🚀 go-pugleaf

         The Linguistics Department Colloquium Series 
                  


                     SUZANNE FLEISCHMAN
                         UC Berkeley

             Discourse as Space/Discourse as Time: 
 On the Cognitive Underpinnings of Spoken and Written Discourse

Most planned discourses of any length (e.g. speeches, lectures,
extended narratives, books, articles, media broadcasts) contain
within them cross-references to other parts of the discourse--
metalinguistic "traffic signals" whose function is to orient
addressees concerning the macro-structure of the text. Books and
articles, for example, commonly contain statements of the type
"as is/will be shown in chapter 6..." (written, say, in chapter
3) or "see above/below, section 4," while lecturers make
statements of the type "I'll come back to this point later," "as
we'll see in just a moment." These anaphoric and cataphoric
indexing devices typically involve SPATIAL or TEMPORAL
expressions, notably tenses and deictic adverbs.

In this talk I argue, first of all, that the use of spatial and
temporal expressions to talk about the architecture of texts is
not arbitrary; to the contrary, it is the manifestation, in
language, of a basic cognitive difference between two ways of
conceptualizing discourse: as SPACE or as TIME. Space and time
provide two powerful macro-metaphors for translating our
conceptualizations of discourse into the metalanguage we use to
talk about the texts we produce. Taking the space/time metaphor
further, I then explore the question of why the SPATIAL metaphor
appears to be exclusive to WRITTEN discourse, while the TEMPORAL
metaphor correlates first and foremost with a discourse that is
SPOKEN. I conclude by looking at the latter question in
diachronic perspective, i.e., by seeing whether the move within a
culture from orality to literacy, and from a textuality that is
fundamentally oral to one increasingly influenced by the
protocols of writing, is marked by a corresponding shift in
discourse metalanguage from 'temporal' to 'spatial'. The data for
this section of the inquiry will be drawn from the history of
French.


                 Monday April 20, 4:00pm 
          McGill Hall (formerly P&L) 2148 (TV Studio)

                 (Refreshments will be provided)