 Yn eich ffeydd gyda'r swyddech chi'n gwybod arno i'r delwodau i'r llwydai ac mae'r ystyried yn gwneud yng nghymru yn nautol. Felly mae'n blynedd yn f upperfynol, ond mae'n ffeydiol a byddai'r byd. Mae'n ddod yn ddermdbwy'n dd-, yn ddermdbwy'n ddermdbwy'n ddermdbwy'n ddermdbwy'n ddermdbwy'n ymlaen o bryd. I will keep your mind off the drink for half an hour or 40 minutes as I think it's going to be difficult. My background is sort of literary studies as a first degree, then linguistics for a long time, a kind of associative linguistics in which powers important, which became critical discourse analysis in genre studies, and then a move into media studies and culture studies and of course there, you begin to realise that language isn't all there is in terms of making meaning. So then an interest in images and how they are also culturally formed, not simply naturally there but culturally shaped, and what that might mean and of course then everybody knows this and notices it, that in everyday communication anywhere, image and writing go together on websites, we have moving, we have motion, temporally instantiated texts, you have moving images, you have speech, you have sound, you have all these things, all of them making meaning. So the new task I thought was really to understand in that much more complex communicational frame what these different modes each did in an ensemble and of course in that what you begin to realise is that language is a part of a meaningful ensemble, it's a part of the meaning of this ensemble and if that's the case, you have to ask what kind of part is it, if language is partial in terms of meaning making, it's of a bit of a shock to a long blogger centric tradition at least in the West, and then you have to ask in what ways is language partial, but of course that applies also to the image in what ways is image partial, and sort of thinking about that, more recently I've begun to, I've never, people say, you've lost your interest in language, well I haven't actually lost my interest in language, it's a little bit like sort of being shot with a rocket outside of the earth's atmosphere and then looking back and sort of seeing the earth actually differently to the way you see it when you pour oil down your kitchen sink, when you think, yeah, it's just going to disappear and it doesn't matter, and when you sort of see it from up there, you see the boundedness of earth and I think when you step outside a linguistic frame, you see the boundedness of language and I think that's important, just what can language do and what can it not do, and tonight what I want to do is sort of go a step further forth, about ten years or so I've become uneasy about using the term language because it doesn't take much thinking to realise that speech is temporally instantiated, the material of speech is sound, the sort of compression and rare refaction of air and with that we make meaning, in time with compression and rare refaction of air, with intensity, with variations in pitch, very very different to the kind of inscriptions we make on the surface and to call all these things, there's various kinds of means of making meaning by one name, it's actually quite surprising and that's what I want to pursue for a while. Anyway, just to finish that little story, in all of that sort of change I've become interested now in seeing maybe I've gained some insights about meaning in a way I didn't have before and reflect back now on writing and speech and maybe see it differently and of course in all that process I moved from a linguistic framework to a semiotic framework and the world looks different if you're not linguistically framing but semiotically framing, if the question isn't what are the linguistic entities but what resources are there for making meaning, that becomes a different kind of question anyway. Because I can't do jokes I have to sort of just do various light entertaining, for me entertaining a little bit of etymology and a little bit of history of linguistics as I call it here, light. And just about the word language, obviously it's derived from French long, Latin lingua at the time, a major part of what we call the speech apparatus is used metaphorically or some of you would say methodically to name this thing. And then I said something about 1066 and a little bit of all that which is you know those French then came over here and kind of took over and colonised this country and suppressed one level of population and of course named important things and so we have this language because the French came over here. If we didn't have the French coming here we'd have different kinds of meanings and that's important to realise too that these meanings are not arbitrary, they're not accidents, they are the outcome of histories, of social histories and to bear that in mind, other places name things differently. And then winding forward by nearly a thousand years in the 1920s and 30s, Leonard Bloomfield wrote his hugely influential book The Language published in 1933 in which he described the relation or rather he described the domain that linguistics should occupy itself with and he said speech is the proper domain of linguistic inquiry. But fortunately we have an alphabet to transcribe speech into written form and so therefore it makes it much easier, we'll look at writing. And in that little slide of hand, speech got neglected really except for people like politicians and phonologists, speech got neglected and language began to stand or rather writing began to stand for language and incorporated speech and of course all of this stuff about people's speech then kind of being judged ungrammatical is a result of that act because you looked at the grammar of writing and the grammar of speech of course is an entirely different thing. So even if you just look at English alone I think it becomes unrealistic to name these things together. They have to be treated as separate things. The proper domain of linguistic inquiry I think might be speech and it might be writing but as separate kinds of things semiotically it begins to be different than anything. And just the issue of naming, in English you do have speech and writing which are these semantic terms because speech is actually etymologically related to Sprache and writing is a Germanic term but you have this superordinate term, longage language so it clamps these disparate things together and after a while this becomes common sense, it becomes naturalised and what is natural you don't see. In German as I say Sprache and Schrift and of course