II.

Toward a Science of Text and Discourse

II.A. Paradigms for the study of language
1. If we define a text as a communicative event (I.34), a discourse would be a set of interconnected texts, the primary instance being the conversation. It would follow that text and discourse are the main channels for people to encounter language. If so, all work for cultivating or studying language would have been at least implicitly or indirectly concerned with texts, even though only a few were explicitly or directly so. Before moving ahead, we can look back on past disciplines in this perspective. 2. Each discipline is circumscribed by a schema or scenario of shared concepts and methods regarding what questions to ask and where to seek the answers. The currently fashionable term is the paradigm, which the philosophy of scienceattributes to each normal scienceperforming its routine work of solving problems (puzzles). Periodically, a paradigm shift occurs, most radically in the scientific revolution. To cover its broad range of concerns, a science of text and discourse must shift to a transdisciplinary paradigm that does not just displace some older paradigm with a new one, e.g., sentence linguistics with text linguistics. Instead, ours should be a meta-paradigm that integrates multiple paradigms in order to situate their concepts and findings in wider contexts where disciplines can interact in full solidarity to develop a detailed ecologist program for sustainable social progress (I.60; II.132). To encompass the range of rich,interconnectedissues we face today, we must transcend the philosophers popular but outmoded scenario of competing paradigms locked into a Darwinian struggle for survival (cf. III.24, 181; VII.199). In that spirit, it is essential to build upon our precursors and to appreciate the problems they faced and the solutions they attempted.

II.B. Textuality in grammar, rhetoric, and logic

3. The oldest and richest tradition belongs to the maintenance and interpretation of prestigious texts, typically official, legal, ritual, sacred, or poetic. Evidently, the text, particularly the written inscription, was widely esteemed a potent social instrument for expressing and transmitting the important knowledge of the culture. This esteem is most evident when prestigious texts are cited in legitimizing discourse about what is right or binding, witness these two examples from the 15th and 20th centuries [8-9] (i.a.).

[8] I am talking of the statutes that have the force of canons and of decretals that are universally binding on the church [] since it is useful to introduce any reform on the basis of precedent, I would submit an imperial letter which is credited to Constantine (Nicholas of Cusa, On the supremacy of general councils in church and empire, 1433) [9] [Prime Minister ] Begin reviewed the text in detail, and finally concluded, This document is not a proper basis for negotiations [] He focused on words and their meaning [] In all, the American team prepared 23 versions of the Framework for Peace. I wrote the original Sinai agreement personally, and there were eight different texts before we finished (Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith, 1982)

Evidently, many people believe having written text settles things for good. 4. Yet the elite rank and specialized training of many experts on prestigious texts say, for the Vedic priests or the Kabbalists of the Torah, or for todays attorneys of corporate law suggests that the text can be a highly problematic social instrument. Paradoxically, the experts apply specialized skills and procedures to construct a meaning that has an adaptive valuefor them while purporting to have only registered and presented the one correct or true meaning. The authority of the text is all too readily co-opted for authoritarian moves of power (cf. II.129; III.10; V.14). The reifying formalist myth of the self-sufficient text with a stable and determinate meaning, which inflates the individual over the social (cf. I.39; II.110; III.107), serves the dual agenda of enhancing the prestige of texts and securing the rights of interpretation for elite groups (V.80; VII.199). 5. So in most historical settings, textual skills decide whether access to knowledgepromotes either power and inequality or else solidarity and equality. Discoursal power moves are easy to mystify as literal and true statements about reality because few people properly appreciate the potential of discourse to construct and negotiate reality (cf. VIII.75, 131). Conversely, discourses of power are hard to demystify because doing so requires us to raise our critical consciousness and suspend our easy routines of understanding talk in order to draw wider and subtler connections (cf. I.59). We need to critique such familiar expressions as nature and reason, e.g. in [10], and recognize such discourse to be a direct precursor of todays myth of intelligence and aptitude being predetermined by nature (VII.64). [10] Every constitution is founded on natural law [that] exists by nature in reason. [the] wiser and more excellent are chosen as rulers in order that, endowed with a naturally clear reason, [] they may choose just laws and by these govern others and hear cases. [] thus those who are strong in reason are by nature masters and rulers of others (Nicholas of Cusa)

The mystification of discourses of power has been abetted by the disinterest among language-related disciplines in explaining the relevant strategies and providing an explicit theory for such a long-standing and important practice. Evidently, powerful people are not eager to have it made public how they use discourse in ways that are quite adaptive for them and quite maladaptive for the disempowered. 6. Three main disciplines have traditionally been concerned with language. The discipline of grammar has sought to expound the organization of a language in terms of forms, patterns, and rules. Typically, prestigious texts were chosen as sources, which enhanced the prestige of grammar and encouraged qualified scholars to study and cultivate it. Using such sources placed traditional grammarians fairly close to text linguists and kept them from anticipating the 20th-century rift between language study versus text study (cf. II.24). Their own specialized education and high literacy legitimized the early grammarians claim to know the language and encouraged many of them to act as language guardians by adopting conservative, elitist standards and by making prescriptionsfor correct usageand proscriptions against incorrect usage. This strategy was highly adaptive in creating a lucrative and self-perpetuating market for expertise about grammar. In practice, the standards were largely constructed along social lines to accentuate the dual distinctions between writing versus speech and between a prestigious variety or dialectversus one or more non-prestigious ones (cf. VII. 251-55). The reliability and generality of such grammars for representing actual usage remained uncertain, insofar as the things people were not supposed to say were precisely ones which many people did say. 7. The conservative quality of grammars was reinforced by the strategy of recycling earlier grammars, even ones from other languages, e.g., when the English abbot lfric Grammaticus (ca. 955-1020) relied in [11] on the Latin grammarians Priscian of Caesarea (5th century A.D.) and Aelius Donatus (4th

century). Like many later grammarians, lfric assumed that English grammar should be legitimized by borrowing upon Latin grammar and using the same descriptive terms. Fortunately, the models they admired, such as Priscians Institutio de arte grammatica and Donatus Grammatica urbis Romae, took a very broad view of grammar, witness Donatus sections on the voice, letter, syllable, feet, tones, schemes, and tropes (de voce, de littera, de syllaba, de pedibus, de tonis, de schematibus, de tropis). Hence, lfrics notion of grammatica (Anglo-Saxon stfcrft, skill in letters [of the alphabet], but also learning, study) covered the sounds of speech and the construction of meaning as well, in each case foregrounding written language. In modern terms, the grammar extended into phonology, intonation, and semantics (cf. II.29f, 48ff, 63). 8. Rhetoric was a more directly textual discipline whose social function was to teach active and public skills, especially for oratory, rather than to cultivate the passive and private skills gleaned from the grammatical study of prestigious texts. The rhetoricians saw in language less a catalogue of correct forms and patterns than an armory of discourse strategies for practical goals. This scope was not necessarily narrower than grammar, because the rhetoricians, while not trying to cover all the points a grammar might address, emphasized richer factors of context, e.g., how to persuade particular audiences. Rhetorical effectiveness may not coincide with grammatical correctness; some audiences might see an inappropriate power move in the use of a cultivated style preferred by grammarians. Rhetoric (with the Greek root erein meaning speak) has therefore been more political and populist and centered on oral discourse, whereas grammar (with the Greek root gramma meaning letter) has been more academic and elitist and centered on written discourse. Privileging grammar over rhetoric in education right up into modern times reflects the policy

of granting preferential knowledge access to reward high literacy and standard dialect rather than the skills of popular communication (VII.162f, 169f, 212f). 9. Recognizing the public demand for training in rhetoric and the profits of the schools already offering it (e.g. the school of Isocrates), Aristotle expounded his famous Art of Rhetoric in search of a systematic philosophical and psychological foundation. His method of classifying into subtypes has proven vastly influential ever since, even among modern linguists (II.34; V.45). For example, he distinguished between the deliberative rhetoric for reaching decisions in assemblies, the forensic (or litigious) for arguing cases in court, and the epideictic for displaying elegant or ornate language. His advice about the proper style or usage of language was ambivalent, due his admiration for poetry and stage drama (e.g. by the sonorous Euripides). He recommended appropriate language and the normal idiom but also exotic and distant language that is artificial but seems natural. For writing, his ominous suggestion that content ranks below style has stirred considerable annoyance (cf. V.39).
[12] the virtue of style is to be clear, and to be neither low nor endlessly sublime, but appropriate. [] the discourse must be made to sound exotic, for men are admirers of what is distant, and what is admired is pleasant. [] one must do this without being noticed and give the impression of speaking not artificially but naturally. [] the technique is well concealed by drawing words from the normal idiom, [] we should make little use of exotic, compound, and artificial ones; [] they involve too great a change from what is appropriate. [] written speeches have more effect through their style than through their intellectual content.

Despite a brief plea for correct grammar (agreement of Gender and Number), he differed prominently from the grammarians (and even more from the logicians) by describing how to build rational or logical arguments and proofs upon uncertain or subjective premises, and how to gain power by exploiting the audiences emotions (anger, contempt, gentleness, friendship, love, pity, envy, jealousy). He classified people into character types by age and by social rank, noting that the rich are arrogant and overbearing and mindlessly happy, for their wealth is the highest measure of all things, and they believe themselves privileged to rule; just what the wealthy backers of todays New Right coalition devoutly and mindlessly believe (cf. VII.32). 10. Logic was a discipline aspiring to complete the search for a universal system of knowing in the discipline of philosophy (from Greek roots, love of knowledge). Whereas some philosophers invoked an absolute first principle such as Nature or God, others turned to language as the privileged mode for knowing, meaning, defining, asserting, and so

on (whence logic from the Greek root logos meaning word or speech and, technically, sentence). Early logic, with strong affinities to mathematics and geometry, sought to construct proofs on certain and objective premises rather than on the uncertain and subjective premises of rhetoric. So whereas the grammarians cultivated a body of prestigious texts, and the rhetoricians composed tactical arguments for debates, the logicians sought a system of principles (or axioms) whereby statements and arguments could be constructed and proven true or false, independently of text type and context, or of speaker and hearer and their beliefs, attitudes, or goals. The term logic might therefore justly subsume all relationships and methods whereby the value of a term can be strictly determined through formal steps from the known value of other terms (cf. III.167f). In the idealized complete system, every fact, premise, and conclusion would be either true or false, freed from the rich and evolving contexts of everyday experience and ordinary discourse. 11. A favorite illustration has been the classical syllogism:
[13] MAJOR PREMISE: All men are mortal.
MINOR PREMISE: CONCLUSION:

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Yet even this threadbare syllogism is not so simple and certain. The conclusion is valid only from a sparse reading of the major and minor premises by handling the words and phrases as mere counters or placeholders, but is convincing from a rich reading based on our knowledge of what the words mean and how the world is organized. The validity holds whether or not we know who Socrates was or what is meant by man and mortal, because the syllogism merely uses language to restate the truism of set theory that a property holding for all members of a set also holds for each individual member (cf. II.50; V.113). But we are convinced because we do know all that, and we might be upset if the wording were changed to all men are moral or Xanthippe is a man, even though the syllogism would still hold. We could only dispute the facts, which the logic doesnt claim to supply. Nor is the logic relevant if somebody retorts that Socrates was immortal because his life and works live on, or interprets man in an unusually rich sense, as when Antony says of Brutus This was a man because the elements were so mixed in him (Julius Caesar, V, v, 72-75). Logic disdains mixed elements. 12. Logic symptomatically underrates the essential difference between language versus mathematics and geometry, whose exactness and universality hinge on being disconnected from content and context. The meaning of numbers and their combinations is precisely the quantities they express; the meaning of lines and figures is precisely their dimensional and

positional relations (cf. III.158). These sparse conditions do not hold either for a natural language like English or for human knowledge of the world and society. A disquieting tradeoff impends: the more rigorous and precise the logic becomes, the sparser the meaning and the lower the cognitive and social relevance of its statements (cf. II.50, 57; III.168). 13. Still, over the centuries, the project for using logic to definitively capture truth and meaning has enthroned logic as the prime model for all human thought and reasoning (II.96; III.167), both in idealism and in some radical versions of its archrival realism, such as logical positivism holding that certain (positive) knowledge is based on observable physical phenomena, and verificationism holding that knowing the meaning of statements equals knowing how to verify them by observing the reality they describe. Similarly, the science of language has at times used formal language as the leading model for natural language (cf. II.58, 99; III.167-73). So philosophy, language science, and psychology have projected their own procedures for designing formal models and representations over onto human processes of thought and language at large. I hold this projection to be a category mistake whereby a theory is short-circuited onto the domain of practices it purports to describe or explain (cf. II.96; III.169, 180; V.124; VII.63; VIII.17). How far human thought or language might be formal or logical is a question to be empirically discovered and not just quietly pre-empted or taken on faith (II.79;III.173; IV.30). 4. Fig. II.1 sums up how grammar, rhetoric, and logic might be assessed as three approaches to

texts. Typically, a grammar has been derived from passive skills honed on a body of prestigious texts, mainly written; a rhetoric by practicing more active skills on oratory texts, mainly oral though sometimes transcribed and embellished; and a logic by formal skills with using notations and determining the validity and truth values of mainly artificial texts. 15. Despite their disparate perspectives on texts, grammar, rhetoric, and logic co-existed over the centuries in a trivium, a trinity of eminent scholastic domains (called liberal arts). Some early authorities saw no tension among them, e.g., when Aristotle sought to merge rhetoric with logic and treated grammar as well (II.9). Our modern age has seen them split

up; grammar has survived best, heavily represented in schooling at all levels (VII.K.2), whereas marginal areas are left to rhetoric in departments of speech or journalism and to logic in philosophy. The heritage of the trivium has been a studious respect for high standards of style, cogency, and clarity that education has appreciated without being properly equipped to impart the requisite skills in equality (Ch. VII). Perhaps a science of text and discourse can contribute to a productive reassessment of criteria for grammatical standards, rhetorical effectiveness, or logical validity.

II.C. Textuality in philology

16. The notions of language science or modern linguistics owe much to the field of philology, which was established in the nineteenth and century, and whose chief concerns were: (a) historical connections among successive stages of a language; (b) comparative connections among languages from related groups or families; and (c) geographical connections among various dialects of a language. All three investigations have gathered their main evidence from written text-artifacts and devoted scrupulous attention to problems and inconsistencies in transmission and transcription. Historical studies, particularly by the Neo-Grammarians, sought to formulate laws of language change, but also to produce reliable textual editions (e.g. the Hildebrandslied, 1812), and to cultivate the language skills for studying and using these whence such academic domains as Old English and ltere Germanistik. Comparative studies, particularly those of the Indo-European group, inquired which languages were related, and whether the relations were due to common ancestry or to other factors like migration and borrowing. Geographical studies, often labelled dialectology, focused on forms or pronunciations that varied from region to region in regular ways. This work pioneered thorough methods to describe dialects apart from the usual pejorative social attitudes (cf. II.6; VII.49, 171; VIII.96, 150). 17. One eminent success in philology was to describe the great sound shift that split off from the other Indo-European languages the Germanic branch that would later produce Anglo-Saxon and later still English. For example, the unvoiced stops (where the air passage is stopped but the vocal cords are inactive, II.29) written as p, t, and k, got shifted to fricatives (where the air passes with friction) written as f, th, and h, whence Latin pater, tres, and centum versus English father, three, and hundred. A shift could be strikingly regular, affecting virtually all relevant words and even progressing to a precise geographical line; unaffected items are probably later borrowings or frozen proper names,

ritual terms, and so on. So the sound shift shed light on all three branches of philology: describing the history of languages and their common ancestry as well as the evolution of dialects. The discovery nicely fit the 19th-century concept of natural laws reaching all across the sciences. Here already, the study of sound systems fostered an impressively tidy theory of language, and detached the language from the discourse practices of social agents (II.29; III.137). 18. Philologists also pioneered the technique of working with authentic data from a corpus of language samples; and they carefully described what they found people saying instead of prescribing what people should say in the manner of traditional grammar. The key question was which forms were attested, i.e., textualized in preserved inscriptions or transcriptions for reliable identification and collation. Here, the textualizing of forms provided the means not merely to determine their function and meaning as for all language (I.41) but to decide which forms merited scrutiny at all. Although Indo-European is commonly held to be a scholarly reconstruction and an abstract system of forms rather than an actual language, some unrecorded language(s) resembling it must once have been textualized in order to develop and stabilize the formal regularities we can trace in its descendants. And the recovery of genuine texts in any early offshoot of Indo-European is a sensational event, witness the stir in our own century over the discovery of Hittite going back 3,000 years. 19. Recent research has raised again the prospect that, contrary to the standard view among philologists, that Indo-European may not be unrelated to other language families after all. Supportive evidence includes the -m- in First Person forms and the -t- in Second Person forms consistently appearing across the whole group called Eurasiatic by Joseph Greenberg, including also Uralic, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, ChukchiKamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut. Some linguists, such as Morris Swadesh, have even revived the prospect, once discounted by philologists, of a monogenesiswhereby all the worlds languages descended from a single one. How they might have evolved into separate groups is being actively discussed in the wake of startling findings that populations with different language families also differ in their genetics. These findings converge with burgeoning explorations of the relationship between language and genetics. 20. Fig. II.2 shows how the branches of philology might be seen as three more approaches to texts.

The historical branch compiled and edited documents and inscriptions to trace the historical stages in a language. The comparative branch mapped the relations among languages or language families indicated by patterns of attested forms complemented with painstakingly reconstructed forms. The geographical branch used surveys and questionnaires to elicit the dictation or transcription of regional varieties. In each of the three, the concept of language varied to focus on evolution, comparison, and variation, respectively. 21. Philology grappled valiantly with the problems of analyzing authentic data and of weighing textual evidence against conflicting or missing evidence, especially when postulating non-attested forms. With living languages, in contrast, informants can be consulted, and the obstacle may be not too little evidence but too much too many diverse opinions and too little consensus about the vocabulary, grammar, or sound systems in various dialects or geographical areas. Most techniques of taking dictation rarefy the factors not easily represented through the conventions of writing (III.195). And if schoolmasters are the informants, as for the monumental Deutscher Sprachatlas research, their usage may be more self-conscious than the usage of ordinary speakers. 22. Despite such problems, philology inaugurated major advances in the directions later pursued by modern linguistics. The main concern was no longer grammatical, rhetorical, or logical standards, but the systematic properties of all the data that could be assembled in a corpus. Philologists appreciated the prestigious texts of literary and poetic discourse and scrupulously collected and edited them. But they also worked to uncover and preserve any surviving samples of non-literary discourse, such as statutes, proclamations, proverbs, prayers, incantations, personal letters, and so on. This concern prefigured the more resolute move of linguistics to affirm the centrality of spoken ordinary language over written elite language (cf. II.24ff). Still, many modern linguists have not properly acknowledged their debt to philology. They may have been motivated by rivalry or by competition within academic language programs treating ancient and medieval languages from a mainly literary viewpoint. Yet these programs did pave the way for modern language programs in the schools and universities. Perhaps a science of text and discoursecan requite our own debt

to philologists by providing further perspectives for the study of the early texts they have so diligently preserved.

II.D. Textuality in modern linguistics

23. The term modern linguistics designates a field of research and method that emerged in the 19th century and was consolidated in the 20th. It resolved to be modern by making a fundamentally new departure from the earlier approaches to language outlined so far in this chapter. It would be scientific by framing explicit theories of language and implementing disciplined practices. It would describe what people do say rather than prescribing or proscribing what people ought or ought not to say. It would provide comprehensive coverage of the whole language rather than selective coverage of grammatical, rhetorical, or logical issues. And it would defend the primacy of spoken language, e.g. by developing elaborate methods for representing sounds more accurately than with conventional orthographies (especially for English, VI.56); although written language samples were often used and their visual clarity did some cheap explanatory work in identifying units and their boundaries (cf. II.29, 34, 38; III.195, 202; IV.1) 24. However, the ratio between theory and practice in modern linguistics has remained profoundly problematic (cf. IV.21) The human practices connected to language are dauntingly vast and diverse, and certainly do not, by themselves, stipulate the form or the content a theory of language ought to have. So, many linguists though by no means all, as we shall see have attempted to stipulate a theory from the top down, i.e., in purely theoretical terms, which would stipulate the methods for connecting it to the practices of linguists and of speakers. A famous project of this kind was inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussures course in general linguistics (published in French in 1916), which declared the true and unique object of linguistics to be language studied in and for itself, termed langue in French, and placed it in a stringent dichotomy against language use, termed parole. Henceforth, the classical program for mainstream linguistics as we find it reflected in influential works and in the agendas of university departments, professional journals and conferences, and so on has typically constructed its theories of language according to tenets like these: (a) Language is a phenomenon distinct from other domains of human knowledge or activity. (b) Language should be described apart from the conditions under which speakers use it. (c) Language should be described by internal, language-based criteria.

