Chapter II, Part 3

II.F. Discursive studies of language  

111. Discursivism¹¹⁰ can designate an approach for practicing ‘discursive engagements’ with other texts or discourses to explore their linguistic, cognitive, or social constitution (I.35). A ‘language’ is defined as a vast ‘virtual system of available options’ (a ‘theory of everything’, as it were) in a genuine dialectic with a ‘text’ defined as an ‘actual system of selections and combinations’; a ‘discourse’ is defined as an actual multi-system of related texts (cf. I.35ff). Ideologically, discursivism resonates with ecologism, which sees text and discourse as resources for free access to knowledge and society (0.7; I.76). Historically, it is emerging as a post-modernist project committed to inclusive multilingualism and multi-culturalism. Like functionalism, with which it shares key interests, it has evolved on two distinct sides, namely text linguistics and discourse analysis, which I believe to be converging (cf. II.119).

112. Discursivism stands firm upon being frankly explicit about its own social, ideological, and academic orientation and consciously positioning the ‘voice’ of the author who shares knowledge as a charter of ‘being educated’ (I.78, 84; II.209). Moreover, the voice too is shared and ‘polyphonic’, seeking ‘intersubjectivity’ through contact with a wide spectrum of alternative or contrasting voices and viewpoints in their own words rather than just paraphrasing or summarising them all. Discursive diversity benefits from post-modernism and multiculturalism at the present stage of political and economic history, when they engage in counter-discourse against the discourses of right-wing governmental or corporate power-brokers who fear diversity will bring pressure to share.

113. Discursivism does not aspire to completeness of description or analysis, which in the past has imposed drastic restrictions on both the data and the description (0.8), e.g. ‘syntax independent of meaning’ (II.69, 79). For ecologism, completeness is a ‘hopeful utopia’ to work toward without attaining; we can always say more about a text, compare or contrast it with more alternative versions or with other texts, or trace it further back to its sources or forward to its effects, and so on. The realistic aim is to pursue the exploration until we have captured some non-trivial and non-obvious aspects of interest and relevance for our agenda of understanding and enhancing human communication (0.8). If we view texts as ‘work in progress’ (I.39), our own discourse can further the ‘progress’ by broaden-ing inclusion and exploiting the inclusive essence of language (cf. I.38f, 47). In theory, then, discourse remains an open process that can ‘progress’ through multiple discursive engagements, as when explanation clarifies and renews its own content (cf. I.76, 113); our success in this ‘progress’ is the real foundation for whatever authority our work may attain.

114. In practice, we should expressly apply the ‘ecologist strategies of discourse’ we are seeking to describe. So I adopt user-friendly, ordinary language as far as I can, and technical language only as far as is genuinely required. I also build balanced or parallel patterns, as when I introduce each approach to ‘studies of language’ in this chapter by suggesting how it ‘defines language’ and where it might be situated ‘ideologically’ and ‘historically’ (II.4, 25, 75, 90, 111).

115. The texts and discourses we describe can be chosen for their relevance to a  discursive theme concerning some significant issue or problem in current public discourse. One such theme would be corporate cynicism, where ‘social benefit’ is a ‘doublespeak’ term for ‘private profit’:

[70] The Council for Nuclear Safety showed more than 1000 workers in Harmony Gold Mines[…] have received an annual radiation dose five times higher than it should be. ‘Essentially, these workers were being fried.’[…] ‘They are not provided with protective clothing or even instruments that would allow them to measure radiation levels.’ ‘Mining has a social benefit and we can’t make it so costly that workers’ jobs are at risk’, said Anglogold representative Johan Botha. ‘So perhaps you say radiation will kill you, but no jobs will also kill you.’ ([Johannisburg] Mail & Guardian, 01/03/99)

In the less cynical corporate discourses of the past, the ‘representative’ would express ‘surprise’ and ‘regret’, however insincere, and promise some ‘investi-gation’ or ‘remediation’. But the ‘new cynicism’ offers a brutal choice between being ‘killed’ by ‘radiation’ or by starvation (‘joblessness’). The ‘workers’ being black Africans and the spokesman being a white Afrikaner encapsulates the sinister history of gold mining in South Africa.

116. In Tanzania, African workers in gold mines didn’t need to wait around for radiation to kill them (first reported by Amnesty International):

[71] Ten of thousands of small-time prospectors[…] held legal claim stakes to their tiny mine shafts.[…] In August 1996,[…] bulldozers, backed by military police firing weapons, rolled across the goldfield, smashing down worker housing, crushing their mining equipment and filling in their pits.[…] About fifty miners were still in their mine shafts, buried alive. (Best Democracy)¹¹¹

In the corporation’s cynical response, the incident was ‘a complete fabrication of a bunch of greedy, lying Black Africans trying to shake them down’ — a version ‘backed by the World Bank’, which had ‘granted the biggest loan guarantee in its history’ to ‘develop the site’; an actual videotape of  ‘a worker going into a pit to retrieve bodies’ was said to show ‘bodies of ne’er-do-wells killed by local resi-dents, or victims of mine accidents distant in time or place’.¹¹¹ An ‘internationally respected expert on human rights and the environment, Tanzanian lawyer Tundu Lissu’, who called for an ‘investigation’, was ‘charged by the Tanzanian government with sedition’ — this action too ‘supported by the World Bank’.¹¹¹

117. And the ‘social benefits’ of gold mining may be granted not just to workers, but to all residents in an ‘area’[72]. In fact, all forms of life in the region may embrace a golden opportunity to be ‘killed’[73]. Corporate cynicism again re-sponded, this time from the boss of the Australian company running the mine[74].

[72] Mining Awareness produced a leaflet that drew attention to the problems of blasting, dust, chemicals, silting, erosion, water supply, pollution of the area and waste disposal associated with gold mining.¹¹²

[73] An enormous ‘toxic bullet’ of deadly cyanide that accidentally overflowed a dam at a Romanian gold mine has contaminated 250 miles of rivers in Hungary and Yugoslavia, killing millions of fish, shutting down water supplies and leaving a trail of aquatic devastation that will require years to repair. (NGO Coalition To Save Our Rivers)^www

[74] the only fish I’ve seen are the four fish held up by two 14-year-old boys that were described as ‘Environmental Experts’. (Brett Montgomery)^www

The Romanian disaster was accidental, though foreseeable from a string of similar incidents at the site (cf. VII.62). But unleashing toxic waste seems planned to become policy in the globalisation sponsored by the same World Bank, witness an internal memo from its Chief Economist, Lawrence H. Summers[75].

[75] Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs[less developed countries]?[…] Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted.[…] The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable: a country with the lowest wages[loses the least in] foregone earnings from morbidity and mortality.¹¹³

Such data point up how the discursive theme of corporate cynicism can challenge not just discursivism and ecologism, but the well-being of whole societies.

118. Discursivism aspires to be a ‘progressive’ enterprise for producing discourse about discourse and staging a productive interplay of discursive positions. The present Introduction is a programmatic attempt to enlist discursivism in such a project, ranging across the Internet and large corpora from discourses of literature, philosophy, history, politics, economics, science, and technology.

II.F.1 Discursive studies in text linguistics

119. The immediate ambience for discursive studies has been partly mounted by text linguistics and discourse analysis. Though I am inclined to see their concerns converging today,¹¹⁴ their histories have been mostly divergent. As befits its name, ‘text linguistics’ came more from inside linguistics proper, and so was more allied with formalism. Discourse analysis, at least in English research, came more from outside, especially from ethnographic fieldwork studies of previously undescribed languages and cultures (II.58), and has thus been more allied with functionalism. They gradually converged as text linguistics recognised the text to be primarily a functional unit and only secondarily a formal unit.

120. Text linguistics¹¹⁵ seems to have a diffuse history because much early work did not circulate widely, or bore diffuse designations, such as ‘linguostylistics’¹¹⁶ or ‘functional sentence perspective’.¹¹⁷ The field gained a modest identity during the 1960s and 1970s, concentrated at a few institutions across Eastern and Western Europe. The ‘cold war’ hindered the study of texts from consolidating research in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the ‘East’, and Finland, Spain, Italy, Holland, West Germany, and Austria in the ‘West’. A further hindrance was the dominance of ‘Linguistics Departments’ so focused on the ‘sentence’ as to regard ‘sentence linguistics’ (as we then called it for contrast) as a tautology or pleonasm, and ‘text linguistics’ as an oxymoron or casuistry.

121. Ironically, the text was admitted chiefly to relieve some pressures arising when formalist linguistics expanded from syntax toward semantics and, more guardedly, pragmatics. In theory, the text was at first just a sequence of sentences; and in practice, it was reached roundaboutly by going ‘beyond the sentence’. Proposals were duly advanced for ‘text syntax’, ‘text semantics’, and ‘text pragmatics’ like the theoretical and abstract ‘components’ postulated for the sentence, with the syntactic one ‘generating’, and the other two only ‘interpreting’ (II.81), as if a text could be an empty syntactic shell waiting to be filled with meaning and purpose.

