Speechtime Continuum

[The following was excised from an essay for my linguistic anthropology class. It didn't serve the piece as a whole, but I still like the passage. ~omg academia~]

// Valery Kenski //

It is difficult to document the time of a conversation. Not the duration of the encounter or the date when it took place, but the spatial sense of time, the temporal context of a relationship that must extend infinitely forward and backward from the moment at hand. This aspect of an interaction tends to remain unvoiced, but it is vital.

Every "linguistic encounter" is framed by expectation and then interpretation, though they may be informal, brief, or even unconscious. The human mind loves to create narratives, to find patterns that will constitute stories, so we parse our lives in terms of these devices.

// Alan Turkus //