ABSTRACT

One of the unique aspects of our CAM and CAM2 is the fact that they introduce the discourse level from the ground up. These communication act models require that the minimum semiotic unit is no longer the phoneme or morpheme, but the speech act itself. And the term speech act in this context is more of a collective than a singular, and may include multiple utterances. (The term utterance may be understood to include the term sentence, but is more flexible in that it may also be a phrase or other unit of discourse.) As we discussed in previous chapters, one of our goals is to develop a working theory that can operate at the textual level . In so doing, we are constantly aware of the importance of the cultural context in determining textual meanings. We have reinforced the importance of textual-level cultural meanings not only through the CAM models, but also in our working definition of genre and hybrid-genres, as well as our definition of lexical meaning in Chapter 7.

Remember: All changes in form yield changes in meaning.