(d) Language should be considered a uniform, stable, and abstract system in a single stage of its evolution, i.e., in a synchronic perspective at the present time rather than in an evolutionary or diachronic one across historical time. (e) The description should be stated at a high degree of generality what applies to the entire language or even universally to all languages. In the early stages, these tenets strategically suited the academic politics of establishing a monodisciplinary normal science in a sparse and self-conscious scientific climate. Disconnecting language by itself from issues in neighboring fields, such as literature, history, folklore, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, was expected to make the description more compact, unified, and rigorous by imposing strict limits on which data get accredited, i.e., accepted as worthy of investigation and placed into the established categories. 25. But a theory of this type raises a serious problem for practice: language is not encountered by itself but only in use. Undaunted, linguists undertook to construct a language as a theoretical system presumed to underlie all of its practical uses, though the preferred term was discover to uphold classical realism by implying that this system is a reality waiting to be found. The chief practices of discovery have been data-handling moveslike these: (1) collating: the data samples in a corpus are compared and contrasted to see what they have in common, e.g., which word types frequently co-occur; (2) consulting informants: native speakers are asked to judge or rate data samples of their language, e.g., which among several versions of an utterance they would be more or less likely to say; (3) generalizing: certain aspects of the data are construed to be general ones, e.g., that the Subject-Verb-Object order of a sample set of English Sentences is a typical pattern for the whole language; (4) rarefying: the rich data as we find them in real discourse are rendered sparse by disregarding certain aspects or details, e.g., variations in the actual pronunciation of the same language sound; (5) decontextualizing: the data are removed from the observed context and treated as if they could occur in isolation or in a wide range of contexts, e.g., irrespective of the social status of groups or speakers; (6) introspecting: the linguists base estimations on their own intuitions about the language, e.g., which sentences conform to grammatical rules.

These practices were performed as cognitive moves while organizing materials and constructing theories and models, and as discoursal and social moves while stating the results and informing colleagues through reports, conferences, journals, books, and so on. Because our own language strongly affects how we classify and label things, the discoursal aspects of doing linguistics are far more influential and significant than has been widely recognized. 26. The practices for these data-handling moves differed between two broad approaches to language. Fieldwork linguists (as the term says) go work in the field of cultural and social activities and carefully record a corpus of authentic data: what native speakers of a previously undescribed language or dialect are actually observed to say. In contrast, homework linguists (to coin a new matching term) work at home (or in the office) with data that have been supplied from an outside source. The data may be authentic, as in a computerized corpus of real discourse (II.64). But they may also be invented data by the linguists, who are fluent speakers and claim to represent the whole community of native speakers. This tactic is highly problematic, and we need to consider why (II.36; IV.21). 27. In practice, fieldworkers never encounter language by itself, even if the official theory purports to describe it; you confront language in rich connections with language use and exploit modes of data that are not just linguistic, such as the procedures of buying and selling goods (II.33). Your work is always strongly data-driven, and practice-driven, especially when you join in the social practices of interaction and conversation. The practices supply continual tests: if your theory or your conclusions are wrong, youll get corrected, misunderstood, teased, or ignored. In contrast, homework can disconnect theory from practice by relying on your own introspection and intuition to formulate and describe what native speakers are presumed to know about the language by itself. The work becomes strongly theory-driven, especially when you pursue a construction that, by definition, does not directly manifest itself in data or in practice, and when you try to disconnect invented data from cognitive and social constraints. Nor are your theory and conclusions tested by being put into practice. Instead, theories and descriptions get evaluated mainly by standards of design, such as formality, rigor, elegance, or compactness (cf. II.43, 92). In exchange, authentic data such as everyday conversations may look messy or deviant, hardly worthy of attention (II.41; VII.133). So the quest to discover the language-system as an underlying reality can paradoxically lead radical homework linguists to replace the language with a technical construction which exists only in their own theorizing and can be connected to language data only when these have been removed from practice and translated into some

sparse notation. Along the way, real speakers as informants get marginalized and silenced, and a written standard variety parades as the language itself (VII.165; VIII.18) the linguists version of the fundamental contradiction between inclusive theory (e.g. for covering an infinite set of sentences) versus exclusive practice (e.g. for disregarding ordinary conversations) (cf. I.6; II.41). And cultural memory gets erased to avoid questions about how concrete discoursal practices might evolve and for whose benefit (III.113). 28. After 70 or 80 years of research, the status of language by itself is still uncertain. Since it is not a manifestation but a theoretical construction, it cannot be verified by conventional observation of the practices of language use. So we can move to a higher plane and observe the progress of linguistics as a science. There, our testable hypothesis might be: if language is indeed a uniform, stable, and abstract system we can describe by purely linguistic criteria, then we should observe steady long-range increases on three test scales: (a) coverage, i.e., how much language data have been described; (b) convergence, i.e., how far various descriptions get corresponding results; and (c) consensus, i.e., how far linguists agree about how the description should be stated and assessed. What we actually observe, however, is not a steady overall increase but an uneven pattern of increases in some domains, and stagnation or short-range decreases in other domains. How far linguistics might count as a normal science (in the sense of II.2) is still not decided; its normalcy fluctuates periodically and substantially (II.41). 29. We observe the stablest increases in the description of language sounds, which had already anchored the philologists concept of language being governed by natural laws (II.17). In the domain of phonology (or phonemics), linguistics discovered a uniform, stable, and abstract system of phonemes: theoretical minimal units which correspond to the practical units of language sounds, and whose quantity and nature can be precisely described in practice for any language by the physical and mental criteria that differentiate them (cf. II.45, 48). Physically, each phoneme is connected to articulatory events and locations, e.g., a voiced dental stop such as /d/ produced when the vocal cords vibrate and the air flow is blocked by the teeth (cf. II.17); the concrete physiological processes are investigated in the kindred domain of phonetics. Mentally, each phoneme must be capable of differentiating between elements (words or word-parts) that also differ in meaning, e.g., /d/ versus /t/ in hid versus hit (III.92). These two sets of criteria nicely converge in practice to give tidy results: complete coverage and a high consensus among phonologists. The description also reaps some cheap explanatory work from the visual match between the notation of many phonemes and written letters, or technically, the graphemes, of the

popular Roman alphabet even though spoken language was the official domain to be described (II.23). 30. This huge success on our three test scales made the study of sound systems in phonology into the model paradigm for early modern linguistics, whence the series of -eme terms (e.g., morpheme, lexeme, syntagmeme, sememe) modelled on phoneme. Henceforth, mainstream theories confidently projected language to be an array of uniform, stable, and abstract subsystems, usually called levels, each consisting of a repertory of theoretical minimal units which correspond to the practical units in the language data and which constitute a system of differences (cf. II.39, 45, 114, 123). A complete description of a language would be the sum of the descriptions for each subsystem, supplied by linguists investigating the several areas within a neat division of labor. Research of any scope or in any area could contribute on its own terms, e.g., by doing pure phonology or only syntax. In this fashion, linguistics would be mono-disciplinary and would also contain a set of smaller monodisciplines. 31. Impressive success was also attained in the domain of morphology (or morphemics). Here, the theoretical minimal units are the meaningful forms called morphemes, which correspond to the practical units of word-parts, such as word-stem, prefix, or suffix, and of non-segmentable words. This domain offered vital support for fieldwork in Peripheral regions on previously undescribed languages of lesser diffusion that often defamiliarize the Western fieldworker by presenting much more elaborated systems of meaningful forms than do the familiar Western languages of Center regions (e.g. English and French) (cf. II. 37, 86; VIII.9). The polysynthetic languages spoken, say, by Native Americans join morphemes into long word-like constructions that would be expressed by complex phrases in other languages, e.g., [14] from Paiute of south-western Utah (reported by Edward Sapir), or even by whole utterances, e.g., [15] from Aymara of Peru and Bolivia (reported by Martha J. Hardman) (cf. II.62). [14] wii - to - kuchum-punku-rgani-yugwi va nt - m() knife-black-buffalo - pet - cut up-sit (plural)-future-participle-animate plural they who are going to sit and cut up with a knife a black cow (or bull) [15] aru-si kipa - si - p - xa - a - naka -sa - ki - puni - rak- spa - wa speak-REFL-bridge-PROG-PLUv-COMP-NOM-PLUn- we -just-always-also- VRB-3rdP+DES-AFF I know it is desirable and necessary that all of us, including you also, keep communicating The piece-by-piece or interlinear translations customarily provided in fieldwork linguistics (cf. VI.73) combine ordinary language with specialized functional labels (like animate plural)

to suggest what the various morphemes contribute. In the Aymara data [15], the morphemes convey not just the content such as speak, but a rich palette of grammatical functions and aspects, such as reflexive (REFL) (i.e. speak to each other), progressive (PROG), plural of numerousness for the verb (PLUv) and for the noun (PLUn), completive (COMP) indicating sententious certainty, a marker for the third person of the desiderative aspect (3rdP+DES), a transition from the opening verb to a nominal (NOM) and then back to a verbal (VRB), plus a final affirmation marker (AFF) that turns the whole cluster into a sentence type. The idiomatic or free translation shows English using clausal framing to convey aspects such as sententious certainty and desiderative (I know, it is desirable and necessary). 32. How has morphology fared on our three test scales proposed in II.28? Coverage faces the tough practical problem that the stock of minimal forms of a language could include the entire vocabulary of indivisible words plus word-parts. The preferred solution has been a theoretical division between the grammatical morphemes in stable, compact classes, e.g., the set of all verb inflections for present, past, and so on, versus the lexical morphemes in unstable, open classes, e.g., the set of all verbs or verb stems. Morphology would seek to provide full coverage of the grammatical ones as the proper morphemes, whereas the lexical ones would be lexemes and would be consigned to lexicology, a domain often left at the borders of linguistics (cf. II.38, 64). The ensuing division between grammar versus lexicon became an accredited dichotomy in formal linguistics (II.49), whereas systemic functional linguistics has projected the fundamental unity of the lexicogrammar apportioning the work of expression to grammatical or lexical resources in a characteristic way for each language or language type (II.63). 33. Morphology attained its best convergence through the fieldwork described in II.31, where theory and practice are always connected, and where all available clues must be exploited to discover the meaningful parts in transcriptions of actually observed utterances. This job requires acute skills in listening and transcribing, but also in relating utterances or utterance-parts to cognitive and social constraints, whether or not these might be described in linguistic terms (II.27). Moreover, you must meet the practical challenge of moving from being a total outsider for the community of speakers over to being an insider who can speak the language well enough to interact in communicative practices (cf. VIII.9). Along the way, you continually test and refine your description, and adjust your theory accordingly. 34. Consensus is supported by the emphasis on identifying and isolating the morphemes in the data, which can extract some cheap explanatory work from the linear distributions

being visually displayed by a transcription into a reliable phonetic alphabet (cf. II.23, 29, 38). One straightforward method is to repeatedly segment the data until no further meaningful subdivisions appear feasible, and then to classify the segments and the patterns these constitute. This immediate constituent analysis, if applied in all observation of wordstructure, was expected to eliminate any inconsistency of procedure. You can, for instance, readily distinguish the bound morphemes that can occur only as a part of a longer unit from the free morphemesthat can occur by themselves. 35. But even so, morphology is less congenial than phonology for the classical program of mainstream linguistics because the data are not nearly so tidy and compact. For example, Modern English has fairly few indisputable bound morphemes, such as the endings for plurals of nouns and for tenses and persons of verbs, or the endings such as -able and ish for deriving words; in return, much of the grammatical work is now done with the socalled Function Words (e.g., Articles, Prepositions, and Conjunctions) which, like bound morphemes in other languages, belong to small or closed sets and have key phrase positions but sparse or indeterminate meanings. The lexical work is mainly done with the so-called Content Words (e.g., Nouns, Verbs, and Modifiers) which belong to large or open sets and have flexible phrase positions but richer and more determinate meanings. A Content Word is more self-sufficient and more likely to be uttered alone (e.g., fire!, run!, terrible!) than is a Function Word (e.g., ?the!, ?at!, ?unless!), except maybe to emphasize a contrast. Also, the Content Words are more likely to take on the remaining bound morphemes (the inflections), e.g., to signal a declension of nouns with singular versus plural or a conjugation of verbs with present versus past (IV.20, 47, 62, 82). 36. English also illustrates the problems for describing a language that has assiduously borrowed word-stems, prefixes, and so on, e.g., from French, Latin, or Greek, which are no longer recognized as meaningful units by many contemporary monolingual speakers. Should a morphological description include not just the more obvious units like the prefixes in- and im- for negation alongside un-, non-, or a- but also the erudite units like -pter (wing) in helicopter, where speakers would more likely identify the final -er as an agentive suffix (compared, say, to propeller) on the verb helicopt, which has in fact appeared in a recent English dictionary with the irritable label back formation by false analysis? Such etymological data would bring in language history and thus undercut the mainstream program to describe language in a single stage of its evolution (II.24(d)). 37. Still, these problems for theory have not kept morphology from making huge practical contributions by describing hundreds of previously undocumented languages through active

fieldwork, such as that sponsored by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and carried out by Kenneth, Evelyn, and Eunice Pike, Robert Longacre, Joseph Grimes, and their many diligent colleagues and students (cf. IV.41; VI.73). This work is undoubtedly the most memorable and enduring achievement of modern linguistics. We have gained not merely a deepened and defamiliarized sense of the striking morphological diversity of languages, but also refined methods of investigation we can reapply to the more familiar, worked-over languages (cf. II.86, 108). We can also rework the classifications of languages begun by philologists like Rasmus Rask and continued by linguists like Edward Sapir, Joseph Greenberg, and Morris Swadesh (cf. II.19). 38. Looking to reapply the successful methods of morphology, the next domain in terms of unit size would logically be lexicology, whose theoretical units, the lexemes, correspond to the practical units of words; but this domain did not at all fit the linguists beloved conception of a uniform, stable, and abstract system. So the next domain taken up was actually the subsystem of syntax, which concerns the organization of phrases and clauses in structures or constituents. Here, fresh problems cropped up. Consensus was hard to achieve about what the theoretical units, prospectively called syntagmemes (after the terms phonemes and morphemes) or phrase structures, might be, and how they might correspond to the practical units ranging from just one word (e.g. help!) to a phrase and on up to an extended clause or sentence. Since the repertory obviously would not consist of minimal units, some new mode of theory would need to deal with complex units, Nor does it seem feasible to give an exhaustive, precise coverage of phrases and clauses; even the traditional division into Subject and Predicate can leave tricky residues, e.g., signals of the speakers viewpoint like frankly (cf. IV.28, 206). Once again, the visual appearance of data written down does some cheap explanatory work in indicating some divisions between words and between phrases (cf. II.23, 29, 34). But the linear sequence is not rich enough: we can inspect the positions of items but not the relations among them we can see where things are but not why they are there or where else they could be. 39. Evidently, the methods for segmenting data into formal units and classifying these into repertories supported convergence and consensus much better for phonology and morphology than for syntax. Linguists began to cast about for other theories and methods, particularly ones that would still treat language as a uniform, stable, and abstract system. So the system was redefined to consist not of a repertory of theoretical minimal units (II.30) but of a repertory of theoretical rules for arranging simple units into complex units. Here, the correspondence between theoretical units and practical units dramatically receded, insofar

as these rules would not produce (or describe) the phrases and sentences themselves, but rather the underlying structure of phrases and sentences. This new paradigm therefore felt authorized to reject the data-driven and practice-driven methods of descriptive fieldwork for classifying and organizing data and extracting patterns from a corpus of observed speech, in favor of theory-driven methods for designing a generative homework model of language by itself. The model would be a generative grammar: a highly technical construction whose rules would generate all the grammatical sentences of the language by assigning them structural descriptions, and no ungrammatical sentences (cf. II.105). The grammar does not specify how people actually produce real sentences or why they say what they do (although discussions kept using terms like producing sentences); it only specifies the abstract structure of possible sentences. The homeworkers craftily declared it unreasonable to demand of linguistic theory that it stipulate a discovery procedure for actually constructing the grammar, given a corpus of utterances (cf. VII.132, 326); how one might have arrived at the grammar was not relevant to the program of research one may arrive at a grammar by intuition, guess-work, all sorts of partial methodological hints, reliance on past experience, etc. Of course, practical discovery procedures were just what fieldworkers had always demanded of linguistic theory, and they were shocked to be called unreasonable by people using hints and guess-work. 40. The ratio between theory and practice in modern linguistics became more elusive than ever (cf. II.24). The dichotomy in the classical program of mainstream linguistics between language by itself (langue) versus language use (parole) (II.24) was redrawn between competence, i.e., what speakers of the language know, versus performance, i.e., what speakers actually do or say. Competence belonged to an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community who knows its language perfectly, and determines only what is grammatical, i.e., described by the grammar; performance would determine what is acceptable, i.e., approved by real native speakers. This line of reasoning installed the idealized grammar as the formal model for competence (cf. VII.K.2). It was easy to invent plainly grammatical or well-formed examples like [16] and plainly ungrammatical or ill-formed ones like [16a], while still others seemed grammatical and yet disturbingly odd like [16b] (cf. IV.129).
[16] Revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently. [16a] New appear revolutionary infrequently ideas. [16b] Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Introspection and intuition were expected to underwrite an explicit formal statement of the status of all such samples. But from that day to this, no such statement has been produced for any language. In hindsight, it seems evident that introspection and intuition cannot achieve in practice the task set down for it by the theory (cf. II.27, 65). No strong evidence suggests that the native speakers intuitive knowledge of the language is substantially more precise and uniform than his or her actual utterances and can be disconnected to make purely grammatical judgements about invented sentences. Introspection is opportunistic, coming into practice when data are presented and evolving to adapt to viewpoint and focus, rather than subsisting as a stable theoretical system when its not being used. 41. At this stage in mainstream linguistics with syntax as the model paradigm (cf. II.30, 49), its status of a normal science fluctuated uneasily (II.28). The increase along the three test scales proposed in II.28 stagnated and gradually turned into a decrease. In theory, full coverage of language data was built right into definition of the grammar: assigning a structural description to all the grammatical sentences (II.39). But in practice, only modest sets of sentences could be so devised that their grammaticality was indisputable; the rest were sensitive to varying contexts and interpretations, which are presumably affected by performance factors. The homework linguists had once proclaimed that descriptivist data-driven practices only precluded the development of a theory (a theory being of course a formalist grammar); the lesson now emerged, with high poetic justice, that generativist theory-driven procedures preclude the description of adequate data in practice. The same grammar purporting in theory to provide total coverage of all the wellformed sentences of English might in practice provide almost no coverage of a corpus of observed speech in everyday conversations, which would often look ill-formed and which was always produced by real speakers who are neither ideal nor homogeneous and certainly dont know the language perfectly (cf. II.27, 54, 57, 66, 95). A paradoxical scenario arose: reality being claimed for a technical construction while rejecting the reality of human discourse inclusive theory with exclusive practice (cf. I.6; II.27). And instead of becoming a genuine normal science, generativist linguistics could only be a normalizing quasi-science that cannot describe authentic data but only the data it has expressly normalized, thereby rendering them empirically undecidable (cf. III.172). 42. Convergence among the descriptions of data was impeded by the burgeoning theoretical apparatus of formal rules and notations and innovative terms. True to the grammars name, each fresh rule-set transformed the datas appearance, sometimes closer to the surface structure of sentences as we find them written down in ordinary

orthography and sometimes venturing at varying distances into the deep structure that was held to underlie sentences and to generate them through procedures of transformation, e.g., to convert Active into Passive. The prerogative to transform the surface data often led to divergent results, especially if, as was freely conceded, surface structure is unrevealing as to underlying deep structure, and if the grammar does not, in itself, provide any sensible procedure for finding a deep structure of a given sentence. 43. Consensus was concentrated in the early phase when generative grammar still had a standard model. Soon, the leeway for inventing theoretical rule-sets spurred proposals for competing models. The fuzzy connection between theory and practice in such models prevented using a corpus of authentic data to establish a consensus about the best model; instead, models were hotly debated on theoretical grounds (cf. VIII.22). Over thirty technical constructions still contend within the field, bearing trademark names like case grammar, Montague grammar, lexical-functional grammar, X-bar theory, or government and binding, and advocated on technical and formal criteria of design (II.27), which again do not favor consensus. 44. Perhaps the evolution of modern linguistics outlined in this section could be retold as the search for constraints, with constraint being broadly defined as any factor making some items or patterns of a language more or less likely than others. The Saussurian conception of a system wherein everything holds everything else in place (un systme o tout se tient rigoureusement) suggests that a language by itself (langue) consists of a complete set of standing constraints. The generative conception further assumes that the range of those standing constraints is formally circumscribed within the borders of the grammar. An alternative conception, sponsored by systemic functional linguistics and related methods, sees language as a system (or multi-system) of evolving interactions between standing versus emergent constraints, and among linguistic, cognitive, and social constraints. Language is interposed like a layer inside a cake (Fig. II.3): society uses language to understand and