122. Viewed in retrospect, the contact with authentic texts eventually had to drive a shift of emphasis in text linguistics from theory-driven toward practice-driven concepts of the ‘text’, and from top-down to bottom-up concepts of ‘language’. In theory, working up from the bottom might eventually arrive back at the top, perhaps at the degrees of generality and abstraction that formal linguistics deemed so essential for ‘scientific research’. In practice, this movement did not occur. Instead, we gradually acknowledged that the richer and more interesting aspects of texts, both for theory and practice, are situated in more specific and concrete issues of textuality and intertextuality.

123. By this route, text linguistics arrived at the conception of the text as a communicative event intended and accepted as a contribution to a discourse, defined in turn as a set or series of relevant texts in any communicative medium (I.40). Here, both text and discourse are practical units, which obviates the need for an expressly theoretical unit like the texteme¹¹⁸ to be a theoretical unit ‘above’ the other ‘‑emes’ described in II.3 and corresponding to the text as the practical unit. In our dialectical account where language is the theory and discourse is the practice (I.40ff), the units in the ‘virtual system’ of the language remain theoretical until they get put into practice within an actual system;¹¹⁹ and the context of the practice can act through a dialectic back upon the theory, notably when the usage is creative or novel. The major bridge between language and text is the intertext, a large set of texts which manifest shared strategies of selection and combination, but which were not intended as contributions to the same discourse (II.158f).

124. A favoured topic in early work was ‘pronominalisation’¹²⁰ (also called ‘anaphora’¹²¹ or ‘reference’¹²²), which mainly organises various relations among Nouns and Pronouns within a Text. Pronominalisation is surely a ‘grammatical’ and ‘linguistic’ issue, but is not limited to the single sentence. In sample[76], ‘Good’ Mrs Brown is introduced with the Noun Phrase ‘the old woman’ and functions as the Topic Agent for the Paragraph; the Pronoun ‘she’ makes the Subject of a series of Sentences detailing her repugnant exterior in a Thematic Sequence: ‘ugly – red  rims – eyes – mouth – miserably dressed – face  – uglier’. The consistent Cohesion easily identifies the Female Pronouns with the correct person.

[76] The old woman took her[Florence] by the wrist.[…] She was a very ugly old woman, with red rims round her eyes, and a mouth that mumbled and chattered of itself when she was not speaking. She was miserably dressed.[…] She seemed to have followed Florence, for she had lost her breath (Dombey)

More delicate textual functions of pronominalisation apply to these data about the same ‘old woman’ in a later scene of the novel:

[77] ‘It’s my handsome daughter, living and come back!’ screamed the old woman,[…] dropping on the floor before her, and still rocking herself to and fro with every frantic demonstration[…] ‘Yes, mother,’ returned Alice.[…] ‘Get up, and sit in your chair. What good does this do?’ ‘She’s come back harder than she went!’ cried the mother. ‘She don’t care for me!’[…] ‘Of course I have come back harder. What else did you expect? I don’t know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn’t’, she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling from her breast.

The ‘daughter’ refers to her ‘mother’ with Second Person Pronouns, but the mother dramatises Alice’s rebuke of ‘frantic’ emotional displays by using the Third Person Pronoun, as if calling on an unseen compassionate audience to witness the ‘hardness’ we also witness from Alice’s bodily posture ‘excluding every softer feeling’. In response, the daughter sarcastically assigns the credit for the ‘hard-ening’ to the Third Person Noun Phrase ‘my own dear mother’.

125. Centring on the text means downgrading the sentence from the obligatory theoretical unit of language to the preferred practical unit of written discourse, normally defined in English either by punctuation (starting with a capital Letter and ending with a Period) or by grammar (at least one Independent Clause). We can now address any relevant Stretch of Text, whether or not it counts as a sentence in some ‘grammar’. We might finally explore the cognitive and social functions that can favour ‘complete sentences’, e.g., compensating for ‘hearing loss’[78], or meeting an ‘attainment target’ in education[79]; or else disfavour them, e.g., taking lecture notes[80], or calling for an urgently needed ‘scalpel’[81].

[78] Never use only one word; always use the complete sentence; always talk at normal pace, without exaggeration (Hearing Loss) ¹²³

[79] Pupils should be able to[…] produce, independently, pieces of writing using complete sentences, some of them demarcated with capital letters and full stops or question marks (National Curriculum English) ^www

[80] To summarise a lecture you need to[…] record the main points as they are made. Do not worry about writing in complete sentences. (People in Organisations) ¹²⁴

[81] In this surgical context, the words are sufficient as pointers to required meaning.[…] By the time the surgeon had produced his complete sentence, the patient might well have bled to death: a victim of syntax. (Aspects  of Language Teaching) ¹²⁵

Having to point out where ‘complete sentences’ are obviously inappropriate indi-cates how far they are routinely overrated. Oddly, sample[79] implies only ‘some complete sentences’ need the orthographic signals of a written sentence.

126. By downgrading the sentence, we also downgrade the status of ‘grammati-cality’, obviating the formalist projects for a sentence-based ‘text grammar’,¹²⁶ which foundered on the problems of defining the ‘grammatical text’ as opposed to the ‘ungrammatical text’ or ‘non-text’. In retrospect, we can recognise the notion that the text is a grammatical unit as a gross category error. Once we define the text as an event (I.40; II.123), the ‘non-text’ must be a ‘non-event’ that does not or cannot occur; we could not describe the properties non-texts have, but only ones properties they lack and real texts have. So we would launch a quixotic quest for impossible properties by excluding every property any text is found to possess. How baffling that might prove can be gleaned from the myriad texts whose proper-ties are hardly ‘grammatical’ in any theoretical or formal sense but do make them appropriate to their communicative functions, as in a newspaper header[82], a telegram[83], or a notice in an ‘agony column’ (charged by the word!)[84].

[82] LOVE-TUG KIDS SNATCHED BY ‘DANGER MAN’ DAD Terrified tots dragged away in gun drama (Daily Mirror)

[83] HELLO DARLING. BACK IN BLIGHTY. 14 DAYS LEAVE. TRY JOIN. REPLY MY HOME. LOVE LESLIE. (Enigma Variations)

[84] My lady sleeps. She of raven tresses. Corner seat from Victoria, Wednesday night. Carried programme. Gentleman answering inquiry desires acquaintance. (Agony Column)

In a practical and functional sense, these texts are grammatical, plainly telling who ‘snatched’ and ‘dragged’ whom[82], who got ‘back to Blighty’ (nickname for England among soldiers overseas) for ‘14 days’ of ‘leave’ and ‘love’ with whom[83], and who has ‘raven tresses’ and ‘carried a programme’[84]. Such texts display the grammatical option of ‘Non-Clause’ Patterns which lack Subject and Predicate but which can well be appropriate, efficient, and effective (section IV.E)

126. Here, ‘grammar’ is not a mainly theoretical construct, as in formalism and generativism, but a dialectic of theory and practice, as in systemic functional linguistics. So the grammar should be described dialectically by continually relating theory to practice and adducing not sparse invented data like the pedestrian and predictable[85], much cited in formalist linguistics but not found in any large corpus I have queried, but rich authentic data like the sprightly and unpredictable[86] about Uncle Josh Weatherby trying golf for the first and last time in his life.

[85] The man hit the ball.

[86] So I whaled away at that little ball, and by chowder I hit it. I knocked it clear over into Deacon Witherspoon’s pasture, and hit his old muley cow, and she got skeered and run away,[and] never stopped a-runnin’ till she went slap dab into Ezra Hoskins’ grocery store, upsot four gallons of apple butter into a keg of soft soap, and sot one foot into a tub of mackral, and t’other foot into a box of winder glass. (Punkin Centre)

Ironically, data expressly designed to be ‘grammatical’ fail to reveal the real power of the grammar. The failure worsens if we invent ‘ungrammatical’ non-data, e.g.:

[85a]*Hit man ball the the.

[86a] *I whaled that I’d muley slap Deacon glass into butter foot skeered.

We have our hands more than full enough with real data.

