Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing

by Wallace Chafe

Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on close analyses of conversational speech as well as written fiction and nonfiction, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination.

Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many linguistic phenomena, such as pronouns, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages, such as the historical present and the free indirect style. While the book focuses on English, there are also discussions of the North American Indian language Seneca and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people.

This work offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness that will interest linguists, psychologists, literary scholars, computer scientists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1994

About the author

Wallace Chafe was one of the foremost original scholars of the functional theoretical approach to linguistics. He was involved in ongoing work with several communities of North American Indians, most notably the Seneca of New York. He also wrote extensively about discourse, language and consciousness, laughter, prosody, and other topics.
At the end of his life he was Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Reviews

[Natália B]

posledná kniha prečítaná v rámci môjho vysokoškolského štúdia *insert nostalgic sigh

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some major contributions to the fields of Linguistics and Psychology here. The ideas about how consciousness play a role in formation of language are ground-breaking. It's a difficult read, but engaging and enlightening. The third section about displacement starts out with interesting concepts but quickly devolves into literary theory.

[Marcus Dovigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A theoretical and challenging work about the interplay between consciousness and language. Parts One and Three were great but Part Two was a bit of a slog for me.

"In ordinary life, much of what anyone knows was first in the consciousness of someone else and is later shared through language. Language makes it possible to transcend immediate perceptions, actions, and evaluations and allows a person to experience secondhand what others experienced firsthand." (p.237)

"Cultivating the imagination is not a standard or a recognized part of scientific training, but we should not be glad of that fact. I would take special care never to downgrade the role of imagination in the pursuit of understanding, always appreciating its crucial role." (p.24)