appropriate theworld , while the world passes via language into a socially shared worldmodel. The classical program of mainstream linguistics would disconnect language from

this configuration, as if rolling the layers apart (Fig. II.3, right side). Language by itself can be described in purely linguistic terms only if it can hold firm and continue to subsist and operate upon its own internal, standing constraints (cf. II.54). 45. But can language by itself hold firm? It apparently can in some sparse sectors whose constraints are general and uniform and whose organization seems fairly frozen. In phonology, every phoneme is held precisely and uniquely in place by the physical constraints of articulation and by the mental constraints of being able to differentiate between elements that also differ in meaning (II.29). The physical constraints are the clearest, but the mental ones can be easily met by finding at least one contrastive data pair like hid and hit, whose members do not mean the same thing; we neednt state what they mean or how their meanings differ, we only need a ready consensus that the meanings do differ (cf. II.48). 46. Internal standing constraints also suffice for some fairly sparse and frozen sectors of morphology. For example, the inflections of nouns and verbs can be covered and classified without having to state their often complex relations to cognitive constraints (e.g., what might be the Agent of an Action) and social constraints (e.g., how ProNouns can signal power or solidarity). Also, the distributions of morphemes can be firmly grasped by observing them in a corpus of authentic data, where the speakers themselves were respecting cognitive and social constraints (cf. II.33, 58, 75). 47. In syntax, however, where the constraints are more specific and diverse, the search was less successful. Descriptive syntax could not progress very far beyond morphology, e.g., in phrase structure grammars, and identified the linear positions of segments much better than the constraints that would put them there. Syntacticians kept looking deeper, whence the shift from fieldwork over to homework methods (II.39ff). Linguists apparently assumed that purely syntactic constraints corresponding to rules would emerge most clearly from invented data out of context, since authentic data in rich contexts obviously obey nonsyntactic constraints too. Stating which sequences (or sentences) can or cannot occur in theory should prove easier than stating which ones actually did in practice. Predictably, the ambition to make syntax stand on its own constraints highlighted the frozen islands of language, i.e., the stabilized formal patterns of sparse standing constraints such as article + noun in English. Yet even in languages which, like English, have a fair quantity, these frozen islands by no means suffice for continuing increases in coverage, convergence, and consensus. Without realizing it, generative syntax had taken on the unworkable task of freezing the whole system, and each attempt necessarily got partial and divergent results (IV.3). Even simple invented data (e.g., John is eager to please, II.66) may refuse to freeze

over: the more you fixate and analyze them, the likelier you are to notice other aspects or interpretations. 48. This predicament encouraged widening the search for constraints to encompass semantics, the investigation of the meanings of language. Early theorizing had implicitly disconnected semantics from the rest of linguistics by insisting that the relation between form and meaning is arbitrary, i.e., not motivated by any natural bond. Intriguingly, this move deviated from the mainstream program by appealing to the history and evolution of language: how the meanings came to correspond to the sound patterns we now observe. But the relation between form and meaning is not all arbitrary within the system and the consensus among speakers (II.62); it eludes linguistics because it is always evolving in multiple dimensions on several levels. In phonology, the phonemes need merely differentiate meanings (II.29, 45). In morphology, the morphemes grammaticalize meanings, but the meaning may not be decided until a morpheme gets used, e.g., the English Possessive -s that might indicate many relations beside possession, e.g., part (the cars engine), temporality (tonights feature film), locality (Hollywoods fashion industry), and so on. In lexicology, the lexemes lexicalize meanings that are typically stable though often adaptive, e.g. freedom (VII.10, 18, 31). In syntax, the syntagmemes linearize meanings that are also grammaticalized and lexicalized. This scheme, which will be enriched later on (II.62; III.92, 203, 232ff), does not foresee a level or domain for meanings by themselves, fully separated from these other levels: such a level might indeed look quite arbitrary. 49. At all events, semantics long led a shadowy life within linguistics, and was often left to the philosophers. Some linguists even vowed that meaning should not be a part of their science at all. Others undertook to develop a semantics closely modeled upon the betterknown levels. When phonology was the model paradigm (II.30), structural semantics postulated a repertory of sparse-looking theoretical minimal units called sememes (or semes or semantemes), such as Animate or Human. When syntax became the model paradigm (II.41), this scheme was taken over into semantic features (or markers) specified by formal rules and situated in the lexicon rather than in the grammar these two being considered separate levels or components, as they already had been in morphology (cf. II.32, 75; IV.14). Neither approach fared well on the test scales of coverage, convergence, and consensus. Research centered on programmatic demonstrations with meagre examples, and even simple analyses (e.g. kill = cause + die) raised thorny disputes. In retrospect, this outcome could have been predicted. Of all the aspects of language, meaning is the hardest to freeze and suffers the most through disconnecting

language from peoples knowledge of world and society (II.74). We are left with no way to tell what practical units these theoretical units might correspond to: ideas, human actions, real objects and events, cultural artefacts, and so on. A sememe or feature like +Human cannot be a stable, determinate unit: how complex or simple and how abstract or concrete it is depends on the context, e.g., on whether it occurs in the discourse of biology, anthropology, philosophy, religion, politics, law, or medicine (cf. III.93). Trying to analyze meanings out of context or else for all contexts are two equally impossible jobs the one having too few constraints and the other too many and linguists get vague or conflicting results (cf. II.53f; III.32). Meanings can converge and linguists can reach a secure consensus only by assembling a representative set of discourse contexts, where the constraints have been applied by real speakers (II.65, 75). 50. Nor has it been easy to reach a consensus about how semantics should interact with syntax. After withdrawing his early claim that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning, Chomskys standard model gave the semantic component the job of supplying formal rules for interpreting and disambiguating syntactic sequences that had already been generated (structurally described, II.39) by the syntax. Because this arrangement blocked the semantic constraints from helping to construct the sequence, a counter-proposal was soon made to give the generative role to the semantics, and to postulate the logical form for the deep structure of the sentence before the syntax kicks in. But consensus also broke down about how to represent a logical form: logic pursues sparse issues like truth and validity rather than the rich ordinary meanings of words or utterances (cf. II.10ff). The logical forms shown in sample analyses glibly retained undefined ordinary words, e.g., in this semantic representation for a sentence from James McCawley:

The formula states that it is true for all members (xs) " being a universal quantifier that each x loves xs wife. The formal treatment covers only the assignments into sets, an issue logic can handle (II.11). The rich meaning of the crucial love is not semantically or logically analyzed into units, and attempts to do so would hardly converge. 51. Further constraints were plainly needed, and the stage was set to welcome pragmatics, which had been defined by linguistics and semiotics as the study of the uses of language in a three-part scheme alongside syntax and semantics. Fended off by the staid division between language by itself versus language use, pragmatics had made its

academic home mainly in philosophy. Linguistics now admitted pragmatics on the condition that, like semantics, it would respect the formality prescribed for syntax. So pragmatics was to supply further sparse constraints in the guise of rules for interpreting and disambiguating sentences by specifying what a sentence implies, entails, or presupposes, and how its meaning (sometimes!) depends on the speakers intention and the hearers acceptance. What appears to be a simple statement about reality, e.g., Rodolfos c freddo fuori (its cold outside) in Puccinis La Bohme, can be intended and accepted to be a proposal to stay inside; Mimis answer ti star vicina (Ill be near you) reacts by implying that shell keep him from feeling the cold outside. 52. A catchy motto for pragmatic inquiries was how to do things with words (John Austin), and not just how words are formed and arranged or what words mean. The notion of speech act was adopted from ordinary language philosophy, a term contrasting with the more technical or formal language philosophy of logical and mathematical systems (cf. III.167). Here, research sought to specify the conditions under which an utterance act or a locutionary act corresponds to a propositional act of stating a content or message, an illocutionary act of performing a discourse action (e.g. promising, threatening), and a perlocutionary act of eliciting an effect on the hearer (e.g. getting compliance). Whereas the propositional act foregrounds the constative function of making statements about the world, the illocutionary act is most prominent in the performative function where saying and doing fully converge (e.g. pronouncing this meeting adjourned). 53. Although the constraints supplied by pragmatics were well received in linguistics, the mainstream program of disconnecting language by itself from language in use was not widely repudiated. Analyses still used invented data; the speech acts were analyzed from the standpoint of an ideal speaker or hearer (II.40f, 50, 128; V.4); and linguists resisted admitting a wide range of cognitive and social constraints in general (cf. II.49; III.32) three trends that, as we saw, hinder convergence and consensus. Also, the sentence was still the chief formal unit, now held to be the vehicle of the theoretical unit of the speech act (cf. II.83). The meaning of the utterance was only modestly constrained by presuppositions (what must be valid if the proposition is true) and implicatures (what follows logically from what you say), both of these usually being propositions formatted as single sentences too. Such conceptions continued to encourage idealization and to obscure the ratio between theory versus practice, especially by impeding the analysis of authentic data from observed conversations (II.41).

54. On the whole, the search for constraints throughout mainstream linguistics has followed an ambivalent, zigzagged course: integrating steadily more domains or levels of language without explicitly renouncing the heavily theoretical conception of language by itself being a uniform, stable, and abstract system. Richer constraints were admitted uneasily or through disguised forms and obscure terminologies about rules or features. Today, we can roundly reject the mainstream conception for having definitively failed the three test scales of coverage, convergence, and consensus. The failure demonstrates that language does not hold firm upon its own internal standing constraints (cf. II.44f). If we disconnect cognitive and social constraints, language merely skids out of control and eludes our most resolute attempts to describe it. In sum, the classical mainstream program summarized in II.24 cannot be achieved either in theory or in practice and cannot provide a sound basis for a normal science. We now recognize that such technical constructions as Saussures abstract langue and Chomskys purely grammatical competence (II.24, 40f) cannot be fully described by any method. Whereas descriptive fieldwork linguistics at least makes such concepts less constructional, generative homework linguistics only makes them more technical; and the two sides keep on drifting apart. 55. Its high time, I submit, to reconnect theory with practice by consolidating a postclassical linguistics and reformulating the tenets stated in II.24: (a) Language is a phenomenon integrated with society and with its knowledge of the world. (b) Language should be described along with the conditions under which speakers use it. (c) Language should be described in terms of interactions between standing versus emergent constraints, and among linguistic, cognitive, and social constraints. (d) A language constitutes a dynamic communicative system undergoing continual evolution. (e) The description of a language should be stated at fluctuating degrees of generality between the entire language and the specific discourse context. Such a program will demand hard work to accredit a much richer range of data and to rethink our familiar categories from a monodisciplinary perspective over into a transdisciplinary one (cf. I.5, 39). But in return, we can finally make genuine headway toward coverage, convergence, and consensus and situate theory and practice within a dialectic where each defines the other (II.80, 112). 56. Within this post-classical program, the concepts and methods of linguistics would be resituated in differently conceived projects and deployed as tools toward further ends rather than as ends in themselves (cf. II.79). They would be placed in a theoretical framework expressly asserting that the design of language is organized for the uses people make of it in

practice, and that our data should be described expressly in those terms (I.38; II.112). Conversely, the uses of language are richly constrained by the organization of language but also by the organization of society and its knowledge of the world. So the uses of language must be intensely scrutinized as the crucial arena in which language, society, and world mutually organize and negotiate themselves. The job is immense, but we have reached a turning point where easy little projects are no longer relevant (III.201). 57. Our program should also transcend the long-standing contest between formalism, which inquires how the elements and patterns of language are shaped or arranged, versus functionalism, which inquires how those elements and patterns are put to use. Formalism has profited from the project to describe language by itself, since the forms seem reassuringly uniform, stable, and abstract, whereas functional data point toward the side of language use and keep connecting language with world and society. Moreover, formalism makes formality into a free-standing goal that must be maintained at all costs, as if a formal theory could only be challenged by a still more formal one and not by issues of practice (III.170; VII.188). Despite its long-range stagnation over the years, formalism has maintained its orthodoxy of pure theory and exclusive claims to scientific status, and its self-confident optimism that a fully formal description is just on the horizon. Ironically, the much-advertised rigor and objectivity of the methods, with their imposing notations derived from formal logic, set theory, predicate calculus, algebra and the like, was combined with a subjective leap of faith into a project that had to be shielded from contact with authentic data and real speakers (II.41). Meanwhile, a semblance of progress was upheld by assuming that some factor or manifestation of language can be explained by sticking a formal label upon it or by rewriting it into a formal notation (II.27; III.167ff, 184). Functional factors had to be either excluded (as parole, performance, surface structure, and so on) or else admitted in formal disguises (e.g., by defining the topic of a sentence as the leftmost noun phrase dominated by [i.e., being a major constituent of] the sentence). 58. The formalist project is stymied as long as it obliges linguists to formalize data and disconnect them from their functions but cannot control how you do it. A major trade-off ensues: coverage of language, convergence among data, and consensus among linguists all decrease when natural language data get rewritten into formal notation, and increase when data get treated in natural formats (Fig.iI.4) (cf. II.12, 41; 65; III.167ff; V.1). The trade-off is to be expected, because people,

includinglinguists, are real speakers rather than ideal ones and agree less when they formalize natural language data than when they speak, listen, read, and write them. Conversely, the more the data are examined in the contexts and practices where they actually occur, the easier it is to agree about what they mean (II.65, 74f). 59. Formalism has also been favored by the project of dividing up the organization of language into subsystems called levels, each one to be described by its own internal criteria and not to be mixed with the others. The levels would be formally linked within a structural hierarchy based on the size of units and the constituency between parts and wholes, as proposed by the influential American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. The phonemes as sounds shown toward the top (Fig. II.5).would be the

constituentsof morphemes as forms, the morphemes the constituents of lexemes as words, and the lexemes the constituents of syntagmemes as phrases. We could thus envision a scheme of multiple levels piled upon each other, with the shallower levels nearer the surface of an utterance The breakdown into their respective building-blocks would give us a scheme like Fig. II.6 for the utterance they sounded unspeakably horrible (Collins COBUILD Dictionary, p. 1602). As we move from phonemes to morphemes to lexemes, we usually get fewer units, though not just from adding up the sum of the parts. In Fig. II.6, the units matching the phonemes are written in phonetic script, and the units matching the

morphemes in the usual orthography but in their base forms, e.g., able + ly = ably, or horror + able = horrible, although for many speakers an item like horrible might be a single unanalyzable unit. The scheme looks visually transparent and data-friendly in registering the practical units we can readily discover in the data. It also has a clear criterion for completeness, namely when all units have been isolated and labeled. And it raises the attractive prospect that asparser subsystem can be the model for a richer one, e.g. phonology for morphology, so that linguistic theory can manage with one parsimonious set of concepts and methods, e.g., by segmenting data into minimal units (cf. II.30ff, 87). But several stubborn problems persist. A discontinuous constituent would be awkward, e.g., the verb live it up with an obligatory Pro-Noun in the middle, or the Possessive King + -s in the King of Englands hat. So would a multi-level unit, such as the Latin imperative ! (go!), which could be analyzed as a phoneme, a morpheme, a lexeme, and various syntagmemes (verb phrase, clause, complete utterance) all at once and would thus have itself as its own constituent several times over. Also, the scheme makes no reference to semantics or meaning, leaving us to naively assume that the meaning of the whole is simply the sum of the meanings of all of its parts. And finally, the practical use of language would look like shuffling blocks, the speaker fetching the pieces and putting them in a row, while the hearer takes the row and pulls it back into the pieces. All these problems highlight how the formalist scheme implies disconnectedness and masks the unity and continuity of human utterances, and obscures the interaction between local micro-units and global macro-units (cf. III.224). The function of formalism is to authorize an academically accredited failure to connect, faithfully reflecting the endemic malady of modern society (I.4; II.61, 86; VII.22; VIII.16). 60. In a functionalist scheme, in contrast, the levels would be richly connected, not just through the size of units and the constituency between parts and wholes, but through mutually determining functions between means and ends, as proposed by the eminent Czech linguist Frantiek DaneFormal units are recognized in terms of what they contribute how they function both within their respective sub-system and within the current discourse. As shown in Fig. II.7, the means-end connections would go across on three parameters.

First, the levels whose formal units are typically but not obligatorily smaller are the means for the ends of the levels whose units are typically larger (up to down axis on the left side). Second, the forms on each level are the means for the ends of their meanings on that same level (left to right axis). And thirdly, the meanings on the levels whose units are typically but not obligatorily smaller are the means for the ends of the meanings on the levels whose units are typically larger (up to down axis on the right side). 61. This formulation sounds a bit more complicated than the formalist one, and the scheme is not visually transparent because we see only the forms, i.e., the more manifest means, and have to infer or reconstruct the ends and meanings (cf. IV.4). This problem might resemble the problem, aired above, that the rules of syntax do not appear in sentences (II.39), but for us the lesson is not to move away from the data but to move resolutely toward them, namely the data indicating how people connect means with ends, and forms with meanings, when they use language in discourse. If formalism fails to make connections, functionalism insists on making connections. Authentic data supply rich constraints, whereas invented data serve the untypical ends of linguistic analysis and rarefy or disconnect important constraints (cf. II.53, 59; IV.5). So a functionalist account is better positioned for convergence and consensus by acknowledging the constraints from knowledge of world and society. And our own descriptions of discourse can be made accessible by exploiting the potential of discourse for constructing and sharing models of the world and society (II.131; VII.71). 62. Formally, the relation between form and meaning looks arbitrary in the dismissive sense of mainstream linguistics, since few objects and events in the world suggest what sounds should be used to express them (II.48, 90). But functionally, the relation is always motivated to achieve the task of organizing the meanings with the formal resources the language provides. The distinct levels of language are required because this task is actually a cluster of subtasks: meanings need to be differentiated by phonemes (in sounds), grammaticalized by morphemes (in word-parts), lexicalized by lexemes (in words), linearized by syntagmemes (in phrases), and, finally, integrated by texts (cf. II.48; III.92, 203, 232ff).

