Differences between science writing and humanities writing often appear as glosses in guidebooks, but empirical studies comparing these two genres of writing are uncommon. This study investigated the use of a highlighting mechanism – the Hallidayan notion of the marked Theme (MT) – to understand how the sciences and humanities foreground contextual information, and what this implies about the nature of writing in these two broad disciplines. The corpus comprised 80 research articles, 40 each from the sciences and humanities. MTs were analyzed for their grammatical forms and functions using the Hallidayan framework. The findings revealed that while both genres of writing had roughly the same proportions of MTs used, they differed in their use of thematized clauses. More non-finite clauses were found in science writing, and more finite clauses in humanities writing. Science writing favored the use of Cause MTs, whereas humanities writing used more Contingency and Angle MTs. These findings suggest that science writing values brevity and authorial presence. Humanities writing, by contrast, prefers a more elaborate writing style, with a focus on establishing the conditions needed for the authors’ interpretations, and integrating the viewpoints from other scholars. Suggestions for further research involving other disciplines and multi-disciplinary fields of study are recommended.
{"title":"Marked Themes in academic writing: a comparative look at the sciences and humanities","authors":"Alvin Ping Leong","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0188","url":null,"abstract":"Differences between science writing and humanities writing often appear as glosses in guidebooks, but empirical studies comparing these two genres of writing are uncommon. This study investigated the use of a highlighting mechanism – the Hallidayan notion of the marked Theme (MT) – to understand how the sciences and humanities foreground contextual information, and what this implies about the nature of writing in these two broad disciplines. The corpus comprised 80 research articles, 40 each from the sciences and humanities. MTs were analyzed for their grammatical forms and functions using the Hallidayan framework. The findings revealed that while both genres of writing had roughly the same proportions of MTs used, they differed in their use of thematized clauses. More non-finite clauses were found in science writing, and more finite clauses in humanities writing. Science writing favored the use of Cause MTs, whereas humanities writing used more Contingency and Angle MTs. These findings suggest that science writing values brevity and authorial presence. Humanities writing, by contrast, prefers a more elaborate writing style, with a focus on establishing the conditions needed for the authors’ interpretations, and integrating the viewpoints from other scholars. Suggestions for further research involving other disciplines and multi-disciplinary fields of study are recommended.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139552503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article addresses the issue of motivated signs in semiotic theory and practice. It examines two influential versions of the term, Saussure’s and Kress’s, focussing on and triggered by Kress’s influence. It claims Kress’s importance lies not so much in theory as such, as in his analytic practice, multimodal analysis, as underpinned by this theory. Accordingly, it deploys a version of this practice on Kress as he is ‘doing theory’. It uses his late work Multimodality (Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality. London: Bloomsbury) as the main source of examples of theory and objects of analysis, and applies a similar approach to Saussure. The outcome is a theoretically-informed corpus including many examples of motivated signs in use. From this empirical corpus the article makes some indicative generalizations about the role of these signs in semiotic practice. It shows how pervasive these signs are, and how important these are for analysis. It connects them with a crucial but under-researched aspect of all social uses of meaning, the modality meta-function (checking validity/modality of all semiotic acts), in which motivated signs play an essential role. It reveals a more complex Saussure, more complementary to Kress, and enables more powerful multimodal analyses of social meanings and functions of text and talk.
