- Discourse, Consciousness,
and Time
Wallace Chafe
In this book, Chafe recognizes and explores the uniqueness of natural speech and writing as a tool that can help us understand the important relationship between language and consciousness. The ways in which we can interpret this interaction are affected by different variables. First it is important to think of language as being represented in three ways: thinking, speaking, and writing. Within these categories, the relationship between consciousness and time provide a useful measure by which Chafe uses to monitor how information producers and information receivers interpret information.
Chafe describes the value of thinking of language as both public versus private and manipulated versus natural. Science most often uses a language that is both public and manipulated. But it is also useful to study private language, what takes place internally. Chafe argues that this is a closer representation of what is real and naturally occurring in people's minds. Although both ways of observing language have significant value in answering different question, the study of internal data is a more natural representation of what naturally occurs. He, therefore, largely focuses on conversation.
Since there are many ways for language to manifest itself in both speaking and writing, Chafe focuses particularly on conversation because speakers in conversation seem to have the most natural connection to language. He then uses conversation as a starting point from which he can gauge other forms of language.
Chafe then sets out to define consciousness. Its has constant properties in that it has a focus, it is embedded in a surrounding area of peripheral consciousness, is dynamic, has a point of view, and has a need for orientation. Adding to the complexity of consciousness are some variables. Chafe does not try to set up an exact formula for how consciousness affects language, rather he assumes that thought, language, and behavior have a definite relationship with one another. In fact, he says that the purpose of behavior and thought is to satisfy some interests of the of the information producer in terms of how they will be received by the information receiver.
In Part 2 of the book, Chafe explores the ways in which language is represented in the mind, dividing it into three activation states: active, semiactive, or inactive. These categories can be spearated by looking at the basic unit of verbalization, the intonation unit: things like pauses or breaks in conversation, timing, and changes in pitch. He believes that the relationship between intonation units and the flow of consciousness will reveal a great deal about the naturalness of language.
What he describes as activation cost, identifiably, the light subject constraint, and the one new idea constraint all involve the language producer to access what is happening in the mind of the language receiver. Within these categories, it is most important to realize that "consciousness enters into the production of language in two ways: it provides the ideas that are represented, but is also responsible for representing them·.On that basis we can speak of a represented consciousness and a representing consciousness " (198).
Bringing flow and displacement together can
enrich our understanding of each, while giving us a more complete picture
of consciousness in its entirety. For example, Chafe looks at how a writer
represents his consiousness through writing, called the displaced immediate
mode. "Language verbalizes an extroverted consciousness that directly
perceives, acts on, and evaluates its environment·since it combines
an introverted representing consciousness (belonging to the proximal fictional
character) with an external represented consciousness (belonging to the
same self at a distal time and place)" (227).
Yet it is also important to look at how the writer's laguage affects the reader. He uses this diagram to illustrate:
