Preface

Patrick J. Coppock

The fifteen articles that make up this volume were all, with the exception of this preface, presented and discussed at an international conference entitled ‘The Semiotics of Writing: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on the Technology of Writing’, held at the International Centre of Semiotic and Cognitive Studies of the University of San Marino from 12-14th November 1999, with the present author as scientific organiser. In carrying out this interesting and enjoyable task I was well supported by the director of the Centre, Professor Patrizia Violi and her administrative staff, Ms. Emanuela Stacchino and. Ms. Paula Cenci.[1]

The biggest thank-you of all must of course be extended to our invited speakers and our other conference participants, without whom the event would not have taken place in the first place. Many, in spite of otherwise busy agendas, committed readily to travel to San Marino from such distant corners of the globe as Australia, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden and the United States to help make The Semiotics of Writing the significant international event I believe it was. Each added his or her own personal ‘signature’ to the proceedings in the form of challenging and original presentations, and keen involvement in spirited exchanges on the various themes touched upon during three intense and stimulating days together.

So what was it that we set out to do with the Semiotics of Writing? Well, the main objective for the event was to bring together, and open up a transdisciplinary conversational space for, eminent scholars from a broad range of research areas, all in one way or another concerned with the theme of written communication.

Writing research: A field in growth

Starting from quite modest beginnings as a field of empirical study in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (see Martin Nystrand’s article in this volume for a comprehensive historical overview), writing research has now begun to position itself internationally as a dynamic, pragmatic, and not least highly transdisciplinary field of inquiry, focusing on many different forms of written communication which are studied from the point of view of a wide range of research perspectives. More recently, attention in the field has begun to move towards understanding the complex relationship between the semiotic system of writing and other semiotic or representational systems increasingly found in electronically mediated multimodal texts: photographic images and other forms of visual art, diagrams, animations, video and sound sequences. This shift of attention has naturally enough been provoked by the need to address in meaningful ways the increasing degree of blending of these different ways and means of making meaning in texts linked in networked hypermedia systems, and the interactional aspect of different forms of shared writing environments opened up for by the development of new media technologies.

Semiotics and cognitive science

This growth and diversification of the field of writing research parallels similar tendencies in the broader and more general fields of semiotic and cognitive studies over the last thirty years or so. Semioticians have traditionally concentrated their energies on examining processes of meaning-making through the exchange and interpretation of signs – an interdisciplinary and generic term which today in practice is generally taken to mean various forms of texts and/ or utterances, construed as situated acts of communication – as they function in a broad range of socio-cultural contexts. Cognitive scientists, on the other hand, have tended to concern themselves with attempting to understand, through structured empirical forms of research, the relationship between observable, quantifiable aspects of cognition processes – which in practice means different forms of behaviour – and their biological and neuro-physiological correlates. In both the above-mentioned fields, issues relating to aspects of multimodality in communication have been brought more and more to the fore in recent years.

Although sometimes seeming to differ quite radically in their basic epistemologies and methodological approaches, and thus still considered by some scholars and scientists as separate, and even incommensurable, fields of inquiry, there is something fundamental which both these domains of research share. This common ground is a deep and passionate belief in the necessity and productivity of transdisciplinary forms of communication, cooperation and understanding in scientific research. As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear – not least thanks to the continuing efforts of the San Marino Centre in promoting constructive forms of dialogue between semioticians and cognitive scientists – that vast domains of overlap and common interest do indeed exist across the boundaries of these two domains. This growing sense of scientific fellowship and community in the general area of semiotic and cognitive studies is beginning to create and exciting sense of continuity across the two domains, traversing and transgressing any form of postulated ‘divide’ between them. Those differences in perspective and methodology that do exist merely make for lively and constructive dialogue and healthy controversy. As Marcello Dascal has repeatedly reminded us, truly excellent science cannot develop and spread without healthy forms of controversy, and the discourse dynamic in the zone of proximal development between cognitive and semiotically oriented forms of inquiry provides just such an area of growth.

As its name implies, the International Centre for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies seeks to promote constructive forms of synergy in the zone of proximal development between these two highly complex fields. The Semiotics of Writing gave people a chance to meet, present, compare and critically discuss their respective ideas, perspectives and approaches. From this small beginning, new forms of interdisciplinary cooperation and understanding have hopefully already begun to grow.

Themes

Some central themes explored at The Semiotics of Writing were as follows:

The semiotics of writing: writing construed as a socio-semiotic system for human communication and meaning-making

Writing and cognition: the role of writing in the development of ontological and other forms of categories, concepts, forms of argumentation, inference and reasoning

Writing and culture: the role of the various systems, forms and genres of writing in the evolution and development of human culture

Writing science: the role of the semiotic system of writing in on-going processes of scientific research and communication

Writing and learning: the role of writing in institutionalised and other forms of teaching and learning

Writing technologies: how modern technologies designed specifically to write with, and in, affect the writing process and the types of texts produced

Obviously, with such a wide range of issues and themes on our agenda, and with a time frame of no more than three days in which to present and discuss them, we were able to do no more than touch briefly on a few core empirical and theoretical perspectives implicit in the above set of themes. It has been very inspiring to receive and read the very varied collection of articles contributed by our conference participants which now make up this volume, and I am pleased to be able to share them with you, thanks to our excellent co-operation with Brepols.

Perspectives

To give some idea of the general organisation and content of this volume, I shall now briefly present each of our authors and their respective contributions, while at the same time attempting to position them and their work within the wider context of the international writing research community which the San Marino event sought to promote.

Broadly speaking, three threads in current writing research are woven into the contributions in this volume. The first has its roots in anthropological, ethnological and ethnographic tradition of inquiry, offering a broad perspective on literacy development in a wider sense within a transcultural, evolutionary and historical framework. A key figure in this tradition is Jack Goody, whose thought and work we shall meet in some more detail a bit later on.

