Abstract
In my research on discourse over the last few years, I became aware that theoretical work done in the fields of anthropology, rhetoric, and psychology on oral and literate tradition sheds light on a variety of discourse phenomena. In investigating how this is so, I concluded that it is not orality and literacy per se that accounts for the findings of the oral/literate research, but rather that typically oral and typically written discourse reflects relatively more focus on interpersonal involvement and content, respectively. However, there is something very tantalizing about dichotomies, and something catchy about the notion of orality versus literacy. People continued to walk away from my talks and my articles with the oral/ literate split more prominent in their minds than what I intended as my main idea: that it is not orality vs. literacy per se that is the key distinction, but relative focus on involvement vs. content.
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Tannen, D. (1982). The Myth of Orality and Literacy. In: Frawley, W. (eds) Linguistics and Literacy. Topics in Language and Linguistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9302-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9302-7_3
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