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Rhetoric and Time: Cognition, Culture, and Interaction

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Rhetoric and Time: Cognition, Culture, and Interaction RHETORIC AND TIME: COGNITION, CULTURE, AND INTERACTION by MICHAEL MOSS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Todd Oakley Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY January, 2013 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of Michael Moss Candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree*. Dr. Thomas Fountain Dr. Todd Oakley Mr. James Sheeler Dr. Mark Turner July 9, 2012 *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 4 INTRODUCTION: What Is Going On Here Now? 5 CHAPTER 1: Temporal Cognition: Time, Meaning, and Culture 18 CHAPTER 2: Interactive Time: Charity, Relevance and Cognitive Bias 43 CHAPTER 3: The Costs of Rescheduling: The Case of Indian English “Prepone” 91 CHAPTER 4: Time-Saving Interaction: The Case of Straight-Talking Israeli Dugri 151 CONCLUSION 181 REFERENCES 197 3 Rhetoric and Time: Cognition, Culture, and Interaction Abstract by MICHAEL MOSS Temporal cognition, cognitive bias of time-saving heuristics in decision-making, neo-Whorfian linguistic relativism, pragmatic theories of interaction and inferential processing, and cross-cultural research are emerging methodologies for enhancing contemporary understanding of high-stakes rhetoric. As a unified framework they can provide strategic communicators much needed insight into the psychology and practice of time-management in the digital culture of the attention economy. 4 Introduction: What Is Going On Here Now? “Time is mysterious; tea-time doubly so” – Douglas Adams1 By way of introduction, a statistic: According to a survey of the Oxford Language Corpus, the lexical item “time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language.2 It is difficult to draw conclusions about how people value and relate to words, constructs, and their meanings based on lexicographical prominence alone. But in this case a cultural intuition suggests itself: Time seems ever more relevant to us because we commonly perceive ourselves of being in possession of increasingly less of it (Hassan 19). This withering observation points to the slippery nature of time as a concept and an experienced reality. Of course, the general anxiety of “holding” onto time is perennial. There is nothing intuitive about mortal finitude. Just as it is a brutal empirical fact, so too is time a prime generative source of human meaning that arises out of universal mechanisms of the mind (Turner 17). Temporality informs the bodily basis of human meaning, notions of human agency, and, synchronized activities involving joint attention (Turner 113). The latter shows us that meaning is more than a property discretely residing in minds, but also the cooperative product of minds creating shared meaning through interaction. Perhaps the most singular form of human temporal synchronization is communication. Language is a tool and users have to adjust its cultural “settings” so that members interact in the right time and in proper measure. There is, however, no such thing as a default setting. The 1 Douglas Adams. Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul. Pocket Books, 1991. 2 Anon. 2006. “The Popularity of ‘Time’ Unveiled.” BBC, June 22, sec. UK. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5104778.stm. 5 individual is enculturated from earliest development and grows up with a language suffused with culture, world view, and conceptual storehouse (Oakley 126). Three placeholder inspirations help animate my fascination with time, meaning, and culture. First is Erving Goffman’s instinct to ask the question: “What is it that’s going on here (Goffman 1974: 45)?”3 The Goffmanian curiosity is especially alert to the patterns organizing everyday experience. I formed a very acute intuition of how people relate to time and language based on six years of writing instruction in a course designed to expose engineering students to the conventions of professional communications. The students were typically tasked with presenting simulated research proposals in written and oral form to an audience of their peers role-playing as potential decision-makers. The gist of my observation was that many students struggled with frontloading their claims. They seemed to experience difficulty processing the concept of rhetorical exigency. Exigency refers to the sense of urgency that necessitates a rhetorical intervention (Katriel 178). In workplace communication it is often the pragmatic needs of the decision-maker that constrains the structure of the argument (Wasson 210). The real world scenarios of a decision-maker simultaneously evaluating competing proposals, multi-tasking, or concentrating on optimizing time in an already overburdened schedule rarely registered with students as possible realities. It was in the absence of time urgency as a factor determining the reception of their arguments that I perceived the operative assumption guiding their presentational 3 Quoted via Mark Turner. 2001. Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science. Oxford University Press. 6 strategies. They were relatively scrupulous about respecting assigned allotments of space (assignment length) and time (duration of presentation). But they were crucially missing a standard of relevance that reflected real-world conditions. They instead subscribed implicitly to a concept of an abstract rational decision-maker. This imaginary construct was decoupled from environmental pressures and cognitive biases. Decisions were not polluted by time constraints because the real guiding imperative was the systematic presentation of the truth. The question is how such an ideal of rationalism got so entrenched in their thinking about communication. It was clear that they thought they were using language for its intended purpose. For these students, communication was designed for rational minds to exchange informational content. It was a channel for impartial transmission of objective knowledge (Lakoff 250). It was an accurate representational instrument to report what was “out there” in the natural world. It was not time-sensitive and could not be rushed or hurried along. Would these students recognize the great Harvard polymath Harry Austryn Wolfson’s directive to examine words closely? “Words,” he said, “At their best and fullest, are nothing but floating buoys which signal the presence of submerged, unuttered thoughts (qtd. in Holton x).” Indeed, the notion that words contain complex semantic inventories and that concealed in utterances are depths of meaning animate my perspective. It is the same disciplinary spirit that informs the cognitive approach to linguistics in its semantic and pragmatic realizations (Evans and Green 513). Finally, 7 what student response would there be to Kenneth Burke’s exhortation that one need, so to speak, “put in one’s oar” into an argument after having taken its measure (110)? I locate my project in the rhetorical tradition as my central interest is in strategic communication. The rhetorical choices that language users make are influenced by culture and cognition (Oakley 1998). The relationship between the two is bridged by language through interaction. Notions of time permeate all aspects of this process, and so are changeable with varying cultural, cognitive, and interactive conditions. But the unifying concern with language use as a form of decision-making, with time as a resource, and with linguistic activity as a means of temporal resource management combine to define my approach as rhetorical. The questions animating my work proceed from the way users of language access temporal cognition and recruit temporally-defined behaviors in strategic communication. What sort of interactional and cultural constraints operate in time-sensitive scenarios of high stakes rhetoric? What role does a large scale integrative process such as globalization play in the evolution of professional standards of interaction and time management as a cultural leveler? How is it impacted by the technological reality of a global wireless network enabling instantaneous information sharing and connectivity? These major research questions ground my study, although they can be narrowed to a core rhetorical concern: What constitutes the effective deploying of communicative resources for time-constrained language users to attain culturally bounded optimal 8 outcomes? Of course, the answer is that resource deployment is situational and contingent on a variety of factors and needs. As such, the concept of time and the practice (or better yet, skill) of right timing are part of the overall management of rhetorical resources. This fact, naturally, was not lost on the classical tradition of rhetoric. The rhetorical lexicon is populated by terms such as chronos (the concept of time) and kairos (the opportunistic use of time). The latter refers to the sense of right-timing and proper measure, aspects of general language usage that I will argue are vital to human interaction. Modern research on kairos has in turn reinvigorated the study of rhetoric and the theory of composition. Scholars such as Lloyd Bitzer, James Kinneavy, and Carolyn Miller positioned kairos as a central concept of rhetoric (Baumlin and Sipiora 2002). Bitzer’s famous 1968 essay, “The Rhetorical Situation” located kairos as a primary rhetorical device to leverage exigence (the urgency powering the rhetorical intervention). Kinneavy’s influential essay “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric” (1986) moved
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