127. So text linguistics logically shifted the conceptual centre from ‘grammaticality’ over to textuality.¹²⁷ Three perspectives crystallised in the ‘seven standards’ of textuality:¹²⁸ (a) the text itself as process and product in Cohesion and Coherence; (b) the participants, usually the producer(s) in Intentionality, and the receiver(s) in Acceptability; and (c) the broader context in Informativity, Situationality, and Intertextuality. For a brief review, here’s Uncle Josh again, whose sally into riding a ‘bisickle’ fared no better than playing golf:

[87] I got on that durned masheen and it jumped up in the front and kicked up behind, and bucked up in the middle, and shied and balked and jumped sideways.[…]. Wall, I lost the lamp, I lost the clamp, I lost my patience, I lost my temper, I lost my self-respect, my last suspender button and my standin’ in the community. I broke the handle bars, I broke the sprockets, I broke the Ten Commandments, I broke my New Year’s pledge and the law agin loud and abusive language. (Punkin Centre)

Cohesion can subsume the all the practices of connecting units and patterns for which the Lexicogrammar provides the theory,¹²⁹ and we can retire the cumbrous notion of ‘text syntax’. The Agent first is the ‘masheen’ and ‘it’ as the naughty two-wheeled perpetrator, and then Uncle Josh as ‘Í’, the hapless victim; each is the Subject of a series of Verbs. Coherence can subsume the means for connecting meanings and concepts,¹³⁰ and we can retire ‘text semantics’ too, e.g., relating ‘lamp’, ‘clamp’, ‘handle bars’, and ‘sprockets’ as parts of the ‘masheen’ (hence the Definite Article); and recognising a Thematic Sequence like ‘jumped up – kicked up – bucked up – shied – jumped’, all making the ‘bisickle’ a metaphorical horse; or ‘in the front – behind – in the middle – sideways’.  Intentionality subsumes the conditions that the text producer intends to perform an event as a text, and Acceptability subsumes the conditions that the text receiver accepts the event as a text, which this author whimsically commented on:

[88] The one particular object in writing this book is to furnish you with an occasional laugh, and the writer with an occasional dollar.[…] In Uncle Josh Weathersby you have a purely imaginary character, yet one true to life.[…] Take him as you find him, and in his experiences you will observe there is a bright side to everything.

Situationality subsumes the connections between the text and the context of situation, e.g., Josh being impelled by mishaps to utter ‘loud and abusive language’ and ‘break the Ten Commandments’, the easiest one to ‘break’ on a bicycle out of control doubtless being to ‘take the name of the Lord in vain’ (Exodus 20:7). Informativity subsumes the degrees to which the text or some of its aspects are unexpected, interesting, or stimulating, e.g., the pointedly motley rosters of things that got ‘lost’ or ‘broken’, some literal and some figurative (cf. VI.20). And finally, Intertextuality subsumes the connections between the current text and previously experienced texts, e.g., other tales about the misadventures of Uncle Josh, and, more generally, the ‘tall tales’ of rural America (VI.46). Integrate the five standards except Cohesion and Coherence, and we can retire ‘text pragmatics’.

128. My proposal for using the standards of textuality to retire from the linguistics of the text the fields of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics follows from their predominantly theoretical and non-dialectical status in general linguistics, which has applied them largely to invented data (II.78). An authentic text shows genuine theory progressing into genuine practice; an invented text shows pseudo-theory regressing into pseudo-practice. And this contrast is vital for grasping the complex relation between language and discourse.

129. In return, a vibrant challenge for text linguistics might be to determine how many of the issues addressed by those three fields can be productively absorbed into a general study of texts and textuality. At least some issues were plausibly artefacts of self-imposed limitations in trying to do syntax without semantics, and semantic without pragmatics; and of the blinkered dichotomies like ‘competence’ and ‘performance’, or ‘grammar’ and ‘lexicon’, and so forth. Emblematic moves toward abstraction and idealisation have drained away the practical precision and determinacy of language in use and fomented the compensatory elaboration of theoretical schemes of ‘underlying rules’, ‘structures’, ‘features’, and so on, whose relevance for exploring text and discourse is doubtful. We need a practical theory to validly represent the theories of practice sustained by discourse participants themselves — the theory that makes people ‘competent’ in their language.

130. Since the seven standards are for describing texts, design criteria were proposed for evaluating texts: how far the text is efficient in getting readily produced and received[89], effective in promoting intentions and goals[90], and appropriate to the context, the participants, and the situation[91] (II.24, 129; VIII.31-42). We find these criteria being expressly favoured and recommended, especially in educational settings[92-94].

[89] What were habitually his final meditations? Of one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms (Ulysses)

[90] Wedgie[Tony Benn] then made what I found a very effective speech (Cabinet)¹³¹

[91] Sir Pitt congratulated his brother warmly upon the peaceful issue of the affair, making appropriate moral remarks upon the evils of duelling (Vanity Fair)

[92] Croce[…] attacks the idea of applying rhetorical or critical terms to the unique act of aesthetic expression.[Yet for] the student,[…] the ineffable is to be transformed into ef-ficient communication[…] an essay, or an examination answer. (Exploding English)¹³²

[93][We] use a unique management process model designed to improve the effectiveness of your writing projects[…] that is consistent with your objectives. (Night Owl)^www

[94] Pupils should consider the notion of appropriateness to situation, topic, purpose and language mode and the fact that inappropriate language use[may suggest being] pompous or inept or impertinent or rude. (National Curriculum English)^www

131. Unlike the standards of textuality, which apply by definition to all authentic texts, these criteria may not be met or only weakly, partly because they are rarely cultivated in education or the professions, and partly because they don’t serve the intention of insiders who disempower outsiders (cf. VII.5ff). In academic discourse, a strenuous style can bid for power, as in this ‘definition’ of a ‘dune’[95] in the discourse of geography (unidentified Internet website).

[95] A dune is defined as a body of coarse sand shaped by ambient wind conditions and the grain-by-grain deflation of sand.

The text is inefficient and inappropriate for learners, having (a) obscure specialised terms like ‘ambient’ meaning ‘in the environment’, and ‘deflation’ meaning ‘erosion’; (b) gratuitous specifications like ‘ambient conditions’ (where else could ‘winds shape dunes’, in a tea cosy?) and ‘grain-by-grain’ (how else would sand move, in clumps?); and (c) no relevance to ordinary knowledge, which would interpret ‘deflate’ as ‘remove the air from inside’ — nonsense here. Besides, ‘body’ is an oddly organic term for an object that easily changes or disintegrates; and ‘coarse sand’ is plain wrong — the sand in dunes by my home in Arabia was fine enough to enter around closed windows. In the same strenuous style, rainfall was a ‘precipitation event’; extreme dryness in a small area was ‘localized hyperaridity’; and sand grains that blow away again from their dune ‘became wind re-entrained’.

132. The ecologist alternative might be called critical rewriting, which converts discourse into a user-friendly counter-discourse, as shown in[95a]. Other stretches of the same text could be rewritten as shown for[96-98] into[96a-98a].

[95a] A dune is defined as a mound of sand shaped by the erosion of wind and the motion of sand grains.

[96] Mesoscale dune wavelength is strongly correlated with sand grain size.

[96a] On medium-sized dunes, the waves get longer when the sand grains are bigger.

[97] Transverse dunes are characterized by low length:width ratios and marked asymmet-

   ry, where windward slopes are much gentler than the slip faces associated with lee slopes.

[97a] Dunes formed at a right angle to the wind are very long but very narrow. They rise gently on the side facing the wind and drop sharply on the other side.

[98] Barchans are crescentic dunes confined to directionally-constant annual wind regimes;[…] where sand is sparse, barchans become the expressed dune morphology.

[98a] Barchans are crescent-shaped dunes appearing only where the wind blows in one direction all year and especially if sand is sparse.

The motive for this inefficient wind regime of academic hot air might be to compensate for the author’s confessed inability to explain the formation of dunes:

[99] How dunes first form and then replicate are issues that remain unclear.

[100] the formation mechanism of dune characteristics remains hypothetical

133. Evidently, this design of academic discourse trades off empowering the writer who expends less effort (high efficiency) with disempowering the readers who expend more (low efficiency). The text may be effective to get insider status, and may be judged appropriate even among audiences dazed by it. After all, the most trivial statements can be dressed up to sound like specialised knowledge:

[101] Life goes on.

[101a] Animate vivification perseverates in durational protractedness.

[102] As time goes by, people get older.

[102a] The serial accumulation of elapsing temporality is significantly correlated with a linear increment in the human aging process.

[103] The sky is blue.

[103a] The atmospheric encirculation of our planetary ambience imparts an ocular wave-length chromaticity between 450 and 500 nanometres.

Academic discourse is rarely so extreme, nor do academics expressly harbour such disempowering goals. Rather, we work in a system in which strenuous prose gets rewarded and published by academic journals who expect it too.

134. In this ‘introduction’, textual design will be a recurring theme, relating to ecologist strategies of discourse that promote free access to knowledge and society (0.7; I.76; II.111). These strategies can suggest guidance that is not prescriptive or proscriptive (‘you must say it this way and not that way’, or else!) but rather consultative (‘if you want that effect or emphasis, try saying it this way’) (II.24). If I have surmised that the design of any text can always be improved in the ‘hopeful utopia’ of unlimited space for ‘progress’ (0.13; I.39), then because writing away on this Introduction for more than five years has compelled me acknowledge it.