The second thread might perhaps be characterised by the etiquette ‘literature and genre studies’. In electing to use such an etiquette, however, we run the risk of trying to put a highly complex field of scientific inquiry into a tidy definitional bag, while it would probably be best left to define and develop itself through its own doings. Another etiquette which might be applied here, with similar risks, is ‘rhetoric studies’. But in any case, and whatever we might choose to call it, this thread includes work in a time-honoured tradition which aims to identify genres of written (and spoken) discourse, and to understand what it is that makes them ‘efficient’ (or not) as forms of written (and spoken) communication. The tradition of rhetorical inquiry can be traced back to Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric in the 5^th century, and appears in good health and continuing development today. A good presentation of recent work in this tradition, including a couple of stimulating pieces by Carolyn Miller and Anne Freadman, both of whom have contributions in this present volume, is Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway's 1994 anthology: Genre and the New Rhetoric. Other chapters in the present volume associated with this tradition are those by Carol Berkenkotter and Tom Huckin.

The third thread is more clearly ‘semiotic’ in tone, and even less clearly definable in terms of ‘etiquette’ than those already mentioned. Semiotics is, after all, a field of potentially unlimited scope. Work more or less loosely associated with this thread combines a plurality of perspectives woven into a web of research domains known as cultural, social and textual semiotics. Some is rooted in the American pragmatist tradition – with the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) as guiding light, and William James (1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952) and Charles Morris (1901-1979) as reformers and promoters of this basic perspective. Other work is rooted in European structuralist semiotics, with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) as main its proponent and reformer-moderniser.

Today we find the structuralist tradition most strongly reflected in Greimassian textual and narrative semiotics. But also in Hallidayian social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics there are strong structuralist influences. The latter school, which has grown up in the active and innovative applied linguistics environment of southern Australia, maintains links to similar environments all over the world, and with the critical discourse analysis community in the north of Europe, especially in Great Britain and Scandinavia. The critical discourse movement, being rather less formal in approach (see Martin 1998 for some discussion of this point), has certain aspects in common with pragmatist cultural and textual semiotics, which is predominantly interpretational in tenor, rather than structurally oriented. In Europe at least, the interpretational tradition is most clearly represented in strands of thought woven through Umberto Eco’s extensive exegeses in semiotics, philosophy of language, literary and cultural semiotics. Here, the meaning potential of mass-media and other forms of text – seen as culturally coded systems of signs with a powerful potential for stimulating and maintaining processes of reinterpretation and recontextualisation – is an object of scientific study in itself.

Casting a sideways glance from here in the direction of Eastern European and Soviet traditions of textual semiotics, we find historical and conceptual links to the Peircean semiotic and Russian formalist traditions, as well as structuralism. Here we recall names such as Tvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Boris Uspenskij, Roman Jacobsen and Juri Lotman. In the United States, especially inspired by Peircean pragmatism, names such as Thomas Sebeok, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish spring readily to mind. In the present volume work associated with this thread is that of Kjell-Lars Berge, Patrick Coppock, Lars Evensen, Martin Nystrand, Finn Bostad, Anna-Malin Karlsson and Jim Martin, while Anne Freadman’s work very successfully manages to bridge the conceptual space between the tradition of genre studies and pragmatism.

In what follows I have tried to group my presentation of the various contributions to the present volume loosely together with respect to potential affiliations to the three threads of discourse mentioned above. But, as the astute reader will very quickly understand on reading the articles themselves, there is so much overlapping of interest and thematic matter across the whole range of research perspectives and directions covered in these fourteen articles, that, in the end these even quite vague content categorisations turn out in the long run of things to be far too specific…

Contributors and contributions

Jack Goody (United Kingdom)

As mentioned initially, the anthropological-ethnological-ethnographic thread is probably most clearly represented in the present volume by Jack Goody’s[2] contribution, aptly titled in tune with the conference, The Semiotics of Writing. Goody is Emeritus William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at St. James College, Cambridge in the UK. Carrying out anthropological fieldwork studies in the 50’s and early 60’s in West Africa, he began early on to interest himself in the study of writing. Indeed, a central work in the history of writing research is a pioneering article written together with Ian Watt in 1963, and published the same year in Comparative Studies in Society and History – ‘The Consequences of Literacy’. Since then, he has gone on to publish a number of important books and articles, all of which in one way or another attempt to frame literacy development within a broader evolutionary, socio-cultural and historical context. Here we find a clear focus on the potential consequences of the development of writing systems on human cognition processes, and thus too, for how we organise everyday life in our various societies and cultures.

In his work on writing, Jack Goody has always given priority to trying to understand the specific role which written communication has played in the emergence, development and organisation of social and cultural institutions in contemporary societies: religion, the law, commerce, bureaucracy and the state. His central works in this vein[3] are Literacy in Traditional Societies (edited, 1968), The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), The Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society (1986) and The Interface between the Written and the Oral (1987). In recent years he has begun to interest himself more for the role played by modes of representation other than writing in promoting or retarding sociocultural change. This shift of focus has led him to foreground the symbolic richness and multimodality of everyday communication, and the ambiguities such communication is seen to involve when examined within a historical, transcultural, perspective. This shift is most clearly reflected in his recent Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality (1997).

Goody characteristically refers to writing as a technology of the intellect, construing the transition from oral culture in pre-script, pre-literate, societies, to modern (and post-modern) literate culture in terms of how this developmental trajectory has altered not only our own self-construals, but also our construals of – and thus relations with – the other, and, as a consequence of this, our construals of our communities and the shared physical and psychosocial environments these constitute.

