Remembering Robert and his 7 standards of textuality

I found out tonight that Robert de Beaugrande passed away a few days ago. I don't know him personally, of course, and he's not exactly one of the critics/theorists whose works I've been reading (and going crazy over, both in a good and/or bad way) for the past few years. He, however, holds a special place in my linguistic education.

I suppose I owe my knowledge of de Beaugrande first and foremost to Ubaldo Stecconi, the teacher who introduced de Beaugrande's work to me. I have to admit, I didn't quite understand what it was about at that time. I remember getting a photocopy of some text, which seemed more like an outline to me than an essay. It was talking about the seven standards of textuality. (If you clicked on the link and went as far as Chapter 1, which was the chapter given to us, then you can see what I mean. I believe the online copy is exactly the same as my photocopy; only it was reformatted for online consumption.) All I knew was I liked the notion of 'intertextuality', the seventh and the last standard, a lot, though I'm quite sure I didn't quite grasp what it really meant.

I thought part of the reason I couldn't get it was the text itself. It didn't seem reader-friendly. Another reason could be that I was perhaps too distracted by our teacher, Ubaldo Stecconi, who would go to class with shirt unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, complaining of the heat in this strange yet charming Italian accent, and who would look at your face so intently you'd forget he was your teacher. Or I thought it had to do with my not getting Ferdinand de Saussure. Before de Beaugrande, Stecconi made us read parts of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. I read about the train arriving at the same time every day on that same platform. To the passenger, it was the same train, but really, it was not the same train. I read about the chain of signification and binary oppositions, and the world tilted a little bit and I was lost. (Little did I know back then that things were bound to become even more complicated. Had I known, I wouldn't have complained so much.)

Much later, when I had discovered discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis, when discourse had begun to hold such fascination for me, I realized the reason I couldn't get de Beaugrande before was simple: I wasn't ready. It was the first semester of my sophomore year. During my first year, I did all GE courses. The only core course I had taken was English 100, and I took it during the summer. And English 100 was an introductory course. It was basically a smorgasbord of linguistic theories and things ranging from phonology to morphology to syntax to semantics--but never really reaching discourse. Back then, there was no discourse analysis class, and discourse didn't really mean anything much.

Of course, many of the issues that de Beaugrande raised in his text linguistics are problematic in today's context. (As I said, things just become more and more complicated as you go along.) But to me, his work remains a very good introduction to the study of discourse and will be useful to anyone who's interested in studying it. I remember the fun my students and I had, when in teaching de Beaugrande's standards of textuality, I made them analyze Jose Garcia Villa's 'The Emperor's New Clothes' and 'The Bashful One' using these standards. Imagine a blank page with only the title 'The Emperor's New Clothes' or some squiggly mark hiding on the page and proclaiming itself a poem called 'The Bashful One'. It doesn't even have to be literary. It can be a commonplace sign, just like what de Beaugrande used:

SLOW
CHILDREN
AT PLAY

According to his obituary, de Beaugrande had a flamboyant personality. Of course, I didn't know that about him. What I know though is this: his is the first work that made me realize language can be analyzed as discourse--as one whole chunk of something--and in a way that is somewhat systematic and according to certain criteria. Yes, I'd been doing it long before, in literature classes, for one. I'd been doing it with friends and loved ones, even strangers, deciphering meanings from one conversation to the next. But within linguistics, then it would have to be him.