Notes on Nicole’s Presentation

Nicole’s work, I believe will provide some very interesting insight into what Boerema presents in his article. While Boerema looks at mission statements alone and the way they represent the founding principles of the school, I think looking at the ways the mission statements are borne out in their connections to each other and to the eventual comments that the parents make about the schools. I thought, however, that this reading gave us a very good footing with which to go on and analyze the data Nicole gave us, particularly since it all dealt with the same type of school. It allowed us to think carefully about what that school’s background might be when we looked at the data.

The Fairclough I thought also provided a really nice scaffolding for the work that Nicole is working on. Particularly useful I thought was the table she presented in her workshop, from Ch. 3 of Fairclough, which related each of the constraints in discourse (contents, relations, subjects) with its structural effects (knowledge and beliefs, social relationships, social identities). I think that this might be one of the more useful pieces for my own research, in that it provides a very concrete tie from the discourse feature to the effects it has on the world around it.

What I was most interested in within Nicole’s workshop was actually the repetition. The ways in which a single word or words appeared and reappeared I thought was one of the most interesting parts of her data. This was particularly salient when the same words were picked up in the parent and student testimonials about the school. I thought this went back to Fairclough’s thoughts on experiential values—certainly the words which are most being repeated often have a great deal to do with the ideologies about the schools that the schools administrations most want their parents and students to associate with the school (even if the school doesn’t truly embody them), and in that sense, the presence of the same words in the parent testimonials indicates a certain “taking up” of these ideologies. This would be a really interesting site to explore, and the area where I think Nicole’s work will most significantly expand on Boerema’s.

Most useful to me from Nicole’s presentation were the discussion and application of the values of the word and grammar from Fairclough. I think asking myself many of these same questions about how the text is being construed with regards to ideology, euphemism, expression and connectivity will be very useful in analyzing the way white-knighting ins entextualized in an interactional context.

Reported!: Scalafani

Probably I should’ve recognized that I would one day become a sociolinguist the morning I found myself in a heated argument with my Algebra II teacher over the Ebonics controversy. She was the authority, I was a fourteen-year-old freshman, and yet I had pretty strong opinions on the legitimacy of a language variety and its use in an educational setting—most of them stemming from my own academic success as a speaker of standard American English (SAE) and my years of being termed “articulate” (a term I only much later realized framed my African American peers as poorly-spoken).

While Scalafani unravels a number of pieces of the debate over Ebonics, beginning with the word itself and the way it was framed in headlines (c.f. “The Ebonic Plague” and its homophony with “bubonic plage”), there are two features I want to look at more closely. One is the level at which Scalafani unravels individual words used in the articles, looking at their semantic relationships with other parts of the text, as in my example of the frame created by referring to me as an “articulate” (black) student. This, I believe, will be a useful site for me, as much of the process of WK is a process of responding to and anticipating future text based on often very short stretches of discourse. Looking at the ways words presuppose the use of other words, or examining the frames evoked by the choice NOT to use other words strikes me as a fruitful area for my own research.

A second piece which I found interesting in Scalafani’s article was one which whe dies not explicate herself but rather which emerges from her own writing, and that is the evoking of the prior text of “Frost/Nixon” by her shortening of the 3rd article headline to “Ebonics/Nixon.” The shortened headline does not actually encapsulate the comparison between the Ebonics and SAE (however skewed) that appears in the text of the article and with which Scalafani enages, but rather laminates an additional layer of interpretation—“Ebonics” in this textual frame takes the place of “Frost,” the reporter who trounced Nixon in getting him to admit to the wiretapping and illegal activities surrounding the Watergate scandal. By shortening the article to “Ebonics/Nixon,” Scalafani activates this prior text and much in the same way Nixon detractors celebrated Frost for his victory over the reclusive president, invites the reader to similarly side with and celebrate Ebonics.