In his article he revisits the interesting debate concerning fundamental differences between logographic writing systems such as Chinese and Japanese, where the signifier (in Saussurian terms) is a single character or sign complex, and alphabetic writing systems such as English, where the signifier is a word or group of signs (characters). In both systems, the immediate signified is a word in speech, which in turn is associated through linguistic convention with either an action, an object, a grammatical element or an idea. From this starting point he moves on to look at how writing has come to function as a technology of the intellect, through, amongst other things, development of arithmetical tables, logical procedures (syllogisms) and listing behaviours. These have, he claims, profoundly influenced how we categorize everyday experience, and thus how we interact with our environment. Listing behaviour, for instance, serves both as a memory aid and as a means of organising activities. Making shopping lists and the construction of agendas for executive meetings are a couple of examples that illustrate the functional and pragmatic nature of this written genre. Goody also reflects on the fact that although the (originally arbitrary) order in which letters of alphabetic writing systems are structured (A-B-C-D... etc.) is not generally considered to have a specific signifying function, the fact that there exists a conventionalised (fixed) alphabetical order in writing systems facilitates listing and categorisation behaviours. These must be organized in other ways (via numbering or spatial organisation) in languages and cultures which use logographic writing systems. This in turn affects how information in archives and databases is organized and retrieved. The basic shapes of written characters, which are not generally considered to have any culturally codified signifying function in alphabetic writing systems (while doing so in the case of logographic systems), can easily come to do so in cases where specific forms of lettering come to be used for aesthetic, symbolic or other communicative purposes by various groups. In our present context, the importance of paying sufficient attention to this often neglected aspect of written communication emerges clearly in connection with examples given by David Barton in his chapter on the letter as everyday genre, and in Anna-Malin Karlsson’s chapter on Swedish teenage homepage writing practices. It may, too, easily be read between the lines in Kjell-Lars Berge and Maurizio Gnerre’s chapters which make reference to, respectively, the notion of ‘text’, exemplified in part by children’s’ early writing (and drawing) practices, and ephemeral graphical body writing among South American Indian tribes.

Goody rounds off his contribution with a brief excursus into the specificity of the role of writing in the development of intentionality and mind. It seems clear, he maintains, that writing ‘formalizes’ the semiotic system of language. Spoken language handles easily the flux of everyday experience with its wealth of ambiguities and overlapping experiential categories, whereas written language handles best the development and organization of bounded categories. Writing “creates a beginning and an end, giving rise to the problem of how should we classify ‘anomalies’, which are only anomalies within a written system of categories”. While David Olson has claimed that writing (and literacy in general) facilitates the development of attribution of belief states to others in children, and is thus central for the development of their construals of mind (and intentionality), Goody is more concerned with the effect of writing and literacy skills on complex mind-body states, epitomised by the emotions. Writing about our emotions makes them ‘visible’ in a ‘slow-motion’, careful kind of way, he notes, allowing us to reflect upon them and develop them further.

Maurizio Gnerre (Italy)

Maurizio Gnerre[4] is an anthropological linguist who works within a similar ethno-anthropological perspective to Jack Goody, but with a primarily linguistic, rather than anthropological focus. He teaches ethnolinguistics at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Naples in Italy, while most of his ethnolinguistic research has been carried out in Southern and Central America, since his main interest is in Amerindian languages. Several of his publications in ethnolinguistics have appeared in the United States, Brazil and Italy, and he has also published in Spanish: Linguagem, Escrita e Poder [Language, Writing and Power] (1985). He spends considerable periods of time each year visiting Indian tribal societies in Peru and Brazil to expand his studies of linguistic change and development in everyday contexts.

In his contribution, The Semiotics Of Ephemeral Graphisms In Two South-American Indigenous Societies, Maurizio sketches out a number of interesting reflections on ephemeral forms of writing carried out on the human body in ritual settings among the Huni Kuin tribe, whose tribal area spans the border zone between Peru and Brazil, and who are often known to each other as ‘the true people’. One of his most interesting claims he makes on the basis of his research is that the human body was, and in many cases still is, the primary locus from, and on which, ephemeral and semantically meaningful forms of graphical semiosis emerged. He goes on to qualify this assertion based on a proposed opposition between two experiential categories of ephemerality and lastingness. This seems useful, in that it such categories ought to be readily applicable to a wide range of communicational systems end practices, ranging from the various kinds of body (and sand) painting practices with which Maurizio illustrates his analysis, to practices in more contemporary settings related to the use of cosmetics, piercing, scarring, certain types of mass-media texts, publicity and electoral posters, web sites, hyperlinks between sites, electronic mailing lists, and more dynamic forms of writing such as conversations in Internet chat-rooms and MUD/MOO communities.

David Barton (United Kingdom)

A third contribution in the anthropological-ethnological-ethnographic thread is by David Barton[5]. David is Professor of Language and Literacy at the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language (LAMEL) at the University of Lancaster in Northern England. Together with Mary Hamilton and Roz Ivanic he coordinates the Literacy Research Group (LRG), which since 1983 has been developing the field of literacy, and particularly adult literacy, as a general research area. Other LRG group members come from the fields of linguistics, sociology, psychology, educational research, continuing education, and English language education. The group carries out and encourages interdisciplinary research in literacy; and promotes research in adult literacy, the development of innovative research methods and the improvement of communication and collaboration between researchers and practitioners. David has worked on child language development at Stanford University, USA, and he is especially interested in social aspects of literacy. He has published extensively in Britain and the United States. His publications include: Writing in the community (1992), Literacy: an introduction to the ecology of written language (1994), Worlds of literacy (1994), Sustaining local literacies (1994), Local Literacies: Reading and writing in one community (1998), with Mary Hamilton, Letter writing as a social practice (2000), edited with Nigel Hall, and Situated Literacies, (2000), edited with Mary Hamilton and Roz Ivanic,