another kind of little twist of language but you have to, in German if you want to talk about the distinction you say of Sprache, this is what we, you know, Sprache, Deutschesprache. In fact some of you this morning had the Deutsch, Deutsch, Deutsch, you know. So you have Gestrockende Sprache, this is a kind of redundant expression and Gestschildende Sprache which is a contradictory expression but never mind. I mean this is how we use the resources for naming you can see that even with closely related languages this is very differently handled and another bit of etymology, writing does come from older Germanic forms like old Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, old German, means something like scratching or scratching things on, initially on these thin tablets of Beechwood, rudic inscriptions scratching things or ripping them or in some way sort of in size whereas Schift, Schift actually and therefore inscription is from the Latin Amescu. So sometimes it sort of pays to look at the history of these things and see where we came from and why we've got to where we are and to undo the naturalisation of naming. And something else which interests me a lot which I think in the West is sort of very much overlooked we overlook script systems and I don't think, I mean linguists of course have looked at script systems very closely but they haven't looked so much at the, as it were, the script system as a meaning resource but also the effect it has, the script system, an alphabetic system pretends that it is a transcription of speech and it is sort of in some language more, in some languages less but if you have a system like say for instance a character based script and now I'm beginning to be nervous because there are people here for whom this is kind of imbibed with the stuff that you imbibed as a child but my contention is that in a language, in a language in a resource system such as the Chinese have you have a script system which is quite independent from the spoken system and so when the Japanese 1200 years ago decided to borrow a script system and import it down Kanji to Japan they imported the script system of one culture to their culture when the speech Japanese has spoken, language is nothing like Chinese so you have two parallel systems and to this day I think people who learn Kanji in Japan can go to mainland China or to Taiwan or somewhere and actually read Chinese characters of course a thousand years of different development, social development will mean that the characters might have slightly different meaning but they are readable so here you've got a writing system which is entirely different to the spoken resource and now the question for me is is there a better way of thinking about English or is that an unnatural way of thinking about English English has been written as we know for about 500 years in a real sense before then formal writing was done in French or in Latin and I want to show you a little bit of of what I said earlier about the use of the idiographs of characters in Chinese history Chinese people have not a particular difficulty I mean it is difficult because these things constantly change but they can read characters which occur in a text written a thousand years ago and when we try in English to read a text written a thousand years ago unless you have a formal training in old English or in middle English you simply cannot read the form so I want to say something very briefly about this issue of ontological or social implications of scripts because if a script is and this is an example I've used a lot so I apologise to those of you who know it if a script is like the alphabetic script linear displayed on a line if it has simple elements does it have an ontological effect? Does it matter that something is on a line? Does it matter that something consists of a relatively small number of simple entities linked? Here is a Chinese young person also it is very hard to do this in Taiwan you can see that in each case this young person or these two young people engage with the script system of their culture and attempt to deduce for themselves what the principles are in this script system here simplicity, connection, linearity, sequence and here not simplicity but complexity each character different whereas in the alphabetic script many of these entities repeated similar so complexity, difference not joint in sequence so a very different orientation to something and a bit of a research project that I did with a colleague when we looked at how young people five or six year olds while they were going to primary school in London learned the script systems of their own cultures Arabic and in this case Hong Kong Chinese that's Cantonese but the script system I suppose is Chinese in Saturday schools and so here you've got an example of Selina five and a half year old learning to write a character and I found it astonishing and I didn't realise you learned it on a square sheet but the square is important in the western system the line is important linearity and sequence in this script system the square is important and when Selina starts the first stroke she doesn't lean it on the bottom or lean it on the side left or right or attach it to the top she balances it somewhere at the end of this sequence of 20-year-old strokes it's got a balance in the centre of a square now I'm asking myself does it have ontological consequences that you see the world or rather you see this thing you produce in terms of a square in which you balance things now I've got other examples which I won't show you which come from Japan where university students in Japan produce as they were biographies like timelines of their lives which tend to be modular centrally posed and sort of complexes in the centre of a frame space whereas of course in the west we think of time as kind of linear sequential going from here to there so it's completely different I think there are profound ontological consequences the social consequence of the character I think is that each stroke has to produce each time or rather the character has to be produced each time with the same sequence of strokes and what that teaches you without ever being mentioned is that there is a social order which you cannot change yeah of course when you write on the line you also get told that you can't go too high with the kind of sort of bundle of the whatever it is of the B or the B or two far below the line but this question has a character of 22 strokes each time you make it in the same order that has I think a profound socialising