II.F.2. Discursive studies in discourse analysis

135. For discourse analysis,¹³³ presenting a fluent history is even more difficult than for text linguistics, not just because (as with text linguistics) much early work did not circulate widely or figured under diverse designations, such as ‘tagmemics’ and ‘ethnomethodology’; but also because discourse analysis is resolutely ‘multi-disciplinary’, and its diversity grows with its popularity.¹³⁴ In early stages (up into the 1960s), work was focussed outside Europe on non-European languages and cultures. Linguistics was exploited more as a practical and functional enterprise than a theoretical and formal one, which distinguished discourse analysis from text linguistics until the trends I have summarised favoured convergence.¹³⁵

136. To suggest the diversity of discourse analysis, I briefly compare four influential approaches, all more practice-driven and data-driven than theory-driven, though in differing respects. Fieldwork on lesser-known languages is allied with anthropology and ethnography, but also with linguistics through practical applications of Phonology and Morphology (II.58). Tagmemics¹³⁶ extends the repertory of ‘structural units’ to the Tagmeme, a unit described by the relations between a position (or ‘slot’) and the items that can occupy it in a discourse, whether these be linguistic, cultural, or behavioural (cf. II.65). This approach led to such cogent discoveries as paragraph markers in spoken discourse and story-line markers in folktales. In a stretch of text in a Waorani folktale from Eastern Ecuador told by Dayuma about discovering cassava as a food[104], a hunter finds many tapir tracks near a cassava patch and wonders why out loud. The cassava answers him and says how to remove, cultivate, and prepare it, which he does,  undaunted by a talking plant, and to the grief of the tapirs. The marker ‘ay’ appears seven times introducing the respective instructions in the process (p = person, par = participle,  fut = future, inf = inference, ast = assertive, idt = identifier).¹³⁷

 ‘Then the cassava spoke: “Take me. […] When you carry me to the house, peel off my skin, then cook the inside (stomach) of the cassava. Then eat it.’

Waorani uses Morpheme markers for ‘assertive’ to indicate an Independent Clause in the Declarative, and for ‘inference’ to indicate what is known only by hearsay, e.g., from a story told by the ancestors. Its Morphemes build words efficiently, e.g., ‘ay‘ [see‑much => then] and ‘kēwē’ [live‑always => cassava]. Such folktales fill the cognitive function of explaining or personifying familiar animals and plants, and the social function of binding the community, especially ones like the Waorani under pressure from multinational oil companies and Christian missionaries.

137. Ethnomethodology is an approach to the study of social activity, including discourse, mainly in well-known languages, and allied to sociology and philosophy (as phenomenology).¹³⁸ Though again more practical than theoretical, it explores the ‘theories of practice’ people apply to everyday life as common-sense reasoning, which highlights the ‘theoreticalness’ of human practices (cf. I.8); in return, less work has been done in elaborating abstract academic theories. A special tool is ‘breach studies’,¹³⁹ where ordinary practices are disrupted to see how people react and possibly do ‘repairs’. In one study,¹⁴⁰ the order of sentences was scrambled, turning[105] into[105a]. The test persons tried to restore the original order and were interviewed about their reasoning, giving responses like[106] and[107].

[105] The second man was unlike the others. He was broader and shorter. There was much hair on his body and his head-hair was sleek as if fat had been rubbed in it. The hair lay in a ball at the back of his neck. He had no hair on the front of his head at all so that the sweep of bone skin came right over his ears. Now for the first time, Lok saw the ears of the new men. They were tiny and screwed tightly into the sides of their heads. (Inheritors)

[105a] A. He had no hair on the front of his head at all so that the sweep of bone skin came right over his ears. B. There was much hair on his body and his head-hair was sleek as if fat had been rubbed in it. C. They were tiny and screwed tightly into the sides of their heads. D The man was unlike the others. E. Now for the first time, Lok saw the ears of the second new men. F. He was broader and shorter. G. The hair lay in a ball at the back of his neck.

[106] The new / it’s / you’d probably say that / you know / ah / his ears / and this is what the ears were like / but you wouldn’t make a des- / re- / people’d rarely make a description of the ears and then say ‘these are the ears’

[107] Well it[the opener] had to be D or E because they were the only sentences which had nothing to do with any of the others / well which others could follow from

Such data can shed light on our claims about the Cohesion and Coherence of texts by comparing them to the accounts provided by discourse participants. The dis-ruptions in[105a] range from the less subtle, e.g., the mysterious Pronouns ‘they’ (screwed hairs??) and ‘he’ (Lok? second man?) to the more subtle, e.g. ‘no hair at all’ (as if it were expected) before ‘much hair’ (why it would be expected).

138. The historically related approach of conversation analysis is allied to soci-ology but opposed to philosophy (as speech-act theory).¹⁴¹ It is even more thor-oughly practice-driven and data-driven and does not disrupt ordinary practices. Only authentic recorded discourse is accredited, and not, say, conversations in ‘imaginative written texts’. Applying a brisk functionalism, analysts stress that the interactional categories of utterances are not reliably signalled by their linguistic form.¹⁴² We must consider the position of an utterance in a conversation, especially as part of a adjacency pair with another utterance. In this interchange[108] (BNC data) (/ = short pause // = longer pause), mumsy Ruth evidently guesses from experience that son Paul (age 12) is going to be reluctant. She correctly hears Paul’s questions as evasions leading to a refusal, which the slacker eventually confirms, blaming the job for just not being ‘worth doing’. The subject is dropped and somebody else defuses the standoff by reading out some sports news, which triggers a discussion about whether to go to Wembley to see a match.

[108] Ruth: Paul I’d like you to do a job Paul: I’ve done a job / I’ve been round to Merle’s  Ruth:  no / I’d like you to do a proper job / I’d like you to take a sponge // and I’d like you to clean the paintwork on the stairs // please. Paul: what about touching up? // I’ll touch up Ruth: I’ve done the touching up  Paul: so why does it need? Ruth: you won’t help will you? // Paul: I don’t feel that it’s worth doing. Kevin: ‘Trophy holders Palace are now just three steps away from another trip to Wembley.’

If functionalism starts from the linguistic and moves toward the social, conversation analysis does the reverse. Here, the social setting indicates the relevance of Ruth’s cautious Declarative ‘I’d like you to’ (rather than the Imperative) being uttered four times whilst describing the ‘proper job’ in a sequence of steps and tacking on ‘please’ at the end after an unpromising pause. 

139. The discourse analysis of schooling¹⁴³ has been thoroughly functionalist too, allied with sociology and pedagogy. The data predictably show a tightly controlled organisation specific to the social setting of the classroom, where the teacher guards the initiative in soliciting specific information. The data below were observed in a ninth grade General Science class in a New York City high school (Tr = teacher, St = a student).¹⁴⁴ In[109], teacher and students talk in repetitive circles until the desired technical term is finally (if awkwardly) produced. In[110], the teacher first refuses permission to speak to a student who can’t see the blackboard, and then spitefully declares the intent to ‘flunk’ him anyway.

[109] Tr: What kind of a wave motion is sound? St: It’s — it’s a wave motion. Tr: Sound is a wave motion. What kind of wave motion? St: Sound wave. Tr: Sound is a wave. What kind of wave? St: Vibration Tr: What kind of vibration?[eventually:] St: Oh / um / uh / long / lonj-itud-inal wave. Tr: Eugene is correct[Others comment, whistle.]

[110] Jimmy: Hello there! Tr: No! If you coulda answered this question, I’da said yes.[…] Jimmy: I can’t see.[…] Tr: Tough. T-u-f-f.[…] It doesn’t make any difference where I put you. As of right now, you have a flunking mark. If you change your way of living, you’ll pass.

In an ecologist standpoint, two aspects complement the linguistic ones: the cognitive inefficiency in fishing for the exact answer which the teacher insists on and which the student merely parrots (with difficulty) out of a notebook[109]; and the social confrontation between the teacher and individual students[110]. The teacher must be unaware of the pungent irony in asking students to accommodate the middle-class values of the school system by ‘changing their way of living’ (cf. I.71) — and in personifying an ugly vindictive stereotype.

140. A dramatically different approach to discourse analysis began as analyse du discours¹⁴⁵ in France, allied to sociology and anthropology, and later branching out into philosophy, pedagogy, rhetoric, and political science on an international scale. This approach defines discourse in the broadest sense for all modes of human expression, including discourse in the usual sense along with manifestations of social institutions, the human body, clothing, commodities, and so on. Here, the theoretical decidedly dominates the practical in the special sense of imposing ingenious theoretical interpretations upon practical objects or actions, viz.:

[111] Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.[…] It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object;[…] one can easily see in an object the best messenger of a world above that of nature: at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter… (The New Citroën, 1957)¹⁴⁶

If our own mode of discourse analysis works from a centre of linguistic data outward into widening cognitive and social circles (II.102, 110), this mode seem to revolve around an absent centre. How the data (in this case the commodity) relate to the analysis is a bit mysterious, yet the discourse of the analysis itself radiates certitude (underlined items); in the same text I find ‘of course’, ‘obviously’, ‘it is certain’, ‘it is well known’, and always for what’s far from obvious. Still, the 1957 Citroën was a tangible practical object; in the more recent versions of this approach, the interpretation becomes hermetic and even the object seems to be absent, though the certitude remains (e.g., ‘we can clearly see’ in[112]).

