Discourse across Languages and Cultures (Studies in Language Companion)

373 Pages·2000·1.55 MB·English

by  Carol Lynn Moder

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DiscourseAcrossLanguagesandCultures
StudiesinLanguageCompanionSeries(SLCS)
TheSLCSserieshasbeenestablishedasacompanionseriestoStudiesinLanguage,
InternationalJournal,sponsoredbytheFoundation“FoundationsofLanguage”.
SeriesEditors
WernerAbraham MichaelNoonan
UniversityofVienna UniversityofWisconsin,Milwaukee
EditorialBoard
JoanBybee ChristianLehmann
UniversityofNewMexico UniversityofErfurt
UlrikeClaudi RobertLongacre
UniversityofCologne UniversityofTexas,Arlington
BernardComrie BrianMacWhinney
MaxPlanckInstitute Carnegie-MellonUniversity
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WilliamCroft UniversityofCalifornia,SantaBarbara
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ÖstenDahl UniversityofWisconsin,Milwaukee
UniversityofStockholm
MasayoshiShibatani
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UniversityofCologne
RussellTomlin
EkkehardKönig UniversityofOregon
FreeUniversityofBerlin
Volume68
DiscourseAcrossLanguagesandCultures
EditedbyCarolLynnModerandAidaMartinovic-Zic
Discourse Across Languages and
Cultures
Editedby
Carol Lynn Moder
OklahomaStateUniversity
Aida Martinovic-Zic
MontgomeryCollege
JohnBenjaminsPublishingCompany
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p. cm.(StudiesinLanguageCompanionSeries,issn0165–7763;v.
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1.Discourseanalysis.2.Interculturalcommunication.I.Moder,
CarolLynn.II.Martinovic-Zic,Aida.III.Series.
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Contents
1. Discourse across cultures, across disciplines 1
Carol Lynn Moder
2. Holistic textlinguistics 13
Robert E. Longacre
3. Discourse effects of polysynthesis 37
Wallace Chafe
4. Prosodic schemas 53
Rebecca L. Damron
5. Rhetorical relations in dialogue 75
Maite Taboada
6. Interlanguage pragmatics 99
Euen Hyuk (Sarah) Jung
7. Discourse-marker use in native and non-native English speakers 117
Hikyoung Lee
8. Discourse markers across languages 129
Suzanne Fleischman and Marina Yaguello
9. Intertextuality across communities of practice 149
Ron Scollon
10. Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology 177
Patricia Mayes
11. How people move 195
Dan I. Slobin
12. Why manner matters 211
Jelena Jovanovic and Aida Martinovic-Zic
13. Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives 227
Mary Theresa Seig
14. Rhetorical influences 251
William G. Eggington
15. Contrastive discourse analysis 267
Joanne Neff, Emma Dafouz, Mercedes Díez, Rosa Prieto,
and Craig Chaudron
vi Contents
16. Academic biliteracy and the mother tongue 285
Elizabeth Arcay Hands and Ligia Cossé
17. T exts as image schemas 301
Tânia Gastão Saliés
18. Genre and modality in developing discourse abilities 329
Ruth A. Berman
Index of subjects 357
Index of languages 362
Index of names 363
CHAPTER 1
Discourse across cultures, across disciplines
An overview
Carol Lynn Moder
Oklahoma State University
My purpose in this chapter is to frame the themes of this book and to highlight the
paradigms and perspectives represented in the work of the contributors and the
ways in which they can be productively brought into dialogue.
I will begin by exploring the concept of culture which is central to the main
theme of this volume: the investigation of discourse across languages and cultures.
Although there are myriad definitions and approaches to culture we could espouse
in order to frame the book, I would like for the moment to cite the one put forth in a
somewhat controversial speech which the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss ad-
dressed to UNESCO in 1971:
. . . one could say that cultures are like trains moving each on its own track, at its
own speed, and in its own direction. The trains rolling alongside ours are perma-
nently present for us; through the windows of our compartments, we can observe
at our leisure the various kinds of car, the faces and gestures of the passengers. But
if, on an oblique or a parallel track, a train passes in the other direction, we perceive
only a vague, fleeting, barely identifiable image, usually just a momentary blur in
our visual field, supplying no information about the event itself and merely irritat-
ing us because it interrupts our placid contemplation of the landscape which serves
as the backdrop to our daydreaming.
Every member of a culture is as tightly bound up with it as this ideal traveler is
with his own train. From birth and, as I have said, probably even before, the things
and beings in our environment establish in each one of us an array of complex ref-
erences forming a system — conduct, motivations, implicit judgments, which edu-
cation then confirms by means of its reflexive view of the historical development of
our civilization. We literally move along with this reference system, and the cultural
systems established outside it are perceptible to us only through the distortions im-
printed upon them by our own system. Indeed, it may even make us incapable of
seeing those other systems. (Lévi-Strauss 1985: 10–11)
Lévi-Strauss’s metaphor pictures culture as a closed reference system which af-
fects our ability to perceive the ideas and cultures of others. He portrays the view
of anthropology to be that “direct knowledge of the societies most different from
ours permits an appreciation of the reasons for existence that they have provided
2 Carol Lynn Moder
for themselves” (1985: 10). Clifford Geertz (1986) in an essay called “The Uses of
Diversity” suggests that Lévi-Strauss’s image of culture as a closed train compart-
ment in which the strange is outside, is not adequately descriptive of a modern soci-
ety in which we are no longer studying exotic unknown cultures. Geertz points out
that the anthropologist no longer has as a primary role the description of far away
places where men think themselves descended from wallabies but instead seeks to
portray cultures which are “scrambled together in ill-defined expanses, social spaces
whose edges are unfixed, irregular and difficult to locate.” (p. 121) and where as he
