Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T13:22:14.608Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The whole is sometimes less than the sum of its parts: toward a theory of document acts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

TODD OAKLEY  and
VERA TOBIN
TODD OAKLEY
Affiliation:
Case Western Reserve University
VERA TOBIN
Affiliation:
Case Western Reserve University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) as our principal test case. Marbury has a superabundance of rhetorical questions. They make up a significant and stylistically prominent portion of the total linguistic material of the text, yet they all but disappear from Marbury’s citation history and thus its content as an enduring jurisprudential entity. To account for these facts, we examine Marbury as a whole text addressing a particular situation, as a pastiche of constructions, and as a tool of jurisprudential decision-making. The intersection and independence of these ‘modes of being’ call for an overarching theoretical framework capable of accounting for facets of documents’ existence at three distinct but interpenetrating strata: system, artifact, and construction. We base our theory on primordial cognitive capacities for joint attention and joint commitments, with the strata as consequences of embodied human minds born into and embedded in intersubjective environments filled with and shaped by documents and their circulation. The closed system of United States Supreme Court opinions makes an excellent case for a theory of document acts that will eventually be used to understand and explain more open-ended systems.

Keywords

joint attentionjoint commitmentsintersubjectivityrhetorical questionsinformation artifact ontologySupreme Court OpinionsMarbury v. Madisonobiter dictastare decisis
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 79 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

