Since November 1995 I have been a participant observer in what seems to be a type of evolving community whose norms of interaction have been on the negotiation table since its inception and are still being tested. I believe that we have been developing a set of 'frames of coherence' within this community: a particular email discussion group and the activities that have been undertaken within that group. This dissertation can be conceived of as a case study of some of the norms of interaction which have become apparent during the course of the list's history, and which 'realise' its context. Data on which I base my tentative findings consist of files of almost every post dating from October 1995 up until the present day, and totals about 10 megabytes.
I would like to attempt to define the context of the interaction by an examination of a selection of the products -texts- of these activities, in what is necessarily a synoptic approach, based on my own active participation in the group, and show how they may be 'recontextualised', through reference to some features of the text within the field, mode and tenor of the discourse.
My own perspective in this study draws heavily on the work of Halliday and Hasan (1973,1985, 1994, 1996) who set out five cycles concerning the interrelationship between text and context (1985: 48) which I will outline in the first part of the paper by making brief reference to their relevance to the dynamics of the activities of the mailing list from which texts for this study have been taken.
An account of the field of discourse, the content or topic of discussions, the perspective of the experiences that each participant brings with them, and the struggles to have their experiences and their relevance to the ongoing discourse recognised, is made in the first chapter, and makes reference to the notion of intertextuality.
While a more delicate analysis of the experiential metafunction in terms of transitivity processes evident in the texts used would yield further insights into the nature of the discourse, within the confines of this paper it will not be possible to go beyond an outline of the 2nd order register by reference to the various topics and threads that have formed 'grist for the mill' during the history of the list. These topics, however, show a strong 'orientational' dimension, and highlight the most important facet of the interrelationship between the interpersonal, the textual and the experiential metafunctions: that of the social viewpoint of the participants and the ideological functions that their discourse bring to the discussion. This type of social orientation or 'voice' which participants use and from which position they evaluate the contributions of others has been outlined by Lemke (1995) and is relevant to what participants see as valued texts and as relevant to the discussion.
Aspects of the Mode of the discourse will also be discussed in this chapter, and later the term 'frames of coherence' will be introduced to suggest the ways we set up our interactions, and cue others as to what to expect from how we perform, and derives in part from the work of Richard Bauman (1975. 1990), Labov and Fanshel (in Coulthard 1985), Levinson (1983),and Brown and Levinson (1986) all of whom make reference to how analysts are restricted to observing perlocutionary force, uptake, or response moves in determining what might realise the socially accepted norms of linguistic behaviour in any 'speech community'. Actual written responses are necessary in this medium in order to gauge what other members have made of our performances, whether they have 'made sense' within this context, and how further interactions may be conducted.
For this purpose, certain patterns have been observed and reported on by participants who bring their own perspectives to the negotiation 'table'. In Bateson's (1972 in Bauman 1975: 295) terms, participants, in attempting to define a 'metacommunicative frame' in which they can act, attempt to bring these devices to the surface through discussing their own conventions and patterns of communication.
This study is not meant to be exhaustive or definitive. Terms and labels for elements and structures of discourse are introduced from a number of different perspectives, and suggest ways that work done previously in areas of conversational analysis, discourse analysis - both spoken and written, and cultural anthropology might be applied in order to link the text to the context in which it is embedded. Realisations of the mode of discourse are related very strongly to the context of the interaction as I hope to show, and are necessary in this channel/medium due to the very nature of the constraints placed upon it. Specifically, that participants seem to use a register that is textually similar to that of written communication, but which attempts to maintain some of the features of face to face conversation..
There have already been many studies on the emergent nature of the email or computer mediated communication (CMC) 'genre', which posit that the discourse shows features of both the conversational and the written mode of communication (Shank 1993; Heim 1987; Baym 1996; Ferrara et al 1991; Murray 1988; Keisler et al 1984; Wilkins 1991; Walther et al 1994; Collot and Belmore 1996; Yates 1996, Herring 1996) and it is hoped that this dissertation will point to other avenues of research which will help to define the interaction more completely.
The final part of the paper will look at indicators of the tenor of discourse, and its relationship to how messages are structured in order to alert readers to a participant's stance. Because of the lack of visual, prosodic and other cues useful in what is known as F2F (face to face) communication, and even in telephone conversations where 'real-time' is an important ingredient missing from the email stew, the interpersonal dimension becomes salient in this medium. Apart from these matters becoming part of the field of interaction, they first become salient in the actual mechanisms of posting and response. Each participant needs to orient him/herself to the audience in some way, and whatever formal choices s/he makes from the semantic option network and encodes into the lexicogrammatical surface features of his/her post are taken up and responded to by the other participants. This 'interpersonal' dimension cannot be separated in any useful way from either the ideational content or the textual component of the discourse, because the roles taken and perceived by others in the audience is dependent on the one hand on the stance taken by the writer in relation to both his/ experience and the information s/he brings to the discussion, and on the other hand by his/her use of the textual encoding options in the language. However, to a large extent, it can be posited that role perceptions by other participants are based not on what is said, but on how language is used which reveals what Discourses and social positions the writer has come into contact with or identifies with - with what is sometimes referred to as the writer's 'style'.
What aspects of Tenor - distance and solidarity - can be observed in the ongoing interaction? How are they realised in text? Furthermore, when positing a description of exchange structure, it has been acknowledged (Coulthard 1985) that while formal features cannot be said to realise a one-to-one relationship with illocutionary force or intent, it is obvious that members of a code using community will see certain lexicogrammatical choices as realising certain functions or purposes of communication. It is for this reason that some formal features of the interpersonal metafunction will be discussed to determine whether it is possible to make any predictions about such exchange structure by reference to such formal features.
With the aim of highlighting some of those features of text which give other participants clues about the writer's role and social orientation with respect to both the other participants and the material under discussion, I intend to use two posts from a particular thread and look at them from the perspective of the features of the interpersonal metafunction, in what must necessarily be a 'synoptic' perspective. From this viewpoint, however, it should be possible to make predictions about the reactions of the other participants and how they retrieve the 'meaning' of the interaction through these linguistic cues, and to make generalisations about the context(s) of the interaction itself.
Also, because of the lack of 'real time' face-to-face cues, resulting in a mode of interaction of 'low process sharing' (Hasan 1985), the notion of 'transitional relevance' becomes important: each post, or message, must be recontextualised in some way, because the mode of interaction is also dependent on a technology which allows several 'conversations' to go on at the same time. Therefore, within a broad consideration of the concept of 'frames of coherence' within and across texts, the specific area 'framing', or contextualising each new post will be discussed by examining sections of posts showing framing or reframing 'moves' and the patterns that may be observed within both opening and closing sequences.