Thank you for your response!
I was thinking along the following lines:
Phatic utterances can be regarded as discourse "frames" (even not in
the technical Lakoffian, Minsky, Tannen etc. sense) - greetings,
leave-takings, metacommunicative checks. Manuel Padilla Cruz in "On
the social importance of phatic utterances", following D. Sperber's
work on culture, refers to knowledge about the use of phatic
utterances as "cultural metarepresentations". Victoria
Escandell-Vidal in "Towards a cognitive approach to politeness"
argues that such knowledge is culture specific and is a kind of ROM,
which is as easily accessed and automatic as the "non-cultural frames"
but "cannot be easily modified by other assumptions that
contradict them".
My questions is whether metanarrative or "the author's voice" in literary
works can also be considered phatic communication. It certainly is "framy",
but does it's use depend on cultural metarepresentations? The same
seems to apply to phatic utterances in general, which are not
standardized/conventionalized. Drawing analogy with the existing
research on politeness, one can ask: is phaticity anticipated (are
there certain defaults) or inferred as an implicature, or both???
Cheers,
Andre
Saturday, October 23, 2004, 3:04:50 AM, you wrote:
> Mmm. Interesting. I checked 'frame' with the OED, and there this
> addition (below) to the new edition, which relates it to a 'metanarrative'
> (Incidentally, no apparent recognition so far in the OED to 'frame' as used by
> Lakoff or Fillmore). It doesn't seem to me that 'frame' _should_ involves a
> 'meta-' element, a 'cultural _meta_-representation' by definition does?, but
> then cf. Chandra (below) -- Cheers,
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