Textual Boundaries Research Articles

Text openings and closings in writing and speech

The differentiation of text segments to fulfil specific discourse functions (e.g. to introduce a topic, or to state the time and place of a story), along with the definition of clear textual boundaries that set the text apart from the situational context, are two aspects of the configuration of a text as an autonomous semantic unit. This paper analyzes the opening and closing elements of narrative and expository texts to determine whether they function as well defined boundaries, and fulfil a specific discourse function with respect to the text as a whole. The population for this study consisted of 120 participants, 10 at each of the Age levels of grade school, junior high, high school, and university, yielding 40 participants in each of three target Languages: English, Spanish, and Swedish. The database included 480 texts divided by Modality (written vs. spoken) and Genre (narrative vs. expository). All text openings and closing were coded for positioning, i.e. the framework used by speaker/writers to introduce or conclude the topic developed in their texts, and for functioning, i.e. the role these elements play in the text. Results showed that, as texts become more “detached” from the situation in which they are produced, their component parts become more functionally differentiated. This process is described first in the openings of narrative and expository texts, and later in the closings of expository texts; narrative closings remain a problematic area of text construction for most speaker/writers in this study, in every Age group. These processes of detachment and internal functional specification of text components occurred earlier in writing than in speech. The cross-linguistic differences found in the study are related to different teaching practices, rather than to language specific features.

The Shifting Now: Aspect, Deixis, and Narrative in Classic Maya Texts

Abundant and complex, Maya hieroglyphic texts serve as a crucial resource for understanding pre‐Columbian narrative. This essay documents and discusses the discursive structure of Maya texts. New evidence on glyphic aspect and deixis show the presence of a "shifting now" or "alternating historical incompletive" in Classic narratives. There were two possible motivations for this pattern: to sequence events and establish textual boundaries between incompletive events and, more speculatively, to provide performance cues from hieroglyphic inscriptions.

DEFAMATION IN THE TROUBADOUR "SIRVENTES": LEGISLATION AND LYRIC POETRY

One of the features of satirical writing is that it transgresses textual boundaries in order to address issues and concerns understood by performer and audience to be extra-textual. Despite an awareness of the relations between troubadour sirventes and contemporary political and personal disputes, the possibility that these songs might have functioned as lampoons, and been received as slander, has not been fully addressed.1 The twelfth-century troubadour Marcabru is described in one of the fourteenth-century vidas composed about him as a slanderer: 'e dis mal de las femnas e d'amor' (`and he slandered women and love).2 Maldir,3 from the Latin male dicere, also maledictum or maledictio, means (in classical usage) slander, wicked gossip, criticism or insult.4 This definition is made clearer by the fate assigned the poet in the other vida: 'E fo mout cridatz e ausitz pel mon, e doptatz per sa lenga; car el fo tant maldizens que, a la fin, lo desfeiron li castellan de Guianlal, de cui avia dich mout gran mal' (`and he was much cried out [reputed?] and listened to throughout the world, and feared for his tongue; for he was so slanderous that, in the end, the castellans of Guyenne, whom he had slandered very badly, killed him').5 The precise definition of this maldir is left to the songs attributed to Marcabru in the manuscripts. The eventual murder may be a fictional device, similar to Peire Vidal having his tongue cut out by a knight, for claiming to be his wife's lover, or the death of Guillem de Bergueda at the hands of a footsoldier after a career of mayhem,6 but these violent punishments may be related to contemporary ideas about slander in poetry.7 The association between sirventes and violence is clearest in the vida and razos composed about Bertran de Born, but this corpus raises questions about general troublemaking, rather than the specific instances of slander to be examined here, and will therefore not be addressed in this article.8 The sirventes in a woman's voice previously attributed to Raimon Jordan attacks previous troubadours' songs for mal dir against women,9 and an anonymous cobla advises a woman to avoid slandering another, once again in these terms:10 (For a lady must avoid and reject the slander of another. And if slander of another lady does pass her lips, may she know she slanders herself.) The Latin term maledictum conflated slander with curse,11 but legislation under the Republic differentiated carmen malum, a sung curse aiming to harm the person, from carmen famosum, which attacks reputation.12 Among the dense writings on slanderous words in Quintilian and the Rhetorica ad Herennium,13 as well as in the use of invective curse by Ovid in Ibis and in the Tristia,14 it emerges that Roman society was extremely concerned with the delimitation and control of slanderous words, but that the use of slander, distilled in small doses through invective, insinuation and irony, was an essential ingredient of good oratory. The concerns are evident in the Justinian Code, which took over from the Theodosian Code as the basis for civil law from the twelfth century onwards.15 The two codes directly influence canon law on the subjects of slander and defamation, despite the surprising lack of a specific code on defamation in Gratian's Decretum. It is only with Gregory IX's Decretals that a coherent, but still unspecified, canon-law position emerges.16 This is partly due to the fact that secular courts and local custom tended to be responsible for such cases. Helmholz's study of civil cases of defamation in English church courts up to 1600 notes that the gap in Gratian's Decretum was filled through a provincial constitution promulgated in 1222. This piece of legislation, read aloud in all churches in England, covered all false accusations of crime (such as theft or adultery) but could be stretched to include such `personal defects' as illegitimacy or leprosy. Reparation was not mentioned, since the slanderer was excommunicated, but was implicit in the process of penance, which involved making amends to persons harmed. …

