Summary of the Role of Discourse in Life
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Language serves to:
- provide bases for unity and division within a community and for alliance or conflict with
other communities. Language provides the stability to social order, the sense of status for
people within a social order, and the energy that changes as social order as its situations
evolve.
- provide different interpretations of situations. The way a community understands
situations that happen within it or to it are through choices of what is important and what
causes what. These choices are framed in the language of the motives that a community has
available to it to deal with its situations. Communities typically have many motives available to
them, and choice of interpretation is choice of motive.
- provide the bases and coordination of community action. Communities develop
understandings of what is good and bad about things that happen, things they approve of and
things they condemn. Motives provide them the vocabulary and the frames of understanding
to declare those values. And the motives provide a vocabulary and a script to perform the
motives and performance of these scripts coordinates the community's response to the
situations.
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Our Questions and Procedures for the Semester
Basically the difference between how we will view language, motivation, and action is a difference
in the questions we ask. Some new vocabulary and descriptions will need to be deployed to
answer our new questions.
Questions about the Content of Rhetoric
- What motives operate in the community?
- In what community do they operate? Are they characteristic of subcommunities
with
identity? How widely are they used within the community?
- What descriptions of situations are implied in the motives? How do these motives
frame
understanding differently than other motives?
- What values are implied?
- What actions are implied?
- To what situations is the motive typically applied?
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Questions about the Process of Motivation
- How do motives emerge?
- How do they spread through a community?
- How changeable are motives? By what process do they change?
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Questions about the Influence of Motives on Communities
- How does common language and motives tie the community together? How does it
divide the community? Can we see the transitions between unity and division and vice versa?
- How do motives coordinate community responses to their environment?
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