{"title":"Motivated signs and multimodal analysis in Gunther Kress’s semiotics","authors":"Bob Hodge","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0064","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article addresses the issue of motivated signs in semiotic theory and practice. It examines two influential versions of the term, Saussure’s and Kress’s, focussing on and triggered by Kress’s influence. It claims Kress’s importance lies not so much in theory as such, as in his analytic practice, multimodal analysis, as underpinned by this theory. Accordingly, it deploys a version of this practice on Kress as he is ‘doing theory’. It uses his late work Multimodality (Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality. London: Bloomsbury) as the main source of examples of theory and objects of analysis, and applies a similar approach to Saussure. The outcome is a theoretically-informed corpus including many examples of motivated signs in use. From this empirical corpus the article makes some indicative generalizations about the role of these signs in semiotic practice. It shows how pervasive these signs are, and how important these are for analysis. It connects them with a crucial but under-researched aspect of all social uses of meaning, the modality meta-function (checking validity/modality of all semiotic acts), in which motivated signs play an essential role. It reveals a more complex Saussure, more complementary to Kress, and enables more powerful multimodal analyses of social meanings and functions of text and talk.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"50 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139437328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper introduces a new perspective on analysing courtroom insincerity by focusing on questions asked by lawyers in the Malawi criminal justice system. The study aimed at examining the linguistic tools of tracing insincerity in lawyers’ questions; the varying degrees of insincerity in defence and prosecution lawyers and their rationale for making such choices. The study argues that courtroom setting is a war zone where different parties have divergent goals. Such encounters are much likely to yield higher chances of insincerity, which can be manifested in the questions lawyers ask. The analysis is based on data from four criminal cases, which were collected from the High Court of Malawi. My framework of analysing insincerity in questions examines the prescribed degrees of control that questions exert on the witnesses in relation to their productiveness. The findings indicate that, when examining witnesses, prosecutors exercise less insincerity while defence lawyers opt for questions with high insincerity. These imbalances in language use are enshrined in and supported by law in its statutes. The findings of this study have jurisprudential implications, especially in Africa which is internationally less represented in the studies of language and law.
{"title":"Insincerity in lawyers’ questioning strategies in Malawian criminal courtroom discourse","authors":"Wellman Kondowe","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0083","url":null,"abstract":"This paper introduces a new perspective on analysing courtroom insincerity by focusing on questions asked by lawyers in the Malawi criminal justice system. The study aimed at examining the linguistic tools of tracing insincerity in lawyers’ questions; the varying degrees of insincerity in defence and prosecution lawyers and their rationale for making such choices. The study argues that courtroom setting is a war zone where different parties have divergent goals. Such encounters are much likely to yield higher chances of insincerity, which can be manifested in the questions lawyers ask. The analysis is based on data from four criminal cases, which were collected from the High Court of Malawi. My framework of analysing insincerity in questions examines the prescribed degrees of control that questions exert on the witnesses in relation to their productiveness. The findings indicate that, when examining witnesses, prosecutors exercise less insincerity while defence lawyers opt for questions with high insincerity. These imbalances in language use are enshrined in and supported by law in its statutes. The findings of this study have jurisprudential implications, especially in Africa which is internationally less represented in the studies of language and law.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138579996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden’s way to handle the crisis was referred to as ‘the Swedish strategy’ and regarded as unconventional. Most studies of the Swedish strategy have focused on politicians’ legitimations, but not on the discursive negotiation in a media context. The objectives of this critical discourse study are to examine how the Swedish strategy was (de)legitimised in Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, during 2020, and what role national discourses played for discursive framings of the Swedish strategy. Using legitimation analysis combined with affect as a discourse analytical concept, we examine 71 newspaper articles. The findings show how a nationalistic framing highlights trust and responsibility as key aspects of the strategy, but also how trust and responsibility are used in delegitimations with additional frames, such as consequences for individuals’ everyday lives, or the frame of an international scientific community. The findings shed new light on the role of national discourses in the initial internal debates about Swedish COVID-19 management, and on the usefulness of an analytical approach that considers an elaborated analysis of different delegitimation strategies and the importance of affect for discourses and (de)legitimations.