His contribution to this volume, the title echoing that of one his recent publications, is Everyday Letter Writing: Letter Writing As A Social Practice. In it he explores, with reference to a series of fascinating examples, how the practice of letter-writing in everyday life serves a wide range of social and interpersonal functions for those who pursue it, and how this form of literacy contributes to maintaining and modifying existing social practices. He underlines constantly the importance of studying everyday forms of letter writing, writing by ordinary people, since this is one of the most pervasive literate activities in human societies, but points to a continuum running from everyday literacy-based activities of this kind to more specialised forms of the same activities. People write, after all, not only to one another in everyday life, they write to schools, companies and to politicians, and they sometimes tend to divide the task of writing such letters among different family or community members, depending on their specific competencies and social roles. Writing (and reading) personal letters is considered, also in practical terms, a rather different kind of sub-activity, with different kinds of connotations, to that of writing and reading more ‘official’ letters. David touches too, on a series of interesting cross-cultural and historical aspects of letter-writing, noting for instance that families in some Amish communities write letters together, with members adding a few lines at the bottom of the letter as it is circulated among them. In other Pacific islander communities, letters can be seen to contain more affect that people are traditionally allowed to display in their oral conversations. The study of everyday letter writing as social practice, he concludes, must take account of and describe in detail not only of the texts themselves, but also the people who write them, the activities they associate with their letter writing, and the various material artefacts they have appropriated for use before, during and after the writing process.

Martin Nystrand (USA)

Martin Nystrand[6] is director of the Wisconsin branch of the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA)[7] This project is run in collaboration with the University at Albany, State University of New York, and with additional sites at the University of Georgia and the University of Washington. Martin’s research interests range from the history of ideas about writing, text and meaning, discourse analysis, classroom discourse and learning, to ecological models of instruction and learning. He is co-editor of the research journal Written Communication. Recent books include Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom; The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity between Writers and Readers, and What Writers Know: The Language, Process, and Structure of Written Discourse.

His contribution Culture Supports For Empirical Research On Writing provides a thorough historical overview of the emergence of writing research in the United States in the1970’s as a field of empirical research. One key point that he makes is that great ideas and visions are not enough to wreak change on their own. There must also be nurturing contexts – cultural and disciplinary niches – that are receptive to these ideas and give them space and time to be tried out and developed. Taking as his point of departure the recent success of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as an example of how a specific historical, social and cultural context played a vital role in the construction of the success of this monolithic project, positioning Gehry as “the right man with the right design in the right place at the right time”, Martin goes on to examine how a burgeoning intellectual movement at Harvard University in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s away from the then dominant pedagogical, prescriptive concern for text features in writing instruction and evaluation, and over to empirical research specifically tailored to describe cognitive writing processes, where text processes and the writing strategies of individuals were brought to the fore, paved the way for the development of modern writing research. In tune with the pragmatic thinking of John Dewey and William James a century before, the new writing research sought to construe writing as a dynamic, meaning-making process, within which individual thought and agency became transformed into text. This issued in a highly productive period of writing research in the 1970’s where a large number of case-studies were carried out in various (largely educational) settings, providing many new insights into how individual writers thought about and organised their own writing processes.

In the 1980’s yet another new focus was brought to the field, largely due to the influence of anthropological and ethnographical research methodologies and thinking, which stimulated an increased interest in the social and cultural context of writing, and their effects on individual writing processes and composition strategies. Researchers became more attentive to how individuals managed (or not) to tailor their writing to specific social situations and discourse communities at different times and places, positioning themselves intersubjectively and reciprocally in relation to various readers and response givers. Many of these impulses are present in writing research today, where there is still a strong focus on various kinds of identity work, especially in studies of young people’s writing (see for instance Lars Evensen, Kjell Lars Berge and Patrick Coppock’s chapters in this present volume). But, as will become clear on reading several of the other contributions in this volume (see for instance Carolyn Miller, Anna-Malin Karlsson and Finn Bostad’s chapters), the scope of the writing research field is now widening considerably in other directions in order to incorporate the specific characteristics of writing carried out, increasingly collaboratively, in and with new media. These media allow people to co-operate with one another at a distance far more easily and more quickly than before, and to incorporate multimodal forms of representation in the ‘texts’ they write, exchange and talk about, and there is a growing need to understand the strategies and competencies that they are developing in doing so.

Finally, bearing in mind that, as David Barton points out in his chapter, there is already a vast amount of writing being carried on outside of traditional institutional settings, much of which has been little studied in systematic ways, Martin has a vital point in his conclusion in when he notes that “Some but not all of the voices in the new discourse about writing were conventional and institutional, including the instructional voices of teaches and students, as well as studies, dissertations and published articles and books. And some of the voices were cultural and political with sources transcending the academy itself. Taken together these voices constitute the ‘textual space’ in which disciplinary voices have meaning and gain authority.”

Lars Sigfred Evensen (Norway)

Lars Sigfred Evensen[8] has been worked closely with Martin Nystrand for many years in developing the international writing research field. He is professor in Applied Linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. His research interests include the epistemology and the sociology of the disciplinary field of applied linguistics; the development of written language competence and the teaching of writing, technologies of writing and hypermedia, text and discourse studies, interactionist perspectives on communication and curriculum reform in the educational system. Lars was one of the founders of The Nordic research Group for Theoretical and Applied Text Linguistics (NORDTEXT) in the early 1980’s, and leader of the Nordic literacy project NORDWRITE, and the associated Norwegian national literacy project DEVEL: DEVELoping Written Language Competence. He has published extensively in Norway, Scandinavia and internationally in the fields of applied linguistics and writing research. At present he leads the project ICT BABEL which is part of the larger interdisciplinary research program ICC: Information, Communication and Competency, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The main tenet of the ICT BABEL project is that successful interdisciplinary communication is a necessary precondition for continuing innovation in knowledge development, and the project focuses on to what degree new information and communication technologies are able to support (or hinder) such communication.

