Barbara Johnstone

Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics Barbara Johnstone

In recent years, many humanists and social scientists have rejected the notion that understanding is a simple matter of encoding and decoding. Current theory in linguistic pragmatics, in rhetoric, in cultural anthropology, and in literary theory, stresses the situated, interactive, rhetorical nature of understanding. Various approaches to the ways understanding is constructed in the process of interaction--such as interactional sociolinguistics, epistemic rhetoric, ethnography of communication, functionalist poetics, and reader response theory--make reference to the crucial role of repetition in this process. Linguists have examined repetition in conversation and in language acquisition. Anthropologists and folklorists have studied the role of parallelism as a feature of performance and as a recurring characteristic of ritual forms of talk. Students of poetics discuss repetition as a key feature of artistic language. Literary theorists and rhetoricians discuss "intertextuality," or the ways in which the authors of new texts make use of old texts. Clearly, anyone interested in a comprehensive theory of understanding must pay close attention to the mechanisms and functions of repetition. -- Preface.

Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics Barbara Johnstone

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