Spoken Discourse Seven

I must confess that in direct opposition to the last unit, I found this one tedious as fuck. There is of course a difference between ‘interesting’ and ‘important’ or ‘useful’, so the boredom threshold is no excuse for not taking it seriously, but it does make it harder to pay attention. Some observations though, however disjointed –

1.

Coulthard does rather conceptualise of conversation as a fight. The right to speak is ‘contested’, speakers are ‘vulnerable’ at the ends of sentences. ARGUMENT IS WAR for you classicists out there. But this isn’t argument.

So the statement that, “turns to speak are valued and sought” is in need of particular explanation. By who are they valued, and to what ends? What about the introverts? Is this culturally specific? I actually found this reading relatively interesting, but there are a hell of a lot of unexamined assumptions floating around at the back of it.

But the thing of “at least but not more than one” does give me the chance to show you this –

2.

It’s all downhill from here. The F+H reading was interminable. Let’s take a quote out of context, shall we?

“…we believe that it is neither feasible nor desirable to present a complete inventory of all the acts necessary to analyse every conceivable conversation.”

Neither feasible nor desirable. That needs some more explaining, I think, and rather cuts to the heart of my nagging suspicion about this entire module: that it’s just more reductionist, structuralist onanism.

“Look, a pattern!” Well done you. What can do with it? Why do you want to discover it? To what end, please tell me?

I can fully get why something being unfeasible shouldn’t get in the way of exploring what you can, but how could you not desire to know as much as you could? In the absence of any apparent use for this knowledge surely knowledge for its own sake becomes the whole point? I’d also point out that, absent any external application for any new knowledge it’s arguable not ‘new’ at all, merely existing practice clothes in new vocabulary.

Sorry. Cranky about this. Unit Six seemed so promising at last, and now I can’t help but feel it’s all been pissed out of a window again.