His contribution Grounding In Interaction builds on earlier work in grounding and social interactionist theory, and looks at innovation in language use, especially among young people. He opens by asking the semiotically controversial question: “Would signs still be signs without somebody to interpret them?”, and follows up by positioning himself clearly on the ‘no’ side of this long-running epistemological debate. From this starting point he goes on to insist that actual people are a constitutive element of the ‘signhood’ of signs, exemplifying his claim using some interesting materials from an on-going action research project in which he is involved (‘Invisible Teenagers’) which studies how young writers in secondary school learn to argue in written prose. A central tenet of his argument is that innovation in language comes into being first and foremost at the borders of convention. Not only student writing, he argues, but also everyday competent written and spoken discourse stands with “one foot placed firmly in the realm of convention, while the other searches for the border of convention, sometimes crossing it,”. In doing so there is a transgression of conventional norms, which creates a virtual space with a potential for innovation in language, and thus also in thought and action. He ends with a series of interesting reflections on the notions of language and genre, also in scientific discourse, noting that they cannot be construed as static objects, but are dynamic and flexible resources that develop and change through use in immediate interaction. Linguistic and genre convention in such a context must be seen as a resource with a potential for continuing growth and development and not a straitjacket.

Kjell Lars Berge (Norway)

Kjell-Lars Berge[9] is professor of Nordic Language and Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests range from textual science and discourse analysis, to writing research and semiotics. He is involved in a number of national and transnational research initiatives in Norway and other Scandinavian countries, amongst others the Norwegian Factual Prose Project (Norsk Saksprosaprosjekt), which is concerned with the development of a theoretical and empirical framework for the study of factual prose texts in Norwegian, and the KAL-project: which is an investigation into the quality of tenth grade student examination texts in Norwegian.

He has titled his contribution to this volume From Utterance to Text, Again: Theoretical Reflections on the Notion of ‘Text’ Based on Empirical Studies of Writing in Different Contexts. Taking as his point of departure the notion, with which doubtless all contributors to this volume would wholeheartedly agree, that writing is first and foremost a way of making meaning – a form of mediation structured in a particular kind of way, negotiated and further developed in on-going interaction processes – he goes on to link up to the discussion of ephemerality in Maurizio Gnerre’s article, by postulating as a fundamental distinctive potential of writing its potential for persistency. Whether this potential is fulfilled in practice or not – e-mail messages and text files on computers can be after all deleted intentionally (or not), letters and books can be burned etc. – meaning-making through writing is essentially a way of leaving a trace in the world. As such it may be continually recontextualised. Each time a written text is recontextualised and reinterpreted, it comes to constitute a new trace created by the interpreter. The act of constructing a trace can also be considered as an utterance, a form of individual expression embedded in an intersubjective meaning-making process. Children are generally fascinated by writing as a way of leaving a trace, and their text-making as part of their play and identity work constantly reflects this fact. Kjell Lars lets us examine a number of texts made by children in pre-school and elementary school settings, as well as a fascinating text constructed by a North American Indian chief and members of his tribe to express their wish to develop a relationship of mutual respect with the president of the new United States of America. All these texts combine elements which cannot always be clearly categorised as either ‘writing’ or ‘drawing’, but which reflect the variety and mixity of graphical resources which authors may elect to use in order to make salient for others aspects of their experience which they consider pertinent.

From here, Kjell Lars goes on to develop a more theoretical discussion of the general notion of text, pointing out that it must also include forms of expression mediated as both writing and speech. He contests David Olsen’s (Olsen 1977) distinction between the utterance (informal oral statements) and text (written prose statements). His argument is that spoken utterances, as potentially ephemeral semiotic phenomena, may well be texts, but they NEED not be. In the same way, written utterances, as potentially persistent semiotic phenomena, may well be texts but they NEED not be. In terms of cultural semiotic theory (cf. Lotman 1990), to be CULTURALLY defined or classified as texts, spoken and written utterances need to be considered by the community in which they are circulated, read and interpreted, as culturally significant or valid in some larger sense. The hows and whys of processes of cultural evaluation and valorisation of utterances as texts (or not), the development of systems of social and cultural norms which explicitly define such processes, and how these norms come to change over time in response to internal and external cultural and social pressures are the really interesting meat on the bone of this particular discussion, but to get properly to grips with this particular meal we shall have to leave it for other places and times, which there hopefully will be plenty of in the not too distant future.

Anne Freadman (Australia)

Anne Freadman[10] is Associate professor in Romance Languages at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include theoretical problems and issues concerning key concepts in general semiotics; the use of the concept of genre as an analytic device in the study of particular semiotic practices; and the intersection of genre and gender. She is currently involved in research into the concept of genre, genre and gender, and the semiotic writings of C.S. Peirce, and is supervising work in feminist cultural analysis (women's diaries, women's installation works), feminist theory (especially literary), rhetoric and translation. Some of her recent publications include Models of Genre for Language Teaching (1996); Music 'in' Peirce (1993); ... you know, the énonciation ... (1995); Feminist Literary Theory (A Question (or Two) About Genre) (1996).

Her contribution The Visit Of The Instrument Maker takes as its point of departure an exchange of telegrams and letters between the famed American father of pragmati(ic)ism, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the English philosopher and originator of significs, Lady Victoria Welby. The exchange is interesting because Peirce, excusing himself in a letter for not having replied to a telegram some time back from Welby, does so with reference to a curious visit by an elegant person claiming to be interested in purchasing his house, which had been advertised by a sign outside to be for sale at the time. The visitor, however, it subsequently emerged, was in fact a refuge from a nearby Insane Asylum. The ageing Peirce, probably rather lonely due to being in a very a difficult period in his professional life, and not initially realising all the complexities of the situation, had in the course of talking to the man discovered that they shared an interest in common, since the visitor by profession was an instrument-maker, and the two had engaged in a lengthy conversation. This instant rapport can be explained by the fact that Peirce had worked for a large part of his life at the American Coastal Survey, and was thus very interested in technologies and mathematics of precision in measurement, and personally knew a large number of instrument-makers. Seizing the fact that Peirce used the telling of this particular story to Welby as a means of providing an excuse for a delay in a sequence of correspondence, Anne goes on to use the series of exchanges between Peirce and Welby as an example in discussing and expanding in a very useful way the notions of uptake, whereby it is possible to construe genres as sequences of texts; mixity of genres, where genres of various kinds can be seen as parasitic on one another; and finally, the more general issue of exemplarity, where she discusses the interesting distinction made by Quintillion between use of standard examples in the teaching of writing, which encourages students to mimic the ‘typical’ in some supposed class of genre, and the use of exemplary models, which encourages them to discover and emulate the uniquely excellent – to find in the very best models from the past exactly those features, writing strategies and meaning-making resources, which made them stand out from the pack. Emulation in this context means, then, to aspire to exemplary status, not merely to reproduce its forms.

