Discourse Communities, Sacred Texts, and Institutional Norms

Abstract

systematic investigation of speech has long been subject of inquiry among linguists, from the dialectologists who charted rural speech forms in the mid-1800s (Gumperz 116) to the dialectologists of the 1960s who, following the innovations of Labov, initiated the first serious interest in the speech of the cities (Halliday 154-55). Although speech communities have been variously characterized (Hudson 25-30), we may adopt Hymes's definition: a community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety, for example, standard, vernacular, dialect, etc. (54). ethnography of communication focuses on speech communities and the organization of communication within them (Saville-Troike 17). Despite this long history of inquiry, speech communities have not traditionally been an area of study in rhetoric. As Martin Nystrand writes in What Writers Know, rhetoric has tended to focus on audience, linguistics, on the speech community: The rhetorical study of audience takes into account the ways in which writers locate all available means for achieving particular effects on readers. .... linguistics of writing, by contrast, is the examination of the effects of readers, as speech community of the writer, upon writers and the texts they compose (1-2). Only recently have compositional studies begun to investigate communities of writers and readers, though the terminology seems to be changing, to communities, in order to signal the focus on the written rather than just the spoken. Patricia Bizzell, for example, argues that lack of familiarity with the academic discourse community is an important cause of students' writing problems, and both James A. Reither and Kenneth A. Bruffee discuss the importance of enabling students to understand discourse communities' bodies of knowledge, conventions, and strategies. Marilyn M. Cooper attempts to describe discourse community and the dialectic involved as discoursers and community each act upon the other and change each other. In