Wallace L. Chafe

The "distal/proximal" distinction is a bit kindergarteny, but I guess sometimes it's important just to theorize these things and hope someone else can build a mighty edifice with them as a result. more interesting is the idea that direct speech overcomes the limits on memory--places us there--and that if we still have it, there must be a utility there, which is questionable, I'd say, but it would be nice to believe that everything happens for a reason. And if the word is only ours once we've appropriated it, as Bakhtin says, what does that mean for indirect speech, the ugly duckling? what does it mean that the only way we can preserve a speech event is by refracting it through ourselves, alienating it from the original speaker? Big cool questions.… (mehr)