Carol Berkenkotter (USA)

Carol Berkenkotter[11] is professor in Rhetoric and Communication at the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University. Her research interests range from genre theory and genre analysis, to the rhetoric of science; disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity; qualitative methodology; and cultural/historical approaches to literacy. She has recently published a book together with Tom Huckin, entitled Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/ Culture/ Power (1995), and is currently working on a second book, entitled Psychiatry's Rhetorics, on the rhetoric of the psychiatric classification.

Carol's contribution to this present volume builds mainly on this latter work, and is entitled Capturing Insanity: The Wedding of Photography and Physiognomy in the Nineteenth Century Medical Journal Article. Here she examines in depth how photography was first used in a, then, innovative way in Great Britain in the mid 1800’s to support and illustrate psychiatric case reports, and also rather disturbingly, how the lack of the possibility of direct reproduction of photographs in printed publications at the time contributed to changing the way in which women patients were visually represented in the final versions of these reports. In one of the interesting cases mentioned in her article, a young working-class woman reportedly suffering from a condition diagnosed as ‘religious melancholy’, appears in her photograph as a person to whom we as viewers can relate – she is portrayed as an open person with a slightly quizzical, even assertive gaze into the camera. In the lithograph used in the publication, however, she is gazing at the floor, or perhaps a table where there is a small pile of books on which she is resting her arm (the books do not appear in the original photograph), seemingly complete absorbed in her own melancholic world, with no possibility of relationship with the viewer.

What for me was most interesting about this particular example, quite apart from the fact that it raises interesting issues about the effects of the different technologies (photography, writing and lithography) on the representation of insanity (the theme of the article), is that it forces us to consider to what degree the lithographic representation was designed to be an intentional manipulation of the ‘reality’ of the image of the person that was represented in the photograph. Given that the lithograph most likely was an commissioned piece of work, what instructions were given to the lithographer, and why? Was it adapted to support more forcefully the image intended to be presented in the written text? Was the idea to turn the person represented into a ‘standard’ rather than ‘exemplary’ model (apropos Anne Freadman’s discussion mentioned above). Like all good examples, also this one certainly seems to raise a lot more interesting questions for writing researchers than those one is initially prompted to consider in one given type of textual context.

Tom Huckin (USA)

An oft-time collaborator of Carol’s, Tom Huckin[12] is an applied linguist working at The University Writing Program at the University of Utah. His main fields of interest are discourse analysis, technical and business writing. He teaches courses on professional writing [13], largely based on students working together in collaborative projects, emphasizing problem-solving in organizational contexts, writing for multiple audiences, and writing with visual and numerical data.

Tom's contribution is entitled Textual Silence and the Discourse of Homelessness. In it he examines the notion of textual silence in text, identifying five basic types: speech-act silences, presuppostional silences, discreet silences, conventional silences and manipulative silences. His principal focus is on manipulative silences, a key characteristic of which is that the writer does not intend the silence (essentially an intentional omission of certain types of information) to be noticed by the reader. Manipulative silences are thus not intended to have communicative import in themselves. Silences of this kind foreground one specific set of ideas or issues and background others, and the general frame of reference for the topic in hand differs from that which the reader might normally be expected to bring to the topic. Tom then goes on to discuss and exemplify how manipulative silences may be identified empirically in a large text corpus, and goes on to analyse in some more detail one specific mass-media text – an article on homelessness published in the Seattle Times. As he points out in conclusion, silence in text is not something generally treated completely seriously by rhetoricians, discourse analysts, semioticians, teachers of writing and linguists. At the same time it potentially possesses as much power as language itself. Here one only has to consider the longer term historical and sociocultural import of the southern Italian practice of maintained social silence (or omertà), not only in the community, but also in the mass-media, without which the nefarious criminal sub-culture of the Mafia and its associated links to high-level political corruption in post-war Italy would not have managed to flourish as it did. Fortunately however, we may nonetheless still be able to claim that manipulative silence can only really be effective in deeply negative ways wherever and whenever there is systematic denial of access over longer periods of time to a plurality of sources of information, coupled with a serious lack of critical attention to text content and framing on the part of readers. This in turn highlights the considerable weighting he puts in his conclusion on the pedagogical importance of teaching students of writing to recognise various forms of textual silences, both in their own and in others’ writing. Critical readers and writers who do not simply go along with accepting restricted versions of the normal frame of reference for a given topic in media texts would seem to be essential to the further development and good health of any kind of modern, democratic society.

Carolyn Miller (USA)

Carolyn Miller[14] is professor of English at the Department of English at North Carolina State University, where she teaches courses in their Master of Science degree in Technical Communication [15]. Her research interests include the rhetoric of science and technology, writing in the professions, classical and contemporary rhetorical theory, and on how values, interests, and prior knowledge affect the ways that individuals and groups interpret and respond to communication. Her current research applies these interests to risk communication; she is also studying the role of novelty and tradition in scientific rhetoric. She has published articles in a wide range of academic journals and several scholarly books, and is a co-editor of the award-winning book, New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication. She was also instrumental in designing and implementing the Master of Science in Technical Communication at NC State and served as its director from 1988 to 1995.

