I was fortunate to actually hear the plenary address at the 2010 LSA meeting and therefore be introduced to the 2010 reading verbally; however, there are always differences between a spoken and written version of the same text (if there weren't, we'd have much less to study), and it is useful to be able to examine them both.
Tannen's framework is perhaps one of the more useful for my own work in that it seems apparent that the process of white-knighting is one of re-keying. In the 2006 article, she focuses in on an extended discussion of a text which is repeated, reframed, and rekeyed over the course of several discussions. The discussion moves from a simple discussion about whether or not a husband is willing to take a box to the post office to a more general discussion of whether or not the husband will be supportive in the instance that the wife's job becomes extremely stressful upon the inauguration of a new president. This pattern is readily recognizable in a number of interpersonal arguments of this nature, but the framework of tracing the way the conversation comes up again repeatedly (repetition), is marked as both argument and humor (rekeying), and is changed from a discussion about one thing to a discussion about another (reframing) gives useful insight into how we can better unpack the complicated layers of discourse that are present in such interaction.
Most useful to me from the 2010 talk is perhaps this issue of the taking on of voices, as Natalie does in the bath. As she permits herself to take on both her mother's and her own voice, through her doll, she separates herself from herself, and is able to comment on her own actions through her mock disapproval of her own behavior. The taking on of voices is something which happens quite a bit in the context of white-knighting; sometimes from the interactants themselves, and sometimes from "sockpuppets" who are pretending to be anyone from the characters from the original novels or the characters from the fic that is being discussed. Looking at the way this taking on of voices enables the commenters to provide an additional layer of commentary will, I believe, prove fruitful in my own analysis of the ways white-knighting is constructed.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Layers, Lamination and Frames Gordon 2009
It’s always interesting to be introduced to the same data through the eyes of two different researchers. Before this week, I was exposed to the Sloan project data through only the LSA plenary address (Tannen 2010), which is a rather different look than Gordon gives them. Tannen’s focus is on the way that these conversations get rekeyed—turned into conversations about other things, and seems to indicate a process by which they turn, whereas Gordon’s emphasis is on the dialogicality present in the conversations by the virtue of the repetition of strings of the text.
By focusing on the repetition, Gordon uncovers some things that Tannen does not—the intertext in this situation is created by the repetition itself—often verbatim repetition. The words take on new meaning not by who says them and when and in what manner, but by simply being repeated. I think this may be a useful space for me to probe in my own research, as much of what goes on on the internet is verbatim repetition, and the degree to which things are reframed by this repetition would be interesting to uncover.
Particularly interesting, I thought, were the times when the repetition was the source of the rekey, for example, in the "superior research subject" conversation, where the husband and wife turned it from teasing the wife about her recorder to teasing the husband about his teasing. This may be a spot worth probing further for my own research, as again, the rekey happens even with this identical repetition. and in fact it is the repetition itself, and the fact that obviously she's repeating it for a reason, that causes the rekey.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Lost in Translation: Becker 1994
Becker looks at a very particular and very literal kind of prior text in his article, "Repetition and Otherness:" an actual translation of a passage in Classical Malay. He notes the ways in which prior texts define a community and are used by a community, particularly as tropes from which to build other texts, for example, the "how many x does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" This one rang as particularly salient for me--as a graduate student, I spend a great deal of time with other graduate students and newly-minted Ph.D.s, and as a result whenever it takes more than one of us to accomplish some menial task, like putting together a new coffee table, someone inevitably says something along the lines of, "How many Ph.D.s does it take/how many years of graduate education does it take to do x?" In invoking the joke, we're of course tying in not only to the prior text of the "how many" joke, but also in to the humor of the incongruity of whatever (seemingly) simple task we're trying to perform and the supposed expertise that arises from having such advanced educations.
I found most intriguing in Becker's work the idea of the "untranslatable" tropes which rely on these sorts of common prior texts. Even though presumably one could translate a joke such as this one into another language, without the prior text of the joke's history, much of its humor is lost. Instead of drawing on a bank of similar jokes in the listeners' collective memories, it is only an isolated statement, which may have some intrinsic humor by way of incongruities such as the one I mentioned above, but which loses a significant portion of its humor in the absence of the ability to draw on the prior texts of what other versions of the joke have preceded this particular telling.
One thing I also found intriguing was the idea of prior text being invoked by the way in which a text is presented visually. For the Malay speakers, the text under discussion is presented in Arabic, which creates an intertextual tie to the Islamic holy texts which the Malay speakers would have encountered. Although sociolinguists focus a great deal on form in terms of things like syntactic structure, adjacency pairs and the like, we miss a great deal of things which can be communicated by other issues of form, such as prosody and the actual form of in which written text is presented. Sometimes we look at this in terms of some visual representations, and some slxs have looked at, for example, the way the form of a transcript affects the way we think of it (I'm thinking of Bucholtz's article on the politics of transcription here), but I find that on the whole, we could do more in looking at the actual presentation of text to the "reader" (or hearer) of that text.
