Spoken Discourse Five

So this is what’s been bugging me about performatives: they’re not really, are they? They don’t, in and of themselves, change anything at all.

I know that they’re meant to be the conditions for the performatives to function as such, but surely it’s those themselves that ‘change the world’ and not the words themselves? A ship doesn’t get a name until it’s written on the side, a couple isn’t married until they’ve signed the register, and a student doesn’t get house points until they’ve been written down in the record book. It's not all magic, y’know?

Spoken Discourse Four

Ah, OK then. Lectures. Nice to see that I wasn’t completely off track last time.

Mainly practical, this one, again. Which is nice but doesn’t give me all that much to get my teeth into here. One thing I would ask is why “staying very close to the classroom analysis” is necessarily an “advantage”. I can see why it’d be pleasingly symmetrical to produce a unified theory, but square pegs, round holes and all that.

Written Discourse Ten

Right, this is pretty much what I’m doing my essay on: trying to work my way down to some practical applications of CDA. I’ll keep it on ice for the time being, but if any of the few of you reading this (“Bueller? Beuller?”) want to get into it in any further I’d be more than happy.

Written Discourse Nine

You know how I said that CDA felt very wooly? I take it back, I take it all back…

Written Discourse Eight

“They were also concerned with ‘scientificity’; in other words, a description meant ‘objective investigation’.

Also:

“observation done in a scientific manner has the status of value-free facts.”

Oh, be still my aching sides… 

  

Visual Grammar

Running at a bit of a lag between finishing the units and posting about them here. As difficult as it might be to believe I do try to put some thought into these things. However, to tide us over until I pull my finger out (and other ill-matched idioms) here, with particular regard to Kreuss and van Leeuwen's concepts of the demand and offer gazes, is the front cover of this year's first grade English Communication textbook -

Fill yer boots.

Spoken Discourse Three

A pleasingly practical unit, this one, so not much in the way of notes here, either. I would suggest, though, that the highest rank of discourse being the Lesson is arbitrary and artificial, and ignores concepts of curriculum planning and progression. The claim that it is possible to show ‘objectively’ where ‘one topic ends and another begins’ is also fairly brave.

Written Discourse Seven

When reading up about performatives, all I could think of was this –

Written Discourse Six

1. News as Narrative 

Finally, something with a bit of meat on it. And also a lovely excuse to share this with everyone again –

Written Discourse Five

I think, maybe, here we’re starting to get a bit closer to something resembling a point. An answer to that ‘Why?’ question I asked last time out. Nothing definitive, but it’s beginning to present a utility beyond the merely descriptive.

1. Some Sort of Sub-Heading

The note’s claim that ‘The Sydney School does not acknowledge any debt to Longacre’s work’ seem quite odd. Not because it’s wrong, I’m sure it’s entirely accurate, but because, once again, a lot of this seem to be hanging off the bones of classical rhetoric, which is a far, far older debt. The section covering definitions of genre (5.9) seems awfully similar to the standard modes of rhetoric. It’s not just me seeing this, is it?