{"title":"National discourses in (de)legitimations of the Swedish COVID-19 strategy","authors":"Karin Idevall Hagren, Theres Bellander","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0100","url":null,"abstract":"During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden’s way to handle the crisis was referred to as ‘the Swedish strategy’ and regarded as unconventional. Most studies of the Swedish strategy have focused on politicians’ legitimations, but not on the discursive negotiation in a media context. The objectives of this critical discourse study are to examine how the Swedish strategy was (de)legitimised in Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, during 2020, and what role national discourses played for discursive framings of the Swedish strategy. Using legitimation analysis combined with affect as a discourse analytical concept, we examine 71 newspaper articles. The findings show how a nationalistic framing highlights trust and responsibility as key aspects of the strategy, but also how trust and responsibility are used in delegitimations with additional frames, such as consequences for individuals’ everyday lives, or the frame of an international scientific community. The findings shed new light on the role of national discourses in the initial internal debates about Swedish COVID-19 management, and on the usefulness of an analytical approach that considers an elaborated analysis of different delegitimation strategies and the importance of affect for discourses and (de)legitimations.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"76 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138561560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Never in modern times has public health communication been so critical yet so fragile. When the first COVID-19 case was detected in Taiwan, Taiwanese health officials readily embedded pandemic detective narratives within public announcements to alert and reassure citizens about the government’s preparedness. Such narratives are subject to revision because of challenges from the press, thereby inviting uncertainty as to who is telling the truth. In this study, I draw on the notions of narrative construction and circulation to analyze video recordings of daily press conferences about COVID-19 in Taiwan and trace how the Taiwanese media covered the island’s first COVID-19 case from diagnosis to recovery. Along the way, pandemic detective narratives were multimodally told, untold, and retold. The health officials’ narrative (re)entextualizations conflicted with those of the press and the person with COVID-19. This conflict stemmed from the different means of narrative construction and circulation that each narrator utilized to make sense of the illness experience. The differences suggest a tension between asserting control and conveying authenticity that intertextually potentiates and debilitates trust.
{"title":"How pandemic detective narratives potentiate and debilitate trust","authors":"Sheng-Hsun Lee","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0080","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Never in modern times has public health communication been so critical yet so fragile. When the first COVID-19 case was detected in Taiwan, Taiwanese health officials readily embedded pandemic detective narratives within public announcements to alert and reassure citizens about the government’s preparedness. Such narratives are subject to revision because of challenges from the press, thereby inviting uncertainty as to who is telling the truth. In this study, I draw on the notions of narrative construction and circulation to analyze video recordings of daily press conferences about COVID-19 in Taiwan and trace how the Taiwanese media covered the island’s first COVID-19 case from diagnosis to recovery. Along the way, pandemic detective narratives were multimodally told, untold, and retold. The health officials’ narrative (re)entextualizations conflicted with those of the press and the person with COVID-19. This conflict stemmed from the different means of narrative construction and circulation that each narrator utilized to make sense of the illness experience. The differences suggest a tension between asserting control and conveying authenticity that intertextually potentiates and debilitates trust.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"61 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139230965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper argues that classroom role-play can be conceptualised theoretically as an oral genre, as defined within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The work draws on analysis of 15 video-recorded child-led role-plays in which groups of three 4–5 year-old children engage in five different life-like social scenarios. The study is underpinned by SFL register and genre analysis of the children’s interactions, and the findings reveal how the children’s linguistic choices have a direct impact on the dynamically unfolding role-play, and how imaginary scenarios are construed by the instantiation of individual genre stages, some of which serve to regulate the role-play and others that mimic real life social scenarios. The findings suggest that the two different types of stages construe two separate, but interwoven contexts, with the make-believe context often being dependent on the regulative context. The paper offers new insights into the ways in which SFL can reveal nuances in children’s dialogic and dynamic language in play.
{"title":"Using genre to explain how children linguistically co-construct make-believe social scenarios in classroom role-play","authors":"Sarah Jane Mukherjee","doi":"10.1515/text-2021-0185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0185","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that classroom role-play can be conceptualised theoretically as an oral genre, as defined within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The work draws on analysis of 15 video-recorded child-led role-plays in which groups of three 4–5 year-old children engage in five different life-like social scenarios. The study is underpinned by SFL register and genre analysis of the children’s interactions, and the findings reveal how the children’s linguistic choices have a direct impact on the dynamically unfolding role-play, and how imaginary scenarios are construed by the instantiation of individual genre stages, some of which serve to regulate the role-play and others that mimic real life social scenarios. The findings suggest that the two different types of stages construe two separate, but interwoven contexts, with the make-believe context often being dependent on the regulative context. The paper offers new insights into the ways in which SFL can reveal nuances in children’s dialogic and dynamic language in play.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"59 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138542286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article is a practitioner-based account of the uptake of Kress’s ideas on literacy, literature and meaning-making in South African educational contexts, in particular, his integration of politics, semiosis and literacy. It examines the affective force of these ideas in South African classrooms in certain institutions during the immediate post-apartheid period from 1994 onwards, showing how Kress’s key concepts and principles provided a transformative theoretical framework for the work of progressive educators. A Kress-inspired framework propelled new conceptualisations of literacy and meaning-making in these classrooms and beyond – at all levels, from primary through to tertiary – and fuelled research from 1994 into the first decade of the new millennium. Given Kress’s insistence on the social, as in social semiotics, and his stress on the integration of representation, communication and situatedness, this article focuses on his ideas in context, how and why they were put to work and what their outcomes were. It is proposed that the South African case – although unique in many ways – may be relevant to postcolonial and decolonising educational contexts in the South more generally.
{"title":"Educators’ uptake of Kress’s ideas on meaning-making and literacy: a case study from South Africa","authors":"Denise Newfield","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0060","url":null,"abstract":"This article is a practitioner-based account of the uptake of Kress’s ideas on literacy, literature and meaning-making in South African educational contexts, in particular, his integration of politics, semiosis and literacy. It examines the affective force of these ideas in South African classrooms in certain institutions during the immediate post-apartheid period from 1994 onwards, showing how Kress’s key concepts and principles provided a transformative theoretical framework for the work of progressive educators. A Kress-inspired framework propelled new conceptualisations of literacy and meaning-making in these classrooms and beyond – at all levels, from primary through to tertiary – and fuelled research from 1994 into the first decade of the new millennium. Given Kress’s insistence on the social, as in <jats:italic>social</jats:italic> semiotics, and his stress on the integration of representation, communication and situatedness, this article focuses on his ideas <jats:italic>in context</jats:italic>, how and why they were put to work and what their outcomes were. It is proposed that the South African case – although unique in many ways – may be relevant to postcolonial and decolonising educational contexts in the South more generally.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"22 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138527028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this paper I show how Gunther Kress, throughout his work, struggled with the contradictory poles of intellectual attraction that lead many other thinkers to firmly anchor themselves to fixed positions and safeguard themselves from doubt. I will focus on two issues, the tension between social determination and individual agency, and the tension between ‘critique’ and ‘design’. In his early work, Kress spoke of the individual as socially determined and of linguistic competence as a product of the social structure. Later he began to emphasize individual agency (and the agency of ‘communities’) rather than the power of ideologies and institutions. But the tension between the two continued to be felt throughout his work. Secondly, though Kress was one of the originators of critical discourse analysis, he later distanced himself from it, arguing that critique looks backwards and focuses on power and convention, while design looks forward and focuses on empowerment and innovation. But here too, the issue was never finally settled, and Kress recognized that critique and design are interdependent. Finally, I will describe Kress’s ‘exploratory’ approach to semiotics in which an open attitude to data, dialogue, and the interdependence of text analysis and theory-formation play a fundamental role.
{"title":"Determination and agency in the work of Gunther Kress","authors":"Theo van Leeuwen","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0067","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper I show how Gunther Kress, throughout his work, struggled with the contradictory poles of intellectual attraction that lead many other thinkers to firmly anchor themselves to fixed positions and safeguard themselves from doubt. I will focus on two issues, the tension between social determination and individual agency, and the tension between ‘critique’ and ‘design’. In his early work, Kress spoke of the individual as socially determined and of linguistic competence as a product of the social structure. Later he began to emphasize individual agency (and the agency of ‘communities’) rather than the power of ideologies and institutions. But the tension between the two continued to be felt throughout his work. Secondly, though Kress was one of the originators of critical discourse analysis, he later distanced himself from it, arguing that critique looks backwards and focuses on power and convention, while design looks forward and focuses on empowerment and innovation. But here too, the issue was never finally settled, and Kress recognized that critique and design are interdependent. Finally, I will describe Kress’s ‘exploratory’ approach to semiotics in which an open attitude to data, dialogue, and the interdependence of text analysis and theory-formation play a fundamental role.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136227747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper presents a conceptual analysis and critical review of the notion of ‘affordance’ and its uptake, transformation and application in the work of Gunther Kress. It traces its origins and explores how Kress, co-founder of social semiotics, (re)conceptualised affordance and incorporated it in his social semiotic theory of sign making, defining affordance in terms of the “potentials and limitations of specific modes”. The paper discusses how his take on the term was received, and develops a radical critique questioning the analytical merits of affordance. It concludes with a call for a return to Kress’s original question of exactly what it is about a form (signifier) that makes it suitable, in the eyes of the sign maker, for what they want to express (signified), and to consider materiality and social convention alongside the sign maker’s lifeworld, audience, situation, and conditions of sign making.