Becker's article also reminds me of Agha's work on naming, and the way the "baptisimal event" of name-giving invokes the prior texts (my lamination of this term onto Agha's work) of all who have had that name before. Extending the notion of prior text and repetition onto this part of Agha's analysis might yield interesting results.
I found most intriguing in Becker's work the idea of the "untranslatable" tropes which rely on these sorts of common prior texts. Even though presumably one could translate a joke such as this one into another language, without the prior text of the joke's history, much of its humor is lost. Instead of drawing on a bank of similar jokes in the listeners' collective memories, it is only an isolated statement, which may have some intrinsic humor by way of incongruities such as the one I mentioned above, but which loses a significant portion of its humor in the absence of the ability to draw on the prior texts of what other versions of the joke have preceded this particular telling.
One thing I also found intriguing was the idea of prior text being invoked by the way in which a text is presented visually. For the Malay speakers, the text under discussion is presented in Arabic, which creates an intertextual tie to the Islamic holy texts which the Malay speakers would have encountered. Although sociolinguists focus a great deal on form in terms of things like syntactic structure, adjacency pairs and the like, we miss a great deal of things which can be communicated by other issues of form, such as prosody and the actual form of in which written text is presented. Sometimes we look at this in terms of some visual representations, and some slxs have looked at, for example, the way the form of a transcript affects the way we think of it (I'm thinking of Bucholtz's article on the politics of transcription here), but I find that on the whole, we could do more in looking at the actual presentation of text to the "reader" (or hearer) of that text.
Becker's article also reminds me of Agha's work on naming, and the way the "baptisimal event" of name-giving invokes the prior texts (my lamination of this term onto Agha's work) of all who have had that name before. Extending the notion of prior text and repetition onto this part of Agha's analysis might yield interesting results.
Snatches of Other Texts: Fairclough 1992
"Intertextuality is basically the property texts have of being full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in, and which the text may assimilate, contract, ironically echo, and so forth. [Emphasis mine]"
Fairclough's definition of ITXTY is a very interesting one, because I think it explains a great deal of his approach to text and register and discourse and a number of other things which he describes. Most important in his article, I believe, is his vision of texts and discourse as being more parole than lange. I've always been drawn to the term "languaging," because it to me encompasses a lot of what language is--less something static which we can understand through rules and structure (although I'm sure many formal theoretical linguists would disagree with me on that one) but rather something which is shaped on the fly by the ways in which it interacts with other parts of language.
On the note of formal linguistics, however, it was interesting to note that Fairclough appropriated the language of formalism in describing loci of discourse in using the term "complementary distribution," for example, the "school" discourse and register is defined in part by the fact that it is in complementary distribution with the locations which are "non-school," such as home. The question then arises if these loci of discourse exist without the loci that they are defined in contrast to: can we understand "school" discourse without having home discourse and neighborhood discourse to describe it against?
It seems that a lot of meaning arises out of these sorts of juxtapositions--school discourse becomes school discourse precisely because of the discourses that it is not. As we attend to the "snatches" of text which are present in another text, it seems evident that it is not only the presence of these snatches but also in the way they are defined by what they are in contrast to which provide a great deal of their meaning. This, I think, is an important part of intertextuality itself--the ways in which the texts interact with one another and create meaning through their contrasts (or lack thereof).
Fairclough's definition of ITXTY is a very interesting one, because I think it explains a great deal of his approach to text and register and discourse and a number of other things which he describes. Most important in his article, I believe, is his vision of texts and discourse as being more parole than lange. I've always been drawn to the term "languaging," because it to me encompasses a lot of what language is--less something static which we can understand through rules and structure (although I'm sure many formal theoretical linguists would disagree with me on that one) but rather something which is shaped on the fly by the ways in which it interacts with other parts of language.
On the note of formal linguistics, however, it was interesting to note that Fairclough appropriated the language of formalism in describing loci of discourse in using the term "complementary distribution," for example, the "school" discourse and register is defined in part by the fact that it is in complementary distribution with the locations which are "non-school," such as home. The question then arises if these loci of discourse exist without the loci that they are defined in contrast to: can we understand "school" discourse without having home discourse and neighborhood discourse to describe it against?
It seems that a lot of meaning arises out of these sorts of juxtapositions--school discourse becomes school discourse precisely because of the discourses that it is not. As we attend to the "snatches" of text which are present in another text, it seems evident that it is not only the presence of these snatches but also in the way they are defined by what they are in contrast to which provide a great deal of their meaning. This, I think, is an important part of intertextuality itself--the ways in which the texts interact with one another and create meaning through their contrasts (or lack thereof).
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