作者：李曙光
出版社：世界图书出版公司
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
语篇对话性的理论及应用试读：
Introduction
In the early years of the last century, linguistics grew from a dependent branch of study in comparative historical philology into an independent discipline because Saussure, the founding father of modern linguistics, successfully and systematically adopted the structural approach to studies on language. Structuralism has thereupon become so influential that whatever different interpretations are placed on the exact meaning of the word, as Robins (2001：225) argues, “few linguists would now disclaim structural thinking in their work.” The influence of Saussurean structuralism, however, is not confined to the linguistic circle which includes such great names as Hjelmslev, Chomsky, Halliday and so forth, but has instead been so widespread that it actually provides a framework for the humanities, or at least for “organizing and orienting any semiological’ study, any study concerned with the production and perception of meaning’” (Pettit, 1977：vi). Mostly in this sense, Greenberg (1973) argues that for nearly over a century, social scientists have consciously turned to linguistics for direction and thus confirmed “linguistics as a pilot science”. Thus the structural framework derived from Saussurean linguistics, the primary semiological discipline, dominated the analysis of the literary arts, the analysis of the non-literary arts and the analysis in social psychology and social anthropology, and so forth during much of the latter half of the twentieth century (especially in France) (Unger, 2004).
When Saussure's new understandings of language were heralded as a linguistic revolution in western countries, they also met with an enthusiastic reception in Russia where a new nation state was built by drawing inspiration from Marx in the first quarter of the last century. Through Jakobson and his coleagues, Sau sure's influence was firmly established and spread, and thus Russian literary formalism came into being, which inturn anticipated the later prosperity of continental structuralism (Hutchings, 2004). But in the same country and almost in the same period of time, together with his friends and students, Mikhail Bakhtin, an enigmatic thinker in Former Soviet Union, who is believed to “have left an indelible marls on our intellectual and scholarly landscape” (Gardiner, 2003：ix), mounted an assault on the philosophical foundations of Saussurean structural linguistics, which he believes has inherited heavily from Leibniz's rationalism and abstract objectivism and turned the living language into a dead object for scientific and objective study by severing it from its context of use—taking langue as its exclusive object for systematic study and ignoring parole (i.e. the actual speech) and its social, historical and cultural connections. Through criticizing Saussure, Bakhtin tries to push the studies on language back onto the right track by drawing enough insights from German philosophical traditions to which, among others, Kant, Marx, Humboldt, Husserl, Bühler and Cassier made great contributions. In sharp contrast to Saussure, who is believed to insist on the choice of the bifurcation of the synchronic observation on language rather than the diachronic model, and on the choice of the bifurcation of static langue rather than the dynamic parole as the legitimate object for his linguistic study, Bakhtin gives more emphasis to the dynamic dimensions of language：in his eyes, language can only exist in its use; that is, it is always socially situated and constructed. Studies on language have to focus on actual speech—the living language rather than the dead one. As is widely known, Bakhtin's criticisms of Saussurean linguistics are primarily made in his seminal book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (MPL), the only monograph exclusively on language problems published under the name of Yolosinov, a key member of the now-widely-accepted Bakhtin [1]Circle. Although Bakhtin has clearly elaborated in this book his positions on the philosophical foundations of language problems and accordingly made a relatively specific study on speech reporting, a common mechanism shared by human languages, he does not give a name to the way of studying living language in its context of use that he has strongly advocated.
His different understandings of language problems from Saussure actually have formulated the ontological and methodological foundations for his translinguistics, a competing way of studying language problems against Saussurean structural linguistics, which is firstly advanced in Proflems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (PDP) where [2]discourse of Dostoevsky's novels is discussed (Bakhtin, 1984:181). Although the notion of translinguistics is still pointed at Saussurean E3ure linguistics”, Bakhtin's purpose then is obviously to explore the polyphonic nature of Dostoevsky's novels that he believes are full of dialogic relationships between different voices. These dialogic relationships, according to him, “cannot be measured by purely linguistic criteria” (Bakhtin, 1984：182), but belong to the realm of translinguistics. That is to say, when the concept of translinguistics is advanced, it is closely related to the discussion on the discourse of Dostoevsky's novels rather than encompassing the issues of language use in a wider range. In addition, unlike Saussurean linguistics, whose object and way of doing things have been clearly defined once it was proposed, translinguistics remains on the level of making general commitments to do what Saussurean pure linguistics fails and is unable to do. And moreover, Bakhtin's translinguistic analysis of novel text relies heavily upon the insights and competence of the analyst rather than concrete linguistic evidence. As Lynne Pearce (1994: 66) points out, “it is interesting to see how, in tacit acknowledgement of this, Bakhtin resorts to words like ‘feel’ to describe the reader's task (e. g., ‘This process has to do with the ‘feel’ we have for distancing...’ [Bakhtin, 1981：419]).” It is generally believed that a textual analysis which relies too much on the analyst's personal “feel” rather than detailed and sufficient linguistic description is strongly redolent of running impressionistic poetic comments; that is, according to Halliday (2000：F42), it cannot be accepted as a rigorous analysis at all.
Though it is generally believed that The Problem of Speech Genres (PSG) is another significant work (apart from MPL) on the “pure” language problems, unfortunately, in this place Bakhtin focuses exclusively on utterance and genre, as if he has simply forgotten the notion of translinguistics he once proposed in PDP. Most probably, that is why the concept of translinguistics receives relatively less attention [3]in the circle of scholars working on Bakhtinian linguistic legacy. This lack of concern is well reflected in the four-volume collection of the seminal research papers, edited by Gardiner in 2003, on Bakhtin's ideas concerning philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, linguistics, psychology, history and even political science in the last thirty years. In this collection, entitled Mikhail Bakhtin, only one paper, Answering as Authoring：Mikhail Bakktin's Translinguistics, contributed by Michael Holquist, is on the topic of Bakhtin's translinguistics. Insightful as it is, the paper only focuses on the metaphysical foundation of translinguistics, failing to demonstrate the implications of translinguistics as an analytical tool for doing concrete [4]analysis for its object in a similar way Saussurean linguistics can do. In the Chinese world, researchers also mainly focus on the philosophically-semiologically-and-poetically-oriented interpretations of Bakhtin's theory about discourse or translinguistics, for example, Hu Zhuanglin (1994b; 2001), Wang Jiaxing (1998), Yang Xichang (1999), Ling Jianhou (2000; 2001; 2002), Ning Yizhong (2000), Bai Chunren (2000), Feng Lin (2001), Li Bin (2001), and Liu Hanzhi (2004), to name [5]just a few. That is to say, translinguistics is seldom interpreted in a [6]linguistically-oriented way.
The objective of this book, therefore, is to make a relatively more linguistically-oriented interpretation of Bakhtinian translinguistic ideas dispersed in his works written over several decades. Thus under our focus will be the subject of translinguistics, its connections with the contemporary canonical linguistic theories which share with it a similar philosophical foundation for observing language, and its applicability as a theoretical framework to analyzing hard news text.
To incorporate the linguistic findings into Bakhtin's translinguistics and thus turn the latter into a more workable framework for analyzing texts on the basis of due lexico-grammatical observations is what we mean by recontextualizing Bakhtin's translinguistics. The recontextualization of it in the setting of contemporary linguistics and media studies is partly motivated by Bakhtin's hypothetical assertion that any actual speech (i. e. any utterance or text) is full of dialogic relationships between various voices that can only be measured by translinguistics. Given that non-literary texts such as hard news reportings are encompassed in his classification of utterances or texts, they are expected to be dialogic in nature and their dialogicity can be analyzed by the framework provided by translinguistics. It is understood that although Bakhtin has theoretically taken the so-called public discourse including hard news text into his translinguistic consideration, he himself limits his dialogic reading to novel texts (especially those of Dostoevsky's). Sometimes he seems even to be distracted to make some seemingly self-contradictory statements. For example, he tends to argue that poetic forms like the epic and certain kinds of lyrics and some nonliterary texts such as hard news reports are essentially monologic, for they enforce a singular, authoritative and finalized voice upon the world. Only novels and indeed only certain kinds of novels are truly dialogic, and thus “submit to unfinalized and infinite dialogue” (Bakhtin/Volosinov, 1986：122-3; Bakhtin, 1986: 150-2; Allen, 2000 # 26; Pearce, 1994：64). Thus if the public texts such as hard news reportings can be read in a dialogic manner, Bakhtin's hypothetical assertion that any text is hetero-glossic and dialogic in nature can receive empirical support. In so doing, translinguistics can be developed into a framework that possesses stronger theoretical force and accordingly has a wider-range coverage. That is to say, aiming at a linguistically-oriented interpretation of translinguistics, we will start our discussion by accepting Bakhtin's hypothetical assertion that any text is dialogic in nature and anticipates that the monologic hard news text can also be read dialogically. If this gets done, Bakhtin's self-contradiction will be resolved by developing [7]translinguistics into a more general framework for textual analysis. Our recontextualization of Bakhtin's translinguistics in the setting of modern linguistics is actually also allowed by Bakhtin himself, who does have acknowledged the existence of complementarities between translinguistics and “pure linguistics” by saying that “they must complement one another” but, of course, at the same time he still maintains “they must not be confused” (Bakhtin, 1984：181). Unfortunately, Bakhtin fails to spare due efforts to demonstrate to us how linguistics complements his translinguistics or vice versa. Although in his later years, he seems to return to this topic by making several insightful observations on the differences and connections between linguistics and translinguistics, they