the Hindi-Urdu 'na' as a sentence-final particle. Although also used as a topic marker and negation, 'na' occurs sentence-finally across clause-types. In light of the data, we think the following hypothesis offers the best fit: 'na' signals the speaker’s belief that the content of na’s containing clause is a reasonable inference, given what’s common ground. Notably, in addition to other clause-types, we explore na's distribution in exclamations and exclamatives. We link our work to recent (...) research on the polar question particle 'kya' in Hindi-Urdu. (shrink)

We focus on a sui generis grounding move in Hindi-Urdu dialogue, namely 'voh hi na'. 'Voh' is third person pronoun and can function as a propositional anaphor in dialogue. 'Hi' and 'na' are two discourse particles in Hindi-Urdu. A dataset consisting of minimal pairs of dialogues is presented to get a better sense of the move. Using dynamic models of discourse structure, we propose a semantics for 'voh hi na' in terms of its update effects.

Speech act theorists tend to hold that the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by one interlocutor alone: either the speaker or the hearer. Yet experience tells us that the force of our utterances is not determined unilaterally. Rather, communication often feels collaborative. In this paper, I develop and defend a collaborative theory of illocutionary force, according to which the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by an agreement reached by the speaker and the hearer. This theory, which (...) builds upon linguistic and sociological work on adjacency pairs and conversational interaction, can accommodate the complexity of speaker intentions (which may be disjunctive, indeterminate, and/or inconsistent over time), and renders speech act theory more compatible with theories of common ground. (shrink)

Presuppositions are at the same time a crucial and almost neglected dimension of arguments and fallacies. Arguments involve different types of presuppositions, which can be used for manipulative purposes in distinct ways. However, what are presuppositions? What is their dialectical function? Why and how can they be dangerous? This paper intends to address these questions by developing the pragmatic approaches to presupposition from a dialectical perspective. The use of presuppositions will be analyzed in terms of presumptive conclusions concerning the interlocutor’s (...) acceptance of a proposition, which can be assessed as reasonable or unacceptable. Their dialectical function is described in terms of dark side commitments attributed to a collective "voice" representing what is commonly shared. For this reason, they count as attempts to include the presupposed contents into the hearer’s commitment store, which in some circumstances can reverse the burden of proof. The different manipulative strategies grounded on controversial presuppositions will be examined by showing the distinct roles that the latter play and the relationship between the degrees of presuppositional implicitness and the speaker’s burden of retraction. (shrink)

Generic generalisations like ‘Opioids are highly addictive’ are very useful in scientific communication, but they can often be interpreted in many different ways. Although this is not a problem when all interpretations provide the same answer to the question under discussion, a problem arises when a generic generalisation is used to answer a question other than that originally intended. In such cases, some interpretations of the generalisation might answer the question in a way that the original speaker would not endorse. (...) Rather than excising generic generalisations from scientific communication, I recommend that scientific communicators carefully consider the kinds of questions their words might be taken to answer and try to avoid phrasing that might be taken to provide unintended answers. (shrink)

Occlusion is most commonly presented as an aspect of certain genres: occluded genres. Here, occlusion is proposed as a property of the processes by which genres are taken up. While routine use of genres creates expectations around when the genre’s uptake is commonly occluded, such expected practice can be subverted by deliberate disclosure. Occlusion and disclosure in the process of genre uptake thus become argumentative and powerful moves in communicative interaction. In three case studies, I analyze processes of occlusion in (...) relationship to the genre of the letter to the university president. (shrink)

Literary studies are often seen as a discipline without method. Research articles in literature do not have method sections, nor do they list what type of evidence has been included in a particular project or by what procedures primary material was analyzed. Because of implicitness of questions of method and research design, writing in literary studies is difficult to teach and often relies on students' abilities to infer their own strategies for reading and writing. I analyze a textual corpus of (...) recent research articles from Canadian Literature and Studies in Canadian Literature in order to clarify typical discursive patterns that are used when discussing methods of literary scholarship. On the basis of these findings, we can ask: How can teaching in literary studies be adjusted in order to demystify the methodological practices of the discipline? (shrink)

Este trabalho busca refletir sobre os efeitos materiais do acontecimento e da biopolítica, ou seja, buscamos entrar na ordem do acontecimento e da biolítica pela via da arqueogenealogia de Foucault. Para isso, vamos retomar a questão “como pode um acontecimento ser escrito?”, lançada por Barthes no mesmo ano em que ocorreu o acontecimento do Maio de 1968, para refletir sobre outro acontecimento: o Outubro de 2005, também ocorrido na França, quando vamos demonstrar que os filmes de horror também podem fazer (...) parte da escritura do acontecimento e enunciar discursos da biopolítica, como nós demonstraremos na análise de "Frontières" e "À l’interieur". (shrink)