effect okay so I've used most of my time already so the rest of the talk will have to be much breather but you can see what I'm saying that once you begin to have a look at these things as a meaning resource the assumption that you have a single thing called language begins to kind of disintegrate so a brief history of English speech and writing and then writing in English in the contemporary landscape of communication something about these contemporary environments and what I think is a trend which is from linearity to modularity never mind that the cultural technology of alphabetical writing is in some ways linear there is now in any case a move to modularity and then of course the question which occupies you in your professional lives and is occupied by everybody today what consequences for the teaching and learning of speech and writing and I think the consequences are different and of course particularly what consequences in terms of the technologies the digital technologies that are the issues for today so a brief history I want to show you something from the 16th 17th century so writing in the 17th century is about 50 or 100 years old it isn't settled it isn't clear what a sentence is it isn't clear what paragraphs are it isn't clear what the textual structures of writing are because these are all still being experimentally sort of being trial but the first thing you can say and I'll show it to you I think there is a close relation between speech and writing and speech is the model for writing the second thing is that both speech and writing are shaped by social factors and that would be for me the underlying assumptions for all of this inquiry these things are always shaped by social factors so when we're talking today about you know what's going on here I would always ask first of all what is going on socially and agency was mentioned in two of the talks and there's been a fundamental change in agency in the last 20 years very young people assume they have agency because in a society in which the market dominates choice is the dominant principle of constructing identity and children want to construct their identity through a choice and that many of them have a financial means of doing so ok so here is an example from the 17th century it is 1653 it's a period of great religious and political ferment the king's head has been chopped off about five years earlier religious ferment people write lots of tracks but the other thing that's happened technologically speaking and it relates a bit to what we're talking about now the printing press has kind of exploded or rather the printing press hasn't exploded but rather the number of printing presses has exploded in London over 100 publishing houses that is printers that also publish stuff in a small case I mean like the medieval city of London 100 of these things all the printing and publishing stuff and here is an uneducated woman a woman called Anna Trapnell and she writes the religious tract and I want to show what resources she uses to make for her writing to make a sentence so this is the first chunk of text in the first stage of the tract and now I've taken this first chunk and analysed it a little bit and I'm calling it the social makeup of a 17th century sentence and the first bit I've called the speech of the people mixed with the speech of the preacher so she says actually this last bit here is two sentences the sentence is quite long here you haven't got all the second sentence because it gets repetitive but she says I'm Anna Trapnell the daughter of William Trapnell who lived in Poplar in 70 Parish that I think is the speech of the everyday of the uneducated person and then my father and mother living and dying in the profession of the Lord Jesus my mother died nine years ago that I think is shifting into let's say the speech of the congregation that she attended and then the preacher's speech the last word she uttered on her deathbed were these to the Lord for her daughter law, double thy spirit upon my child these words she uttered with much eagerness three times and spoke no more I think that's shifted from the speech of the daughter of the shipwright in 70 then I think she goes back to that full of speech I was trained up to my book in writing I've booked in fellowship with a church meeting at All Hallows where I've Mr John Simpson as a member for the space of about four years I'm well known to him and that whole society also to Mr Greenhill preacher at 70 and most of that society and it goes on for about another four or five lines like this one sentence so the question is what is the principle of the construction of attendance what is the principle of construction for a paragraph these things are at the moment very different the resource that she uses is the speech that she hears and the resource that she uses I think is a sort of a notion of of of a topical kind of creation anyway the other person that I've looked at is John Milton writing at the same time a track called Herobigotica which is a track against censorship the government was trying unlike now to kind of keep the lid on the discussion debate and the proliferation of opinion but Milton is university educated he's trained in Greek and in Latin he wrote Greek and Latin verse he wrote Greek and Latin prose and he uses that resource but it's the resource of oratory of Greek and Latin oratory he uses that resource to bring into English and kind of shape English in relation to the oratory of Greek and Latin so the first bit I've called measured contrast so he that can apprehend and consider vice with all her bates and seeming pleasures and the other stain and yet distinguish and yet prefer that which is truly better he's the true warfare in Christian and then I've called the next bit adding negation on negation these are the sort of rhetorical forms that you've learned with Greek and Latin oratory I cannot place a fugitive and cloister virtue unexercised, unbreed that never sell its out not with that dust and heat and last year I've called the next sentence balanced opposition assuredly we bring that innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather that which purifies us as its trial and trial is by what is contrary so a little sense of 17th century English written and where it comes from socially it comes from the university from a training in the classics it comes from the street it comes from the church in different ways and I want to use it as a model that the social is always at which determines the representation but anyway winding forward by 300 years now things are settled this is a front page of the times it's not current news it's from 1959 maybe that's a surprise just to see that from 1959 to now the look of a newspaper has changed to that extent this here in terms of subjectivity demands concentration demands work demands sustained time to engage with this 40 years on in 1999 the times has changed a vast social change in which notions of pleasure, entertainment a limit of time so things can come shorter they can come more spaced out the difficulties reduced in terms of visual engagement with it not necessarily in terms of syntax a social change the reading subject of this newspaper is a different reading subject to the reading subject of this newspaper even though in terms of class she or he might actually have remained quite the same and then another example here an information book for 7 to 11 years old they're called The Boy Electrician written first in 1923 again I've shown this example a lot so forgive me for that but written to save boys who love to play with electricity make radios or bells for the front door and stuff from electric using themselves so here's an information book for 7 to 10 years old or 11 years old a little while on by the 1990s this my copy I picked up in the second hand it was published in 1946 so it had a long period of relevance by the 1990s this is an information book it's very different and of course my focus is on writing the history of writing and what has happened to writing here writing is the carrier of the information which needs to be conveyed is a question which is the carrier of the information that needs to be conveyed is it image or is it writing and in that question has the function of writing in relation to image or the function of writing changed or is it still the same as it was in 1923 so this is and I think what you begin to get now is I think a move from the linearity of this page or this form of writing to what I'm beginning to call this page what you're beginning to get is a specialisation of modes image for that and writing for that different kinds of functions different kinds of information carried by these and what I think you're also getting long before the emergence of the term web2o and user produced content is actually the appearance of the requirement for pages with this I'll no longer call her in a reader but I don't know what to call that person but somebody who engages with this to actually design this page according to their interest because there isn't a linearity that tells you start here and go there this says what are you interested in most are you interested in the images are you interested in the big image in the skeleton what's your interest and depending on your interest you find your way around this page a different entity a different textual entity from this you actually design knowledge from material which is provided to you but in a relatively unordered way so to think that these kinds of things that we're talking about are the consequence of technology alone I think is an error I think these things are more I'm attempting to be controversial more the consequence of social changes which allows now some of the authority of the author the power of the author to be transferred to the reader and the reader to make knowledge from stuff which is being presented to her so writing in English in the early to mid 20th century I think is that in formal environments speech is no longer the model for writing for educated writers speech is no longer the model for writing for lower class speakers I'm using that speech remains the model for writing and hence of course the problem in school the different cultural capital that different children bring into the school and secondly then speech and writing have become distinct in many aspects of syntax of textual organisation and in some lexis and we know that and really we do have now I think sort of parallel strands which still connect between phonology and graphology at the point of lexis for certain kinds of syntax but are in many ways distinct and I want to insist that it will continue to be shaped by social factors I want to show now some consequences of this shift of some of the information being pushed onto an image so here is a textbook page from 1935 signs for 13 year olds boys because boys went to grammar school girls didn't do signs really this is for boys this book was praised by the reviewers for being very interesting to boys in terms of its lavish illustrations but in this book all the content that you need to know in order to pass exams is actually given to you in writing so consequently of course a certain kind of complexity of syntax is necessary by 1989 it's no longer the case that all the content that you need to know is in the writing in fact if you want to know something about circuits and pass the exam on circuits you cannot look at the writing because it says nothing about what a circuit is like what a circuit is like is now shown in images images of two clients topological and topographic images which are actually relatively realist and images which are abstract that you can generalise so it's a case that of course you can generalise with image and you can be specific with image just as you can with language two sentences or rather two little chunks from each of those here is a sentence from the first of the 1936 and I'll read it and I've marked in bold every verbal element because I think where there's a verbal element you've actually got an embedded clause an embedded sentence when a current is passed to the quality of the direction indicated in the figure we can show by applying Fleming's left hand rule but the left hand side of the code is down and the right hand side to move up it's six clauses or seven it's in fact seven joined together it's a complex syntactic entity different kinds of integration this is I think what used to characterise scientific writing because you had a complex conceptual thing and you had to have a complex syntactic semiotic thing by 1989 the sentences have changed in your first circuit you used torch bulbs joined with wires two modern electrical equipment uses the same basic ideas one if you look inside a computer there are not many torch bulbs or wires two the wires and bulbs have been replaced by electronic devices by transistors, chips and wire emitting diodes there's an enormous simplification of syntax in this textbook still for 14 year olds as it was in 1936 but this time not for the elite gender elite that went to grammar school but this time for all of the population that goes through school at this point so it's a social factor and in fact social factors of a complex time I'm interested to show that these social trends will have effects on what writing is I mean writing is not something which is stable and stays the same I think today there was some debate or discussion of that somebody asked a question somebody from was it you from Canada asked about these things so so I think writing that I'll say from the 1990s to 2009 in informal and in many formal environments writing occurs together with image with sound with colour a whole range of modes each of which carries part of the meaning the distinctions of formal and informal are shifting and blurry a social fact about power about social structures organisations changing writing is shaped by the design of writers in complex environments now the writer is not just writing but the writer says should I put this information in a image or should I put this information in writing or should I use colour to produce cohesion and writing is part of a designed ensemble of meanings shaped by the purposes of the design in social environments so social for me remains crucial design as saying this is what I want to achieve in the rhetorical kind of frame for this kind of audience a seven year old what here are the resources I have and I'm going to use them in this particular writing has become very much one design element in a complex designed ensemble and I think writing now from 2009 onward the first thing I would say if you want to know about the future then think about the future of writing then think about the future of semiotic claims think about the future of the social you know at the moment we have a situation where the state is no longer in control of the market the state doesn't actually work together with the market the state has become the servant of the market I mean that's been demonstrated sort of very clearly over the last year or so and so will this continue what kinds of social effects does this have I mean what kind of subjectivity what kind of notions of identity are produced by that generation I think has a different effect now than it used to have I've called generation here the social and semiotic construction of age just in the way that I think we know gender is the social construction of sex and generation I think is now a significant factor in the differentiations around writing so here I've got a website called the poetry archive and this is a home page this is for the likes of me who are used to something nice linear and kind of coherent and set out by somebody orderly for me but when we come to this same website and the pages for children it looks different I think linearity is gone and modularity is dominant writing is no longer the dominant mode writing is there but in a very different form and when you think now about online environments for learning for learning writing you have to ask what force of writing as a cultural technology can you learn from this site and to go to another example like it I mean here is a BBC home page for adults still sort of ordered and linear when you get the children's home page it's a bit different now this is the online stuff that young people engage with as a matter of course this is naturalised writing is there but writing is a part of a very complex ensemble and my question is what sort of writing would you learn from materials of this kind and how prevalent are they now and how prevalent will they become and I think this age difference already I think when I looked at this in 2004 there was much more orderliness to the adult side so I think this is an ongoing movement it is again as a five minutes or yeah I'll let you know so language if we keep that term is partial speech and writing are partial means they are different things so what are the questions for the learning and teaching of speech and writing in specific social environments in what ways writing is speech partial but in any case in one of the trends what will writing as a cultural technology be like what is it like at the moment kind of in profession and different way but what will it be like this website here says tells you something well it's one of that story that you can make from that writing is a part of a multi-mobile ensemble in the most formal ways so when I go to work on the bus taking the 91 bus along Seven Sisters Road at the big junction there with Conwy Road there is when I look out there is a sign here it's multi-mobile my question is if it didn't use image would it work it's about 150 meters before this busy intersection how long would the drivers have to read the complicated text would it actually could it be working I think image shows image alone is probably not quite sufficient but image is more important I think here than words image shows this is the Morrison's car park and colour foregrounds and highlights if you can see it despite there is a red line around the block at the bottom on the other side is another supermarket again writing image and colour again you can see the colour even less on this one it's the sort of marking here you should drive from where you are same modes but a different style a different colour a different form of drawing it's a different aesthetic and it's a different aesthetic because I do think I don't want to impuny what it's taste here but I do think Morrison's customers just have a different aesthetic to weightless customers and I'm not saying I'm not saying I go shopping but these things as I was sort of showing have ontological effects what you can do with writing so if I say in a science lesson or the teacher says tell me something about a cell and one of the children says Mr a cell has a nucleus you have a particular kind of ontological form here two entities connected by a verbal entity of possession if she says well come out and draw it for me then this person has new questions where in the cell is the nucleus this doesn't arise with speech it's not a question it doesn't arise, it can't arise where is the nucleus is the nucleus big is it a kind of a circle is it a dot so I drew one for you I think it's relatively correct what I'm saying is that the different representations are not neutral in respect to what we might call model they're ontologically entirely distinct and this is as much the case in these banal examples as it is with less banal examples I might just I might just stop here because I think I've either made my point or I haven't and this leaves at least five minutes for two or three comments thank you