We classify English strings into three clusters: internal, relational, and external perspectives.
Cluster 1: Internal Perspectives
Internal perspectives indicate the stings of English that prime audiences to engage the interior mind of the speaker or writer or a character the speaker or
writer references. Strings priming an internal perspective include first person, expressive, affective, subjective, and time-projected thinking. Communications primed from these strings strike audiences as personalized and disclosing.
Personal disclosure describes, perhaps, our earliest experiences with writing, revealing to readers a rich and diverse warehouse of thoughts that reflect the unique perspective of the individual self: personal cognitions, subjective esti-mates of confidence, diffidence, neutrality, intensity, expectancy, contingency, affect, retrospection, and anticipation.
Interior thought can pop up in inexperienced writing even when the writer tries to suppress subjectivity. Ask anyone poised with a camera to take a photograph of a chair and the result will be a picture of a chair. Ask an inexperienced writer poised with a pen to describe a chair and one is likely to get strings like:
93. I see a chair that…
94. The chair in front of me looks like a…
95. The chair has an interesting shape…
Unlike the photograph, words that tumble from our minds without forethought tend to reveal our inner mind at work. Among all media of representation, speech and texts most effortlessly plop the reader in the midst of the communicator’s thought. In film, it takes special production techniques, like voice-overs, to let the audience overhear a cinematic character’s silent thought. With texts in particular, the impression of silent thought comes early. Children can keep personal diaries before they can keep time. Getting children writers to write from inside their own head is no trick. Getting them to see beyond their spontaneous thought is the harder challenge. In one preliminary study (Collins, Kaufer, Neuwirth, Hajduk, &
Palmquist 2002), we found inexperienced writers overtly exhibit their inner thinking in their writing significantly more than do expert writers, even when given the same writing task.
The tense-aspect system of language adds a rich dimension to interior writing.
It unmoors the writer’s thought from a static present and frees it to project back-ward and forback-ward in time. With the tense-aspect system, writers can express not only what they, their narrators, or characters think now. They can portray what such individuals, from an anchored point in time, have thought or will think.
Speech and texts can accomplish these shifts in time with incredible efficiency. In addition to tense and aspect, many content ideas encode time-shifting. A rich example is the concept of conspiracy. “The gang was to make off with the loot when the clock struck one.” In this sentence, we meet a cabal of persons planning the future, under cover, from the vantage of the past. The sentence portrays a conspiracy because of a future projected from a past vantage point (was to + verb).
Conspiracies are hard to prove in the physical world but easy to concoct as objects of thought because of the fluid ability of language concepts to distribute a communicator’s thinking across multiple horizons of time.
Cluster 2: Relational Perspectives
A speaker or writer’s art at priming audiences draws from a second cluster of priming strings, what we call relational perspectives. English strings emanating from this perspective rely on two distinct senses of relation. The first sense involves connecting audiences to the representations within the language. These connecting strings evoke shared reasoning, social ties, and directed activity with respect to audiences. The second sense involves navigating audiences through the linear medium of language. These navigational strings aid audiences as they make their way from beginning to end in speech and from left to right in text.*
Cluster 3: External Perspectives
A writer’s priming art draws from a third cluster, what we call external perspectives. Strings drawn from this cluster convey a world outside of mind and witnessable through the public senses. Through these externalized or descriptive strings, writers engage readers in scenic and temporal depictions.
Descriptive strings allow listeners and readers to experience situations and worlds within the text, situations displaced in time and space from the immedi-acy of the audience’s context.
*A theoretical footnote is in order here, especially when we talk about cues to readers in texts, implying as we may seem to be that every text presupposes an empirical reader wading through.
Many documents, including much of our greatest literature, was composed for an actual readership no longer alive. Theoretical issues are thus raised about the extent to which we can talk about texts as leading a live reader when the text is hundreds or thousands of years old. Our approach to texts may be justly criticized for finessing these issues raised by old texts.
Certainly, there is an argument to be made that both individual interpretation and interpretations pooled across a population change over time. We do not read English texts of earlier decades and centuries with the same contextual and cultural implications as we read contemporary texts. The strings we report are based on contemporary English only and do not take into account the changes of English from the time we use it to Chaucer’s time. (Foucault, 1977; Ong, 1975). That said, the strings we report on are deeply embedded in the rhetorical substrate of the English language and much of this substrate is surprisingly resistant to processes of historical language change. For example, we have found that the substrate our catalog research has brought to the surface is surprisingly more resistant to historical change than neologisms, proper names, and the various references of context and culture that inform downstream interpretations. Thus, for example, while strings we codes are restricted to contemporary English and ignored the English of Shakespeare’s time, the context of Elizabethan London, and the Globe Theatre, the strings of contemporary English from the rhetorical substrate we have extracted in our catalog still do a respectable job sorting Shakespearean genres. Positive and negative affect terms of English (e.g., good, just) that were true for Shakespeare remain true for us. Fundamental ways of portraying rhetorical action from internal, relational, and external perspectives appear to have remained intact from the beginnings of English. Our categorization of rhetorical action from everyday strings of English seems somewhat resistant to historical change than parts of language requiring deep context and cultural reference. This, of course, is not to deny that we could do better analyzing old texts if we built representational dictionaries closer to the temporal and cultural time they appeared. But it is to suggest that the layer of language we are trying to capture, the rhetorical substrate, remains more stable across aspects of language change than other language variables.
Experienced writers understand, and control putting a single visual concept-image (chair) before the mind of a reader and also dropping off a more extended and scene-involving word picture (green and white lawn chair, its cushions shabby and torn from too much horseplay at the beach). The writer can also create images of spatial intervals, describing a chair that is facing, or abutting, or standing next to a sofa. The writer can depict motion, making a character run, glide, or snort and extending motion into intervals of space as well (running all the way home). The description in these cases is scenic, the camera of the writer’s inner eye sampling a space without interruption. Description, moreover, can cut across scenic boundaries, suggesting a dissolve between scenes and the feeling that time has passed between the end of one scene and the start of another. When the cuts are fast and the scenes mark fleeting events in a temporal stream, the audience can feel a fast-paced narrative montage (e.g., Caesar came, saw, and conquered). The simplest narratives are scene-less events that chain together the start and surcease of action along a single plot line. Temporal descriptions can also include the shifts between events (e.g., the next time, the following week, they finally arrived). When these shifts cover intervals of time that are longer than eyewitnessed time, audiences feel the displacement of time as well as space.
That’s why drifting across the ocean suggests the elapse of time in a way that drifting across the kitchen floor cannot. Finally, temporal descriptions can include intervals of time (for ten years, during the cold war). These intervals can repeat and, when they do, they become cycling intervals (every week, most Tuesdays, each morning) that can indicate ritualistic as well as recurring events.