{"title":"What modes can and cannot do: Affordance in Gunther Kress’s theory of sign making","authors":"Jeff Bezemer","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0055","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a conceptual analysis and critical review of the notion of ‘affordance’ and its uptake, transformation and application in the work of Gunther Kress. It traces its origins and explores how Kress, co-founder of social semiotics, (re)conceptualised affordance and incorporated it in his social semiotic theory of sign making, defining affordance in terms of the “potentials and limitations of specific modes”. The paper discusses how his take on the term was received, and develops a radical critique questioning the analytical merits of affordance. It concludes with a call for a return to Kress’s original question of exactly what it is about a form (signifier) that makes it suitable, in the eyes of the sign maker, for what they want to express (signified), and to consider materiality and social convention alongside the sign maker’s lifeworld, audience, situation, and conditions of sign making.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"6 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138527029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Tasting sessions are a social activity in which the senses and the sensorial features of the tasted objects are the main focus of the participants, who do not only experience taste but also aim at precisely describing it. For doing that, they use pre-formatted tasting sheets and pre-existing standardized repertoires of descriptors. This paper investigates the relations between bodies and sensations, linguistic expressions and the normativity of lexical repertoires. While the literature has insisted on the sensorial lexicon of diverse languages and its specialization within expert domains, the very way in which the sensing body, language, and the normativity of standardized categories are precisely articulated in tasting practices remains understudied. Using an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, this paper demonstrates how participants in training tasting sessions achieve practically, bodily and materially the association between the sample tasted, the sensing body and the use of lexical repertoires. Artefacts and tools like tasting sheets and lexical lists are situatedly mobilized in a way that enhances the senses but also socializes and standardizes them. On the basis of cheese tasting sessions video-recorded during training workshops of professional tasters in Italy and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the paper demonstrates how the normative order of sensing is achieved through the imbrication of the use of tasting sheets within the sensory examination of samples – thus showing how body, materiality, language, and artefacts are normatively constrained, practically managed and bodily aligned in the tasting session.
{"title":"The normative order of sensing: enacting the tasting sheet in tasting training sessions","authors":"Lorenza Mondada","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0195","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Tasting sessions are a social activity in which the senses and the sensorial features of the tasted objects are the main focus of the participants, who do not only experience taste but also aim at precisely describing it. For doing that, they use pre-formatted tasting sheets and pre-existing standardized repertoires of descriptors. This paper investigates the relations between bodies and sensations, linguistic expressions and the normativity of lexical repertoires. While the literature has insisted on the sensorial lexicon of diverse languages and its specialization within expert domains, the very way in which the sensing body, language, and the normativity of standardized categories are precisely articulated in tasting practices remains understudied. Using an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, this paper demonstrates how participants in training tasting sessions achieve practically, bodily and materially the association between the sample tasted, the sensing body and the use of lexical repertoires. Artefacts and tools like tasting sheets and lexical lists are situatedly mobilized in a way that enhances the senses but also socializes and standardizes them. On the basis of cheese tasting sessions video-recorded during training workshops of professional tasters in Italy and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the paper demonstrates how the normative order of sensing is achieved through the imbrication of the use of tasting sheets within the sensory examination of samples – thus showing how body, materiality, language, and artefacts are normatively constrained, practically managed and bodily aligned in the tasting session.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":" 48","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135192538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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