Carolyn’s contribution is entitled Writing in a Culture of Simulation: Ethos Online. Here, we meet Julia, a kind of mini computer robot known as a ‘chatterbot’, that visitors to networked communities in MUDs, MOO’s and Internet chatrooms are meeting more and more. Julia has been designed to take the Turing Test, which, if successful, means in practice to manage to convince, at least for a while, a human interlocutor meeting and interacting with her online, that ‘she’ has a human intelligence. As an artefactual ‘inhabitant’ of online text-worlds or distributed virtual environments capable of interacting with humans, the case of Julia is of particular interest, claims Carolyn, in that ‘she’ may perhaps be able to help us understand better some of the specific effects which the ‘culture of simulation’ (Turkle 1997) now being opened up via networked writing and interaction environments, is having on writing practices, or as Carolyn often refers to it herself, rhetorical action in general. Declining the opportunity to discuss trends in writing instruction related to the transition from a ‘culture of calculation’ – the world of DOS and UNIX – over to the culture of simulation offered by Windows and Macintosh interfaces, and also the issue of ‘the death of argument’, which tends to focus on loss of authorial control and fragmentation of linear discourse by hypertext, she elects to pursue the issue of what kind of interaction we are actually involved in when we engage in ‘computer mediated communication’. Her contention is that the Turing test, as instanced in human interactions with a chatterbot like Julia, is not a test of intelligence at all, but rather a test of rhetorical ethos, that particular qualitative aspect of discourse which allows us to infer the character of our interlocutor.

Work some time back now with a computer program that simulated a psychiatrist (ELIZA) demonstrated the so-called Eliza effect, i.e. that we often tend, as Turkle puts it, “to project our own complexity onto the undeserving object”, attributing more intelligence to computer programs than they actually possess. In a culture of simulation people quite readily come to treat computers as social actors. This can be coupled with the fact that in interactions with other previously unknown people, we readily tend to form specific impressions of the personalities of our interlocutors, in spite of having little real evidence to allow us to do so. Given these preconditions, it emerges that exclusively computer mediated interactions between real people can sometimes facilitate the development of highly intense (hyperpersonal) emotional relationships between people who meet online. In this kind of situation, argues Carolyn, there is a strong need to establish in reliable ways in encounters online who we can trust, who we can learn from, whether they are like us or strange and challenging, whether we can dominate them or them us, whether they will enthral or disgust us. Being able to do so in the longer term is almost more important than knowing whether the other we are communicating with is a real human being or an artificial agent. Her main contention then is that testing for rhetorical ethos – mobilising to the maximum our ethopoetic impulse, both in representing ourselves online and in evaluating our interactions with others we meet there, will be more and more important as time goes on as an aspect of our increasingly networked everyday lives.

Finn Bostad (Norway)

Finn Bostad[16] teaches scientific writing at the department of Applied Linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. In his teaching he seeks always to integrate the use of networked information and communication technologies. Since 1996 he has been developing Internet and web-based curricula for courses in Hypermedia in the Humanities, in Information Technology, Communication and Learning, and in Information Technology in Language Teaching. He is currently involved in several national and transnational projects evaluating the application and functionality of new information and communication technologies (ICT) in the humanities, amongst others the Lingo Project[17], Meaning-Making in Hypermedia, Distance Education in Applied Linguistics and Network-based Language Learning. Some of his more recent publications are available via the Internet: What happens to writing when texts in ‘a world on paper’ are replaced by messages in ‘virtual space’? (199??); Hypertekst og meningsskapende systemer [Hypertext and Meaning-Making Systems] (199?); IKT som samhandlingsteknologi - en rapport [ICT as co-operational technology - a report] (199?); IKT og ny læringskultur [ICT and new learning culture] (1997).

His contribution Dialogue In Asynchronous Online Writing builds on empirical research carried out over several years into information and communication technologies as technologies of collaboration, and their role in the creation of networked communities for the sharing and development of knowledge. A central hypothesis of this study is that new information and communication technologies may make it possible to transfer the ownership of knowledge from the individual to the collective via the creation of extended networks of interdependent human relations. Rather than writing with the computer, Finn is studying interpersonal collaboration mediated by the computer: writing through the computer. The networked world of the Internet has two faces: on the one hand it is a cultural arena coloured by a philosophy of openness and free communication which encourages and promotes collaboration and sharing, and on the other, by competition and economic struggle for global and local dominance, especially in terms of rights to various kinds of web content and other informational resources. The increasing use of computers and networked digital technologies in human communication is changing the time and space of dialogue. This is moving us into an environment where many kinds of information are becoming more easily changeable and reusable, and this creates a new cultural potential, where messages, texts and net identities are increasingly unstable.

This networked world creates new rooms for collaboration between people, who sometimes never actually meet one another in real life, but who nonetheless over time develop close working and personal relationships. But in this kind of context, what becomes of the relationship between language, text and subject? What of the relationship between the self and other? What of the relationship between artefact and object? Finn’s study, which involved students enrolled in university courses, parts of which were conducted online, looked at how the students used language and writing online to create a professional (student) identity; how it was used heuristically in their problem-solving work; to what extent it was used to discuss professional or personal matters; and to what extent it was used phatically to maintain contact with one other. Interestingly, it emerges from this research that it can take considerable time and effort to create a real sense of community online. A key factor in this process is the construction of a common understanding of dialogue as active participation and knowledge-sharing. In distance education settings of this kind, it appears that participants, especially those who are older, need to learn over time to evaluate other participants as equally relevant dialogue partners and informational resource providers as the teacher. When they begin to do so, then the speed of response to each others’ messages, coupled with a generous sharing of information with other participants are key factors in the further construction of a successful dialogue culture over time.