[112] We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signi-fying links or archi-writing depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism (Felix Guattari, in le Figaro) ¹⁴⁷

In cognitive or social terms, this mode of discourse analysis is hard to situate. Any ecological potential would require becoming more accessible to the society whose discourses it purports to analyse.

141. Among the youngest and most vigorous approaches is critical discourse analysis,¹⁴⁸ devoted to ‘the analysis of linguistic and semiotic aspects of social processes and problems’ (Ruth Wodak).¹⁴⁹ The analysis engages with discourse to pursue such factors as cultural allegiances, ideologies, power relations, and political factions. In its own way, it uncovers the ‘theoreticalness’ of social and discursive practices as reflexes of underlying ideologies:

[113] I view social institutions as containing diverse ideological-discursive formations[which] ‘naturalise’ ideologies, i.e., win acceptance for them as non-ideological ‘com-mon sense’.[…] To ‘denaturalise’ them is the objective of a discourse analysis which adopts critical goals[and] shows how social structures determine properties of a dis-course and how discourse in turn determines social structures (Norman Fairclough)¹⁵⁰

Yet ‘critical thinking’ inherently reaches out for ‘solidarity’:

[114] True dialogue cannot exist unless it involves critical thinking, which discerns an individual solidarity between the world of humans, admitting of no dichotomy between them,[and] perceives reality as process and transformation[…] for the sake of continu-ing humanization.[…] (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed)¹⁵¹

[114] profoundly resonates with ecologism in its utopian hope for ‘humanization’.

142. For the future, a vital path for discourse analysis, and for text linguistics too, might be to integrate these several approaches, and to cultivate alliances with disciplines who share an interest in text and discourse: semiotics, ethnography, cognitive psychology, and computer science, but also ‘inter-disciplines’ like cognitive science, discourse processing, social psychology, rhetorical psychology, constructivism, and post-modernism. Despite their diversity, these could all gain from an ambience of transdisciplinarity:¹⁵² not just the sharing across borders that sustains ‘interdisciplinarity’, but a comprehensive and unifying design intended from the outset to serve multiple disciplines.

II.F.3. Discursive studies in corpus linguistics

143. Descriptive and discursive approaches to language study have in recent years been forcefully boosted by corpus linguistics,¹⁵³ a corpus being a large and strategic collection of authentic text and discourse (cf. I.78, II.19, 42, 78). Ideolog-ically, this field is a renewal of realism flowing back over the eroded alluvium of idealism in language study. Historically, the field is allied with philology and fieldwork linguistics in accrediting only authentic data which are attested by actual occurrence as linguistic, cognitive, and social facts (cf. II.29, 31, 97, 103).

144. Although corpora are not new, their use is revolutionised by computer technology providing ready access to knowledge about language from samples that would be laborious, if not impossible, to cull and access by hand. We now command unprecedented facility in such operations as collecting data, resolving their meanings and uses, and assessing their relative frequency or typicality. We are freed from overburdening our own intuition and overgeneralising our personal knowledge of the language by inventing our own data. We are thus securely repositioned in the language community from which academic or formalist approaches would isolate us as privileged embodiments of the ‘ideal speaker-hearer’ (II.82, 85, 87).

145. The time seems auspicious to assess definitions of ‘language’ that expressly link theory and practice. In the broadest definition, a ‘language’ is, or is in, the set of possible discourses it can serve to produce. As theory, the definition is incontestable, since no set of discourses can display the exhaustive or complete uses of a language; but as practice it poses intractable difficulties by invoking a partially virtual set that can never be fully accessed, whether by a linguist, a native speaker, or a whole community. In a narrower definition, a ‘language’ is, or is in, the set of actual discourses it has served to produce. This is less sound in theory and only marginally more tractable in practice, since many discourses are unrecorded and inaccessible.

146. In a still narrower definition a ‘language’ is, or is in, a very large subset of the discourses it has served to produce. This is again is less sound in theory but finally tractable in practice, allowing one accessible set of actual discourses to stand in for the partly inaccessible set of possible discourses. Now our principal problem lies in the optimistic and ultimately improvable assumption that our subset genuinely represents the whole set. In theory, the subset should offer a scale model of the whole set, smaller in size yet matching its proportions, units, and features; our own practices may presuppose such a theory, whilst running far ahead of it. Still, the same theory is apparently the basis for the ‘discursive competence’ of native speakers, even highly skilled ones; each one relies on the experienced subset of discourses they have produced or received — their ‘personal intertext’ (II.158). 

147. We thus trade the notion of the ‘infinite set’, which has had a muddled history in the theory and practice of modern linguistics (II.76), for the ‘represent-ative subset’, which is a practical entity currently seeking a theoretical account. We transform ‘intuition’ into an interpreter of authentic data rather than a creator of invented data (cf. II.87, 144).  Intuition continually supplies plausible ‘mini-theories’ about what is meant or intended and discards implausible ones, e.g. for:

[115] Pancakes to sell for grave flags (University Herald)

[116] Insecticide sprayed on judge’s oral ruling (Spokane Chronicle)

[117] Progress slow in beating death (Miami Herald)

[118] Congress votes for running trains over union workers (Courier and Journal)

Although such mini-theories are not strictly provable, their validity can be tested on the quality and quantity of the data at hand. Intuition is opportunistic, springing into action upon contact with data; and its reliability rises along with the quantity of the data. It therefore gains substantial power when assessing a large corpus of data and not just fudging isolated data like ‘sincerity may virtue the boy’ (cf. II.78).

148. For the present, the concept of the representative subset must remain intuitive. We can only guess at the relative importance and proportions of various text types produced in a language like English. No doubt any subset incurs some partly accidental conditions of data collection; and spoken data require the labours of recording and transcription, especially if we try to represent the Prosody of speaking (Ch. IV), or the Visuality of the situation (Ch. V).

149. Still, we can take heart at finding that each substantive increase in the size and variety of the corpus readjusts our qualitative as well as quantitative image of the language. Making a corpus, say, ten times larger does not merely multiply the data by ten, e.g., 10 occurrences in a corpus of a million words becoming 100 in a corpus of 10 million. Discourse data have a curiously ‘fractal’ aspect in that further contours of precision emerge as we raise the delicacy of our analysis through larger corpora , yielding finer details and more exact proportions. A large ‘tagged’ corpus like the BNC allows us to distinguish among styles, registers, media, genders, age groups, and social classes. For example, the item ‘illiberal’ never occurs there in spoken discourse, imaginative writing, or the discourse of women; it occurs only in the written discourse of men of fairly high status. It turns the slippage in the converse term ‘liberal’ to accuse ‘liberals’ of presumed inconsistencies:

[119] It is the Civil Liberties people who are being illiberal and intolerant by presenting evolution as fact when it is only a theory. (In Good Faith)¹⁵⁴

The item is readily associated with discourses of contested power, where ‘liberals’ are pelted with truly unbelievable hatespeak from ‘conservatives’ (VII.33).

150. Undeniably, describing the quality of data in large corpora presents daunting challenges to both theory and practice. We might propose a basic cline for data between rich, where the constraints of the linguistic context suffice to determine the meaning, e.g.[120], versus sparse, where they do not or only loosely e.g.[121] (cf. II.126). Historically, ‘dogsbody’ was a pejorative term for junior naval officers doing everything for the senior ones, and for their bilious food, like soaked sea biscuits. But BNC data show that neither meaning is current today, when the term designates a menial job or job-holder fielding a miscellany of trivial tasks.

[120] ‘But who wants to work in a solicitors?’ ‘Be fun!’ ‘Yeah but they treat you as a skivvy. Make coffee, make tea, general duties.’ ‘General dogsbody!’ (conversation)^BNC

[121] While ‘real police work’, crime, was almost non-existent, other dogsbody incidents could provide a measure of relief. (Mersey Beat)

Corpus data enable us to cross-contextualise from rich over to sparse, as when we use[120] to determine the meaning in the context for a constabulary[121] (e.g. hunting down the drunk and disorderly). We can apply the same strategy when the meaning is creatively or uniquely recontextualised, e.g., for a ‘bowl’ and a ‘computer’ that got used for all sorts of odd jobs[122-23].

[122] What about the kitchen bowl? Poor dogsbody, its hard enamel is chipped like a dalmatian. (Martian Sends)^BNC

[123] That  minicomputer  was  sent  naked  into the market with no software as the ultimate

  dogsbody product, a computing resource for any whim that needed one. (Unigram x)^BNC

For the ‘skivvy’ in[120], BNC data show it more focused on domestic chores:

[124] A skivvy was vital if the evening was to be a success. Someone had to go round with the coals, wash up, sweep, scrub, polish, fetch and carry. (First of Midnight)

[125] I’m just the skivvy round here! Cook the din-dins, put the cat out, clear up the junk on the great man’s desk (End of the Morning)

In authentic data, richness forms a dynamic trade-off with unpredictability, whereby meanings in context can be grasped after the fact though they cannot be predicted before the fact.

151. Rich authentic data can also provide reliable evidence for the evolving meanings of lexical items, such as ‘smash and grab’, originally a no-brainer robbery where you ‘smash’ the window, ‘grab’ the loot, and run like hell[126].

[126] Police have praised three people who detained a suspect following a smash and grab raid at an Essex jeweller’s shop. The thief[…] smashed a hole in the shop window using a hammer and grabbed about £3,000-worth of gold jewellery before making off on foot. (East Anglian Daily Times)

I ran across data covering police visitations with ‘sledgehammers’[127], snappy football tactics[128], or pigging out[129] (where nothing gets ‘smashed’).

[127] A major heroin dealing ring was believed smashed today after police made a series of early-morning raids in Liverpool.[…] 55 officers, some carrying sledgehammers, launched their ‘smash and grab’ raids on homes in the Everton and Kirkdale areas. (Liverpool Daily Post)

[128] At the County Ground, it was daylight robbery; a smash and grab raid by Charlton. They had 3 attacks and scored 2 goals. The alarms in the Swindon defence failed to ring. (television news)^BNC

[129] At British Petroleum’s annual meeting last year, there were protests about a ‘smash and grab’ raid by one group who scoffed too many sandwiches. (Daily Telegraph)

I also found data tracking the more mechanized trend of the ‘ram raid’, where a car or a lorry is driven through a shop window[130]. Among the more imaginative implements in the data were a ‘mechanical digger’ operated by a ‘builder’[131]; and an earthy ‘wheelbarrow’ propelled by a putative gardener[132] (who else collects ‘green wellies’?). So far, the meaning seems to have evolved just a little, e.g., in one  wryly literal use[133] and in one football victory[134].

[130] Ram raiders smashed a stolen BMW car through the window of an exclusive boutique, stealing thousands of pounds worth of clothes. (Liverpool Daily Post)

[131] A builder appeared before Chelmsford magistrates yesterday following investiga-tions into an attempt to ram raid a cash dispenser with a mechanical digger. (East Anglian Daily Times)

[132] A thief staged a ram raid on a shop with a wheelbarrow. He loaded the barrow with paving stones before running straight through a plate glass window,[and] escaped with gardening equipment worth £300 and three pairs of green wellies. (Northern Echo)

[133] Police are investigating a ram raid after a farmer reported a Suffolk ram had been stolen from his field at Grove Farm, Bradbury. (Northern Echo)

[134] Ramraid: Swindon and Derby in a six-goal sizzler.[…] The Live match Swindon against Derby County[…] brought 6 goals and the man of the match award for Glenn Hoddle. (television news)^BNC

[134] puns on the nickname of the ‘Rams’ for the ‘raided’ Derby team.¹⁵⁵

152. Authentic data also provide good evidence for innovative items as they emerge. A new class of fiction has ostensibly debuted as ‘aga-sagas’ and displaced ‘bonkbusters’[135] (‘blockbusters’ with copious ‘bonking’). A London bookseller has provided the recipe[136]; perhaps readers who yearn in vain for ‘rural bliss’ relish seeing it plunged into ‘crisis’.

[135] The talk at this week’s London International Book Fair at Olympia was of ‘Aga-sagas’, so-called because they feature the type of characters whose homes would be incomplete without an Aga.[…] Aga-sagas have taken over from the steamy sex bonkbusters of the Eighties. (Scotsman)

[136] the writer[is] advised to create a family living in rural bliss with a gaggle of children then land them in a crisis, preferably involving the central character in an affair with an older/younger man/woman. (same)

According to data in the BNC and on the Internet (but in none of my dictionaries), an ‘aga’ is a massive heat storage cooker, fuelled by oil, gas, coal, or wood, and a prestigious symbol of ‘rural bliss’, effusively lauded by its devotees, viz.:

[137] I can’t imagine life without one[…] The whole appeal of the Aga is to do with lifestyle and[…] it has become the focal point of the kitchen. (Belinda Marshall)^www

153. Surely the most significant new discoveries in authentic data are the pervasive regularities that are more specific than the language yet more general than the text. Colligations are regular combinations of grammatical selections, whereas Collocations are regular combinations of lexical selections.¹⁵⁶ Both can reveal the vitality of Attitudes: Ameliorative for good or approved, and Pejorative for bad or disapproved (cf. VI.34ff). The Colligation of Passive with the Auxiliary ‘get’ is consistently for bad things getting done to people, collocating in my data with ‘humiliated, corrupted, fired, kicked, choked, drowned, murdered’ and so on. Disapproval also goes with the Colligation Demonstrative + Noun + ‘of’ + Posses-sive Pronoun[138-39], which can be reinforced with a suitable Modifier[140-41].

[138] ‘That brother of mine’, she said, ‘is an asshole.’ (The Edge)

[139] When Faye had one of those turns of hers, awful things happen. (Good Terrorist)

[140] ‘Where did you go?’ ‘To that vile city of yours! It's filthy!’ (Furniture)

[141] Forgive my not rising, but I dare not move out of this chair until this wretched hair of mine is dry. (Hidden Flame)

But with the Indefinite Article, approval wins out:

[142] My own mother used to make steak-and-kidney pudding. It was a great favourite of ours too, especially mine. (Maggie)

[143] A friend of mine, a dear friend, ran from one end of the back line to the other and had his picture twice on the same photograph (Bury the Dead)

154. For Collocations, I’ll look at the lexical expression ‘overcome’. In my British and American Writers Corpus (BAWC), it usually means ‘suffer adverse effects of an overly intense emotion’, a common occurrence in English novels. The major Collocates ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling(s)’ appeared either to the right as the Subject of an Active Verb[144] or else to the left as Agent of Passive Verb[145].

[144] her emotion overcame her speech, and she retired to her apartment, to think, if in the present state of her mind to think was possible. (Udolpho)

[145] Young Decoud felt overcome by a feeling of impatient confusion. (Nostromo)

Here again, Attitudes  emerged: just a few Ameliorative Collocates  like ‘admiration, delight, happiness’, against a host of Pejoratives like ‘anguish, despair, gloom, grief, misery, nausea, pain, repugnance, shame, sorrow, terror’. Other groups of Collocations in BAWC data included exhaustion, e.g., ‘fatigue, weariness, drowsi-ness, sleep, slumber’; and booze, e.g., ‘wine, porter, liquor, bottle, intoxication’.

155.  In a historical perspective, the Emotions predominating for ‘overcome’ in the BAWC, featuring imaginative writing from the mid-18^th to the early 20^th centuries, yielded in BNC data from the 1980s and 1990s to more mechanical causalities like noxious fumes[146], physical forces[147], and sports events[148].

[146] A disabled woman was rushed to hospital after she was overcome by gas fumes at her council house. (Northern Echo)

[147] The centrifugal force at the edge of the nebula overcame the gravitational force exerted by the mass, and a ring of material broke away. (Fate of the Dinosaurs)¹⁵⁷

[148] Milton United overcame their Reading Senior League opponents at Fairmile in the Berks and Bucks Intermediate Cup (Radio Oxford)^BNC

156. Widening our scope to social factors, we might surmise that the cultures among readers of the older imaginative writing mistrusted strong Emotions, partic-ularly Pejorative ones, which ‘overcome’ people and undermine their self-control or their power to act or speak. Within the Narrative, the expression could carry the communicative function of delaying or deflecting the sequence of actions whilst inviting readers to be vicariously ‘overcome’ (like Miss Morland in Northanger Abbey reading Mrs Radcliffe’s Udolpho). BNC data indicate that this function has receded in imaginative writing today; even in the fervid world of Mills and Boon I found no woman ‘overcome by emotion’ (cf. III.71).

157. The qualities of authentic data as briefly reviewed lead me to conclude that the relation between language and discourse is not the one represented in conven-tional linguistics. The hoary injunction to ‘study language by itself’ and disregard ‘speech’ oddly implied that language is an extremely ordered system which somehow produces extreme disorder — a ‘heterogeneous mass of accessory and accidental facts’ (II.40). Corpus data, in contrast, show language to be a system of virtual order guiding the system of actual order in discourse, not heterogeneous but variegated. Aside from scripted situations, e.g., reciting a memorised lesson, the order of discourse is always in the process of being constituted, and its precision is sustained by trading off richness to handle unpredictability (I.36; II.21; VI.3).

158. A corpus is an intermediary entity between language and discourse. It might termed an intertext ,¹⁵⁸ a large set of texts which manifest similar strategies of selection and combination but which were mostly not intended to be contributions to the same discourse (II.123). Daunting questions arise that should be tackled in earnest: how far any one text presupposes other texts that set up genres or registers, introduce terms, determine standards of currency, and so on; how each discourse participant builds up a ‘personal intertext’ , the large set of texts which he or she has produced and received and which provides the foundation of his or her ‘discursive competence’  (II.146); and why communication is rarely blocked by the necessary uniqueness of each personal intertext, which must be an adjustable and expandable system with fuzzy boundaries.

