Page 145 - Literacy in the New Media Age

134 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

writing; very much closer to transduction. It seems a thin outer layer which this
woman writer has acquired as part of her middle-manager training. She has not,
however, integrated and fully transformed these quite differently organised
resources for herself. The life of the institution, with its written forms, and the
life of the private domain, with its much more speech-like forms, are, it seems,
held very much apart.

Dynamic interrelations of framing systems

In the discussion below the relation of speech and writing is no longer in the
foreground. Here I focus on the clamping together, through punctuations, of
parts of a text which stem from quite distinct semiotic domains. In the previous
case clauses were drawn together to form more tightly linked structures, in this
case, a small fragment from the previous example ‘… to first consider …’ the
two elements drawn together are, in the case of ‘first’ an element which has a text
(-ordering) function, and in the case of ‘to consider’ an element from the
ideational domain. A text-ordering element is integrated into the ideational
domain, altering the character of both. The textual becomes ideational, and
thereby loses it text-organising function. Both the textual and ideational together
move towards becoming a new lexical element. Less punctuation (‘to first
consider’ rather than ‘first, to consider’) means more syntactic structuring work;
the new simpler structure is the result of more syntactic work; and it disguises
that work. The split infinitive is the marker of an ordering which, in this case at
least, is transgressive. It marks a cross-border trade, from textual to ideational,
and from there to the lexical. The prohibition of the split infinitive in prescriptive
grammar may well have this as its unacknowledged and unrecognised base,
namely a prohibition on transgressive structures, structures which cross and
thereby blur boundaries and categories.

Trading between semiotic systems

I have shown two types of framing. One is involved in the move between two
different modes, focused on the units of clause and sentence. The other involves
the integration of elements from distinct semantic domains, focused here on
elements from different functional components of the mode of writing. Many more
distinctive instances could be shown, though the principles are the same, and
may be relatively clear. The production of text is a complex process of
orchestration. In part it is what the writer does to produce the desired order for
the text; in part it is done to direct the reader in their reading. In all cases a large
number of means are employed to incorporate elements from all sorts of domain
into what will or can become a coherent textual/conceptual/rhetorical/ideological
entity. Punctuation in the old narrow sense is one of these means. What is clear is
that all the ordering systems interact in complex ways.