Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Meaning, the mind and the brain
- Part II Discourse and society
- 8 Language as discourse
- 9 Society presupposes language, and language presupposes society
- 10 A closer look at oral societies
- 11 Differences between oral and literate societies
- 12 Empirical linguistics deals only with recorded language
- 13 Meaning, knowledge and the construction of reality
- 14 The language of the scientific experimental report
- 15 Diachronicity, intertextuality and hermeneutics
- 16 Meaning and the interpretation of a haiku
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - A closer look at oral societies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Meaning, the mind and the brain
- Part II Discourse and society
- 8 Language as discourse
- 9 Society presupposes language, and language presupposes society
- 10 A closer look at oral societies
- 11 Differences between oral and literate societies
- 12 Empirical linguistics deals only with recorded language
- 13 Meaning, knowledge and the construction of reality
- 14 The language of the scientific experimental report
- 15 Diachronicity, intertextuality and hermeneutics
- 16 Meaning and the interpretation of a haiku
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is the primordial speech situation which we have to investigate if we want to find out what distinguishes spoken from written language. For me, the typical primordial speech situation is an informal gathering in which participants act, each participant contributing their individual intentions to an emergent collective interaction. This interaction is, to a greater or lesser extent, symbolic, in the sense that it includes verbal communication concerning the behaviour of participants, communication which negotiates, explains and reflects what otherwise would be just behaviour. Primordial speech situations take place in settings shared by participants and encompass the objects which make up this setting. They let their participants share a reality available to all of them.
It does not matter so much how ‘real’ this reality is in a more philosophical sense. Certainly this ‘shared reality’ is already constructed and endorsed through endless negotiations that have taken place in an endless row of past speech situations. In times immemorial, there may have occurred a situation in which the participants found it fit to ‘carve out’ of the stuff that constructs the ‘reality’ an assemblage they agreed on calling a chair. In subsequent situations, they used this label chair for similar assemblages serving the same function. In a current situation the question would hardly arise whether some concrete object could be called a chair; but if it does, for instance with an ambiguous post-modern piece of furniture, negotiations will be collaboratively conducted leading to some degree of agreement among participants as to whether the object should be given that name.
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- Meaning, Discourse and Society , pp. 140 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010