Each language farms out these subtasks in its own way (I.38; II.32) along several parameters of design, which we shall explore in Ch. III. For complexity, analytic languages have simpler words and make the phrase be the primary unit of formal organization, as in Modern Mandarin Chinese (Ptnghu) or, to a lesser degree, English (cf. IV.195); synthetic languages have complex words with readily distinguishable word-parts such as stems and affixes, e.g., the nouns with 15 cases in Finnish (cf. III.117; IV.134); polysynthetic languages have very complex word-forms, e.g. Aymara (cf. II.31). For stability, isolating languages keep the basic or root form unaltered, e.g. Vietnamese; agglutinative languages glue together compounds out of units each of which has its own meaning, e.g. Bantu; and inflective languages make formal changes that are meaningful only in combination with a root form, e.g. ancient Greek. Or again, some languages organize form-systems through prefixes, e.g. Khmer, while others do so through suffixes, e.g. Nootka. All this formal diversity is offset by the functional compatibility of languages for being interfaced with the constraints of world and society. 63. An expressly functional scheme of levels might look like Fig. 8. Prosody is the intonation of

the overall sequence of uttered sounds and words, having a melody of pitch, stress, volume, and tempo in spoken discourse and being partially represented by punctuation in written discourse (cf. IV.E). The lexicogrammar unites the resources for lexicalizing and for grammaticalizing along a parameter of delicacy: more delicate patterns have finergrained criteria for accepting specific lexical items or small sets of these, whereas less delicate patterns have coarser-grained criteria for accepting large sets of items (cf. IV.B). Each language goes its own way in apportioning lexical and grammatical work(II.32) and in correlating the work with cognitive and social constraints. Finally, discourse is the level of the total communicative event, including discoursal moves, gestures, facial expressions, emotional displays, and so on, in contexts of situation (cf. I.33; II.89; IV.F). 64. Functionalism has recently gained a vital new resource for accessing authentic data in contexts. Large computerized corpuses of authentic texts enable us to assemble and analyze items and patterns on a scale and scope that simply werent feasible before. As of

mid-1996, the largest is the Bank of English developed at Birmingham University under the supervision of John McHardy Sinclair, with some 323 million words of running text from contemporary spoken and written sources, including: British and American books; newspapers (e.g., Times, Independent, Guardian, Today, Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, Economist); magazines (e.g., Esquire, Good Housekeeping); ephemera such as letter-box mailings (e.g., YMCA appeal for homeless people, Friends of Earth Tropical Rainforest Campaign); radio broadcasts (British Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio); and recordings of conversations. This is the widest coverage we have ever had of a language, though it is far from complete (cf. II.78). 65. As a corpus gets larger, it does not simply show us the same data multiplied out, e.g., each item being ten times as frequent in a corpus ten times as large. Instead, the larger corpus both turns up fresh data that did not appear at all in the smaller ones and displays the previous data in steadily finer delicacy for the range and frequency of the combinations. Hosts of regularities emerge that escaped notice in smaller data sets, and would elude unguided intuition and introspection. We still have to interpret the data, but our results are much more favorable to convergence and consensus than results from linguistic methods without a large corpus (cf. II.74ff). We are now on the favorable side of the trade-off cited in II.12 and shown as Fig. II.4 in II.58. Instead of coverage, convergence, and consensus decreasing when natural language data get rewritten into a formal notation, they are now increasing when data get treated in their naturally occurring formats. 66. Conversely, the corpus highlights the improbable and unnatural quality of invented data like John is eager to please (II.47). Typical contexts of real discourse call for less simple-minded and peremptory utterances. For example, all three instances for eager to please in the Bank of English have a Direct Object Target, and a more interesting Subject Agent than the legendary John, e.g., the government keen to please powerful forces such as wealth and the Church [18-19].
[18] < a government official who is eager to please the wealth goddess > [19] < the Sandinistas. The government is eager to please the Church [20] < show a sociable child who is eager to please or charm those around him >

Linguists who attempt to judge the grammaticality of invented sentences may strain their intuitions, e.g., on a sample like John is eager to sneeze; and the strain gets worse for naive informants who consider what would be sensible, not what would be well-formed (cf. II.40f). The corpus solves this dilemma by displaying data that real speakers have already

approved (II.46, 76). We need to account for the communicative competence these speakers dont just possess in theory but also manifest in practice (cf. I.59f, II.76). 67. Corpus displays look shallow, but, because the data remain in their contexts, we can better locate both shallower and deeper constraints and assess the plausible functions of the forms and patterns we do see. The words are not regarded as the basic individual units but as interactors in co-texts, i.e., in the grammatical and lexical environments of a text, and in collocations, to adopt Firths well-known term for words considered in the company they usually keep. These collocations operate within the lexicogrammar along the interface between lexicon and grammar: many lexical items turn out to have specific grammatical preferences (cf. II.73; IV.13, 133). Collocations follow both the sparser standing constraints such as frozen word-order in phrase patterns and also the richer emergent constraints such as knowledge of world and society, which are hard to formalize as rules in a theory but easy to apply in practice (cf. I.55; II.75; III.1, 142). 68. I shall briefly inspect some corpus data I took from the Bank of English on the Verb warrant in July 1994, when the corpus had 200 million words. The search software displays a set of lines with the key word roughly in the middle of each line. The lines can be automatically alphabetized from various positions to the left or the right, e.g., to get a systematic list of all the Modifiers just in front of a Noun. The lines also need some handsorting when positions are unstable, e.g., how many positions before a Verb to look for its Subject; and when semantically useful clusters dont follow any alphabetical order. Handsorting is quite time-consuming but can reward the effort by turning up interesting arrays of data. 69. If you look at the words in the several positions to the left and right of the key word are displayed in descending order of frequency, the results are not especially informative. The Content Words indicating what typically warrants or is warranted are outranked by Function Words such as Prepositions or Negations. This proportion is general, because the choice of Content Words is of course much wider and the Function Words occupy more consistent positions, (e.g., the to just ahead of warrant), but is also specific to these data because of such contextual factors as the prominence of Negation (e.g., not and on the left, no on the right) for declaring what is not warranted though it might seem to be. 70. A hand-sorted heuristic is to regroup the lines to collect and highlight content categories; a shortened version with some of the more interesting data is shown in Table II.2. Such displays help us

< because we dont have the acreage to warrant <M01> Yes.<F01> one. But I dont > < aggressions, each too small to warrant war. Because possession of the > < office and that his behavior could warrant both criminal and political steps> < Boren says the charges, if true, warrant serious concern, but he stresses > < chickens which are good enough to warrant their own <FCH> appellation > < their circumstances simply do not warrant charitable assistance. <t> For > < bark disease. Degenerating trees warrant specialist attention. Felling or > < citys past discriminatory practices warrant a strict plan, one that includes > < distress levels severe enough to warrant professional intervention > < On its own the documentary wouldnt warrant more than a 4: out-takes of films > < Costa Ricas economic conditions warrant the cut in aid, which the country > < insists there is enough evidence to warrant an investigation # One suggestion > < food shortage is severe enough to warrant breaking the embargo # This report > < of impropriety alone is enough to warrant punishment # Ralph Lotkin, the > < were internal matters that warrant no outside interference. Shay > < nothing in the market today to warrant optimism or pessimism, and that > < the national objectives at stake warrant the deaths of U.S. troops # Oil, > < these old homes are chilly enough to warrant guests wearing thermal long johns > < a serious enough operation to warrant intensive care. <LTH> Dining at > < revelations of an affair did not warrant my leaving the Government. <t> I > < situation is not bad enough yet to warrant that type of appeal. We do not see > < violence in South Africa to warrant any relaxation in security > < women were too unimportant to warrant a special ritual, and in societies >
Table II.1

appreciate how many constraints are multi-functional in relating to more than one of the usual levels or components of linguistic analysis. Where we decide to situate them is an issue to determine in relation to the motives of our research. 71. For pragmatics, we could notice the explicit but fairly rare Performative Ill warrant (or I warrant) for indicating you feel sure though you cant point to real facts. Alongside invented sentences, a sample like [22] looks complex, with four Dependent Clauses embedded into each other, but in real discourse it would be easy enough to comprehend for the adolescents it is addressed to (cf. IV.111).

[21] The soil may look innocuous enough when you've dug it over but Ill warrant its teeming with rooteating wireworms. [22] Ill warrant I even heard Honey Bane shuffling by somewhere in the background of a song that will provide the perfect soundtrack for when your mum wont let you out of your room until youve done your homework.

Less explicit but far more frequent and influential in the data is the pragmatic force implied in declaring what does or does not warrant what. By implication, an event or situation is informative (unusual, significant) enough to warrant some reaction, and those who might be expected to react say if they will or will not and how. The one who does the saying is typically a person representing some institution or authority, and the data indicate what kind: government, judiciary, military, sports, business, science, and medicine. Other persons who use warrant imply they have authority, e.g., the journalists and media persons who said the Chevrolet Beretta does not warrant particular mention or the documentary wouldnt warrant more than a 4. 72. For semantics, we could notice that many of the Subjects and Direct Objects fall into associative classes we could group under general headings, e.g.:
(a) as
SUBJECTS: ACTIONS:

aggressions, behavior, blow, brawl;

PROBLEMS:

RESOURCES:

acreage, growing area,

MESSAGES:

scrappable cars;

KNOWLEDGE:

evidence, information, scientific authority;

message,

complaints, revelations; (b) as

DIRECT OBJECTS:

air leaks, antitrust conspiracy, casualty rate, chilly old homes,

REACTIONS:

degenerating trees, discriminatory practices, distress levels, food shortage, ill health, violence; (IN)APPROPRIATE change, conclusion, increases, motion, plan, step, treatment;
MESSAGES: CONSUMPTION OF RESOURCES:

cost, expenditure, loss of troops lives, overeating, shelf-space;

apology, billing, briefing, brochure, comment, description, mention, satire, talking-to; airing, attention, consideration, consultations, examination, hearing, inquiry,
SOLVING PROBLEMS:

KNOWLEDGE-GATHERING:

investigation, review, trial;

(profesional/surgical) intervention, economic assistance,

RETALIATING:

breaking the embargo, easing interest rates, wearing thermal long johns, intensive care, more elaborate feeding, making peace, using these drugs; prosecution, capital punishment. charge(s), banning the show, Gods anger, jail time, lengthy ban, massive American retaliation, penalties, pre-emptive strike, criminal

Such groupings are of course not mutually exclusive, e.g., an action like legal trial being either knowledge-gathering about misdeeds or retaliating against the accused. Still, we can make a modest semantic table with Subject-groupings and Object-groupings and some typical correlations (Table II.2). Often, a correlation between the left and right hand columns turns up on the same line in the data,
SUBJECT-GROUPINGS OBJECT-GROUPINGS

actions resources messages knowledge problem Table II.2

(in)appropriate reactions/retaliations consumption of resources messages knowledge-gathering problem-solving

e.g., evidence (knowledge) plus investigation/trial (knowledge-gathering) or degenerating trees (problem) plus specialist attention (problem-solving). But we certainly do not have a semantic rule here. We also find, say, action plus message, e.g., operation plus briefing; or knowledge plus reaction, e.g., evidence plus banning the show; and so on. 73. For morphology, we could notice the accumulations of several prefixes among the Processes, fitting the semantic and pragmatic constraints that warranting often involves situations in which people act together (viz. commitment, complaints, consideration, conspiracy, consultations); or where something is not what it should be (viz. impropriety, insufficient, unimportant, unorthodox, unsatisfactory, untutored); or where people want inside knowledge (viz. inquiry, investigation) or want to break in on the chain of events (viz. interception, interference, intervention, introducing); and so on. For syntax or grammar, we could notice the dominance of Third Person subjects (222 occurrences), versus just 4 in First Person and none at all in the Second Person; and, within in the Third Person, the handful of Pro-Noun Subjects he (6 occurrences), she (0), they (5), and it (5) versus the large number of Noun Subjects. Evidently, persons are much less likely to warrant something than are their actions or the situations they create; and the authoritative force encourages Nouns stating what warrants instead of just saying it warrants. 74. How far the data on these various levels reflect the standing constraints of the language or the emergent constraints in the discourse is an open question that only enters our agenda when we have corpus data on display. Probably, the answer is that they lie in between and function because they dont have to go all on one side or the other. The same holds for the ratio between linguistic constraints versus cognitive and social constraints, as we can see here in the factors of Attitudes about good or bad values (III.99). For the contexts of warranting, the bad ones predominate but with a variety of linguistic means. The value may be lexicalized in the Subject only (e.g., casualty rate warrants a step), in the Direct Object only (e.g., cases warrant capital punishment), or in both (e.g., aggressions warrant war). Also, various grammatical categories serve, e.g., Nouns (job bias, violence) or Modifiers (discriminatory practices, chilly old homes). Seemingly general or neutral

lexical items (circumstances, conditions, occasion, operation, qualities, situation) that would not have values as a part of their own core meaning also carry values in most of my corpus data. Even without more co-text, data like there wasnt a single incident to warrant any action from me imply a bad incident calling for retaliatory action. Or, when scientific authority does not warrant exaggerated respect, a normally good value is moved toward a bad one. 75. We return here to my point about how much semantics loses when language gets disconnected from world and society (II.49). Trying to give a formal definition of the meaning of an item like warrant in isolation naturally foments an ambience of vagueness or ambiguity and a compensatory pressure for arbitrary, complicated sets of rules or features, leading to a decrease in convergence and consensus. Invented sentences dont help much either; I, for instance, had no clear notion of how warrant gets used in sentences until I saw the data. Even harder would be to state formal restrictions for how the item could not be used. Corpus data might appear ambiguous or even ill-formed in the purview of formal or logical analysis, e.g. [23-28]; but such uses are quite meaningful in real contexts. According to an informal survey among my students with long hair, [23] probably means that certain shampoos (substances) warrant only one shampoo (one act of use) rather than that some acts of use warrant only one substance, though both readings are certainly reasonable. In [24], the major threat, unlike the Performative speech act of threatening, is not an action contingent on someone elses action (Ill do this if you do that) but an action against someone whos done nothing; the context fits the familiar domain of military and political discourse that mystifies aggression as defense. The same domain lends an unusual meaning to air leak in [25], where planes or missiles rather than air are passing through. In [26], inclusion is marked but avoids an unmarked harsher term like confinement (cf. III.126). In [27], appear rather than appears does not oblige us to think that surgery is to be done on stories or story-tellers rather than on the people in ill health. In [28], unpredictable seems intuitively better with bad if, as I at first thought, the performance of an athlete or team might call for a break; but when I accessed the co-text, the missing Subject was British weather (you know its bad but not how bad or when).
[23] < shampoos are effective enough to warrant only one shampoo per wash.> [24] < as a major threat sufficient to warrant a pre-emptive strike of their own.> [25] < the White House says these air leaks do not warrant military interception > [26] < disability is not felt sufficient to warrant his inclusion in the wheelchair > [27] < stories of ill health that appear to warrant surgical intervention. Frequently >

[28] < not bad enough nor predictable enough to warrant a mid-season break. >

These various constraints are easy enough to apply; major problems start only when you try to formalize them by consigning them to specific units and segments, or by stating them in abstract rules or features (cf. I.55; II.49, 58, 67, 88; III.167f; IV.17). Meaning is omnipresent at all levels of language, as J.R. Firth liked to say; but we cannot isolate just one level and expect to find its meanings intact. Only texts enable people to integrate meanings in a dynamic convergence and to reach a consensus (II.62; III.92); if you pull texts apart, meanings disintegrate along with convergence and consensus. These trade-offs hold for ordinary speakers and linguists alike, and its high time we stopped pretending to be the grand exceptions. Our best chances for analyzing data and reaching significant insights are to build upon (rather than disown) the procedures we share with participants in real discourse. 76. Moreover, we are then better positioned for the linguistic data-handling moves listed in II.25. The sorted displays make a handy basis for collating data and deciding what to generalize, e.g., whether the warranting entails some authoritative force constraining which kinds of situations warrant which kinds of actions. We rarefy in not having the communicative situation available for observation, but we can enrich by accessing the source domain, e.g., a business-oriented newspaper like the Economist. We decontextualize by looking at the single line, but we can recontextualize it at once by calling up the source text, e.g., to get British weather [28]. We can introspect and apply our intuitions under firmer constraints and test them by predicting the words or concepts before and after the line on display and then calling up the sources. And finally, we are consulting informants in the vast population who produced the data, and we can easily recruit native-speaker informants similar to the ones who produced the data or to whom the data were addressed, e.g., writers or readers of newspapers and magazines, to make judgements, predictions, and so on about the data. We are acting as informants ourselves when we interpret the data, but we are deploying our communicative competence far more naturally than when we judge the grammaticality of simple invented sentences like ?John warrants to please (or sneeze) (II.66). We are introspecting not to decide if the data are genuine samples of English the producers already decided that but to determine the constraints on their production, e.g., the probability of collocations among semantically related words like the highly frequent evidence + trial, in contrast to improbable isolated combinations like degenerating trees + specialist attention that still make sense in context.

77. Corpus linguistics might also finally resolve the divisive opposition between fieldwork linguistics versus homework linguistics (II.26f). Fieldwork data can be slow and troublesome to collect, whereas homework data can be artificial and vague to analyse. Now, a huge corpus of authentic data can be made simultaneously accessible to linguists in many locations and situations spanning a wide range of methods and projects. Fieldworkers can share their data even at early stages of investigation and obtain on-line help with the analysis, e.g., from linguists who have studied the same or similar languages. Homeworkers can access authentic data so easily that they can no longer legitimize relying on their own invented data. Such gains amply reward the labor and expense needed to compile the corpus, especially when the data must be painstakingly transcribed to represent such factors as a tone-system, e.g., in Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua), which has developed the pinyin orthography for the purpose. For non-written languages, corpuses will remain small until the capabilities of sound recognition by computer are highly advanced. We can also expect significant advancements in the software to supplement human data-handling moves, e.g., by assembling and displaying patterns for steadily richer classes of lexical items rather than for single items. 78. Corpus linguistics transforms the problem of coverage too. We need no longer choose between conceiving a language to be either a repertory of minimal units or else a repertory of rules for constructing and arranging simple units into complex units (II.31, 39), both of which conceptions have impeded the wider coverage of data. Instead, we can conceive a language to be an open set of texts and discourses for which a very large and growing corpus is a steadily finer approximation (IV.29; V.2). Our description will never be complete but will be continually tuned. And it will not be uniform but finer-grained in some areas and coarser-grained in others, and will attain far more precise degrees of delicacy in the lexicogrammar. We may well discover such delicacy that virtually every lexical item collocates in its own different way an unexpected vindication of Saussures obscure dictum that in language there are only differences (cf. II.29f, 114), yet not in the language system (langue) but in language use (parole) where he stoutly refused to look for it! If so, lexicology may be transformed even in its most central concepts, such as synonymy. In my corpus data, for example, serious concern collocates pejoratively, whereas serious consideration collocates amelioratively, even though we seem to have the same word serious and two words with similar definitions, concern being marked interest or regard and consideration being continuous and careful thought. But we actually have here two

meanings of serious: one in such collocations as serious problem, i.e. grave, and the other in such collocations as serious intention, i.e. sincere. 79. Rising delicacy may in turn help us to determine the relative degrees of formality appropriate to our description (II.13; III.173; IV.30), and to determine on rational grounds how formal and how functional a consensual description of English should be; my own motto would be: as formal as necessary but as functional as possible. We will also be better positioned to select suitable constraints, categories, terms, and so on for wide yet systematic coverage (cf. IV.133). The description would be integrated into a growing annotated corpus from which users could access manageable displays of data plus their descriptions. With a multiple design, the corpus could be consulted as a lexicon, a grammar, a lexicogrammar, a guide to usage, an index of terminology, a pedagogical resource, and so on (cf. IV.29, 133; VII.344). This design may well resemble the storage of language in the human mind (III.243). 80. My sketch of modern linguistics has come full circle: from the resolve to describe language by itself up to the strong move back to authentic language use. The earlier tools can now serve to describe the dialectics between language versus use and between form versus function in terms of the interactions among the familiar subsystems or levels of standing constraints along with the newly identified classes of emergent constraints we discover in corpus data. A fresh generation of data-driven theories and methods can support the post-classical program formulated in II.53: describing language as a dynamic communicative system integrated with knowledge of world and society. We can lay to rest our stony dichotomies and schemes for fragmenting language and freeing theory from practice. Our science can shift from confrontational rhetoric over free-standing formal theories and notations over to cooperative projects for describing real data and addressing social issues of discourse. 81. Proceeding as in the foregoing sections of this chapter, Fig. II.9 suggests how five linguistic approaches can be compared as five views on texts. In structural linguistics (e.g. Saussures

synchronic linguistics), language exam-ples from whatever sources are classified into categories of units within a uniform, stable, and abstract system of distinctive features (e.g. the phonemes). In fieldwork linguistics (e.g. Pikes tagmemics), authentic discourse is observed, transcribed, and described as a mainly formal but also partly or implicitly functional system (e.g. of morphemes). In generative linguistics (e.g. Chomskys transformational grammar), the homework linguist as native speaker introspects, submits invented sentences to intuitive judgements about their well-formedness, and constructs a mainly syntactic rule-system (a grammar) representing an ideal speaker-hearers knowledge of the language (competence). Functional linguistics (e.g. Hallidays systemic functional grammar) studies authentic utterances and relates means to ends. Corpus linguistics (e.g. Sinclair, Svartvik, Greenbaum) displays data lines with key words from a large computer bank and formulates the interactive constraints on all levels, whether formal or functional, and standing or emergent. These characterizations are sketchy and simplified, and some of the terms have been quite unstable over the years, especially structural and functional, about which I shall say more later on (III.69, 71, 80f). Also, their programmatic disputes do not make them into separated paradigms in the sense of II.2. They are all descriptive and view language as a system (or a multi-system), and they are all concerned with forms, structures, and functions. Moreover, they have often moved beyond the boundaries of their official theories in order to gain new insights. So the prospects are fairly bright for a fresh alliance both among these approaches and with neighboring disciplines to support a broad science of text and discoursefor exploring human cognition and communication in society. And, as we shall see in the following section, much of linguistics is already progressing in just this direction.