Narratologies of Pleasure: Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Narratologies of Pleasure: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Georgia Johnston (bio) In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein creates a new economy of reading by extending expected limits of text, identity, and narrativity. 1 First, she creates a textual extension, a reading “beyond the ending” 2 of her own text by including the genesis of her own text; Stein’s “I” will begin to write her autobiography through the voice of Toklas as Toklas’s autobiography ends: “You know what I am going to do,” she writes, “I am going to write it for you” (237). 3 Second, she creates an extension of identity, reading beyond her own ending by using the figure of Toklas as her observer/recorder: 4 Toklas mirrors Stein as the other at center, labels Stein as genius, 5 and becomes the fulcrum of a text that continues to return to the moment when Toklas comes to Paris, creating anew Stein’s meeting Toklas and initiating the text, which defers an ending by beginning. Third, she creates an extension of narrative practice, a reading beyond the text through references to other texts, many of them Stein’s own. The intertextual referencing delicately resists traditional reading practices, which insist not only on a linear progression throughout a text, with clear beginning, middle, and ending, [End Page 590] but on textual boundaries. Those boundaries, as if a text is framed, instigate an expectation of unity and wholeness for a text, an expectation that Stein’s intertextual referencing politely undermines. Through these extensions, Stein experiments with text, reader, and author. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has eluded the label of experimental writing. Marianne DeKoven, for example, in her formative analysis of Stein’s experimental writing, ends her study before the autobiography. Her useful definition of experimental writing—as “the obstruction of normal reading [which] prevents us from interpreting the writing to form coherent, single, whole, closed, ordered, finite, sensible meanings” (Different Language 5)—certainly eliminates the autobiography from that category. The autobiography retains flat, surface, simple, coherent language, nothing like the plurality of meaning in an experimental text like Tender Buttons. 6 DeKoven, as do other critics, emphasizes the coherency of the autobiography: it “is in many ways characteristically modernist, with its impressionistic or associative temporal structure, following the course of memory rather than chronology. Its compelling voice is that of Stein’s reported conversation: wry, whimsical, a peculiar mix of understatement and exaggeration. It is this voice, coupled with Stein’s free-ranging memory of historically interesting personalities and events, which are the core of The Autobiography” (125). 7 DeKoven’s accurate and perceptive characterization of the autobiography describes, however, only one version of this text. As Stein did with her coterminously written autobiography Stanzas in Meditation, with its doubled messages—one for herself (and Alice Toklas) and one for strangers 8 —Stein presents two reading positions within the one text. She produces a text that can be read as if unified and bounded by its textual frame and a text that can be read as if it were the origin of a web of other readings, which a reader—while reading the autobiography—might read outside the boundary of The Autobiography. The first type of reading is one which marks the reader as stranger; the second type of reading positions the reader as intimate of Stein, not through knowledge of Stein’s private life, but through an economy of “one completely telling stories that were charming, completely listening to stories having a beginning and a middle and an ending” (“Ada” 16). 9 [End Page 591] 1. The Text for Strangers The first reading position enhances the drive towards “single, whole, closed, ordered, finite, sensible meanings,” rather than obstructing traditional textual reading. It invokes the expected pattern of beginning, middle, and end, with the beginning reoccurring when Toklas arrives in Paris. It provides a pleasure of reading through narratological sequencing and repetition. This type of reading position invokes as natural the ideological construction that perceives “past and present as related and as establishing a future” (Brooks 98). 10 For the reader, “narrative . . . must ever present itself as a repetition of events that...

Genre Analysis and the Identification of Textual Boundaries

Recent years have seen a considerable growth in the area of genre-based language studies. Many of these studies focus on levels of discourse structure which have been variously referred to in the literature as the 'schematic structure', 'generic structure', and 'generic structural potential'for a particular genre. Very little research, however, has attempted to examine the criteria that have been used for the identification of textual boundaries in genre studies. This paper examines a number of examples of genre analysis with the aim of identifying the criteria employed for the identification of textual boundaries in these studies. In doing so, it reaches the conclusion that there are non-linguistic, rather than linguistic, reasons for generic staging in texts, and that the search for structural divisions in texts should be seen as a search for cognitive boundaries in terms of convention, appropriacy, and content rather than as a search for linguistically defined boundaries.

Variation in narrative structure: A simple text vs. an innovative work of art

The paper is concerned with variation within the narrative type of text, and in particular, with variation between two rather extreme forms of narrative: simple, structurally stereotyped children's stories and an artistic story, ‘The Steppe’ by A. Čexov. The focus is on the signalling of text-strategic continuity and text segmentation, as manifested in the use of markers of temporal text strategy and devices of participant reference. The variation under investigation may be viewed in terms of a scale of prototypicality. At one end of the scale, one may find texts which conform to a standard narrative design, and at the other, texts with innovative strategies. In (near-)prototype texts, initial placement of temporal adverbials and the use of a full noun phrase to refer to participant(s) tend to be used to indicate textual boundaries. Conversely, one of Čexov's important text strategies in ‘The Steppe’ seems to be the blurring of textual boundaries to create the impression of a continuous stream. Major temporal shifts are often signalled through non-initial temporal expressions, and we often find a pronominal reference to participant(s) at major textual boundaries. A narrative which deviates from the expected design, all the same, relies on the readers' intuitions about a prototypical narrative structure. Since text-receivers probably interpret ‘unusual’ texts against the background of a prototype, innovative strategies are a source of artistic effects.