Aspects of Orality: A Short Commentary

Abstract

EFORE COMING TO GRIPS individually with the eight essays in this issue, I have a terminological-or conceptual-preamble, which I hope will contribute a little to discussion of problems about oral compositions in words, oral performances, and oral cultures. Following Nelson Goodman,' I use the word script for a (compound) character in a linguistic symbol system, for a written text-rather than for a system of writing.2 Scripts are composed of words-or if we wish, we can also include concrete poems that may contain few, if any, words but are at least composed of letters. But when we speak of words and letters as characters, we do not of course mean particular inscriptions (such as the marks on this page), but types or kinds of inscription: the letter A or the word the which is the same word that appears on many pages. A character can be regarded as a class of inscriptions (waiving certain technical difficulties). A script is what is commonly called a A script is connected by rules of pronunciation with sequences of verbal sounds. The production of such a sequence of sounds in accordance with a script is a sounding or oral performance of that script. And just as we distinguish between scripts as characters and their individual inscriptions, so we can form the concept of dicts as spoken characters which may have as instances innumerable individual utterances. Each time a correct inscription of Invictus is correctly read aloud or recited, we have an utterance; the class of all such utterances is the oral composition, the dict, that corresponds to the script. So much, I think, is harmless. My next step is divisive, and I don't insist on it, though I think it extremely useful: it is to say that a text is a sequence of words in a certain order, so that scripts and dicts are both texts; moreover, a particular script and a particular dict may be the same text. I know that Father Ong objects to this way of speaking, but I note that Mr. Ngal adopts it in one place. It is true that the term implies a certain fixity and prescribes a rigid concept of identity through time-since even to mispronounce one word in reading a script is to produce a distinct dict from that which correctly corresponds to it. It may even be that in oral cultures, complex dicts tend not to reoccur exactly, as each successive speaker learns the text imperfectly, or is unconcerned about minutiae, and so passes on a slightly different version of what he or she receives. Under those conditions, there may not be so much use for the rigorous concept of a dict, and instead we may have to speak of plots or stories which have a looser principle of identity through timestory-utterance B is a retelling of story-utterance A if it describes the same sequence of events, though in very different words. Still, we need the concept of a dict, I think, even if only to compare two performances and to note that they are, strictly speaking, instances of different dicts.