#synoptic

A written text is itself a static object [...]: It is language to be processed synoptically. Hence it projects a synoptic perspective onto reality: It tells us to view experience like a text, so to speak. In this way writing changed the analogy between language and other domains of experience; it foregrounded the synoptic aspect, reality as object, rather than the dynamic aspect, reality as process, as the spoken language does. This synoptic perspective is then built into the grammar of the written language, in the form of grammatical metaphor: Processes and properties are construed as nouns, instead of as verbs and adjectives. Where the spoken language says whenever an engine fails, because they can move very fast, ... happens if people smoke more, the written language writes in times of engine failure, rely on their great speed, ... is caused by increased smoking. [...] Pairs of this kind are not synonymous. Each of the two wordings is representing the same phenomenon, but because the prototypical meaning of a noun is a thing, when you construe a process or property as a noun you objectify it [...] If there was no natural relationship between the semantics and the grammar, the difference between the two kinds of wording would be purely formal and ritualized; but there is such a natural relationship, and so the metaphor brings about a reconstrual of experience, in which reality comes to consist of things rather than doing and happening. Learning [...] involves learning to understand things in more than one way. In a written culture, in which education is part of life, children learn to construe their experience in two complementary modes: the dynamic mode of the everyday commonsense grammar and the synoptic mode of the elaborated written grammar. Any particular instance, of any kind of phenomenon, may be interpreted as some product of the two—once the adolescent has transcended the semiotic barrier between them. Modern scientists have become increasingly dissatisfied with their own predominantly 'written', objectified models and often talk of trying to restore the balance, the better to accommodate the dynamic, fluid, and indeterminate aspects of reality (cf. LEMKE, 1990, especially Chapter VII). They do not know how to do this (I have commented elsewhere on BOHM’s 1980 search for the 'rheomode'; cf. HALLIDAY & MARTIN, 1973, Chapter VI). [...] Teachers often have a powerful intuitive understanding that their pupils need to learn multimodally, using a wide variety of linguistic registers: both those of the written language, which locate them in the metaphorical world of things, and those of the spoken language, which relate what they are learning to the everyday world of doing and happening. The one foregrounds structure and stasis, the other foregrounds function and flow.