Friday, 25 May 2012

Thinking about narrative and such things, it seems to me that the ultimated conceptual/perceptual categories are participant and circumstance. The element -p-c which belongs to neither category is that which opens up the situation, the intertextual, that of which the perception makes things new. Dare I call it the becoming? Its grammatical equivalent is the verb. The element +p-c is the behaver, the active subject, the participant which is not constrained. The element -p+c is the surrounding circumstances, the backdrop, that against which the dynamic perception plays out. And the element +p+c is the participant that is drawn into the action, which becomes a quality of that action.
These four elements may be augmented in various ways. To give the augmented Jakobsonian scheme we introduce a third, symbolic dimension, so that a textual function stands as counterpart within the text to the intertextual, a phatic function corresponds to the behavioural (expressive), a poetic function corresponds to the referential, and a metalingual function to the conative.
This eightfold way will also recall the combinations of Lacan's symbolic, real and imaginary and Halliday's verbal categories (relational = symbolic, existential = symbolic & real, etc, etc).

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