Agency and Consciousness in Discourse: Self-other Dynamics as a Complex System

Agency and Consciousness in Discourse: Self-other Dynamics as a Complex System PAUL J. THIBAULT Continuum Agency and Consciousness in Discourse Self–other dynamics as a complex system PAUL J. THIBAULT Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 15 East 26th Street 11 York Road New York, NY 10010 London SE1 7NX © Paul J. Thibault 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 08264 7426 8 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall Contents List of Figures viii List of Tables x Preface xi 1 Introduction 1 1 Semiosis is a microcosm of human agency and consciousness 1 2 Alterity is a primitive intrinsic value that motivates self–nonself relations and meaning-making activity 2 3 Brain activity regulates body–world relations at the same time that body– world relations organize and shape body-brain systems and functions 3 4 Brain activity is contextually integrated to and participates in discourse 11 5 An outline of the arguments in this book 13 PART I: MEANING AND DISCOURSE 2 The Semiotic Mediation of Consciousness in Social Meaning-making 19 1 The diverse semantic scales of meaning-making 19 2 Indexical meaning-making practices and the semiotic grounding of consciousness 20 3 The deictic field of language and the texturing of consciousness 24 4 Karl Bühler’s theory of the deictic field of language 26 5 Intertextual meaning-making practices and the entraining of individuals to ecosocial semiotic values and constraints 31 6 Lemke’s theory of intertextual thematic formations 33 7 An analysis of the interaction of thematic patterns and genre in an instance of mother–child interaction 35 8 The context-sensitive and probabilistic nature of intertextual thematic formations 38 9 Social heteroglossia as a dynamical field of attractors and repellers and the individual’s re-envoicement of voices and values 41 10 Meta-semiotic meaning-making practices, stratification, and the emergence of symbolic levels of neural organization 43 11 Life as a referent: iconic, indexical, and symbolic dimensions 50 PART II: AGENCY, OTHERNESS, AND THE SELF 3 Agency and Intentionality in Early Infant Semiosis 55 1 The timescales of development and individuation: preliminary questions 55 2 Early infant semiosis and the dyadic regulation of the body-brain system 56 3 Movement, consciousness, and proto-intentionality in infant semiosis: Trevarthen’s account 57 iv Contents 4 A comment on Trevarthen’s ascription of intentionality to the infant 60 5 Proto-genres and semiotically mediated agency in the indexical phase: some reflections on Perinat and Sadurní’s interpretation of Piaget 60 6 Halliday’s account of early protolanguage 63 7 The conscious and the material domains as the two primary modes of experience: implications for the self 72 4 Agency, Consciousness, and Meaning-making in Children’s Play 77 1 The reconstitution of language and experience in symbolic play 77 2 Introducing the play episode: analytical preliminaries 78 3 Connecting the play episode to the context of culture of the participants 78 4 Reconstituting Harré’s theory of agency in relation to interpersonal meaning 82 5 The take up and negotiation of agent positions in the play episode: an analysis 86 6 Consciousness, agency, and the negotiation of self–other relations in and through propositions and proposals 93 7 Agency, learning, and the zone of proximal development 96 5 Egocentric Speech and the Re-envoicement of Others’ Meanings: Dialogue, Genre, and the Emergence of the Self 100 1 Re-envoicement versus internalization and appropriation 100 2 Egocentric speech, interpersonal meaning, and the development of self-reflexivity 101 3 Genre, dialogue, and the self-regulation of the individual 103 4 Vygotsky’s theory of egocentric speech and ludic communication 104 5 The linguistic characteristics of egocentric speech 106 6 Egocentric speech, practical activity, and the self’s emergence as agent 107 7 The imperative and indicative modes and the learning of the reflexive interpretation of self and other 109 8 Indicative mood, reflection, and the development of dialogical thinking 111 9 Egocentric speech, self-awareness, and identity 112 10 Egocentric speech and the dialogical negotiation and emergence of a self- referential perspective 113 11 Egocentric speech, indexical and symbolic modes of semiosis, and the development of the metaredundancy contextualization hierarchy 117 12 Egocentric Speech and the Emergence of Agency 118 12.1 An example of egocentric speech in children’s play: an analysis 118 12.2 Re-envoicing the social semiotic 120 13 Genre as social activity structure-type 121 14 The emergence of a self-referential perspective: the closing of the meta-loop on the “me” sector of the dialogic loop 125 15 Value, self-organizing context-sensitive constraints, and the semantic honing of the agent’s action trajectory 126 6 Agency in Action: from Multimodal Object Text to Performance in the Building of Semiotic Bridges between School and Home 129 0 Preliminary observations on the episode to be analysed and its transcription 129 1 The emergence of meaning across diverse timescales 129 2 The distribution of participant roles in the experiential space-time of the activity: an analysis of the location and distribution of consciousness across the “inner” and “outer” domains in relation to verbal and mental processes 131 3 Agency, viewpoint, and the locus of control of the activity 137 4 The semiotic integration of pictorial, graphological-typological, and linguistic resources in the child’s copy book 139 ... - tailieumienphi.vn