RESIDUAL ORALITY

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RESIDUAL ORALITY

• BASIL HATIM
• Hong Kong
• 2007

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RESIDUAL ORALITY

• For a variety of complex reasons, certain traits
  of the orality of by-gone days tend to linger,
  giving rise to what may be described as orate
  (as opposed to literate) linguistic behaviour.

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THE POWER OF THE WORD

• Residually oral traits culminate in the power of
  the word in the orate text.
• This may be a reflection of the way close-knit
  groups are formed by the word and around it.

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THE POWER OF THE WORD

• Consider, for example, the Arabic term which has
  defeated most attempts at proper translation
  jihad.

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RHETORICAL COUPLETS

• But words do not occur in isolation. A commonly
  used stylistic device in modern standard Arabic
  that is a hold-over from the oral tradition and
  the emphasis on memorability is the so-called
  rhetorical couplets (e.g. pride and dignity).

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RHETORICAL COUPLETS

• These set phrases are often conventional.
  However, couplets are not just simple
  combinations of two or more words, but tend to
  convey clear moral and cultural biases, thus
  conveying new meanings beyond the combination.

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REPETITION PARALLELISM

• Ong argues that this feature exists even in a
  highly literate culture, and concern with copia
  remains intense in Western culture so long as the
  culture sustains massive oral residue -- which is
  roughly until the age of Romanticism or even
  beyond'' (Ong, 1988, p. 35).

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REPETITION PARALLELISM

• In an orate text, however, such stylistic devices
  as parallelism, with full or partial
  lexico-grammatical recurrence, is commonly used
  even when the context is least conducive to such
  high levels of emphasis.

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CONNECTIVITY

• Characteristic of orate behaviour is the tendency
  to establish sentence connectivity additively
  rather than a subordinatively.
• Sentences coordinated with and rather than
  subordinated through when, thus, although,
  while, etc. generally contribute to a smoother
  flow of information, a convenient device when a
  point is being argued through.

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CONNECTIVITY

• As Ong observes, this linear text, which can
  hardly express the complicated relations entailed
  by a more discursively sophisticated process of
  reasoning, is optimally effective in achieving
  instant understanding, an important requirement
  in an orate context .

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AUDIENCE SOLIDARITY

• Text producers operate on the basis of addressing
  their audience not as something made up of
  disparate entities (including skeptics) but as
  one cohesive whole, a unity, not only amongst the
  various constituents, but also between the
  speaker and the group.

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AUDIENCE SOLIDARITY

• Reciprocally, an orate audience would see writing
  or speaking as an endorsement of this oneness, as
  something which one may rarely question or
  contest, as it is always truthful, intimate and
  context-laden. This intense relationship
  ultimately becomes a mindset underlying attitudes
  that are invariably too fixed and regimented.

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RESTRICTED VS ELABORATED CODE

• A restricted code is the speech of socially and
  educationally underprivileged sectors of a
  linguistic community who use typically
  ritualistic and predictable elements in their
  speech, and who tend to be situationally and
  contextually dependent, concrete and less
  abstract and generally less explicit than those
  who use an elaborated code (Bernestine 1972).
  In effect, restricted codes are forms of residual
  orality thriving in the midst of literate
  practices

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ARGUMENT BY PRESENTATION

• Argument by Presentation has its roots in the
  history of Arab society, in the ultimate,
  universal truths of the Quran, and in
  hierarchical societies autocratically ruled by
  Caliphs who were the leaders of the faith, and
  later and until recently, by colonial powers.

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THE ORATE TEXT

• Argumentative claims are made linguistically
  present by calling attention to them, repeating
  them and insisting on their salience (excessive
  pathos) rather than by appealing to logos
• To an English reader, this is perceived not
  without reason as "trespassing, presumptive,
  illiterate, haranguing and breathing down the
  neck of the audience" (Sa'deddin 198944).

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ADDITIVE RATHER THAN SUBORDINATIVE

• Meanings are built up cumulatively for the
  convenience of the speaker, often with a series
  of and,'' rather than when,'' thus,''
  although,'' and while'' to provide a
  discourse flow with analytic and reasoned
  subordination

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AGGREGATIVE RATHER THAN ANALYTIC

• Because oral society relies on formulas to ease
  memorization, meanings are often expressed by set
  phrases -- not a soldier, but a brave soldier.

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REDUNDANT OR COPIOUS

• Since there is no written record for reference in
  an oral society, repetition is necessary for the
  spread and continuation of knowledge.

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CONSERVATIVE OR TRADITIONALIST

• In oral societies, old people are always
  knowledgeable and respected and young people have
  to gain their knowledge from old people's
  memories
• In Ong's opinion, if a person is expected to
  contribute his brain to the development of new
  ideas, he must be freed from the burden of huge
  quantities of memorization.

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CLOSE TO THE HUMAN LIFEWORLD

• As oral societies have no writing technology to
  categorize and structure knowledge at a distance
  from lived experience, oral cultures must
  conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge
  with more or less close reference to the human
  lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective
  world to the more immediate, familiar interaction
  of human beings'' (Ong, 1988, p. 36).

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AGONISTICAL TONES

• striving to achieve an effect but appearing
  contrived or exaggerated
• Knowledge cannot be impersonalized and disengaged
  from the arena of interpersonal struggles.
• Made the Chinese language probably the richest
  among all languages in the world for its words of
  flattery.
• Such a culture makes hypocrisy a political virtue

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EMPATHETIC AND PARTICIPATORY RATHER THAN
OBJECTIVELY DISTANCED

• If the previous feature means a person is
  condemned when his knowledge is defied, this
  feature represents the reverse case when a
  person is condemned, his knowledge is equally
  condemned or when a person is honoured, whatever
  he holds becomes right.

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HOMEOSTATIC

• A tendency to reach equilibrium
• In an oral society, only words and happenings
  that bear meaning in the present context can be
  remembered. Other things have to be forgotten in
  order to reduce the mnemonic load, including the
  original context for the words and happenings.

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SITUATIONAL RATHER THAN ABSTRACT

• People in an oral society tend to rely on real
  situations for the understanding of abstract
  things. Conversely, oral people tend to draw
  conceptual analogies from real situations and use
  them in other situations as standards.

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CULTURE FOR THE EAR

• THE ORAL/AURAL TEXT
• Repetition
• Recurrent and plain lexis
• Overemphasis
• Repetition of specific syntactic
• structures
• Exaggeration

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THE AURAL/ORAL TEXTcontinued

• Discreteness
• Loose packaging of information
• Lack of apparent coherence
• An abundance of improvisory
• elements

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THE AURAL/ORAL TEXTcontinued

• Development by addition and
• accumulation
• Lack of self-awareness in the
• writing process
• Simplicity of thematic structure

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CULTURE FOR THE EYE

• THE VISUAL TEXT
• A balance between content and expression
• Linearization (continuity of
• occurrences and senses)

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THE VISUAL TEXTcontinued

• Elaborate organization of
• sentences, paragraphs and discourse
• Text structure development by
• progression
• A relatively complex thematic
• structure.

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THE END
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