II.E. Moving toward text and discourse

82. Recent trends in worldwide language study and linguistics have finally been moving text and discourse out of the background where they had remained with no well-defined status in conventional schemes like phonology - morphology - lexicology - syntax. The trend was unmistakable at the Fourteenth International Congress of Linguists in Berlin in August 1987, where text and discourse constituted the largest division and the only one having three concurrent tracks of sections (cf. II.109). (The proportions might have been still greater had not many investigators of text and discourse been drawn away to the International Applied Linguistics Association or AILA Congress scheduled shortly after in Sydney, Australia.) Such a move had no precedent in previous congresses and might seem to signal a major paradigm shift or even a scientific revolution within modern linguistics. But the move toward texts came more from a gradual evolution than from a deliberate revolution a reorientation of interests brought on by addressing the central issues and problems in linguistics from a broader and more critical standpoint. 83. During most of this evolution, linguists felt content to stop at the unit of the sentence, which was the traditional unit for analyzing the parts of speech. In modern linguistics, the status of sentence evolved: merely a unit of language use (parole) for Saussure; an independent form not included in any larger form for Bloomfield; and finally the central unit of language (or grammar) for Chomsky. The sentence profited from its potential to assist the continuing search for constraints (II.44-54) while offering a strategic compromise between language by itself versus language use. The sentence can be treated as both a theoretical unit and a practical unit, without attending to the evasions implied in doing so. Thus, the sentence can represent both a set of formal (structural or grammatical) patterns an expanse of fairly frozen islands (II.45ff) whose constituents are drawn in rulegoverned ways from the general language system; and also a self-contained organizational field for specific uses. Formal syntax could thus be enriched with constraints stated as rules and attributed to sentences but more properly applying to utterances, propositions, speech acts, discoursal moves, and so on. This tactic is hardly avoidable if, as suggested by the layer-cake graphic, the language system would skid out of control if it could be disconnected from the constraints of world and society (II.44, 54). By compromising on the sentence, linguistics could expand its coverage without leaving its comfortable familiar terrain. 84. Yet over time, the sentence became overcomplicated as its structure got loaded with an expanding apparatus of deep or underlying rules and features (cf. II.106; III.172). Eventually, the search for richer constraints led some linguists to move on toward text and

discourse. The move was easiest for approaches within fieldwork linguistics and functional linguistics, which had long been getting their data from text and discourse: tagmemics (K.L. Pike, R.E. Longacre) and distributionalism (Z.S. Harris) in the U.S.; glossematics in Denmark (L. Hjelmslev, K. Togeby); the Prague School in Czechoslovakia (V. Mathesius, V. Skalicka, J. Firbas, F. Dane); systemic functional linguistics in Britain (J.R. Firth, M.A.K. Halliday, J.McH. Sinclair); functional grammar in the Netherlands (S.C. Dik); stylistics in Finland (N.E. Enkvist); and intersentential studies in the Soviet Union (N.S. Pospelov, B.M. Gasparov, S. Gindin). Several of these, including the tagmemicists, the Prague school, and the systemicists roundly rejected the dichotomy of langue versus parole. 85. Yet aside from Peter Hartmann and his pupils (R. Harweg, W.A. Koch, S.J. Schmidt, G. Wienold, H. Rieser), whose programmatic research in the 1960s and 1970s did the most to advance text linguistics to critical mass, few investigators foresaw how profoundly the move toward texts would eventually reshape the precepts of linguistic research (II.113). Instead, the text was handily defined as a unit above the sentence in the descriptive structuralist approach, or as a well-formed sequence of sentences in the generative approach (II.105; V.41). Gradually, researchers realized that the text lies beyond the sentence not just in length and sequence over time and space, but in its richer connection to human activities of cognition and communication in society, wherein functional constituents like stretch of text or discourse episode might well be more useful than sentence. This realization motivated new assessments of some long-standing problems implicit in previous linguistics as outlined in II.D. So the decisive step was not just including the text or discourse in the repertory of linguistic units, which some approaches had already done, but resolving to reorient linguistics to suit the expanding range of issues emerging from this inclusion. 86. The reorientation was propelled from another direction by the defamiliarizing findings of fieldwork on non-Western languages of lesser diffusion (II.31, 37) whose formal organization is more obviously constrained by discourse factors than is that of Western languages like English. The contact with different language types led to a fertile meeting of minds among Westerners working on Asian and African languages and linguists who were also native speakers. Among the British systemic functional school, we could cite J.R. Firth and Michael Halliday for Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin) and Japanese, Ruqaiya Hasan for Urdu, Braj Kachru for Hindi, V. Prakasham for Telegu of India, Ayo Bamgbose for Yoruba of Nigeria, Coryell Mock for Nzema of Ghana, Kate Barnwell for Mbembe of Nigeria, and Richard Hudson for Beja of the Sudan; among the German text linguists, Peter Hartmann and Gtz Wienold for Japanese, and Roland Harweg for Sanskrit; and among the American

tagmemic school, Kenneth and Evelyn Pike, Robert E. Longacre, and Joseph Grimes for more languages than I could begin to list here. They all were inspired by the organization of Asian and African languages to adopt flexible and innovative methods and to describe steadily longer and richer samples of discourse data, far beyond conventional academic formalism with its devotion to frozen islands, brief linear segments, and rigorous abstractions, and its accredited failure to make connections (II.47, 59, 61). 87. As extensions of sentence research converged with expansions of fieldwork, the move toward text and discourse became both theory-driven and data-driven. We have seen in II.D how modern linguistics began with small and simple (minimal) units and worked toward steadily larger and more complex ones: phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and syntagmemes (as phrases, clauses, and sentences). Along the way, the linguists tried to conserve their theories and methods by treating the larger units as combinations (and later as transformations) of the smaller ones (II.59). This tactic left the role of meaning unclear and obscured the richer constraints needed for convergence and consensus; language looked like a stack of rows of building blocks, linked only by sparse formal relations of size and constituency (II.59f). 88. When texts were admitted, this tidy scheme was unsettled by the data-driven demands of practical analysis. If we exhaustively transcribed a whole text into phonemic and morphemic notation and diagrammed all its sentences, our description would be fearfully unwieldy and yet would still provide no account of topics, goals, or participant roles. Paradoxically, such formalizing would both over-determine the local data in static units and structures, and under-determine the global data in the dynamics of discoursal moves. If mainstream linguistics discovers and describes sparse uniform data by segmenting and classifying elements or by formulating structure-building rules, a science of text and discoursedeals with rich diversified data in terms of their relevance to communicative interaction (cf. I.33; V.13; VIII.47). We must focus our descriptions and explanations on the more strategic choices and patterns in the agenda and economy of a discourse (as demonstrated in section I.B). So the formal elements and patterns require a systemic functional account as the means for achieving communicative ends within an overall system of constraints: both local and global, both standing and emergent, both from language and from world and society. 89. Not surprisingly, the move toward texts and discourse has been transdisciplinary, extending far outside linguistics proper. Semiotics (or semiotic or semiology), the science of signs, has progressed alongside linguistics, some scholars like Saussure and Hjelmslev

being influential in both. Semiotics has the wider coverage, encompassing not just language but all phenomena treated as signs by humans or animals: gestures, facial expressions, clothing, pictures, commodities, and so on (cf. I.33; II.63). The best-known perceptible artifact, the spoken or written word, is not (as common sense might suppose) the sign, but the signifier with which a signified (a meaning, content, referent, etc.) is connected during semiosis, the process of sign usage. The sign thus consists of a relation between signifier and signified within the act of signifying a dynamic assignment rather than a static twosided token like a coin. 90. This relation was richly explored by the pioneering semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, who worked out a thorough classification of signs. Among his best-known proposals was a tripartite scheme based on the motivation between the sign and the typical occasion of its use. A sign used when the signified (e.g. the referent) has some perceptible resemblance to the signifier is an icon (e.g., placing the silhouette of a locomotive on a road sign to warn motorists of a railroad crossing). A sign used to invoke an experiential association without a resemblance is an index (e.g., a trail of smoke drawn in a cartoon to signal the approach of an unseen steam locomotive). A sign used with a purely conventional or arbitrary link between signified and signifier is a symbol (e.g., saying the word locomotive when warning children to be careful at a railroad crossing). Linguistics foregrounded the arbitrary nature of the sign to justify studying form over meaning and function and disconnecting language from the constraints of world and society (II.48). Semiotics has been far broader. 91. For semiotics, a text would be not a visual or acoustic artifact, e.g., a piece of written language (again as common sense might suppose), but a configuration of signs specifically, an actual systemof signs. This definition suggests that the relation between signified and signifier might hold not for each sign but for the whole text-system (as a supersign) or at least for some stretch of text or discourse episode (cf. III.136). Only in contexts richly constrained by world and society can a single sign figure as a text, e.g., when STOP appears on a traffic signpost. The word STOP is a symbol for an Action to be performed; the familiar red color and the octagonal shape constitute an icon; and its location at a junction or crossing makes it an index. The total sign is also part of an adaptive action space of driving behavior and of a discoursal system of traffic signposts and public statutes for motorists. 92. The move toward text and discourse has also been supported by the fieldwork study of culture in ethnography, anthropology, and the intermediary discipline of social anthropology (cf. V.55ff; VIII.B). Following linguistics (Pikes tagmemics), a distinction has

been drawn between an emic view determining how members of the culture are expected to act and react and what actions mean, e.g., who has the authority to rule, versus an etic view of the basic actions in all cultures, e.g., how foods are produced and distributed (VIII.24-27) a division reflecting the symptomatic gap between theory versus practice (I.6). To look at culture from the emic perspective, we attend to the cultural constraints as they are viewed and interpreted by the insiders, e.g., that the status of people is decided by a system of castes which was ordained by God. To adopt an etic perspective, we attend to the underlying social and material constraints motivating peoples actions, e.g., that the status of people is decided by a military ruling class which periodically stages violent repressions (cf. V.42). 93. Sociology has studied text and discourse in the analysis of conversation and ethno- methodology (cf. V.55ff). This research has further refined the methods of fieldwork linguistics by developing painstaking empirical techniques for observing and analyzing reallife discourse. Instead of constructing theory-driven models of language, a strongly datadriven and practice-driven approach has been applied to social activities like opening and closing, taking turns, and repairing errors, which would be performance data or mere noise for formalist linguists or for speech-act theory. 94. The intermediary discipline of social psychology seeks to bring cognitive processes more fully into the scope of sociology proper and to widen the psychologists concept of cognition to incorporate attitudes, ideologies, emotions, and so on, especially as they are constructed and negotiated in discourse. Empirical data from transcripts and interviews are analyzed to uncover the discourse strategies whereby participants design scenarios versions of the current situation and of other situations invoked by the discourse itself that assign roles and reflect personal and social agendas. Contradictions and conflicts are found to be more commonplace than intuition suggests, whether for different people or for the same person at different times. Instead of trying to establish who is right or which version is true (as recommended by numerous models of language and meaning), research has sought to describe social practices for establishing one scenario over another, including the scenarios of doing science. 95. Mediating between linguistics and sociology, sociolinguistics carries out fieldwork on text and discourse to highlight the social variations of linguistic forms and structures. This work has restored some of the diversity, fluctuation, and concreteness abstracted out by the project of describing language by itself as a uniform, stable, and abstract system in a completely homogeneous speech-community (cf. II.40f, 128). Linguistic variations and

language attitudes have been found clearly reflecting social, regional, ethnic, and economic status, to which people are keenly attuned, though often not consciously so (cf. VII.164-70). During discourse actions, certain linguistic features can, in their own right, convey many messages about status, e.g., to signal power or solidarity. 96. To mediate between linguistics and psychology, psycholinguistics conducts experiments exploring the psychological processes of language. For the descriptive approach allied with behaviorism, research investigated how well sentences are processed when they are rearranged or presented along with distractors or noise; or what sentences people would utter when simply describing a scene such as billiard balls sitting or rolling on a table; or how people rate the meanings of certain words on a semantic differential scale (e.g., from happy to sad, or from strong to weak) (I.31); and so on. For the generative approach allied with mentalism, research investigated how people perceive syntactic structures and boundaries; how processing is affected by transformations from active to passive, or from main clause to dependent clause; and so on (cf. II.41f). In either approach, linguistic analysis has been tacitly accepted as a model for language processing, often with a formalist and syntactic emphasis. A person who perceives and comprehends sentences is then believed to proceed much as linguists would analyze them, making full and precise use of the language data and working either heavily bottom-up to segment immediate constituents or else top-down to recover the underlying structure and apply the correct rules. This belief signalled another category mistake by short-circuiting theory to directly onto the domain of practices it purports to describe or explain (cf. II.13, III.169, 180; V.124; VIII.17), and hindered the development of models of discourse processing that integrate language with other social and cognitive activities. Some aspects of this problem have been addressed by the domain of cognitive linguistics, which is still in the process of situating itself. 97. Meanwhile, a different generation of models was emerging in cognitive psychology, which had been gaining prominence when the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s overcame orthodox behaviorism by establishing the scientific validity of models of cognitive processing (also called information processing), and not just of observable actions. These models supported richer and more expansive experiments on perception, comprehension, learning, and memory. Less committed to linguistic theories than psycholinguistics was, this research progressed from word-lists to sentences and on to texts, usually ones with a Narrative Aspect but occasionally ones with an Expository or Argumentative Aspect. Attention was focused on global top-down organization, and on integrative knowledge

patterns called schemas (or less often, frames or scripts) that constrain the production and reception of discourse. Interacting with the knowledge accessed via the text the textworld model (III.136, 229) a schema would support such actions as pattern-matching (fitting what is perceived to what is expected), problem-solving (seeking a goal and overcoming obstacles), instantiating (finding instances of a type), inferencing (filling in missing knowledge), and so on. Such conceptions stressed the dynamic and integrative aspects of discourse, although the question remained how schemas could be set up, activated, and used for the huge variety of potential discourse contexts in everyday conversation. A surprising answer has recently emerged: they can be made to order (see III.80, 253). 98. The dynamics of operation and integration were being further explored by several extremely general and novel disciplines, which emerged fairly recently without occupying conventional departments. Systems theory congealed in the 1960s to describe the general principles whereby both behavior and mind operate as systems: each element in a system has the function of contributing to the total operation, and an action is an intentional event guiding the systems organization and evolution. For the adjacent discipline of cybernetics dealing with systems of control and self-regulation, the leading function is to maintain a favorable balance or equilibrium of factors by gathering feedback and seeking to maintain a standard by compensating for drifts away from it (as a thermostat does) an instance of the principle of diminishing returns (cf. III.44, 151). For information theory, each event in a system has an information value computed from how improbable it was at that particular moment. By inspecting all the sequences in the systems history, you could compute the probability of any given transition from one event to the next; the less probable the event, the more information it carries. Even without university departments, systems theory, cybernetics, and information theory did influence widely diverse disciplines, such as communication theory, information science, behavioral science, economics, management science, design engineering, game theory, factors analysis, topology, and, in various ways, the central natural sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology. 99. The most far-reaching influence was exerted on a discipline that was soon to attain an overwhelming size and importance, namely computer science, where major technological advances have enforced a constant interaction between theory and practice. To store and process data, a computer needs programming languages in which programs are written as a set of practical representations and instructions. Early programming languages like Assembler were tailored to the machine, which made them tediously user-unfriendly and

quite distinct from natural languages like English. A computer that has no knowledge about how the world is organized or what a human user would want and expect, needs to have everything relevant to proper functioning be explicitly coded, and may still run afoul of bad choices or crude mistakes (bugs). The program can get stuck in an endlessly repeating loop; or subroutines can interact in unforeseen ways such as combinatorial explosion, where the proliferation of branching alternatives overflows the resources of time and memory. Yet after debugging by rewriting and re-running until the program works, no further variations or errors can occur in dramatic contrast to human processing, which is keenly sensitive to resource limitations and degrades performance under overload conditions, no matter how much knowledge may have been acquired (III.214). 100. Programmers and users have long surmised that the computer could be much more useful and user-friendly if programs could be designed to run in more intelligent and human-like ways. Again profiting from the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, a new discipline crystallized under the controversial label (coined by John McCarthy) of artificial intelligence (AI), giving a new and demanding twist to the old disputes over how to define intelligence. Programmers had to construct, from the ground up, a blueprint of the bits, symbols, subroutines, and so on, that would enable intelligent actions to be performed on a machine within a reasonable time. Such actions essayed to simulate human actions and to handle a range of interesting variations. For example, to move or stack blocks on a table, the computer would need a camera eye and a mechanical arm, along with some rudimentary understanding of size, shape, direction, gravity, balance, and so forth. 101. Inevitably, language and discourse were addressed as domains indisputably requiring intelligence. The sharpest insight from this AI research was the vast complexity, variety, and adaptability of the commonsense knowledge entailed in ordinary discourse, which often gets misjudged disorderly (I.39; III.190). Most programs could at best handle discourse actions about a sparse and simplified world, e.g., for giving and receiving instructions to move blocks, or for understanding rudimentary stories and answering questions about them. Still, this research greatly supported the exploration of worldknowledge in cognitive psychology by enabling simulated operational tests for top-down schemas, frames, or scripts (II.97). Since then, AI has branched out into more specialized applications with discourse, such as to support communication in an institution or business, or to simulate an expert consultant. Here, general theoretical definitions of intelligence seem less vital.

102. The latest development in simulation is a new transdiscipline with the remarkable label artificial life, centered on complexity theory and supported by outstanding scientists in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, neurology, immunology, psychology, economics, astronomy, computer science, engineering, robotics, and so on. Here, the goal is to design models of how life could have emerged and evolved from the basic physical, chemical, and biological architecture of nature. The key assumption was formulated this way by Chris Langton, a major pioneer:
Artificial life involves the realization of lifelike behavior on the part of man-made systems consisting of populations of semi-autonomous entities whose local interactions with one another are governed by a set of simple rules. Such systems contain no rules for the behavior of the population at the global level, and the often complex high-level dynamics and structures observed are emergent properties, which develop over time from out of the local interactions among low-level primitives by a process reminiscent of embryological development, in which local hierarchies of higher-order structures develop and compete with one another for support among the low-level entities [and] establish the context in which those entities invoke their local rules.

This capsule statement, whose implications for a science of text and discoursewill be taken up in Ch. III, evokes a significant new idea. We can deal with complex issues or phenomena neither by radically simplifying them (as behaviorism did) nor by fragmenting them into separate levels of analysis (as mainstream linguistics did); instead, we can design models to show how the complexity could have emerged and evolved and how it can be maintained on the basis of richly interacting simple and local entities. Through parallel distributed processing, this interaction can produce the emergent properties of the global system, which are more than, and not always predictable from, the sum of the parts (cf. III.50). The opposition between bottom-up versus top-down is resolved by the connectionist insight that, in a complex system, top-down patterns like schemas can rapidly and cheaply selforganize on line by exploiting evolutionary interactions among bottom-up entities and by exciting or inhibiting the strength of the connections among them (III.248ff; VII.24). A similar account seems plausible for the organization of the global meaning (or topic, theme gist, etc.) of discourse based on the local contributions of phonemes, morphemes, and so on, as outlined in II.59. The complexity of language would depend not just on the standing properties of the virtual system, but also on the emergent properties in an evolving series of actual systems. 103. If artificial life works its way up from the material base of matter and energy, cognitive science works down from the data base of knowledge that controls and

constrains human activities, from everyday behavior over to intellectual thought. In the 1970s, this transdiscipline soon founded a prestigious journal and a society of the same name and provided an energy center for the cognitive revolution mentioned in II.97. The move toward text and discourse has gained substantial momentum through the participation of linguistics along with anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, and computer science, plus their offshoots and intermediaries like social anthropology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. We now see a wide consensus that knowledge can be viewed as a mode of action during perception, comprehension, learning, and remembering, as well as discourse processing (cf. II.112; III.81, 87; VII.115). The transdisciplinary convergence, now energized by artificial life and cognitive science, on a set of common principles to be explored in Ch. III, points the way to finally reconcile such grand and long-lived dualisms as mind versus body, thought versus behavior, and subject versus object (III.17). Doing so would also open a panorama of new prospects for our own project of enhancing free access to knowledge and societythrough discourse. 104. These trends toward transdisciplinarity reflect the rapidly advancing awareness that the significant problems we face today, whether in science or in society, cannot be resolved from the standpoint of any single discipline (cf. II.2; III.1, 154; V.85; VII.320; VIII.1, 11, 81). In November 1994, the First World Congress on Transdisciplinarity was convened in the Convent of Arrbida (Portugal) with the backing of such institutions as UNESCO, the Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques (Paris), and the Union of International Associations (Brussels). The participants included distinguished figures in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, medicine, anthropology, communication, semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, engineering, architecture, theatre, sculpture, painting, and poetry. I was profoundly impressed and heartened by the emphatic and unanimous resolve to formulate an explicit ecologist program of activity and research addressing urgent global problems, such as the technological depletion of resources and the hoarding and fragmentation of specialized knowledge by small elites in wealthy Center nations. Whether or not human ecology and our planetary environment can still be preserved under the devastating stress of consumerism, greed, overpopulation, pollution, and militarism in the coming century is fearsomely uncertain; but without such programs, the stress will certainly lead to global crisis on an unprecedented scale (I.2, 133; III.257; V.78).

