讲座 | Esther Pascual - How language mode affects discourse

讲座名称：How the mode language is used affects discourse structure: 3 case studies

主讲人：   Esther Pascual

举办单位：语言研究院

讲座时间：2023/05/31(周三)  11:45-13:00

讲座地点：松江校区五号楼103会议室

Esther Pascual is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics of Shanghai International Studies University. She works on what she has labeled ‘fictive interaction’, a phenomenon discussed in her 2014 monograph and 2016 co-edited volume (both published by John Benjamins) and in numerous papers in SSCI journals. Pascual is Co-Editor-In-Chief of the international peer-reviewed journals Language Under Discussion and International Journal of Language and Culture, and editorial board member of Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, and the Benjamins book series Human Cognitive Processes. Pascual has also served as elected President of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics.

Widespread writing seems to affect grammar and discourse in profound ways (e.g. Ong [1982] 2002). It is uncontroversial for instance that some grammatical structures, like direct speech, are more common in spoken than in written language (Tannen 1982; Blyth & Wang 1990; Mayes 1990) and also particularly frequent in colloquial speech of the youth (Blyth & Wang 1990; Streeck 2002) and modern public discourse (Fairclough 1994; Vis et al. 2012). In this talk I discuss different interactional structures commonly occurring in ancient written texts grounded in an oral tradition as well as in modern multimodal spoken discourses. Specifically, I will present three case studies on imagined dialogues in: (i) an ancient Chinese philosophical text meant to be recited aloud in a group in a predominantly oral society (Xiang 2016, Xiang & Pascual 2016, Xiang, Pascual  & Ma 2022); (ii) modern printed advertisements and brands, which combine written text with images (Brandt & Pascual 2016); and (iii) a highly influential US satirical news television  show, which is multimodal, combining speech, gesture, and images (Fonseca, Pascual, & Oakley 2020).

I hope to show that the mode in which discourse (mostly) occurs models its structure, so that an oral discourse culture leads to texts that are highly interactional at various levels (from the discourse content to information structure and the sentential and clausal levels). More generally, the intimate relation between language and interaction seems to be reflected in the structure of texts, and thus the field of discourse studies should fully integrate interaction into its analyses and theoretical discussion.