references

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bergen, Benjamin, & Chang, Nancy (2005). Embodied construction grammar in simulation-based language understanding. In Ostman, Jan-Ola & Fried, Miriam (Eds.), Construction Grammars: cognitive grounding and theoretical extensions (pp. 147−190). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.Google Scholar
Borkin, A. (1971). Polarity items in questions. Chicago Linguistics Society, 7, 53−62.Google Scholar
Brandt, L. (2008). A semiotic approach to fictive interaction as a representational strategy in communicative meaning construction. In Oakley, T. & Hougaard, A. (Eds.), Mental spaces in discourse and interaction (pp. 109−148). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bråtan, S., & Trevarthen, T. (eds.) (2007). On being moved: from mirror neurons to empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chien, L., & Harris, R. (2012). Scheme trope chroma chengyu: figuration in Chinese four-character idioms. Cognitive Semiotics, 6, 155−180.Google Scholar
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58, 7−19.Google Scholar
Clark, H., & Gerrig, R. (1990). Quotations as demonstrations. Language, 66 (4), 764–805.Google Scholar
Clinton, Robert Lowry (1989). Marbury v. Madison and judicial review. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
Cowley, S. (2002). Why brains matter: an integrational perspective on The symbolic species. Language Sciences, 24, 73−95.Google Scholar
Cowley, S. (2011). Taking a language stance. Ecological Psychology, 23, 1−25.Google Scholar
Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar: syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Devitt, A. (1993). Generalizing about genre: new conceptions of an old concept. College Composition, and Communication, 44, 573−586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, V., & Green, M. (2006). Cognitive linguistics: an introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C., & Kay, P. (1999). Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: the case of the what’s x doing y? construction. Language, 75, 1−33.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. K. (1988). Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: the case of let alone. Language, 64, 501−538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: a construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Han, C. H. (1998). The structure and interpretation of imperatives: mood and force in universal grammar (Unpublished dissertation). University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time, trans. MacQuarrie, J. & Robinson, E.. London: SCM Press.Google Scholar
Herman, V. (1999). Deictic projection and conceptual blending in epistolarity. Poetics Today, 20 (3), 523–541.Google Scholar
Huhn, W. (2008). Five types of legal argument. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hutchins, E. (1995). How an airline cockpit remembers its speed. Cognitive Science, 19, 265−298.Google Scholar
Komter, M. L. (2002). The suspect’s own words: the treatment of written statements in Dutch courtrooms. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 9, 168−192.Google Scholar
Komter, M. L. (2006). From talk to text: the interactional construction of a police record. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 39, 201−228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koshik, I. (2005). Beyond rhetorical questions: assertive questions in everyday interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.Google Scholar
Krifka, M. (2001). For a structured meaning account of questions and answers. In Fery, C. and Sternefeld, W. (Eds.), Audiatur vox sapientia. A festschrift for Arnim von Stechow (pp. 287−319). Akademie Verlag, Berlin.Google Scholar
Laudusaw, W. (2003). Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations (Unpublished dissertation). University of Texas, Austin.Google Scholar
Lanham, R. (1991). Handlist of rhetorical terms, 2nd ed.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lee, F. A. (1994). Negative polarity licensing in wh-questions: the case of two licensers (Unpublished master’s thesis). University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Luhmann, N. (1995). Social systems, trans. Bednarz, J. Jr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Marshall, J. (1803 [1905]). Madison, Marbury v.. In Cotton, J. A. Jr. (Ed.), Constitutional decisions of John Marshall, vol. 1 (pp. 7−42 [154−180]). New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.Google Scholar
Melser, D. (2004). Acts of thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Menary, R. (2007). Cognitive integration: mind and cognition unbound. New York: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Miller, C. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151−167.Google Scholar
Moll, H., & Tomasello, M. (2007). How 14- and 18- month-olds know what others have experienced. Developmental Psychology, 43, 309−317.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Oakley, T. (2012). Conceptual integration. In Vershueren, J. (Ed.), Handbook of Pragmatics Online: 1−25. Online: <http://benjamins.com/online/hop/>.Google Scholar
Oakley, T., & Kaufer, D. (2008). Designing clinical experiences with words: three layers of analysis in clinical case studies. In Oakley, T. & Hougaard, A. (Eds.), Mental spaces in discourse and interaction (pp. 149−177). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.Google Scholar
Pascual, E. (2002). Imaginary trialogues: conceptual blending and fictive interaction in criminal courts. Utrecht: LOT Dissertation Series, n. 68.Google Scholar
Pascual, E. (2006). Questions in legal monologues: fictive interaction as argumentative strategy in a murder trial. Text and Talk, 26 (3), 383−402.Google Scholar
Pascual, E. (2008). Fictive interaction in everyday life and courtroom settings. In Oakley, T. & Hougaard, A. (Eds.), Mental spaces in discourse and interaction (pp. 79−107). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.Google Scholar
Perelman, Ch., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: a treatise on argumentation, trans. Wilkinson, J. & Weaver, P.. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Quaeghebear, L., & Reynaert, P. (2010). Does the need for linguistic expression constitute a problem to be solved? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 15−36.Google Scholar
Rock, F. (2001). The genesis of a witness statement. Forensic Linguistics, 8, 44−72.Google Scholar
Rohde, H. (2006). Rhetorical questions as redundant interrogatives. San Diego Linguistics Papers, 2, 134−168.Google Scholar
Rowlands, M. (2003). Externalism: putting mind and world back together again. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.Google Scholar
Sadock, J. (1971). Queclaratives. Chicago Linguistics Society, 7, 223−231.Google Scholar
Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1996). How writing came about. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Scofield, R. G. (2002). The distinction between judicial dicta and obiter dicta. Los Angeles Lawyer, 25, 17−21.Google Scholar
Searle, J. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Searle, J. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Searle, J. (2010). Making the social world: the structure of human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, B. (2010). Document acts. Proceedings of the Conference on Collective Intentionality, Basil, Switzerland, August 23−26. Online: <http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/DocumentActs.pdf>.Google Scholar
Tobin, V. (2008). Literary joint attention: social cognition and the puzzles of modernism (Unpublished dissertation). University of Maryland, College Park.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2000). Culture and cognitive development. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 37−40.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
van Charldorp, T. (2011). The coordination of talk and typing in police interrogations (Unpublished dissertation). VU University Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Verela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the cognitive world: the next step. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar