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This may not be the 'normal' place to find realisations about
'the spiritual', but it seems to me that everybody usually concentrates
on the ultimate nature of the mind, whereas the products
of the mind are ignored. To me, the ideas below provoke a lot
of thought about 'how it all works'.
- Ideational. Thought - Message - Text.
The Thought of the author is transformed into the Message he
wants to communicate, which is then put into Text (or Words
if spoken). From any one thought, there is a choice of messages,
and for any message there is a choice of many different textualisations.
The messages and texts which are NOT communicated can be as
important as those which are. (Ref. 1)
If thoughts are put into words, then conversely, do words always
represent the existence of a thought ? Can the original thought
be derived from the words in the text ?
- Pattern. Situation - Evaluation - Basis for
Evaluation. Several of the authors asserts that the basic
simple pattern of ALL texts and ALL communication is Situation
- Evaluation - Basis for Evaluation. That is, you read this
page, then you evaluate it as you wish, then (perhaps) you look
at the reasons why you have evaluated it this way. This statement
is about ALL texts, and it is well worth exploring further.
Does this imply that situatiion-evaluation-basis is the basis
of ALL THOUGHT too ? Other authors expand this root pattern
into more specialised ones, such as for technical writing :-
Situation - Problem - Solution - Evaluation - Basis. Narrative
is said to have a pattern of Setting - Complication - Resolution
- Evaluation - Moral, Many other fields have their own variations
on this one basic pattern. (Ref. 2)
How deep is this patterning ? If it is clear in a text, then
it must be in the thought too ? But, is it implicit in the nature
of the mind too ? (using the above idea about thought, message
and text)
- Implicit Dialogue The imaginary reader -
another author claims that ALL text proceeds as if the author
were being questioned by his imaginary reader with questions
such as - Why is that ? What do you mean ? What is good about
that ? (Ref. 3)
But, does all thought also proceed in the same way of imaginary
conversations ?
Are these patterns of implicit dialogue, thought-message-text
and situation-evaluation purely aspects of communication, or are
they deeper than this. Are some or all of these patterns implicit
in the mind too ? and then, are they implicit in the NATURE of
the mind ? Or, as some 'spiritual schools' seem to insist, is
the mind really not important at all ? But if the mind is not
important, is THOUGHT important or not. And, if thought is not
important, then why do we have it, what is it for ?
All quotes are from "Advances in Written Text Analysis",
edited by Malcolm Coulthard, Routledge, London, 1994. (However,
all of the above text is my own words, adapted or summarised from
the texts)
Ref. 1 - I have adapted this from the comments of Coulthard in
the preface, pps xi - xii and his own Chapter 1, "On analysing
and evaluating written text"
Ref. 2 - from Chapter 4, p56, Eugene Winter, "Clause Relations
as Information Structure: two basis text structures in English"
Ref. 3 - from Chapter 3, p.29, Michael Hoey "Signalling in
Discourse: a functional analysis of a common discourse pattern
in written and spoken English"
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