II.F. A brief history of text linguistics

105. How did text linguistics evolve alongside the trends outlined in the foregoing section? When the field emerged under its own name, the first stage featured text grammar, extending from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Following the mainstream on the European continent, this notion of grammar was largely formalist and closely allied to syntax: either a repertory of morpheme distributions and phrase structures in a descriptive approach, or else a system of rules for assigning structural descriptions to texts in a generative approach (cf. II.30, 38-41, 85). Text linguistics was expected to justify itself by discovering formal constraints, e.g., on Conjunctions and Pro-Nouns, that apply beyond the sentence boundary in different ways than within the single sentence (cf. II.85). 106. Viewed in retrospect, text grammar was a project for reconstructing the text as a uniform, stable, and abstract system by extending the systems already constructed in mainstream linguistics. As in the compromise with the sentence (II.83), the text would be treated both as a formal pattern say, as a theoretical unit called the texteme in analogy to the other -eme units and as a self-contained organizational field for specific uses. A text grammar would state the formal rules that generate the underlying structure of all texts and of no non-texts or ungrammatical texts (cf. II.39f). So the text too got overcomplicated with sparse formal constraints derived by rarefying properly functional constraints (cf. II.84). The dynamic dialectic between the virtual systemin the language versus the actual system of the text and the interactions between standing and emergent constraints and among linguistic cognitive, and social constraints went unexplored. Instead, text grammar struggled to shift the text (or texteme) completely over to the virtual side and to account for it solely through standing linguistic constraints. Not surprisingly, this task never progressed beyond a programmatic stage. The grammatical apparatus needed just for one text (e.g., a prose passage by Bertolt Brecht) grew explosively complex and alarmingly arbitrary. 107. A stubborn legacy of this early stage is the notion that scientific inquiry demands a formal and theoretical definition of the text. Some linguists continue proposing a dichotomy to reserve the term text (rather than, say, texteme) for a theory-driven formal entity, versus the term discourse for the data-driven functional entity, i.e., the empirical communicative event. The problem of how to relate text to discourse then joins and complicates the more general problems of how to model the relation between language versus use or between theory versus practice or between virtual versus actual, and where to situate the intermediary control systems in between, such as style, text type, and discourse domain (cf. Ch. V). If this theoretical text applies to all text types, the constraints are too sparse; yet if it applies to just one text type, then it is less a theoretical than a practical

concept developed for human interaction, e.g., job interview (V.60-64). So we have good reason not to oppose text against discourse but to reconcile them, just as we seek to reconnect theory with practice (cf. II.55, 80, 109, 112). 108. A more tractable proposal, due to J.S. Petfi, was to distinguish between the co-text of the language expressions actually used versus the total context of the communication, including the active knowledge of world and society for drawing mental associations, inferences, and so on. Unlike the previously cited distinction, both sides can be functionally described and related to the constraints of world and society as well as of language. Today, our conception of the co-text as a concrete empirical entity is being sharpened and deepened by large corpuses of real texts (cf. II.64-79). And since these real texts are empirically given in vast quantities, we can dispense with the intractable requirement for a stringent formal definition to identify them all and to separate them from an imaginary set of non-texts. 109. The chief advantage of reconciling text with discourse is to integrate text linguistics with discourse analysis, which emerged when fieldwork on previously undescribed languages of lesser diffusion discovered patterns of both formal and functional organization extending across whole discourses and not just phrases or sentences (cf. II.31ff, 37, 84ff; VI.11). Similarly data-driven methods were soon applied to Center languages of greater diffusion such as English, French, and German. By and large, discourse analysis worked in the U.K., the U.S., and France along with functionalist linguistics (e.g. Halliday, Sinclair), ethnography (e.g. Bronislaw Malinowski), and sociology (e.g. Basil Bernstein); a distinctive approach, with the same name, was developed in France with more orientation toward philosophy (e.g. Foucault). Text linguistics worked in the Netherlands and the two Germanys along with formalist linguistics like generative grammar, generative semantics, and various types of formal logic (notably in Petfis monumental text structure - world structure theory). Still, by the time of the Fourteenth International Congress of Linguists in 1987, these geographical and methodological aspects had expanded and evened out enough that sessions could productively address both text and discourse (cf. II.82). 110. After the early stage of text grammar, which remained rather closed and uniform, text linguistics traversed its more open and diversified stages. The next stage focused on the concept of textuality in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including my own previous Introduction with Wolfgang Dressler. This focus shifted from the text-artifact as a formal unit or pattern over toward the principles of textuality that apply when an artifact is treated as a text (I.C). We realized that textuality is not just a linguistic property or feature or a set of

these, but a multiple mode of connectedness activated wherever communicative events occur (I.41, 43). We were impelled to restore the social connection of text to context and of text producers and receivers to society, formerly eclipsed by our conventional focus on the individual text and author (cf. II.5). 111. Whereas the text grammar stage had emphasized local aspects and sought the formal rules needed to link text constituents into a formal unit, the textuality stage emphasized the global aspects of texts and took the functional unity of the text to be empirically given. We discarded the view of individual formal units and patterns as freestanding entities that can constitute a text only if they are expressly combined by some theory-driven apparatus of rules. Instead, we accepted the combinability of text elements as a basic postulate and sought the interactive constraints that regulate sets of choices. The actual processes whereby a text is produced and received are invested not in gluing element to element but in controlling the connectedness among these choices. Since this connectedness is intended by the text producer and accepted by the receiver(s), our task is not to formally derive or prove the unity of the theoretical text, but to functionally describe and model the unifying economy and agenda of real texts, as outlined in section I.B. 112. These insights led into the textualization stage, better known as discourse processing. We now set about developing process models of the activities of discourse participants in interactive settings and in real time. We were now compelled more than ever to seek a transdisciplinary framework. And we had to rethink even more intensely the problematic dichotomy between language by itself (virtual system) versus language use (actual system). Process models enforce the principle that the organization of language closely reflects the constraints of anticipated uses (I.38; II.56): the language system is expressly designed to integrate multiple modes of constraints (II.74, 106). Again, the relation between virtual and actual proves to be a dynamic dialectic: an evolving interaction whereby each side controls and defines the other. The design of the dialectic should fit the general dialectic in human processing between theory-driven or top-down actions controlled by expected or probable data, versus data-driven or bottom-up actions controlled by activated or manifested data (II.96; III.5); our task is to build models that specify the design of this particular dialectic and thereby reconnect theory with practice (II.55) 113. And so it happened that text linguistics, which had modestly begun with minor adjustments and additions to mainstream linguistics, eventually spilled outside in all directions and unsettled the scenario on the inside as well. Such an outcome can hardly have been foreseen during our early work of adopting and adapting linguistic methods to

deal with textual data and the problems they raised (II.85). Paradoxically, minor modifications of the project to describe language by itself gradually but relentlessly led us back to language where we had originally found it: in the context of human interaction. Today, text linguistics is probably best defined as the linguistic subdomain in a transdisciplinary science of text and discourse. What linguistic theories and methods it can contribute will depend on how it can strategically participate in that larger enterprise.

II.G. Structuralism and post-structuralism

114. A key conception in the evolution of language science has been structure. Though some uses of the term have been inflated or obscure, its most basic and consistent sense would be: a pattern of two or more related elements. In this sense, structures can readily be discovered in all domains of perception, cognition, and language. But in mainstream linguistics, the term structuralism denotes investigations accrediting only sparse structures: (a) The elements should belong to the same system. (b) The elements should be recognizable by formal criteria. (c) The relation between the elements and the structure should be a standing one established within the overall system. (d) The function of the elements and the function of the structure should mutually determine each other without recourse to external criteria. The most fundamental structure, especially in the dichotomous tradition of Saussurian general linguistics, would be a binary relation between two elements standing either in equivalence or opposition, i.e., being either same or different. The ideal structuralist system would be a configuration of elements each of whose function is uniquely determined by its difference from every other element (II.78), and structures and functions would be discovered with maximum objectivity and consensus. The only approximation to this ideal came from phonologys system of phonemes for respective languages, with such precise oppositions as voiced versus unvoiced (II.29f). 115. Still, the sparse conception of structure was widely accredited both by descriptive and generative linguistics, though only in the former did the label of structuralism gain some currency. The generative innovation was merely to accredit a theoretical domain of underlying structures (II.42). Their criteria became more abstract and disconnected from the surface formats of sentences, but remained resolutely formal. Indeed, formality gained a

free-standing self-life, and linguistic description was essentially equated with structural analysis. The question of how all these theoretical structures and elements might operate together when humans use language in practice was fended off by the expedient splits between competence versus performance, deep versus surface structure, and so on (II.40, 42f, 50, 57). 116. Curiously, the label of structuralism that began so modestly in phonology, morphology, and syntax got vastly expanded far beyond language into issues and phenomena of culture, society, ideology, politics, institutions, gender, and aesthetics. The repercussions have affected disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, sociology, political science, philosophy, semiotics, and literary criticism. The sparseness of the original concept of structure underwent a range of metaphorical enrichments that financed wide coverage by trading away convergence and consensus. For example, if anthropologists build models of a society as an abstract system of distinctive features, you are unlikely to agree except about sparse domains, such as kinship with its well-defined distinctions like as age, gender, and generation. Also, you underestimate the role of concrete factors organized not by static feature patterns but by dynamic material constraints upon resources and upon the production and distribution of basic commodities (cf. VIII.13-18). 117. As competing notions of structure grew widely discrepant and still neglected numerous problems, a genuinely radical displacement ensued: the highly visible movement known as post-structuralism. Although this term too has often been inflated or obscure, the leading principle can be recognized in the term itself: to use structuralism as a startingpoint and counterpoint for programmatic turns, revisions, and mutations. Investigators foregrounded the problems disaccredited or marginalized by structuralism as well as the problems implicit in its methods. If structuralism had started out relatively uniform, poststructuralism has been luxuriantly diverse, even though a number of researchers have prominently participated in both movements as if they had become similarly dissatisfied but then moved off in quite different directions. A bizarre paradigm shift or scientific revolution proceeded in ways utterly unlike those portrayed by philosophers of science (II.2): by thriving on a paradoxical continuity and on a dialectical oscillation between old and new. Perhaps structuralism and post-structuralism should count not as paradigms themselves but as meta-paradigms for constructing paradigms (cf. II.2, 132). 118. Prevailing academic strategies for performing cognitive and discoursal moves have been profoundly unsettled. Resolutely objective and certifying procedures were now countered with resolutely subjective and subversive ones. Instead of a steady progress

toward a tidy end-result in a complete description came the fitful perplexed enactment of intractable problems of interpretation, ending in an exitless maze of paradoxes, fashionably called an aporia. Such programmatic disruptions of academic decorum have fostered a widespread misconception of the post-structuralist agenda being just an exercise in perverse, nonsensical pranks or self-indulgent, whimsical ironies. 119. Actually, post-structuralism is a legitimate heir of a long philosophical train of thought regarding fundamental skepticism, irony, ineffability, relativism, and interpretative circularity in such currents as sophism, solipsism, mysticism, nihilism, Romanticism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology the dark inverse or underside of the age-old logicians campaign to establish a flawless system for validating true statements. The shock effects come from us being habituated to institutional and methodological discourse pre-empted by realistic, logicbased models like those sponsored in unified science and positivism, and by sparse, mechanistic research methods like those sponsored in behaviorism and physicalism. The energy of post-structuralism flows from suddenly unleashing the dammed-up reservoir of repressed alternatives, and frankly hailing irresolvable pluralism. Academics who have long subscribed to a Darwinian struggle among competing theories and truths (II.2) easily mistake this brusque insistence on the problematics of sense-making for an irrational aberration into chaos. 120. The impact may be similar on linguists whose search for language by itself had led to neglecting the role of the interpreter (whether it be the hearers and understanders of discourse or the linguists themselves) along with the temporal, contextual, and historical nature of the understanding process. Post-structuralism, in contrast, foregrounds and intensifies the problems of understanding and interpreting until the very possibility of determining meaning, truth, or reality is put in question. Claims for holding the true or authorized meaning are re-evaluated as gestures of the will to power (Nietzsches term) in the service of some ideology or theology such as patriarchy (cf. II.129; VIII.64ff). Interpretation is re-evaluated as an operation of rewriting a discourse by means of a privileged system of significance or a master code (cf. II.126). Some post-structuralists highlight these re-evaluations by engaging in palpably peremptory or arcane discourse which itself flatly defies ordinary strategies of sense-making or habituated views of the obvious. Such discourse is so hard to accept in a constative mode (what it is about) that we can only engage it in a performative mode (what it is doing) as discourse conspicuously enacting those shifts, contradictions, and conflicts of meaning that are being asserted to underlie all discourse.

121. Post-structuralism has at times been identified with post-modernism, perhaps the most inflated and the least consensual term of all (cf. VII.26). The term basically designates a program for moving beyond the doctrine of a modernism that proclaims innovative ruptures with the past and exalts swift progress though technology and erases cultural memories. The program also seeks to develop a suitable ideology for post-industrial society, where the national economies of goods and services are yielding to a single multinational economy of information and control (II.133; VIII.53ff). Understandably, just like modernism itself (cf. VII.21, 25f), such a program has its brighter and darker sides. On the brighter side, post-modernism challenges the modernist quest for definitive truth and authority in the name of rationality, logic, science, and the culture of the West or the Center (i.e., Europe and its sphere of influence), and insists on multiple and multicultural perspectives. New adaptive action spaces are freed for the discourses of social groups or cognitive domains that modernism disempowers, represses, or silences. On the darker side, post-modernism can be co-opted by reactionary and mystifying ideologies of idealism, mysticism, and irrationalism that merely evade the problems of modernism or declare them unsolvable. And the post-modernist program is naturally hard to consolidate and implement, if, as some spokespersons claim, it does not purport to define an essential human nature, to prescribe a global human destiny, or to proscribe collective human goals (Dick Hebdige). 122. Another main branch of the post-structuralist movement goes by the name of deconstruction. Unlike mere destruction, with which its detractors have confused it, this term designates a paradox of both unbuilding and rebuilding. As a method for both the critique and the practice of discourse, deconstruction engages with other discourses, firstly to reveal them involuntarily undermining their purported assertions, and secondly to reappropriate them into a reconfigured web of meanings, like a reshuffled mosaic or a rewoven fabric, but on a raised plane of critical self-consciousness and perplexity. The programmatic claim is that a discourse undermines what it asserts not because the producer is intentionally devious or unintentionally mistaken, but because every discourse is a texture of echoes and allusions from other diverse discourses, and because every system of significance entails conflicts among contestable alternative meanings (VII.19). Thus, the intertextuality of discourse is envisioned to subvert rather than support the textuality of the individual text. 123. The discourse of structuralism has been a natural target for deconstruction, especially by Jacques Derrida. If we select a radical thesis of structuralism and pursue it even more radically (i.e. to its roots), its implications abruptly swerve in unexpected and

incompatible directions. For example, if (as Saussure asserted) every sign attains its value by virtue of its differences from other signs (II.30, 78, 114), then a radical impulse to determine that value would cross-refer us to the signs from which it differs; the value of those signs would in turn cross-refer us to yet others from which they differ, and so on indefinitely. Instead of homing in on some precise and stable value for our original sign, this process steadily widens the expanse of signs and values; at no point do we attain ultimate certainty and determinacy. The Saussurian concept of difference thus implies a deferral: by differing, the sign defers the determination of its value. Differing and deferring converge in Derridas French pun diffrance. 124. What applies to the individual sign should apply all the more to the text in the semiotic and structuralist sense of a system of signs (cf. II.89ff). Whereas intertextuality was ignored by most of structuralism or else implicitly considered a unifying force (e.g., in the organization of folktales), it has been recast by post-structuralism as a source of endless, disruptive interconnectedness. Since many post-structuralists are professional literary scholars, this recasting has been widely pursued through the evasive allusions of one literary text to others, yet not just through the historical or intentional associations sought in traditional influence studies. Whether an author was actually aware of those other texts and intended to echo them is no longer decisive if we can unravel any text, displaying it as a patchwork of other fabrics (and the author as a rag-picker or bricoleur) while reweaving it within a fabric of our own. 125. Post-structuralism has also intensely engaged with psychoanalysis which, since Sigmund Freuds seminal work, has centered on the discourse of therapist and patient (cf. VIII.133ff). Compared to the sparse descriptions of meaning in formal logic and structuralist semantics, the Freudian interpretation of unconscious content and symbolic meaning seems flamboyantly rich yet entails a realistic, almost behavioristic base. The symbolic constructs of the interpreting analyst are directed to the real biographical and organic cause, usually situated in the persons infancy (cf. VIII.136). On that occasion, the conscious had repressed some intense desire or some traumatic event and banned it to the uncon-scious, where it got displaced and intensified until it reasserts itself in a pathogenic mode through a syndrome (a set of medical symptoms), e.g., irrational fears and anxieties or unaccountable feelings of pain or paralysis. The analyst exploits special clues in dreams, slips of the tongue, and so on, to recover the original content and bring it to the patients awareness, whereupon, in theory, a cure should be attained (VIII.134f). The factor of a cure in practice

not being attained or being followed by a relapse has long troubled orthodox Freudian clinicians without impelling them to renounce their belief in this scheme and method. 126. Essentially, post-structuralism has expropriated the symbolic repertory of psychoanalysis without committing itself to the realist base or therapeutic program. The interpretation is now viewed as a prime mode of rewriting into a master code of primeval symbols which Carl Gustav Jung and his school elevated into universal archetypes in the human psyche. Jacques Lacan and his school rewrote structuralist linguistics (mainly Saussure) by construing the symbols or symptoms as signifiers of psychic signifieds, among which the phallus was the most privileged; yet Lacanian discourse is utterly unSaussurian, replete with astonishing moves of decipherment, elaboration, and frankly subjective involvement. This method too appears peremptory and self-indulgent if we try to read it as constative rather than performative (cf. II.52, 120, 129). 127. Another post-structuralist conception of discourse was taken up in an avowedly political mode by materialism and Marxism to explore how alternative or competing significances imply social contradiction and conflict (struggle being the technical term). Here, the tensions and pressures within discourse are scrutinized as expressions of the those in society, especially those pertaining to the distribution of resources and the division of labor in the production and consumption of commodities. The tensions and pressures in turn lead to the pervasive alienation of the human subject within a social environment so contradictory and fragmented as to seem senseless and uncontrollable (VII.22). In this way, social conditions engender the syndromes that psychoanalysis would ascribe to the lone individual. 128. Materialism reproaches structuralism for its allegiance to mainstream linguistics in promoting a uniform, stable, and abstract conception of society and culture (II.116) witness the linguists complacent fiction of a completely homogeneous speech-community of ideal speaker-hearers (II.40f, 53, 95). The ensuing series of idealizations in such domains as structuralist anthropology and New Critical literary studies tamed and reified social and discoursal patterns into harmonious self-contained arrays of forms and features (cf. V.11; VIII.13-18). Materialism strives to re-envision human practices and artifacts in a dialectical relation with their material, historical, social, and political contexts and to describe how those practices distribute power or solidarity. The prospect that complete solidarity may imply a utopian society does not invalidate the ecologist project to enhance human rights and social equality by demystifying the discourse practices of power (VII.35; VIII.29). And might not discourse itself imply a utopia wherein form and meaning, or signifier

and signified, or subject and object, or speaker and hearer, may yet be reconciled (cf. III.183, 198; V.6, 80)? 129. A still more momentous challenge, attending to psychoanalysis as well as to materialism or Marxism, has been mounted by feminism. Here, the master code and the pre-eminent contradiction is the signification of sexes and genders in their linguistic, cognitive, and social dimensions, as discussed in VIII.D. Feminist critiques of language have progressed well beyond the familiar issue of the sexist bias in the lexicogrammars of languages, such as using masculine pro-nouns for unspecified agents or assuming that some professions are always male (e.g. doctor) and others female (e.g. schoolteacher). The more critical and radical feminists, have covered the range from desmystifying the social and political arenas of male dominance over to deconstructing normal or rational discourse as a patriarchal transaction wherein male-oriented significances constitute the norm and female-oriented significances are either excluded or else marginalized as a lack, an anomaly, an inversion, and so on. Even truth and certainty are unmasked as affirmations of patriarchal significances, supported at times through institutional channels of proof such as formal logic and philosophical or scientific argument another channel from authority to authoritarianism (II.4, 120; III.10). Feminists now propose to disrupt these tactics through their own discourse, which is deliberately not composed in such terms and once again enforces a performative reading, this time one designed to demystify the gender bias of obvious constative readings (cf. II.52, 120, 126). 130. The trends in post-structuralism sketched in II.117-29 have lent to the term discourse analysis, particularly in France, a different sense from the more ethnographic and sociological field cited in II.109. The broadening of the term discourse to cover all modes of significance, as cited in II.89, has favored a critical program of political engagement and an ecologist agenda for social progress. Repudiating the formalist description of abstract forms and structures, critical discourse analysis probes rich significances, implicit contradictions, and social or ideological practices and agendas, e.g., those for dealing with social deviation as a symptom of insanity or criminality. And the analysts display their own engagement in these practices while developing models to help tip the balance away from power and toward solidarity. 131. In sum, post-structuralism has been another strong motor for moving the investigation of text and discourse away from the preoccupation with the sparse forms and structures of mainstream linguistics and toward rich human contexts. Our consciousness has been raised for the submerged practices of signifying and sense-making and for the shielded

ideologies and repressed contradictions which discourse has the potential to affirm or subvert, accentuate or reconcile, mystify or demystify. We can now widen our repertory of resources for exploring our own problems of intertextuality, indeterminacy, complexity, and so on, implicated in a science of text and discourse.

II.H Back to the future

132. Though text linguistics and discourse analysis were consolidated under those labels fairly recently, this chapter has tried to show that many of the issues and problems they address have long been implicit in theories and practices of language. We owe a fair tribute to our precursors whose work we can integrate into our own enterprise. In this way, a science of text and discoursewill not be one more monodisciplinary paradigm competing to refute and displace the others but a transdisciplinary meta-paradigm for reconciling them and building upon their results (II.2, 117; III.181). Our agenda must be to integrate language with a sufficiently broad spectrum of human cognition and communication in society to sustain our ecologist program for social progress (II.2, 104; V.89). In this book, I shall be proposing and justifying some prospective foundations for such an agenda. 133. In the post-industrial age, our agenda is most forcefully driven by a vast social and geopolitical knowledge revolution that involves the whole world in a complete restructuring of society; each country and every economy will be much more dependent on knowledge (Erich Bloch), much of it increasingly specialized. So far, this revolution has not enforced social progressso much as intensified human inequalities in the access to knowledge. So the obvious material crisis of resources, sponsored by the ideology of consumerism, has been reinforced by a less obvious knowledge crisis that is largely a communication crisis (cf. III.239; V.78. VII.68). Prevailing discourse practices are ecologically unsound in that they plainly do not empower people to access the knowledge they need for organizing and controlling their lives and careers. So the knowledge revolution urgently calls for a communication revolution to significantly broaden control and participation in discourse practices. This goal must be the prime measure for the ecological validity of any science of text and discoursein the coming years, as we work to reconnect theory with practice and to diversify and integrate our theories and methods within a resolutely transdisciplinary enterprise.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Commentary to II.A (II.1-2)

[The sign marks the boundaries between the commentaries for the respective paragraphs.] II.1 My concepts of text and discourse have been evolving over a series of studies and expanding beyond the linguistic focus I first encountered (e.g. Dressler 1972; M.A.K. Halliday & Hasan 1976); cf. Beaugrande (1980, 1984a, 1990). II.2 paradigm: see also II.30, 39, 41, 49, 81f, 117, 132; III.146-49, 153f, 181; V.10, 98, 102, 121, 123; VII.27, 199; On paradigm in linguistics, see Alcaraz Var (1990); Beaugrande (1991a). The philosophy of science (in German Wissenschaftstheorie, i.e., theory of science) would merit a book-length study of its own discourse, e.g., the continuing edited series Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, of which nine volumes have appeared. For applications to linguistic theory, see Wunderlich (ed.) (1976); Finke (1979a, 1979b). normal science: see also II.24, 28, 41, 54; III.147, 149f, 153f, 181, 189, and Note to VII.1. scientific revolution: see also II.38, 82, 97, 103, 117; III.147-55, 163, 181; and compare the note to II.97 on the cognitive revolution. transdisciplinary: see Note to I.5; meta-paradigm: see also II.117, 132; III.181; VII.27, 101. integrates multiple paradigms: see for example Beaugrande (1980, 1981, 1984a); Rumelhart, McClelland et al. (1986); Langton (ed.) (1989); Newell (1990); Langton, Taylor, Farmer, & Rasmussen (eds.) (1992); Gell-Mann (1994). ecologist: see Note to I.10. struggle: highlighted especially by Kuhn (1970) and Feyerabend (1975).

Commentary to II.B (II.3-15)

II.3 legitimizing: theoretically sophisticated legitimations appear at particular moments of an institutional history (Berger & Luckmann 1967:83); see also Mueller (1973). On reifying the text, see also I.41; II.128; III.23. II.4 authoritarian: see Adorno (1976). II.5 literal and true statements: see Note to I.32. demystify: see Note to I.30. maladaptive: see Note to III.83. II.6 Three main disciplines: I reserve the study of style or stylistics, which was not a consolidated domain in the traditional trivium, for section V.B. The term grammar has been notoriously overused (VII.251ff), and traditional grammar became an established term when modern linguistics compiled formal grammars in programmatic opposition (cf. II.39-43). language guardians: see also I.38; II.116; III.121, 125, 173; IV.46, 92, 149, 173, 195, 233; VI.7, 20, 52, 61; VII.169, 225, 251, 254. II.7 [11]: lfric is cited from the edition of Zupita (1966 [1880]:1f, 4), with my translation; the runic characters and correspond to the two Modern English sounds of th in words like that and thin, respectively. On Latin as a model for describing other languages, see also IV.20, 45, 79, 149, 157; VI.8; VII.256, and Note to II.82. The notion that grammar is best illustrated by written language is still quite commonplace (cf. III.116, 203; IV.215; VI.51; VII.62, 81, 160ff, 213f, 224, 232). II.8 Rhetoric: for a diverse spread of recent work, compare Dubois et al. (1970); Milic (1971);

Spillner (1976); Plett (1977); Kinneavy (1980); Kintsch & Yarbrough (1982); Garca Berrio (1984a); Jordan (1984); Chico Rico (1987); Mann & S. Thompson (1988); Albaladejo (1989). II.9 [12]: Aristotle cited in the new translation of Lawson-Tancred (1991:217ff, 226, 178). New Right coalition: see VII.31-35. II.10 Like grammar, the term logic has also suffered from notorious overuse, especially to promote any line of reasoning that serves your own goals, e.g., Im only being logical!; in this book, the term is reserved for its technical sense explained here. On a different type of first principle, see III.16f. II.11 For Aristotle, the syllogism of logic, which he treated in his Prior Analytics (part II.23) and Posterior Analytics (part I.1), corresponded to the enthymeme in rhetoric (in the Lawson-Tancred version, pp. 75f). sparse versus rich: see Note to I.42. II.12 geometry: intriguingly, Aristotle specifically cited it as discourse where displays of style are not appropriate (p. 217). Yet ironically, the discourse of geometry has never managed to decide what its style should be (Beaugrande 1991b). II.13 prime model: when Berger & Luckmann (1967:82) claim that language provides the fundamental superposition of logic on the objectivated social world, they use the term logic informally for the socially available stock of knowledge. Similar senses are implied by H.P. Grice (1975) and by Carl Frederiksen (1975a). On logical positivism and verificationism, see also III.10, 56ff, 119; IV.125; VII.49, 76, 115; VIII.47; Ayer (ed.) (1959). statements about reality: compare Note to I.32. The term natural language was coined to distinguish real languages like English from artificial and formal languages, which have no native speakers; it can also be distinguished from a computer language (IV.17) and from a proto-language such as infants develop before learning it (III.111f). However, computa-ional linguists tend to blur the term by using it for a rarefied version of human language that their computers can handle (e.g. Winograd 1972; Dowty, Karttunen & Zwicky 1985). II.15 trivium: but arithmetic and geometry traditionally got assigned to the quadrivium together with astronomy and music, as if their connection to logic were unimportant.

Commentary to II.C (II.16-23)

II.16 historical: e.g. Rasmus Rask (1817); Jakob Grimm (1819, revised and expanded 1822-37); Johann Andreas Schmeller (1827); Hermann Paul (1889); comparative: e.g. Rask (1832); Franz Bopp (1833-52); geographical: e.g. Jost Winteler (1876); Georg Wencker (1881). related: after about 1800, historic comparison treated similarities as evidence of original unity, unless they could be proven to originate in local creation, convergence, or assimilation (Hartmann 1963a:74, m.t. [= my translation]). II.17 sound shift: examples from Bloomfield (1933:57). By using the term grammar (Grammatik) so broadly, Grimm (1819) rendered language extremely remote from the individual text. II.18 corpus: see Note to II.64. reconstruction: compare Hartmann (1963a:74ff): because the basic language is not reconstructable as a fact, the question how did the ancient IndoEuropeans speak? was deflected to the level of the language system a formal schema

reconstructed from the features left after a process of abstracting, unifying, and rarefying. Also: the project of stating what manifestation is the same, similar, or related to what other led scholars to postulate a basic form rather than a basic language, because the typical always appears in a form, and the basic language is not reconstructable as a fact. II.19 Eurasiatic: Greenberg (in press). monogenesis: Swadesh (1971); Ruhlen (1992); see already Trombetti (1905). genetics: Greenberg, Turner, & Zegura (1986); Escoffier, Pellegrini, Sanchez-Masas, Simon, & Langanay (1987); Barbujani & Sokal (1990); Cavalli-Sforza, Piazza, & Menozzi (1994). On language and genetics, see also III.51, 60, 62-67, 109ff, 129-33, 165; V.103f; VII.136, 166; VIII.80. II.21 not easily represented in writing: see III.195. Sprachatlas: Wencker & Wrede (1926-56). II.22 debt: Saussure (1966 [1916]: 1f) for example complained of philology following the written language too slavishly and neglecting the living language; but how else can you study old languages that are no longer spoken?

Commentary to II.D (II.24-81)

II.23 modern linguistics: in the space available here, I obviously cannot cite all the important sources, or even do justice to those influential works whose discourse I have analyzed in a booklength study elsewhere (Beaugrande 1991a); citations merely illustrate my line of argument. On language as a written medium, see Petfi (1990); on the written language bias in linguistics, see Linell (1982); Pennycook (1994). II.24 Saussure (1966 [1916]:232, italics changed). classical realism: see Note to III.7. discoursal aspects of doing linguistics: see Beaugrande (1984b, 1991a, 1996). II.27 buying and selling goods: see Mitchell (1975 [1957]). technical construction: see also I.4; II.39, 41, 43, 54; III.155, 189; IV.130; VII.321, 335; translated into some sparse notation: see also II.14, 42, 57f, 65; III.41, 167ff, 172f, 184, 195, 202, 219; IV.17, 19; VI.65; VIII.16. II.29 The terms phonology (or phonemics) can refer either to the subsystem of the language (the sounds) or to the study and description of it; a similar dualism holds for morphology (or morphemics), syntax, and semantics. The choice of terms with either -ology or -emics chiefly reflects research traditions in different schools or countries. phonemes: this term was credited by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1882) to Mikolaj Kruszewski (1879), one of the linguists working at the University of Kazan around 1880. On the subtle problems of relating phonemics to phonetics, see Chao (1933). alphabet: Firth (1957:123) cautioned that separate letters can lead to the apotheosis of the sound-letter in the phoneme. The convention of writing phonemes as abstract sound units in slanting lines but as phonetic descriptions in square brackets (e.g. Moulton 1962:4) also offers us more visual than conceptual clarity. II.30 model paradigm: for Firth (1957 [1951]: 222; 1968 [1957]: 191), phonemic description should serve primarily as a basis for the statement of grammatical and lexical facts, and linguistic analysis should have the same rigorous control of formal categories as in all phonological analysis. II.31 The conception of morphology in

linguistics goes back at least to Baudouin de Courtenay (1882), but made great strides between 1920 and 1960 in descriptive linguistics (cf. Hockett 1942, 1952), especially for fieldwork (II.27) (e.g. Nida 1949; Chafe 1953). defamiliarize: see also II.37, 86; V.56, 72; VIII.9. Paiute: Sapir (1921:30); Aymara: Hardman (1981:16), who has written me that the Verbalizing value of rak depends on the long , where a short one would be suppressed in that position because spa normally takes a consonant before it. II.32 lexicology: this term is much less stable than phonology or morphology, as is its status within linguistics, doubtless because it resists the usual methods of analysis (see Beaugrande 1995a); left at the borders: see Bolinger (1970). II.33 Compare the eminent fieldworker K.L. Pike (1967: 121): the de-scription desired here is one which will allow an outsider to act as would a native member of the culture. II.34 immediate constituent analysis: Bloomfield (1933:209, 221); compare Wells (1947); Longacre (1960). On some problems with constituency, see II.38, 59f, 83, 85, 87, 96, 111; III.39, 196; IV.2, 6, 18, 234; V.56, and Note to VIII.152-58. bound versus free: Bloomfield (1933:Ch. 13). II.35 data not so tidy: see Hockett (1947); Bazell (1949). On Content Words and Function Words, compare Fries (1952), who proposed to replace the traditional labels for parts of speech with numbers (1-4) for the first group and letters (A-O) for the second; and compare II.69; III.208, 235; IV.22, 26, 32f, 88, 178, 187; VI.33, 45, 93, 101. The raised question mark ? merely indicates that the data would be marked or improbable; it has no technical or formal status (cf. also Note to IV.27). II.36 recognized: compare Bloomfield (1933:208): the statement of morphology re-quires systematic study; since the speaker cannot isolate bound forms by speaking them alone, he is usually unable to describe the structure of words. helicopt: Websters Random House College Dictionary (p. 261). II.38 syntax: e.g. Z.S. Harris (1951, 1952); Tesnire (1959). I am being more consistent than most linguists by using the term syntagmeme, which was widely eclipsed by phrase structure; for Pike (1967:133), it was a construction of tagmemes, e.g., in a sentence syntag-meme, where a tagmeme is the correlation between a slot and the class of items that can occupy it. He conceded that the tagmeme seems much less concrete than the morpheme, yet claimed it to be an objective emic unit in normal participant behavior, not a mere conceptual construction of the linguist (1967:203). II.39 In many uses, the term rules suggests a more formalized and deterministic operation than is actually involved, and the term strategies (like the discourse strategies in Gumperz 1984) would be more appropriate, e.g., for the rules in social psychology (e.g. in Potter & Wetherell 1987) and the display rules in emotional research which I shall change to strategies (VIII.119); the distinction between rules versus strategies was well expounded by van Dijk & Kintsch (1983:11, 67, 72). generate versus produce: although Chomsky warned that generating sentences is not the same as producing utterances (1957:48), he himself kept writing about producing sentences (1957:11 13, 18, 30, 31, 38, 45, 46, 103), perhaps he secretly welcomed the confusion to evade the question of how sentences do get produced. unreasonable, not relevant: Chomsky (1957:50ff, 56). II.40 competence, ideal speaker, homogeneous, etc. and [16-

16b]: Chomsky (1965:3, 11, 149f, e.a.); on various versions of competence, see also I.59f; II.41, 54, 66, 76, 80, and Note to I.59. II.41 modest sets: only 24 invented sentences are analyzed and transformed in Chomskys Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. preclude theory: Chomsky (1965:15). II.42 unrevealing, sensible: Chomsky (1965:24, 141). II.43 standard model: Chomskys (1971) own complacent term for his 1965 Aspects model. constructions still contend: see Escribano (1993, in press). II.44 un systme: attributed by J.R. Firth (1957) to Antoine Meillet (1903-04:641), who had actually written: un langage forme un systme trs delicate et trs compliqu o tout se tient rigoureusement; my translation is deliberately more pointed than just holds itself or sustains itself. systemic functional linguistics: sources include Berry (1975-77); Halliday, Fawcett, & Young (eds.) (1987-88); M.A.K. Halliday (1994a); M.A.K. Halliday & Matthiessen (forthcoming). II.45 frozen: see Notes to III.53 on frozen accidents, and to II.47 on frozen islands and on freezing the whole system. II.46 Pro-Nouns for power or solidarity: see I.20 and Fowler et al. (1979). II.47 frozen islands: see also II.54, 83, 86; III.49, 52, 90, 116, 118, 122, 170; IV.214. freezing the whole system: see also I.35f, 38; II.49 73; III.49, 116, 133, 135, 182; IV.3; V.2, 16.7; VIII.22. II.48 semantics: the standard survey is J. Lyons (1977); on discourse semantics, see Seuren (1985); Violi (1990); on some intractable problems of conventional semantics, see Beaugrande (1984b, 1988b, 1991c). arbitrary: especially Saussure (1966:67); see also II.62, 90; III.115, 169, 191(l); III.191; V.62; VIII.12, 114(d), and Note to IV.12. Often, what is actually arbitrary are the theoretical constructions of linguists (cf. II.74, 106; III.128, 172; IV.3). II.49 part of their science: Bloomfield (1933); Z.S. Harris (1951). For Bloomfield (1933:262), the sememe was the meaning of a morpheme and thus presumably a minimal unit. On minimal units of meaning in structural semantics, see for example Weinreich (1966). semantic features: Katz & Fodor (1963). Contrast the semantic processing units in Frederiksen (1977). context: see Frederiksen (1975b); Hassan (1995b); on rethinking the role of context, see now Duranti & Goodwin (eds.) (1992). II.50 autonomous: Chomsky (1957:93, 17). On the short-lived movement called generative semantics, see McCawley (1968); G. Lakoff (1971). The term logical form reveals the persistent concern for form over meaning or content (see also Gazdar 1979); on the tradition of logic, see II.10ff. [17] is taken from McCawley (1968:164f) and is discussed by G. Lakoff (1971:274), who disputes his analysis but makes no analysis of love either. II.51 pragmatics: seminal works include Maas & Wunderlich (eds.) (1972); van Dijk (ed.) 1975; Schmidt (ed.) (1976); Verschueren (1978); Mey (ed.) (1979), and (1985); van Dijk (1981); see now the summation in Verschueren, stmann, & Blommaert (eds.) (1995); and references in Notes to II.52f. semiotics: see II.89ff, 124: the three-part scheme has been much promoted by Charles Morris (1938). formal rules for interpreting: van Dijk (1977:190). At least pragmatics finally got beyond models of meaning for statements about reality (cf. Note to I.32). its cold: an evergreen example (e.g. Lyons 1977:II, 592). II.52 Austin (1962); compare Verschueren (1985) on what people say they do with words. speech act: see also Searle (1969, 1979); P. Cole & Morgan (eds.) (1975); van Eemeren &

Grootendorst (1984); and compare V.54, 59. constative vs. performative: cf. Note to IV.153. II.53 sentence: Searle (1969:25); enrich: see Note to II.82; presuppositions and implicatures: Rescher (1961); Grice (1975); Gazdar (1979). On the difference between everyday implication versus strict entailment, see Lyons (1977:II, 592). II.55 On post-classical science, see Note to III.6. II.57 leftmost noun phrase: Chomsky (1965: 221). II.59 levels not mixed: For a time, some U.S. linguists insisted that rigid, water-tight levels provide the only valid scientific conclusions (quoted in Pike 1967:59; compare Voegelin 1949:78; Trager & H. Smith 1951). constituents: Bloomfield (1933:162). On building block views of language or discourse, see also II.34, 78; III.175; V.93, 16.2; VI.70; VIII.131. discontinuous constituents: see Postal (1964); Huck & Ojeida (eds.) (1987). King: from Pike, who used the term phrase-words (1967:580, 479). !: from Hjelmslev (1969 [1943]:41). sum of the meanings: Saussure (1966 [1916]: 121) and Chomsky (1965:144, 162f); but see Pike (1967:609, 134): the sharp-cut segmentation of meanings is in principle impossible meaning has its locus not in the individual bits and pieces, but within the language structure in an identified context. failures to make connections: see Note to I.4. II.60 On means and end in language, see also I.44; II.61, 80f, 91; III.39, 41, 92-96, 115, 117, 130, 191(e), 196, 209, 233, 243; IV.4-7, 10; VI.60, and Note to III.71; I have revised and specified the scheme in Dane, but in discussions in October 1992 and May 1994, he has confirmed that I am closely following his intent, also in regard to the scheme of three levels proposed in II.63; compare also Trnka (1964). On the elaborate relation between meaning and structure in language, compare Chafe (1970). II.62 My terms for language types follow Sapir (1921:126-43). II.63 Prosody: see Note to I.18. lexicogrammar: see Note to I.19. delicacy: cf. M.A.K. Halliday (1961: 272f); Hasan (1985, 1987); Cross (1993); and compare II.78; III.41; IV.16, 29f, 111, 116, 160, 162f, 166, 181, 199, and Notes to II.65 and IV.14. II.64 On large corpus linguistics, see Sinclair (1987, 1992a, 1992b), (ed.) (1987); M. Baker, Francis, & Tognini-Bonelli (eds.) (1992); Svartvik (ed.) (1992). 200 million words: actually, the active corpus I used was around 169 million words, and fluctuated between 167 and 175 million, according to Ramesh Krishnamurthy at COBUILD. II.65 delicacy: see Note to II.63. This expectation is also shared by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (personal communication, Beijing 1995). II.66 Direct Object Target: these functional terms are explained in Ch. IV and capitalized for easy recognition (see Notes to I.16 and II.68). [18-19]: The data displays have a default length of 80 characters with the key word at the center and <diamond brackets> at both ends (cf. Notes to II.69 and II.70). II.67 co-texts: see also I.32; II.73f, 108; III.39, 120, 132, 135, 206, 233, 244ff, 249, 255f; IV.181; V.106; VI.45. collocations: Firth (1968:106ff, 113, 182). lexicology and gram-mar: see now Francis (1992); lexicogrammar: see Note to I.19. The term preferences, which was made current in computer simulation of language by Yorick Wilks (1975), is now used by Sinclair and his group for the semantic connections in corpus data that do not depend on specific collocations (e.g. Louw 1993). II.68 as a Verb: The software allows a search for specific parts of speech, and I eliminated the Nouns in stable collocations like

search warrant, death warrant, and warrant for arrest. II.70 Table. II.1: See Note to II.66 on line displays and on the <diamond brackets> that also enclose various codes, of which the following appear in the data: for upper case, <FCH>: font change; <FO + digit>: female speaker with identification number; <LCH>: chapter heading; <MO + digit> male speaker with identification number; <h>: heading; <t>: start text; and # indicates a pause or silence in spoken data. levels: see Notes to II.30, 60; for phonology and intonation, a distinctive pitch would go to the Performative Ill warrant, which is discouraged by prosody from appearing in the non-contracted form ?I will warrant. shortened version: see Beaugrande (1996) for a fuller listing. II.73 On freezing a system such as a language, see Note to II.47. Attitudes: see Note to II.53. II.78 delicacy: see Notes to II.63, 65. Saussure (1966 [1916]: 120). synonymy: I am much indebted to John Sinclair for elucidating this point. definitions from Websters Collegiate Dictionary, pp. 172, 178. II.81 Functional linguistics is not consistent: whereas Hallidays group uses authentic utterances, the Prague school often uses invented ones; see now Firbas (1992) for a welcome application to authentic texts.

Commentary to II.E (II.82-104)

II.82 Congress: Proceedings in Bahner, Schildt, & Viehweger (eds.) (1990). scientific revolution: see Note to II.2 II.83 sentence: Ries (1931) already critiqued 140 definitions of this term. M.A.K. Halliday (1985:30, and personal communication 1995) suggests that the familiar term parts of speech (cf. Note to IV 20) might more aptly be parts of a sentence to restore the proper translation from Latin partes orationis, itself a mistranslation from Greek meroi logou, where logos originally had its non-technical sense discourse and only later became a technical term for sentence. For Saussure (1969:106), the sentence cannot pass for the linguistic unit because the totality of sentences that could be uttered is dominated by diversity. For Bloomfield (1933:297), the sentence is able to be spoken alone. Chomsky (1957: 11, 14, 18, 54, 85, 85); curiously, his maiden volume on Syntactic Structures (1957) gave no formal definition of the sentence, at times oddly leaning toward structuralism by associating it with a sequence of phonemes or a sequence of morphemes, and other times warning it would be absurd, or even hopeless, to state principles of sentence construction in terms of phonemes or morphemes (1957:18, 46, 59). frozen islands: see Note to II.47. To enrich is to increase the number and specificity of constraints (I.53; cf. Notes to I.42, 53). II.84 tagmemics: see Note to II.38 on the tagmeme. Of all these approaches, the research in Soviet Union was the earliest and largest body of work on texts but was difficult to obtain in the West until surveys appeared in translation, e.g. Jelitte (1976) and Gindin (1978). rejected the dichotomy: Pike (1967); Trnka (1964); Firth (1957); M.A.K. Halliday (1973). II.85 See Hartmann (1963a, b, 1965, 1970). Several milestones in early text linguistics were dissertations directed by Hartmann (e.g. Harweg 1968; Koch 1971; Wienold 1971). critical mass: see Note to III.50. above

the sentence: e.g. Heger (1976); well-formed sequence: e.g. van Dijk (1972). Generative outlook: for a time, text linguistics and discourse analysis considered adopting systems similar to generative semantics and case grammar (e.g. Dressler 1972; van Dijk 1972; Grimes 1975; Longacre 1976) (cf. II.109), but neither of these lived up to its claims and expectations. The term stretch of text stays clear of the routine assumption by linguists and psycholinguists that the sentence is the unit both of actual speech and of scientific analysis. II.86 A systemic perspective on discourse is elaborated in Benson & Greaves (eds.) (1985), and on text by Martin (1992). I am grateful to Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (personal communication, 1995) for this roster of the systemic functional school. II.87 On building block views of language, see also Note to II.59. II.88 over- and under-determine: compare the general over-constrained and under-constrained status of material in natural science (III.18). means for ends: see Note to II.60. II.89 transdisciplinary: see Note to I.5. Like phonology versus phonemics, the choice of the terms semiotics, semiotic, or semiology for the whole discipline reflects research traditions in different schools or countries more than any genuine opposition in content (cf. Note to II.29). Usually, semiotics is preferred by researchers in Germanic-language countries, semiology by researchers in Romance-language countries, and semiotic by anthropologists and systemic functional linguists. On semiotics versus linguistics including text linguistics, see Nth (1978); Akhmanova & Rolandas (1979); Ransdell (1980); Tobin (1990). The dynamic aspect entirely eluded both Saussure (1966 [1916]) and Hjelmslev (1969 [1943]). II.90 signifier versus signified: Saussure (1966:67, 101f); the terms have spawned a host of arcane orthodoxies and might best be dropped. relation: Peirces (1955:82) model of a co-operation of three subjects: the sign, its object, and an interpretant is inappropriate for cases when no object is involved (e.g. virtue) and when people produce signs rather than just interpret them. arbitrary: especially by Saussure (1966:67) (cf. Notes to II.48 and IV.14). form over meaning: cf. II.59ff. flexible: see for example Eco (1977) and M. Anderson, Deely, Krampen, Ransdell, Sebeok, & von Uexkll (1984), as well as the papers in Koch (ed.) (1990) and M. Anderson & Merrill (eds.) (1991). II.91 actual system: see Note to I.17. adaptive action space: see Note to III.81. II.92 ethnography and anthropology: I have greatly profited from Marvin Harris (1980, 1990a), as well as from C. Geertz (1973), Spradley (1979, 1980), and Erchak (1992a); see also Hymes (1962, 1970, 1977, 1981); Gumperz & Hymes (eds.) (1964); Colby (1966); Bauman & Sherzer (eds.) (1974); Weppner (ed.) (1977); Psathas (ed.) (1979); Gumperz (1982); Hammersley & Atkinson (1983). social anthropology: see Ardener (ed.) (1971). tagmemics: see Note to II.38. emic versus etic: see Note to VIII.24. II.93 The analysis of conversation and ethnomethodology have been influentially developed by Harold Garfinkel and his students, such as Harvey Sacks and Manny Schegloff (see references to V.54f). As Chris Candlin has pointed out in a recent lecture in Vienna, the lack of interaction between this group and British discourse analysis (e.g. Sinclair & Coulthard 1975; Hoey 1979, 1983; Stubbs 1983; Atkinson & Heritage [eds.] 1984; Coulthard 1985) has been surprising and regrettable. taking turns, repairing errors: see

references in Note to V.55. II.94 For social psychology, I relied mainly of Potter & Wetherell (1987); see also Giles & St. Clair (eds.) (1979); Gergen & Gergen (1981); Lindzey & Aronson (eds.) (1985). II.95 sociolinguistics: I profited greatly from the thorough critical survey in Dittmar (1976); see also Marcuschi (1975); Hudson (1980); Fasold (1984); one exemplary study is given by Baugh (1983). II.96 psycholinguistics: I have relied mainly on Clark & Clark (1977) and Levelt (1978). On the contrast in psycholinguistics between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., see Leont'ev (1973); on the contrast between psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, see now Beaugrande (in press, b). On behaviorism in linguistics, see especially Bloomfield (1949); Pike (1967 [1945-64]), and III.128; V.10; VII.131, 323, 332, 338, and note to VII.131. billiard balls: Osgood (1963); meaning scales: Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum (1957). immediate constituents: see Note to II.34. On bottom-up vs. top-down, see also II.97, 101f, 107, 112; III.5, 20, 71, 86, 89, 156, 182, 199, 219f, 231, 250f, 253f; IV.9, 129; VI.70; VIII.16, and Note to III.250. cognitive linguistics compare Fawcett (1980), Langacker (1987), Casad (1995), and the journal of that name published by Mouton de Gruyter. II.97 cognitive psychology: see Neisser (1967, 1976); Kintsch (1977); J.R. Anderson (1983, 1985); G. Cohen (1983). cognitive revolution: see also II.103; III.85, 88, 185; IV.77; V.10, 98, 101, 122; VII.83, 89, 129, 179; VIII.105; its history has been described by Gardner (1985). behaviorism: see Note to III.128. information processing: see Rumelhart (1977); Klahr & Kotovsky (eds.) (1989). On word lists versus texts, see Kintsch (1974); Beaugrande (1986). Experiments: influential early work is reported in Kintsch (1974) and Meyer (1975). Narrative, Expository, Argumentative: see IV.56. schema, frame, and script have been casually or faddishly used in similar ways by different groups; for discussion and references of these three terms and of the rest in this paragraph, see Beaugrande (1980, 1981). II.98 Foundational works in systems theory include Boulding (1968 [1956]); Bertalanffy (1968 [1962]); W. Buckley (ed.) (1968); Prewo, Ritsert, & Stracke (eds.) (1973) (compare Note to III.183); in cybernetics: Wiener (1961 [1948]); Ashby (ed.) (1956); Steinbruner (1974); in information theory: Shannon & Weaver (1949); Shannon (1951); more recent work in these areas is collected in the series Progress in Cybernetics and System Research edited mainly by Robert Trappl for Hemisphere Publishing and the Halsted Press. The concept of function was quite sparse, closer to mathematics than to, say, systemic linguistics. information value: see Note to I.48. II.99 overload: see Note to III.214. II.100 artificial intelligence: I got started with Winograd (1972); Winston (ed.) (1975); Schank, Goldman, Rieger, & Riesbeck (1975); Winston (1977). Keeping up over the years is hard, but general descriptions of most important projects can be found in the papers in the proceedings from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), usually published by the institution sponsoring each conference. On the blocks world, see Winograd (1972). II.101 intelligence: if a human at a terminal carried on a discourse alternately with a computer and with another human and could not tell which is which, the program could justly be called intelligent the so-called Turing test attributed to the distinguished pioneer Alan Turning. understanding stories: see Schank et al. (1975); Schank

& Abelson (1977); Cul-lingford (1978). On recent trends in applications, see Feigenbaum & Pamela McCorduck (1983). II.102 artificial life: the major papers about this field, covering a wide range of sciences, are collected the series of proceedings of the Santa Fe (New Mexico, U.S.) Institute Studies (Philip Anderson et al. [eds.] 1988; Langton [ed.] 1988; Perelson [ed.] 1988; Jen [ed.] 1989; Stein [ed.] 1989; Zurek [ed.] 1990; Langton et al. [eds.] 1992). complexity theory: Waldrop (1992) is a good place to start. Langton (1989:xxii, i.c. [=italics changed]) compare Farmer & Belin (1992). local interactions: see III.52f, 74, 79, 91, 102, 142, 221, 231, 248ff. emergent properties: see also III.50, 53, 70, 72, 79, 81, 84, 90, 105, 107, 149, 165, 169, 177, 219, 248; IV.19; VII.5; VIII.8. parallel distributed processing: Rumelhart, McClelland, et al. (1986); for language, Waltz & Pollack (1985); and see also III.221, 231, 248, 255; VI.22, and Notes to III.92, 93, 220. predictable from the sum of the parts: see also II.30, 59; III.50, 76, 78, 137, and Notes to III.50, 202. On bottom-up vs. top-down, see Note to II.96; the terms local and global are sometimes associated with lower level and higher level, but these terms would conflict with the usual terms of surface, shallow, and deep (see Notes to III.224 and VII.170). connectionist: see also III.56, 102, 188(h), 248ff, and Notes to I.30, III.248, and VI.22; on its numerous applications for theories and models of human processing, see Feldman & Ballard (1982); Hopfield (1982); Kawamoto & Anderson (1984); Feldman (1985); Rumelhart, McClelland, et al. (1986). II.103 A thoughtful summation of cognitive science was provided by Newell (1990); compare Johnson-Laird (1983), and papers in Kintsch, J.R. Miller, & Polson (eds.) (1984), and in Collins & E. Smith (eds.) (1988). On its implications for instruction, see now papers in Rabinowitz (ed.) (1993). transdisciplinarity: see Note to I.5. ecologist: see Note to I.10.

Commentary to II.F (II.105-13)

II.105 text linguistics evolve: see Kallmeyer, Klein, Meyer-Hermann, Netzer, & Siebert (eds.) (1971); Dressler (1972) (ed.) (1978); Hartmann: (1972, 1975). Dressler & Schmidt (eds.) (1973); Glich & Raible (1977); Petfi (ed.) (1979, 1986); Bernrdez (1980, 1982, 1987); Beaugrande & Dressler (1981); Albaladejo & Garca Berrio (1982); Fvero & Koch (1983); Charolles, Petfi, & Szer (eds.) (1986); van Dijk (ed.) (1990); Lundquist (1990); Heinemann & Viehweger (1991); Fonseca (1992); Stubbs (1993). Text grammar was featured in the Netherlands and Germany (II.109), e.g. Harweg (1968, 1972); Petfi (1971, 1972); van Dijk (1972); Rieser (1976); van Dijk & Petfi (eds.) (1977). Seminal work in the U.S. was done by Oriental linguists like Yen Ren Chao (1932) on Chinese and Susumu Kuno (1972) on Japanese. apply differently between sentences: one muchcited case was back-ward pronominalization (cataphora, see IV.192), which is common inside a sentence (e.g., When they are away from home, then village farmers feel sad.) but uncommon between sentences (e.g., ?They are away from home. Then village farmers feel sad.) (cf. IV.192). II.106 texteme: Koch (1973). dialectic between virtual and actual systems: see Note to I.17.

Bertolt Brecht: van Dijk, Ihwe, Petfi, & Rieser (1972); critique in Kummer (1972). II.107 This dichotomy between text versus discourse (going back at least to van Dijk 1972) remains fashionable in Britain (e.g. Cook 1989), doubtless to sort out formalist from functionalist work, but the state of the art no longer justifies any dichotomy between text linguistics versus discourse analysis. II.108 e.g. Petfi (1971). co-text: see note to II.67. II.109 discourse analysis from fieldwork: especially Pike (1967, 1983); Grimes (1975), (ed.) (1978); Longacre (1976, 1983); Pike & Pike (1977); Longacre & Levinsohn (1978). applied to English, French, and German: see Harweg (1968); Koch (ed.) (1972); Burton (1980); Cicourel (1980); Adelman (ed.) (1981); Coul-thard & Montgomery (eds.) (1981); Brown & Yule (1983); Maas (1988); Perinbanayagam (1991); Coulthard (ed.) (1992); Mann & Thompson (eds.) (1992); van Dijk (ed.) (in press). Petfi (1971, 1978, 1979); also van Dijk (1972); Dressler (1972). Malinowski (1922, 1935), Bernstein (ed.) (1970). in France: Foucault (1971); survey in Macdonnell (1986). generative semantics: see Note to II.86; case grammar: discourse analysts have also had some case-like schemes (e.g. Longacre 1976) but not within the mainly formalist framework originally proposed by Fillmore (1968) (cf. Note to IV.41). II.110 Our deliberations on the principles of textuality were indebted to Isenberg (1971). On the text as artifact, see also I.41f, 52; II.16, 89, 91; III.203, 241; VII.213, 288, 299. II.111 The postulate of combinability was stated by Peter Hartmann (1963). II.112 discourse processing: Freedle (ed.) (1977, 1979); Beaugrande (1980, 1984a); J. Black & Reiser (1982); Flammer & Kintsch (eds.) (1982); Ellis & Donahue (eds.) (1986); the journal Discourse Processing (by the Ablex Corporation in Norwood, NJ, USA) is also highly recommended. dialectical: see Notes to I.17 and I.37. The term text processing has also been widely used (see papers in Allen [ed.] 1982; Denhire & Rossi [eds.] 1991). On bottom-up vs. top-down, see Note to II.96.

Commentary to II.G (II.114-31)

II.114 structuralism: cf. II.58, 85, 115ff, 123-26, 128; V.91. dichotomous tradition: see Note to I.39. II.116 vastly expanded: see Jameson (1971); Culler (1975); in anthropology, see C. Geertz (1973:Ch. 13; 1988:Ch. 2); M. Harris (1980:Chs. 7-8). kinship: see Lounsbury (1954); Lvi-Strauss (1969). The weaknesses of anthropological structuralism are discussed in VIII.13-18. II.117 Appreciating the diverse, mobile, and elusive nature of post-structuralism requires extensive reading of the original sources (cf. Beaugrande 1988a); one post-structuralist reader bears the symptomatic title Untying the Text (Young [ed.] (1981). diverse: structuralists generally resemble post-structuralists more closely than many post-structuralists resemble each other (Culler 1982:30); Culler pointed to Hararis two anthologies (1971, 1979), one for each trend, where Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Eugenio Donato, Michel Foucault, Grard Genette, Ren Girard, and Michael Riffaterre all appear in both. II.119 true statements: see Note to I.32; realistic: see Note to III.5 on realism; positivism: see Note to II.13; behaviorism: see Note to III.128; physicalism and

unified science: see Notes to III.10. II.121 For contrary views of post-modernism, compare Giroux (1992) with M. Harris (1995). Center: see Note to I.2. Hebdige (1986:81). II.122 Deconstruction: the chief architect was the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1967a, 1967b, 1972a, 1972b, 1972c), but many variants have sprung up, most of them closer to literary studies than to philosophy proper. For surveys, see Bloom et al. (1979); Culler (1982); Beaugrande (1988a). On relations to system theory, see de Berg & Prangel (eds.) (1995). paradox: see Note to I.3. II.124 folktales: e.g. Propp (1928). Against influence studies: see H. Bloom (1973, 1975), for whom influence is more a mythical or theological connection than a historical one. On metaphors of weaving and fabric, see J.H. Miller (1977). II.125 engaged with psychoanalysis: compare Lacan (1966-71); Deleuze & Guattari (1977); Irigaray (1977); Jameson (1981). II.127 For surveys across the widely and subtly varying streams in materialism and Marxism, see M. Harris (1980) for culture, Lorenzer (1972) for sozialization, Miliband (1977) for politics, and Eagleton (1985) for literature; also Kolakowski (1978) and Perry Anderson (1980). The Marxist critique of formalist linguistics brought forward in the socialist countries, especially the U.S.S.R, e.g. by Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Valentin N. Volosinov, Nikolai Marr, Ivan I. Meshchaninov, and Nikolai S. Chemodanov, was not registered in most Western research until fairly recently, when literary studies rediscovered some significant early writers such as Bakhtin (1981[originals 1934-38]) who was for a time falsely given out to be the real author of Volosinov (1973 [1929]), but only because the latter had been banned (and murdered by Stalin's secret police) (cf. Holquist 1988: xxviff); see also Antonio Gramsci (1971b [1929-34]); on language and materialism, see Coward & Ellis (1977). struggle: if the technical sense is the process whereby social groupings with different interests engage with one another (Fairclough 1989:34), it is nearly equivalent to interaction. division of labor: see IV.38. commodities: see Note to I.8. alienation and fragmented: see Notes to I.1. II.128 dialectical: see Notes to I.17 and I.37 utopian: see III.201; VI.64, 80, 103; VII.291. demystifying: see Note to I.30. II.129 Feminism: see Millett (1970); Firestone (1971); Irigaray (1974, 1977); Daly (1978); L. Clark & Lange (1979); Okin (1979, 1989); Elshtain (1981); Marks & de Courtivron (eds.) (1981); Moi (1985); Nicholson (1986); Tong (1989); C. Pateman & Shanley (1990); Cixous (1992, 1994). For some modest overviews in a discourse perspective, see Beaugrande (1988a, c) and VIII.D. On distinguishing sexes vs. genders see VIII.64. Feminist critiques of language are found in Thorne & Henley (eds.) (1975); R. Lakoff (1984); Kramarae (1981); Hellinger (ed.) (1985); Moi (1985); Phillips, Steele, & Tanz (eds.) (1987); Cameron (ed.) (1990); CrannyFrancis (1992); on women in their speech communities, see Coates & Cameron (eds.) (1989); on feminism and linguistic theory, see Cameron (1992); bias in the lexicogrammars: see F.W. Frank (1985); Baron (1986). II.130 discourse analysis in France: surveyed in English by Macdonnell (1986). critical: see Note to I.30. insanity: see Foucault (1967). On the language of power and authority in linguistic discourse itself, see Beaugrande (1991d).

Commentary to II.H (II.132-33)

II.133 Bloch quoted in J. Groen, Smit & Eisvoogel (eds.) (1990:50, 52). ecological validity: see Note to I.33. diversify and integrate: Note to III.24.