159. A large corpus could in turn be called an interpersonal intertext  uniting samples from many personal intertexts, each of which it far exceeds in variety as well as size. When you access the corpus you are implicitly accessing the pooled competence of the community of contributors, and may verify, adjust, or revise your competence. The corpus can thus attenuate the basic partiality of any one speaker’s knowledge of the language. For me at least, corpus work is always a learning experience, e.g., for words in the BNC like ‘skive’ for skipping lessons in schools[149], or work at a workplace[150]; and ‘naff’ for being hopelessly dull or out of fashion[151-52].¹⁵⁹

[149] I just couldn’t face yet another day of taunts, kicks and bag-snatching so I skived off school. (The Chocolate Teapot) ¹⁶⁰

[150] Most of us do a full week’s work; it’s only the skivers that don’t. (TV news)^BNC

[151] There are hundreds of ineffectual, half-hearted, derivative, dull, inexperienced, outdated and naff groups out there (New Musical Express)

[152] the show’s triumph has been its appeal not just to the unaddressed, naff masses, but also to a fashionable audience of discerning clubbers (Sky)

In my work as a language teacher, corpus data hold great potential for advising my students. When one of them in Arabia wrote[153], I objected to the Verb, only to find data proving me wrong like[154].

[153] The woman follow the oxen to broadcast seeds

[154] The second method is to broadcast the seeds together with not more than 1 kg. to the acre of rape and turnips in late June or early July. (Smallholding)

I don’t mind such episodes because I define both a ‘linguist’ and a ‘language teacher’ not as the expert who knows all the facts of language and usage, but as a competent language user who knows how to find and interpret facts.

160. Though unwieldy and at times distasteful, the Internet is a mine for colourful expressions like ‘shmatte’ for old clothes[155] and ‘mungy’ for muggy, dark and damp[156], which I also found with ‘soil’, ‘water’, ‘smell’, and ‘photo’.

[155] Remember when a stray pen streak on a shirt was reason enough to hand it over to Goodwill? Today, thick ink tags can mark a formerly doomed shmatte as the latest in cool: graffiti glam. (Phoenix.com)^www

[156] During the winter it's pretty dry. But with the spring thaw and subsequent showers, everything takes on a mungy, mildewed smell. (Future Shoes)^www 

So far, participation in the discourses of the Internet is your own decision in most countries, but not, say in the United Arab Emirates, where ‘offensive’ websites are blocked by the sole authorised provider, including all ‘adult education’ pro-grammes — by some silly confusion with ‘adult movies’, I suppose.

161. Appropriate software extends the corpus into an interpersonal hypertext . Whereas a hypertext¹⁶¹  is an intertext whose component texts have explicit links, a corpus has implicit links created on the spot by the query specifications. However, specific links can be prepared by ‘tagging’ the data, as when the BNC is allows searches by region, age, gender (of producer or target audience), social class and modality.¹⁶² Of course, interpreting the findings can be problematic, as when in written discourse, men used Verbs of violent Action decidedly more often than women did, e.g. ‘smashed’ (338 to 124), ‘grabbed’ (544 to 342), ‘punched’ (149 to 43), ‘kicked’ (491 to 291), and ‘killed’ (2559 to 1111). My most puzzling finding so far was the proportion of Female to Male Pronouns at 54.72% in the BNC and at 55.77% in the BAWC, two utterly different corpora. (What’s more, it’s 55.33% in the collected comedies of Shakespeare.)

162. Such findings resemble small islands formed by the tips of immense submarine mountain ranges, and their exploration leads into deep waters. Just to handle the quantities of data we already have will consume the labours of large research teams for a long time to come. I hardly ever launch my concordance programs without running across some unexpected and perplexing regularity, such as the uniformly Pejorative Attitude  associated with the Passive colligation of Pronoun + be + ‘to be’ + Past Participle. In BNC data, the sinister inconveniences to which ‘I am’ (or ‘you are’, ‘he/she is’ etc.) ‘to be’ subjected include ‘hounded, demoted, despised, cut out, punished unfairly, investigated, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, incarcerated, imprisoned for life, chained hand and foot, hanged’. In BAWC data, I am to be ‘abandoned, humbled, persecuted, trampled upon, devoured, condemned’, and  ‘hanged’ all over again — and, for bad measure, ‘boiled alive’, ‘burned at the stake’, and ‘buried at sea’. Ouch.

II.G. Deconstructivist studies of language

163. By my account, prescriptivism is a pre-modernist project; descriptivism is a modernist project; generativism is a mixed pre-modernist and modernist project (II.4, 25, 75); and discursivism reflects the historicity of the discourses it engages. Now we might weigh the prospects when studies of language move toward post-modernism ,¹⁶³ sometimes bearing this programmatic label. Whereas the shift from pre-modernist to modernist  consolidated our theory to guide new practices in Phonology and Morphology , and accredited the study of language as a science, the shift from modernist to post-modernist has dispersed both theory and practice, and on occasion opposed science as an imposition of power and exclusion.

164. Both shifts sought a resolute break with the past, but differed sharply in their motivations. The first shift aimed to develop new methods and assemble data to dispel the prescriptive orientation. The second shift is unfocused and elusive. The methods and data of post-modernism seem hardly prescriptive or descriptive; and its discursive strategies are highly eccentric, or, more precisely, ‘ex-centric’, moving away from a centre no longer in evidence (cf. II.140). The term itself seems to announce some defiance of modernism, aspiring to some theory for transcending and moving beyond it, with a touch of paradox, like trying to look back on ourselves from some future that would no longer be ‘modern’. So far, I see little consensus about how such a theory should be put into practice. Indeed, the notion of ‘consensus’ comes under spirited attack as a modernist construct deployed for the exclusion of alternative concepts and cultures.¹⁶⁴

165. Ideologically , I see some indicators (noted below) of a radical idealism  wherein the ideal not merely dominates but ultimately erases the real, yet makes no claims to be valid or true. Historically, it might be associated with mystical modes of textual commentary, such as the Rabbinical hermeneutics, the Kabala, and the criticism of the Romantic era; but some authorities may not relish the association.¹⁶⁵

166. Perhaps one salient point might be seen in

[157] the effacement of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern.[… ] Postmodernism[is] a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features. (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism)¹⁶⁶

Whilst modernism underwent specialization and proliferated theories (I.23), the ‘high culture’  prospered which post-modernism displaces from the centre.

167. I also see traces of a radical realism  responding to diversity by welcoming multiculturalism¹⁶⁷ and multilingualism .¹⁶⁸ These are now the de facto states of most societies in operational practice — endorsed by official theories of equality but undermined by operational theories of discrimination (cf. I.24). They derive special significance as products of post-colonialism ,¹⁶⁹ following the colonial occupation, first by Europe and later by the United States, of most of the world’s regions and the ensuing patterns of exploitation, displacement, and migration.

168. Post-structuralism ,¹⁷⁰ like post-modernism, signals a programmatic break with the past, but a more specific one turning against the ‘structuralism’  adapted from descriptive linguistics to describe discourse, culture, or art with methods mostly inspired by phonology and morphology (II.44). Its own programme is ambivalent in retaining some pungent discursive methods of structuralism whilst supplanting the formalist claims to objectivity, truth, and rigour, with subjectivity, scepticism, and free play (French ‘jouissance’); and some prominent practitioners have been active in both approaches.¹⁷¹ The discourse of structuralism aspires to be scientific, convergent, and centripetal, invoking a static, deterministic conception of meaning; the discourse of post-structuralism aspires to be innovative, divergent, and centrifugal, invoking a dynamic self-interrogating conception of meaning. A project of the latter discourse could be

[158] to write a history of discursive objects[which] deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.[…] In analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice;[we] no longer treat discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. (Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge) ¹⁷²

Such a project navigates exactly on the reverse side from linguistic structuralism, which describes language by stable systems of units (or ‘signifiers’) with distinc-tive features (or ‘signifieds’), and discounts discursive practice. A reversal subverts the dichotomies between language and discourse (e.g. ‘langue’ and ‘parole’) and between timeless and historical (e.g. ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’) (II.39f), whilst repositioning language as a system for the ‘formation’ of discursive ‘objects’.

169. However, post-modernism and post structuralism may produce a singularly strenuous discourse. The elusive and multiplex qualities they attribute to language are acted out with strategies that could exclude many readers, e.g.[159-60].