puts it “the strangenesses . . . are growing more oblique and more shaded, less easily
set off as wild anomalies” (p. 120). Here we have a picture of culture not as a series of
compartments on a train or a snapshot of an exotic view but rather as a panorama
or a collage. In such a situation Geertz suggests that “locating these strangenesses
and describing their shapes may be in some ways more difficult; but it is hardly less
necessary (p. 120) and that “it is in . . . strengthening the power of our imagination
to grasp what is in front of us, that the uses of diversity and of the study of diversity
lie” (p. 123).
Another metaphor for culture which is more in keeping with Geertz’s view of
modern cultures is one used by Dan Sperber in his book, Explaining Culture.
. . . an idea, born in the brain of one individual, may have, in the brains of other
individuals, descendants that resemble it. Ideas can be transmitted, and by being
transmitted from one person to another, they may even propagate. Some ideas
— religious beliefs, cooking recipes, or scientific hypotheses, for instance- prop-
agate so effectively that, in different versions, they may end up durably invading
whole populations. Culture is made up, first and foremost, of such contagious
ideas. (Sperber 1996: 1)
Sperber’s metaphor of ideas as contagion suggests two factors in the spread of ideas
within a culture: first, the strength of the ideas themselves as reflected in their ability
to propagate and second, the degree of resistance to the ideas offered by the popu-
lation. He goes on to define what we call cultural as “those representations that are
widely and durably distributed in a social group” and to suggest that such a defin-
ition indicates that “there is no boundary, no threshold, between cultural represen-
tations and individual ones” (1996: 49)
If we pause a moment to blend Sperber’s infection metaphor with the domain of our
own discipline, it suggests some interesting possible views of the way that adherents
to particular disciplinary approaches might be gained. For example: Is it possible to
infect a formalist with functionalist ideas if functionalist perspectives have grown,
like bacteria, to epidemic proportions? Can a minimalist syntactician be induced
to consider naturally occurring, discourse level data, if you catch her in a weakened
state after an exhausting analysis of bare X-bar theory and the phrasal uniformity
condition for chain links? The cross-paradigm possibilities are intriguing.
Sperber’s view of culture emphasizes the ideas of a culture and their contagious
qualities. He proposes that the role of anthropology, and social science in general, is
to describe the distribution of ideas in a culture and to explain why some represen-
Discourse across cultures, across disciplines 3
tations are more successful in a given population than others — to develop what he
calls an “epidemiology of representations.” He asserts that such an approach requires
an investigation of individual mental representations as well as the mechanisms by
which these representations are transmitted from one individual to another.
Why then do we as linguists and applied linguists engage in the study of dis-
course “across cultures”? Do we examine the discourse of another culture in order
to glean a more direct knowledge and understanding of that culture’s framework
of knowledge in the same way that Lévi-Strauss’s passenger peers into passing train
cars and observes the gestures and faces of others? Do we, like Geertz, use language
comparisons between cultures to help us to illuminate the diverse language phe-
nomena all around us? Or do we, as Sperber suggests, seek to describe the distribu-
tion of discourse phenomena across cultures and to explain them based on a study
of individual representations and societal conventions for transmitting them?
I would like to suggest that over the last thirty years we have moved thorough all of
these approaches to discourse across cultures. Furthermore, at least initially, each
of the disciplines represented in this volume, Contrastive Rhetoric, Rhetorical Typ-
ology, Discourse Analysis, and Translation Studies, could very easily have been
characterized as a closed reference system, similar to one of Levi-Strauss’s trains
and the researchers in each discipline as passengers. Inside each train, the passen-
gers boarded at the same point of departure, focused on the same landscape, and
attempted to reach the same destination. On the other trains, different passengers
were focusing on other parts of the landscape and moving in other directions. There
was relatively little contact between the passengers on each train so that generally
the behaviors or ideas of those other passengers were often just momentary blurs.
However, in recent years these disciplinary trains appear to have converged onto
parallel tracks, and while they are still focusing on different parts of the landscape,
they appear to be traveling toward similar destinations. The paths of these four
trains are beginning to converge.
I would like to trace their paths up to this point. In order to do so, I have chosen
to highlight the initial points of departure from which these trains began their jour-
neys. Let us first survey the landscape of linguistics and applied linguistics as it was
in the year 1965, before any of our four trains left the station. In 1965, articles in
the journal, Language, showed a predominance of structural and transformational
generative approaches to phonology and syntax. Even among those who resisted
the tenets of the generative framework, sentence-level analysis and examples were
clearly the norm. Although Hymes’s Language in Culture and Society had appeared
the preceding year, its emphasis on the social bases of communication had not yet
been taken up by mainstream linguists.
At this point, the field of applied linguistics mirrored the trends in theoretical lin-
guistics, as can be seen from examining articles from the journal Language Learning
for the same year. In 1965, the articles in Language Learning focused primarily on
the application of structural or generative approaches to language, with topics in-
cluding a contrastive analysis of verb phrases in English and Portuguese, the role of