Through the observation of conversations on Internet Relay Chat and the quantitative analysis of “chat-logs”, I investigate the characteristics of this form of communication unique to the digital realm. My research rests on a theoretical framework integrating the semiotic and pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce (as primary groundwork) with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the sociology of Erving Goffman, to grasp shared significations in cyberspace simultaneously as logical process and as social practice. This exploratory case study yields evidence supporting the potential fruitfulness of Peircean philosophy as the foundation for a new paradigm in empirical communication research, and successfully puts to the test a particular type of method (computational and diagrammatic) suggested to accomplish such research.

Diss.--München, 2002. / Bibliogr. p. [363]-382. Index.

No description available.

Professional writing students must analyze communications in multiple modalities, on page or screen. This project argues that student analysts benefit from using articulated heuristics, summaries of articles, books, or theories in chart form that remain in the visual field with the communication to be analyzed. Keeping the heuristic in view reduces students' cognitive load by narrowing the search for solution to the categories in the heuristic. These heuristics, often one page or one screen, contain key words, phrases, or questions that allow students to approach analysis from experts' points of view at more than one level of complexity. Students locate instantiations of the categories in the communication analyzed, incorporating the category/instantiation pairs into personal schemas for analysis. As students classify communications, relate parts together and to other communications, and perform operations on the content, they see how communication achieves its meaning and formulate appropriate responses. Rather than rely on one all-purpose heuristic, this dissertation presents a range of heuristics reflecting rhetorical, discourse, linguistic, usability, and visual strategies that enable students to critique both form and function in communication. The heuristics reflect a systematically ordered workplace context, articulate an appropriate and specific theory for the situation, interface with other heuristic systems for depth and efficacy, and instantiate the categories at some helpful secondary level of complexity. To theorize the visual nature of the heuristic chart displays, I employ the semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, working through the implications of chart construction as I diagram Peirce's theory of diagrammatic iconicity.

In this thesis, I ask about the descriptive purchase on discursive events of some accounts of speech as action. To do so, I turn to speech act theory, which I read at first restrictively, and later more broadly, moving from John Langshaw Austin to John Rogers Searle to Judith Butler, appealing along the way to Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-François Lyotard and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. In so doing, I construe speech act theory as a genre (or set of genres) of theoretico-critical inquiry. By genre I mean a set of differentiated, recurrent forms of practice which have their own functions or ends, their own means, protocols and postulates: their own speaking positions and objects of representation or inquiry. For my purposes, then, speech act theory denotes a capacious genre of inquiry turning on the topic of speech as action. I take this topic to raise a range of rhetorical issues concerning the pragmatic question of discursive linking. To talk of discursive linking, I suggest, is minimally to presuppose notions of semiosis, of rhetorical situation or occasion and of rhetorical agency, with its attendant postulates of intention and responsibility. I thus read speech act theory rhetorically, as an open set of engagements with the question of how we do things with words: how utterances come to count as action, and how utterance action is described as having determinate consequences and effects. I begin in chapter 1 by reading Austin for his two tensively related, if not countervailing, descriptive tendencies: those of illocution and perlocution. In chapter 2, I attend to Searle as an exemplary development of an illocutionary inquiry, before examining Butler’s work on hate speech and performativity as a type of perlocutionary inquiry in chapter 3. Illocution and perlocution, I suggest, comprise distinct engagements with the questions of speech as action and discursive linking. Although postulates of semiosis and situation, and figures of responsibility, intention and agency are put to work in both illocutionary and perlocutionary inquiries, in each they work differently. This differential work, I argue, marks the differing capacities of illocutionary and perlocutionary inquiries adequately to describe a discursive event. Different construals of speech as action tell different tales of uptake or linking, enabling and constraining different accounts of discursive events. With this in mind, I turn by way of an extended example in chapter 4 to the caso Belsunce, a high-profile homicide case begun in Argentina in 2002. I do so to suggest that a focus on utterance actions as semio-discursive events relates the perlocutionary concerns discussed in chapters 1 – 3 to postulates of cultural memory-work, kairos and rhetorical community. Taken together, this range of concerns helps us to describe the mediatic uptake of the Belsunce case as a particular, complex semio-discursive event. But a description of a discursive event is of course itself a sign, something which, as Peirce notes, ‘stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ and which strives, in turn, to determine subsequent interpretant effects. In this respect, the critical description of discursive events is itself an instance of speech as action which cannot but continue to raise hermeneutic, rhetorical and semiotic questions of discursive upshot or uptake.

Thesis (M.A.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Mass., 2000. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-97).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on April 9, 2009) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of English, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-69).

Thesis (M.A.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Mass., 2000. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-97).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois, 1914. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 44-55.