Strategic Interaction from Texts: Converting Written Discourse into Spoken Conversation

Abstract

The relationship of writing to language was put simply but eloquently some 15 years ago when William Moulton (1966:117) defined writing as what we put down on paper to remind us of what we know about language. At the time of Moulton’s remark, we had only a vague notion of the extent to which written texts mirror language. In the past, linguists and reading specialists saw written symbols basically as reflections of the code-structure of language. But successive stages of the pragmatic analysis of language have led us into considerations of the functionalism that comes from written documents. Previous papers (see, e.g., Holland and Campbell, 1982) have made it abundantly clear that we do not read all written materials in the same way and for the same purposes. We read for definitions, for directions to assemble things, to find our way through a subway system and to determine departure times for airplanes. When it comes time to fill out a tax return we read material presented according to the conventions of a computer programming language (e.g., “enter X in line A and go to Z in paragraph C”).