[159] Our complex, metastatic, viral systems, condemned[…] to eccentricity and indefinite fractal scissiparity, can no longer come to an end. Condemned to an intense metabolism, to an intense internal metastatis, they become exhausted within them-selves and no longer have any destination. (Jean Baudrillard)¹⁷³

[160] The poet/philosopher’s fascination with the Abrahamic adventure is symptomatic of a desire to write a philosophical commentary that makes a soaring exit from the generality of the word. Commentary, grounded in speculative thought, sets off to travel beyond itself, towards the outside of thought, which, paradoxically, coincides with the deepest, unfathomable interiority of Abraham’s untellable secret. (Dorota Glowacka)¹⁷⁴

Ironically, the post-modern ‘effacement’ of the border between ‘high culture’ and ‘mass culture’[157] foreshadows here a new and more hermetic border sealing off an even higher culture for an elite circle of writers and readers.

170. Deconstruction¹⁷⁵ is a major post-modern and post-structuralist arena of theory and practice coming from a critique of philosophy and linguistics, and loosely grouped around some radical ideas. If language is a system constituted entirely by the differences among its units, as some early linguists asserted (II.44), then any one unit is determined by referring to another, which is in turn referred to what it differs from, and so on without end. Applied to meaning, ‘difference’ coincides with ‘deferral’ for the emblematic pun in the French term différance.

[161] The signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself.[…] Every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences. (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy)¹⁷⁶

But to call language a pure system of differences is to mistake it for a system of numbers; and numbers by themselves lack meanings comparable to words. At most, such a system might be compared to the system of Phonemes of Phonology with their ‘distinctive features’ (II.44), though even these need not always differ from each other in the articulated stream of speech, and they certainly don’t ‘defer’.

171. Deconstruction also propounded a vastly expanded and more ontological than strictly linguistic conception of ‘writing’ (French ‘écriture’) as the concern of a new ‘science of writing’ called grammatology, in which ‘linguistics-phonology would be only a dependent and circumscribed area’.¹⁷⁷ This new science might even derive ‘science’ itself from discursive practice by

[162] look[ing] for its object at the roots of scientificity.[…] Writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science and possibly its object — but[…] the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity.[…] The concept of writing should define the field of a science.[…] A science of the possibility of science? (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology)¹⁷⁷

A key step would be to ‘deconstruct’ the ‘metaphysical presupposition’ of modern linguistics that speech is primary and writing is merely derivative’.¹⁷⁸ But I hold this ‘presupposition’ to be effectively moot, an artefact of successes in Phonology and Phonetics, whereas written language has tacitly dominated the rest of  linguistics, especially ‘generative’ Syntax. Besides, published discourses of deconstruction about ‘grammatology’, as well as ‘différance’, ‘dissemination’, and so on, seem rather to imply the impossibility of established science, which is after all a mainstay of the trendily disparaged ‘Western metaphysics’.¹⁷⁹

172. The most forceful impact stems from the radical ideas of deconstruction in discursive practices. To ‘deconstruct’ a discourse can be to produce a counter-discourse that engages with its texture and probes how its implicit assumptions or presuppositions contradict or subvert its explicit exposition, argument, or narrative — not just because the speaker or writer was inconsistent, deceptive, or misled, but because discourse at large asserts a dialectical potential that subverts closure. Yet this process is hard to grasp, and deconstruction must be defended against being misunderstood or misrepresented:

[163] Deconstruction is not synonymous with ‘destruction’.[…] The deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading[…] analyses the specificity of a text’s critical difference from itself. (Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference) ¹⁸⁰

173. Along related lines, radical deconstruction has assailed the conception of ‘literal meaning’ by asserting that ‘all language is figural’: ‘the only literal statement that says what it means to say is the assertion that there can be no literal statements’.¹⁸¹ Rephrased in my terms, the inescapably theoretical status of meaning, noted in I.36 and II.63, was here propelled into an absolute and exitless quandary, like a paradoxical, self-defeating thought-experiment.

174. In its more radical ideas, deconstruction is difficult to situate in respect to the other approaches reviewed in this chapter. Formalism in linguistics was attacked by ‘grammatology’, much as the structuralist projects were repudiated by post-structuralism. But I see slim chances for functionalism after a ‘text’ was defined as a ‘generative, open-ended non-referential grammatical system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the grammatical code’.¹⁸¹ Rhetoric may profit from the interest in figural meaning,¹⁸² though the concept has been so expanded as to seem vacuous.

175. The major if unexpected institutional home of deconstruction has been literary criticism. I see a rich potential in deconstructive practices for ‘literary alternativity’: the freedom of literature to produce alternative worlds and discursive modes that refine our sensitivity toward our ordinary world and discourse. Deconstructors prefer evasive and ambiguous literary texts, e.g., the ethereal poetry of Shelley[164-65] and the self-adumbrating narratives of Rousseau[166].

[164] Figures ever new rise on the bubble, paint them how you may;

We have but thrown, as those before us threw,

Our shadows on it as it past away. (Triumph of Life)

[165] The word ‘parasite’ does not appear in the Triumph of Life. That poem, however, is structured throughout around the parasitical relationship[…] The word ‘parasite’, for Shelley, names the bridge, wall, or connecting membrane which at once makes this apocalyptic union possible, abolishing difference, and at the same time always remains as a barrier forbidding it^. (J. Hillis Miller, ‘The critic as host’) ¹⁸³

[166] [Rousseau’s] entire effort has been directed toward freeing himself, by reflection, from the burden of his own empirical contingency.[…] He has indeed transcended his actual self into a language, a work that now exists outside himself.[But when] he starts to reflect upon the work that he has created, he realizes that it only records his failure really to transcend his own selfhood. (Paul De Man, Romanticism)¹⁸⁴

Literature also fits a deconstructive definition of ‘language’ as a ‘mosaic or tapestry whereby each discourse unravels and reweaves itself out of other discourses’.¹⁸⁵

176. On the side of realism, deconstruction has aided a different ‘post-modern’ critique of discursive practices to analyse and resist the social and discursive domination and exclusion submerged in regressive ideologies of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’. The foremost arena is unmistakably feminism,¹⁸⁶ looking to  ‘recon-struct a more just vision of society’[167] and a ‘non-hierarchical theory’[168].

[167] The massive task ahead[is] to deconstruct the male-dominated media world, and reconstruct a new and more just vision of society where women and men are equal partners,[by] promoting the use of inclusive language and endeavouring to unmask the patriarchal cultural patterns that maintain male bias. (Action)^BNC

[168] Feminism has been a catalyst for analytical practice. Feminists in the 60s and 70s deconstructed our culture to find their way and called for a non-hierarchical theory. This is emerging in the 90s with[…] Reconstructive Post-Modernism;[…] the agenda for the 90s is rooted in daily life, and Postmodernism is in harmony.[…] Deconstruc-tivism has led to the recognition of what is valuable. (Women’s Art)¹⁸⁷

Highly consequential are these dual moves of ‘deconstruction’ and ‘reconstruction’, which are vital to the ‘critical’ agenda in ecologism too (I.33). The deconstructive move seeks out the deeper texture of a discourse within the economy of values, intentions, and presuppositions whereby it seeks to position itself to its audience as normal, natural, and authoritative. The tensions and contradictions emerge that arise not merely from an author’s limits and biases, but also from the impulse to impose closure upon the openness of language and the intertextuality of discourse. The reconstructive move exploits those two factors to generate a counter-discourse.

177.  Perhaps the term reconstructivism would fit an approach emphasising the dynamic diversity and multiplicity of language and discourse, and completing its deconstruction with ‘critical rewriting’ (cf. VIII.43ff), thus dismissing the static unity and uniformity postulated in the linguistics of structuralism and the philosophy of formal logic and positivism. Despite the differences in strategies, this emphasis is shared with discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, where it spontaneously emanates from contact with authentic data; and the prospects for productive interaction seem auspicious today.

178. Reconstructivism can lend renewed force to the ecologist principle that language is always in the process of being constituted in discourse (I.36; II.21, 157) by complementing the specific closure described for rich data with the general openness that underwrites the multiple recontextualisation for generating richness. Moreover, we may become more sensitive toward the systematic limits upon closure, not merely in literary and poetic discourse, but, more surprisingly, also for the discourses of politics, bureaucracy, advertising, philosophy, and even science, including linguistics. And here the utopian space for ‘progress’ towards inclusion and equality remains unforeclosed and indeed guaranteed by the essential nature of language and discourse (I.38).

   179. We might also tap post-modernism for our social and cultural agenda of deploying language and discourse to broaden the access to human knowledge and experience (0.7; I.76; II.111, 134). Our agenda too hails the ongoing multilingual and multicultural evolution of society; and respects the value of ‘mass or popular culture’, and of the many modes of expression which have been repressed or marginalised by the predominantly monolingual and monocultural discourses of modernism. The discourses of the ‘other’, such as minorities, immigrants, gays or lesbians, mental patients, the disabled, the jobless, and the homeless, long denied a serious voice of their own, are now confirmed as valid narratives and testimonies of our times, meriting serious engagement in both theory and practice.¹⁸⁸

Click here to go to Chapter II, Part 4