Este trabalho abre a discussão sobre as representações do conceito de cidadania - tomado como princípio norteador do ensino - a partir de dois documentos curriculares (PCN/Orientações Curriculares Nacionais) publicados no Brasil. A ênfase dada à cidadania nesses documentos vai aparecer como algo pleno e vazio nas redações de professores como constata Coracini (2007) enquanto objetivo político-pedagógico em que apenas se vislumbram alguns ingredientes: criticidade, democracia, liberdade, criatividade..., norteadores de uma prática didática que também se apresenta como fetiche, pacote fechado, (...) que se quer transformador e criador, silenciando as vozes sociais que questionam e desvalorizam a escola e o professor, uma vez que oculta a plenitude e a manutenção da não-cidadania. Dessa forma, as representações do conceito de cidadania põem em evidência a oposição/negação do(s)/ao(s)sentido(s) de cidadania enquanto parte do jogo, o jogo da presença e ausência de que fala Derrida (1995) ao demonstrar que “os elementos de uma oposição binária não têm sentido de forma isolada nem constituem soluções simétrica a seu oposto, mas que eles se dependem mutuamente e que um dos termos tem uma posição dominante”, como explica Silva (1996, p.256). -/- . (shrink)

This article addresses the question as to whether it is logically possible to fashion a discourse exclusively for the natural environment. Could such a discourse emerge without colonization by other social spheres acting as proxy? The prospects appear to be rather bleak, for even in the case of two apparently non-human-directed or non-committal discourses, that of extensionist ethics and new sophisticated management (of environmental crises), the latent social-constructionism built into both renders them monistic discourses hegemonically mapping the territories of what (...) they refer to. It becomes increasingly difficult to escape the human epistemic locatedness anti-anthropocentric critics demand. Despite this, such an exercise offers us the benefit of being mindful of what the crisis of social-scientific discourses amounts to as well as what to expect of discourse analysis as such. Furthermore, the prospects of the two discourses examined are being mapped onto two modified models drawing on Foucault and Deleuze thus helping us understand the pattern of our diverse environmental responses. Ecological thinking is perhaps the first subject-matter that transcends or shatters discourse boundaries and strains both imagination and human powers when selecting between conceptual frameworks, making us aware of the ineluctable feature of social-constructionism present in our social thought. (shrink)

"This book takes up issues of current concern in composition studies, sociolinguistics, and ESL--issues concerning academic literacy, critical literacy, expressive versus cognitive approaches to the teaching of writing, and the like. It does so in a practical, experiential way, drawing on events in classrooms in universities in South Africa and the United States. The contrast between the South African context and the American, as well as their surprising parallels, highlight certain questions concerning the teaching of literacy in a dramatic way, (...) so that theory and practice are brought together. In contrast to writing programs that follow a textbook or a planned sequence of study, the authors describe a narrative pedagogy that encourages students to find a direction and choose activities suggested by their own concerns and ongoing lives."--Publisher. (shrink)

An archive is a repository - that is, a place or space in which materials of historic interest or social significance are stored and ordered. A national archive is the storing and ordering place of the collective memory of that nation or people(s). This article provides a brief his torical/theoretical introduction to the politics of the archive in late capi talist societies and discusses this politics of memory via the performance of ordinary daily activities of librarians and archivists. Some relevant (...) political/discursive questions include: who controls, establishes and maintains the archive, and how do they do so? Which materials are preserved in the archive and which are excluded? As the documents and artifacts selected for the archive are ordered and classi fied, how do the schemas and structures applied include, exclude, fore ground or marginalize those materials? Finally, to what extent do the logical hierarchies for classification and arrangement reflect social or political hierarchies? Librarians and archivists face these concerns in HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 4 © 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199811)11:4;17-32; 006604]their professional practice as they make decisions influenced by budgets, finite amounts of both physical and computer storage space and limited staff resources. The authors give real-life examples of choices made as archivists struggle to balance ideological goals made contradictory by practical constraints. For example, is it more appro priate to acquire as many materials as possible but be unable to describe, preserve and present them adequately, or is it preferable to describe, preserve and make fully available a more limited range of records and documents? Because of such practical concerns in modern technicist cultures, the explicitly political who often is reduced to the technically instrumental how - that is, political-moral questions are displaced to nonmoral and nonpolitical technical discourse, thereby establishing a 'meta-politics' that is understood only by the initiated. Conversely, archival activities such as acquisition, classification and preservation are 'technical' activi ties that may become explicitly 'political'. The article concludes that technical activities always are political, at least latently or potentially, even when they are not contested and made explicitly political. (shrink)

Since The Mid-1980s The Notion Of "Genre" Has Been Dramatically Redefined. This redefinition has prompted theorists and scholars alike to analyze the shaping power of language and culture, and the interplay between the individual and the social.; Recent work in genre studies has drawn upon ideas and developments from a wide range of intellectual disciplines including 20th-century rhetoric, literary theory, sociology and philosophy of science, critical discourse analysis, education and cultural studies. In this text, leading theorists reflect and capitalize on (...) the growing interest in genre studies across these allied fields, and examine the powerful implications this reconception of genre has on both research and teaching. (shrink)

Is writing a human science? Certainly it is not science as such, despite much specialist knowledge about its strategies, developed by scholarly research going back many years. But what are called the human sciences are not ’sciences’ either; they have simply followed in the wake of the natural sciences and used the same word. And yet it is precisely here, in the equivocal area opened up by the statement ’writing as a human science’, that one of the fundamental questions concerning (...) the relationship of these ’sciences’ to writing is revealed. (shrink)