are conducted mainly in the form of note-making rather than being fully developed (Bakhtin, 1986: 114, 118, 120, 122). The reason for his laconism on this problem may be partially because he did have plans to work on this subject but his old age failed him. But what is more important is that he consistently insists on a philosophical observation of the things in his vision. That is, even his analysis of Dostoevsky's novel discourse is for the ultimate purpose to understand the philosophical problems like the relationship between “I” and “other”, and the relationship between “words” and “world”. That is why he maintains that “our analysis must be called philosophical mainly because of what it is not: it is not a linguistic, philological, literary, or any other special kind of analysis [8](study)” (Bakhtin, 1986: 103). But Bakhtin's laconism on the interface between his translinguistics and linguistics and his “reluctance” or even “contemptuousness” to remain at somewhat specific levels of doing things by confining himself within the borders of a certain discipline do not necessarily mean that it is unnecessary and impossible for us to focus on the junctures and intersections between linguistics and translinguistics in order to make translinguistics, whose metaphysical and social dimensions have been fruitfully developed and interpreted, settle on a concrete materialized linguistic foundation. In this sense we are enabled and entitled by Bakhtin to interpret his translinguistics in the context of certain modern linguistic theories. It should be noted at this juncture that among different schools of modern linguistics, Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is found to be compatible with Bakhtinian translinguistics because they share a lot in the understanding of human language use by both emphasizing that language should be observed from a sociological perspective. The stratificational model of human language of SFL and its systematic indepth and fruitful observations of the lexico-grammatical resources of language make a solid foundation for Bakhtin's translinguistics to be developed into a workable framework for analyzing texts other than novels. That is to say, the combination of translinguistics and Hallidayan SFL can enhance the linguistically-oriented potential of translinguistics for textual analysis.
The choice of hard news text as the setting to reinterpret Bakhtin's translinguistics and as empirical evidence to test the validity of our recontextualized model of translinguistics is made on the basis of another rationale. According to journalist training textbooks and canonical media theories, hard news texts are expected to report facts. The core maxim of the highly acclaimed professionalism in the journalistic circle is the principle of objectivity and the ethical bottom line is to be free of bias against or in favour of what is reported (Tuchman, 1978: 160-1; Lau, 2004: 702-3; Potter, 2004). That is to say the authorial effect and fictionality of hard news text are supposed to be reduced to the lowest level, which is in sharp contrast with the novel texts that are believed to be fictional in nature—the story and its characters (especially what they say, do and think about) usually do not have their corresponding real matches in the world out there, and thus fictionality is generally considered the hallmark of a typical novel.[9] Thus the commonsensical relationship between hard news reportings and novels as far as factuality, fictionality and authorial control are concerned can roughly be illustrated by the following figure.[10]Figure 0.1 Cline of textual factuality and fictionality
Given that translinguistics theorizes on utterance or text that is believed to be full of voices from others in its context of use and thus dialogic and heteroglossic in nature, novel texts are then impossible to be taken under the complete control of the authors as they are generally expected, viz, not everything in the novel is simply created out of the mind of the author and at the mercy of his authorial will. Therefore, in Bakhtin's translinguistic analysis of Dostoevsky's novel discourse, the traditional omnipotent authorship gets deconstructed. In Dostoevsky's novels, according to Bakhtin, the characters are made to hold equal status with the author rather than being tightly controlled by the author—the relationship between the author and the character is understood to be that between “I” and “thou” (Bakhtin, 1984: Ch. 2). The author's voice and the voices from the characters interact with one another and thus a polyphonic effect is produced. The deconstruction of the authorship is actually in a measure in agreement with the postmodern mentality, which makes a productive context for a plethora of fruitful interpretations, reinterpretations, developments and even appropriations of Bakhtin's categories and concepts (Allen, 2000: 56-60, 69-76). But it seems to be against our common sense that the characters or heroes hold the equal status with the author and are actually in a measure independent of the latter. That is why Bakhtin's unusual interpretation of the relationship between the author and the heroes in Dostoevsky's novels triggers heated discussions among literary critics (Zeng Jun, 2004: 44-9）. During these discussions, however, it is easy to be overlooked that in Bakhtin's analysis of Dostoevsky's texts, two types of authors have been distinguished: the author-as-creator and the author-as-per-son. “As ‘a constitutive moment of the work’, the status of the former is relegated to the past upon completion of the text. The notion of author-creator for a given work thus effectively dissolves, leaving in its stead the author-person as ‘a constitutive moment of the ethical, social event of life’, who may then offer insights into the work from decidedly different perspectives than formerly—as critic, psychologist, or even moralist” (Danow, 1991: 69). In a dialogic reading of a text, therefore, the analyst most probably reads the text from the vantage point of the author-as-person, who is separated from the traditional unified autonomous author. When reading the text from the point of view of the author-as-person, the reader tends to read the text by shifting his visions from the fictional plane to the actual world, in which the heroes acquire independent lives and engage in dialogues with the author-as-person on equal terms. This is quite evident in Bakhtin's reading of Dostoevsky's novels in PDP. Thus, Danow argues that “[i] n elaborating the relationship of the author to his hero, Bakhtin constantly shifts his discussion from the plane of the fictional to the actual world. Oddly, he frequently refers to the character in a work as a human being, bearing a biography akin to the author and, therefore, as being the bearer of his own destiny” [11](Danow, 1991: 71). Another reason why Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky's novel as “the actual” may be because he believes that Dostoevsky's artistic perception of the world is characterized by the fact that he sees and represents the world in the category of coexistence. That is, he “treats every social and political question on the plane of the present-day”, which Bakhtin thinks “is explained not only by his position as a journalist, which required that everything be treated in the context of the present”, but “is explained precisely by the above characteristic of Dostoevsky's artistic vision” — “all is simultaneous, everything co-exists” (Bakhtin, 1984: 29-30). That is to say, in Bakhtin's eyes, the polyphonic-dialogic novel texts of Dostoevsky have something essential in common with journalistic texts: coexistence of diverse and contradictory materials in the cross-section of a single day. Therefore, it is safe to say that Bakhtin in a measure reads Dostoevsky's novel as news.
Bakhtinian dialogic reading of Dostoevsky's novel texts from a translinguistic perspective actually constitutes one of the major theoretical and practical resources for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), advocated by linguists such as Roger Fowler (Fowler, 1991; 1996) and Norman Fair-clough (Fairclough, 1992 a; 1995). In order to make clear social determinations and effects of discourse which are characteristically opaque to participants in social interactions, CDA analysts read texts (especially the so-called public texts including hard news texts) in the way of deconstructing what we usually take for granted, for instance, the objectivity of news and the academic discourse. In so doing, they intend to reveal the ideological domination and power relations lying behind our “common sense”, and thus to reduce the extent to which we are subject to ideological control. If “novels as fiction” can be accepted as common sense and Bakhtinian translinguistics can be used to read novel texts in a critical way by denaturalizing the canonical understanding of novels (their fictionality and authorship), then can translinguistics allow us to read hard news texts critically? Or can hard news text be read as fiction in which reporters exert a tight control over what is reported as a “creative novelist” does to his heroes rather than just working as a recorder? If the answer is “yes”, then the critical significance of translinguistics is established without arguing, for it can provide us with an analytic framework to read critically any text in the cline from the factual hard news to the highly fictional novel. And it should be noted in passing that considering dialogic readings of literary text have already been fruitfully made by a host of literary critics following Bakhtin, it is empirically advisable for our linguistically-oriented recon-textualization of translinguistics to be conducted in the setting of print hard news text of English, an important genre that makes up one of the two poles of the cline as far as factuality and fictionality are concerned, if we want to attain a translinguistic analytical framework with a wider coverage.
Determined by our major objective, the body of our book consists of five chapters: (1) Bakhtin's Translinguistics; (2) The Compatibility between Translinguistics and Hallidayan SFL; (3) Modeling Dialogicity on Hallidayan SFL; (4) Dialogic Markers and Relationships in Print News of English; and (5) Dialogic Interactions in Print News of English. In the first chapter, Bakhtin's translinguistics is given a relatively systematic account by piecing together his understandings and observations on language dispersed in the works over several decades. In Chapter 2, the compatibility between Bakhtinian translinguistics and Hallidayan SFL is demonstrated from the following
试读结束[说明：试读内容隐藏了图片]