Written Discourse One

1. All Natural Ingredients
People do seem very keen on recipe books as a genre, don’t they?

As with most other introductory units, this one seems to be the standard statements of the obvious wrapped up with a new, but fairly slippery, terminology. ‘Infuriating’ is exactly right, but I am at least heartened by the promise that, “Discourse Analysis is… a tool that we can use to take social action.” Lots of linkages to be made here back to the Language and gender module from sociolinguistics.

I’m curious about Stubbs’ specification of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse. The ‘naturally occurring’ part. As opposed to what, exactly? Are we heading off into Turing Test territory here (again)? Even the most contrived examples of language (as with the examples in the Bloor and Bloor reading) are ‘naturally occurring’ within the specific discourse, it just so happens that it’s a meta-discourse about the discourse of discourse with smaller bugs upon their backs to bite them. And now my head hurts.

On which note, colourless green dreams and all – “We can, of course, invent a context for this sentence” (p16). Nothing is ever context free, and if a statement is grammatical it will always be possible to ret-con a context in which it is plausible, however strange. Which brings us back to the “close link between grammar and meaning” (p17).

Anyone else think that Grice’s Maxims possess a striking similarity to Orwell’s Rules for Writing? It’s not perfect, but there’s a hell of an overlap. Orwell, of course, wanted clear communication, which rather suggested that he was never asked by his significant other whether their bum looked big in this.

I’m also going to try and dig out some links to the Korea Air stuff Gladwell mentions in Outliers. As with all his stuff, interesting ideas that perhaps don’t hang together so well. I’m personally very skeptical about the whole high/low context culture thing (it just seems too pat), but it’s an interesting and sadly dramatic example of the whole ‘implicature’ thing.

2. Yeahhhhh!

Jarowski and Coupland do seem rather keen on the word ‘forensic’. “Here comes the science bit.” Unlike the illuminating (almost despite themselves) tour of various understandings of ‘discourse’ the whole ‘forensic’ thing is left tantalizingly undefined, almost as if simply repeating the word often enough will be sufficient to grant the whole enterprise scientific validity by proxy.

In case you missed it, I’ve broached this before. And here’s a funny picture.

(Also, on a more prosaic note, nice to have the references listed at the end of each separate unit. Much easier to look stuff up)