Anna-Malin Karlsson (Sweden)

A closely related piece of research is that of Anne-Malin Karlsson[18], who is at present working on her PhD at the Department of Scandinavian languages, Stockholm University in Sweden. She has previously taught university courses in general and applied linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, Swedish and text analysis. She has also worked as a freelance reporter for the Swedish language children's magazine Kamratposten, and published non-fiction books for children with the publishers Rabén and Sjögren. Her current research investigates personal homepages made by young people who are, or have been, frequent Internet chatters. Her aim is to develop a description of the various writing strategies used in the construction of personal home pages by this specific group of (youthful) authors as a set of modern literacy practices, and to relate these practices to their wider social and multimodal context. An important part of her study is an attempt to understand how the authors themselves characterise and categorise their own writing and text practices.

In her contribution To Write A Page: Concepts And Practices Of Home-Page Use, Anna-Malin presents some of her more recent research materials, going on to use these as background to allow her to foreground a theoretical discussion of the twin notions of text and writing. There is a widespread notion in our western cultures that real writing should be of a certain shape and amount, and that real text should be elevated above that which is ordinary and commonplace. The basic assumptions behind her work are that writing is a socially and semiotically situated resource for visual meaning making, while text, referring to a meaningful whole, is an interactionally and socially defined multimodal unit. For the chatters in her study, homepage writing was first and foremost a form of identity work: homepages are used by their authors to represent themselves to other members of their online community, and thus function as tools for social interaction.

In this particular discourse community the term ‘writing’ is used to denote both the composing of sections of visual text and the creation and development of whole web pages themselves. Writing is considered something ‘important, but difficult’, but there are still few explicit norms in the community that might guide this kind of writing practices. Homepage writing is something everyone wants to do well, but the quality norms for this practice are still out of reach of everyday language, in spite of their being known by all. While writing is difficult to speak about, the term ‘text’ is often used by homepage writers, and seems to possess a high cultural relevance in this community, with come quite specific cultural conventions attached to it. In use, it primarily connotes visual features of the homepage, and is thus construed in terms of form or shape on the page. Both terms refer to ‘writing’ as it is normally construed, but they focus on two different modalities. Form cannot, in other words, be separated from content. The role of writing must, she concludes, be considered to encompass not only the use of verbal language, but also the production of visually encoded meanings in text.

Jim Martin (Australia)

The volume is concluded in fine style by Jim Martin’s[19] article Fair Trade: Negotiating Meaning In Multimodal Texts. Jim is professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog - with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics. His publications include English Text: system and structure (1992); Writing Science: literacy and discursive power (1993), written together with Michael A K Halliday; Working with Functional Grammar (1997), written together with Christian Matthiessen and Claire Painter; Genre and Institutions: social processes in the workplace and school (1997), edited together with Francis Christie; Reading Science: critical and functional perspectives on discourses of science (1998), edited together with Robert Veel.

In his contribution he outlines some challenges for social linguistics for the new millennium. Speaking of the challenge of hybridity – the multi-voicing of the post-colonial world, he calls for models of multilinguality (language, dialect, register and code), of multifunctionality (ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning), and of multimodality (verbiage, image, sound and action). This is a challenge which the systemic functional linguistics community has already begin to respond keenly to, and he refers to recent innovative work by central systemic functional scholars such as Michael Halliday, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leuwen, Michael O’Toole and Jay Lemke, which map multifunctionality in text across the two modalities of verbiage and image. But what of the relationship between the modalities of image and verbiage in multimodal texts when they are seen in terms of multifunctionality? Jims’s answer is that to date, verbiage-image relations have been analysed in relation to the ideational and the textual metafunctions, but not in terms of the interpersonal. In his chapter Jim makes a first step in exploring the interpersonal dimension of verbiage-image relations, with a focus on evaluation. Verbiage-image relations can be used to treat naturalised reality (the ideational metafunction), social reality (the interpersonal metafunction) and semiotic reality (the textual metafunction). Within the framework of systemic functional linguistics, interpersonal meaning is realised through grammar and lexis, and includes both interactive and evaluative meaning. Evaluative meaning includes three main systems, attitude, engagement and graduation. Attitude focuses on consideration of affect, or emotional reactions, judgement, our ethical stance on behaviour, and appreciation, our aesthetic orientation to the world. Affect (feeling) is central, claims Jim, and socioculturally institutionalised as judgement and appreciation in contexts where social behaviour needs to be controlled, and things need to be attributed value relative to their social significance.

Jim develops his discussion of the ways in which aspects of evaluation are realised in image-verbiage configurations using a series of evocative materials from Nelson Mandela’s Illustrated Long Walk to Freedom, and the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Bringing the Home: National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Jim concludes his engaging study, and our volume, with the observation that verbiage/image relations play a vital role in aligning communities around shared values, in that a rhetoric of sensibility complements sense relations. As new directions for future study within this kind of framework he indicates the role of humour and irony in multimodal text, which seems to me a perfectly admirable direction to go! As he puts it: “Evaluation has our theories of semiosis under pressure; add in humour and irony and the pressure becomes extreme. And that’s what new frontiers of description are for.”

So on that optimistic and forward-looking note it remains only for me as editor to wish you the reader a pleasant, stimulating and hopefully also provoking read!

Bologna, Italy

July 2001

REFERENCES

HUMAN RIGHTS AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION

1997 Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission

FREEDMAN, A AND MEDWAY, P (EDS.)

1994 Genre and the New Rhetoric . London, Bristol (US): Taylor & Francis

MARTIN, J. R.

1998 ‘Discourses of Science’, in Martin and Veel (Eds.), 1998: 3-14.

MARTIN, J.R AND VEEL R. (EDS.)

1998 Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science: London, New York: Routledge.

LOTMAN, J.

1990 Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London: Tauris.

MANDELA, N

1996 The Illustrated Long Walk to Freedom: the autobiography of Nelson Mandela. London: Little, Brown and Company.

OLSEN, D.

1977 ‘From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing’, Harvard Educational Review, Vol 47, No. 3: 257-281

TURKLE, S.

1997 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone