Visions of India: (Self)representations of a (Re)emerging Culture. An Interim Report

This paper deals with a theoretical framework I am trying to apply to a corpus-assisted research into speaker evaluation and positioning in the specialised discourse of political discussion carried out by means of essays. Although an essay is not, because of its asynchronous communicative characteristics, a typical 'deliberate dispute' (Adams 1999), I discuss the mechanism that allows for a quasi-synchronous introduction of topics by means of a memetic technique (Dawkins 1976) in Sen's last controversial essay Identity and Violence. The Illusion of Destiny (Sen 2006). This interim report discusses the tentative effort to combine the benefits offered by a quantitative-qualitative analysis in a corpus-assisted research (Partington, Morley and Haarman 2003) together with SFL, namely Appraisal Systems (Martin and White 2005), and memetic theory (Dawkins 1976 and Blackmore 1999). Finally, some technical reflections on the use of text analysis software to carry out proper memetic analysis will be offered. This paper endorses a blend of analytical tools, as stated, and Memetics in order to obtain an 'extended' model of evaluation which could progressively provide a holistic and refined semantics of writer evaluation and positioning; the desired outcome being the creation of 'maps', either cognitive or thematic, that can assist the reader/analyst (Coffin and O'Hallaran 2005) during the identification of the moves enacted by the author to outline her/his general discursive strategy.