Body as Prior Text: Talbot

What strikes me most about the Talbot reading is the existence of gossip as a solidarity-creating feature, much in the vein of Tovares’ work on television gossip. Gossip inevitably creates a third party against whom some other set of parties are aligned and delineated—the gossipers become one group by virtue of their alignment in opposition to the one gossiped about. Tovares explores this in terms of how women discuss the women on the TV show Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire, in which the show itself allows the women, or a woman and her husband to align in opposition to the way the show presents itself and the women on the show. In the ads, however, first the “gossip” must be constructed, by use of features such as inclusive we and the response to “unasked” questions in the testimonials. These language features provide a site of “gossip” and thus create alignment in the group of women toward whom the ad is focused.

With regard to my own research, it is apparent as I’ve mentioned previously, that the women involved in these fic-writing communities create solidarity through their uses of language. Talbot’s work here gives me a good jumping-off point for looking at the ways in which the texts of the fic communities create “gossipees” to encourage alignment between the people who are doing the gossiping. The community of fic writers are in their own way a synthetic sisterhood, although perhaps a slightly more “real” sisterhood than the consumers of the lipstick ads in that they are able to communicate directly with each other and even meet up outside the internet. Nevertheless, the creation of community via these types of positioning moves I think will be a useful angle by which to explore the process of WK.

Raisch and readings

What was most interesting about the Raisch visit was the literal intertextuality of the focus texts she brought. We've been studying a lot about intertexts which are ehpemeral, which form themselves by the relation of the focus text to the intertexts, but in Raisch's examples, the intertexts were present on the page with the focus texts and form connections unto themselves. The same is true of hyperlinks, and I think, that while Wikipedia may not be the best scholarly source, it would certainly be an interesting focus of scholarly study on intertextuality for that reason--the co-presence of text and intertext literally there on the page.

I found very interesting the Origen reading for today, as it connects much with my own experience. The first time I saw a parallel Bible I was fascinated (a Bible with 4 or more translations in columns next to one another), because in this form, you automatically see what is different, present in one, omitted from another, etc. etc. These sorts of things bring focus to your thinking about the texts themselves and encourage you to probe more deeply the questions raised by the inclusions and omissions--in fact, if I'm writing a devotion or bible study (which I used to do for income), I always like to start by looking at the parallel bible because it immediately draws attention to certain parts of the text. I think the pieces that Raisch brought to class bring up many of the same issues--having the two texts co-present on the page makes immediately apparent what kinds of questions one should be asking about them (Why was this word chosen and not that one? Why is this marked here, but not down here?)

Orr's term of collocution is an interesting one here as well. Orr intends for ITXTY in this respect to be studying people's speech, but I think collocution also happens when you have two written texts aligned as these are. In a way, the two texts "speak together" and it is the product of their joint speech that provides meaning; either one alone is not enough.

That legal proceedings are also highly intertextual doesn't surprise me in the least, and it makes perfect sense that the law was the first discipline to make use of hypertext. Law is nothing if not an intertextual endeavor, with one trying to interpret not only what was said, but also what was meant by what was said and whether the text has a new meaning given its new context. I found the discussion of the two styles of law informative, particularly because as a non-lawyer, it does not seem to me that they are anything other than complementary. I thought Raisch's arguments in favor of students of common law and civil law understanding and interacting with the other only made perfect sense.

Collapsing the Signifier and Signified: Kristeva 1980

As a linguist whose undergraduate training is in anthropology and English literature, I’ve of course spent a good deal of time thinking about the signified/signifier distinction and the distinctions between lange and parole. Of course Bahktin’s commentary on whether or not linguistics should comment on what he refers to as “metalinguistics” seems interesting, especially since his work was concurrent with Labov’s groundbreaking work that formed the foundations of sociolinguistics. Thus for me one of the most interesting aspects of Kristeva’s work is her suggestion that the framework that Bahktin is creating ultimately collapses the distinction between signifier and signified, making both contextually dependent, and bringing to the fore the relationship between speaker and addressee, referred-to and referrer.

Also fascinating to me is Kristeva’s explication of the ways in which the speaker <> addressee relationships create the different levels of “person” we encounter in the texts of novels, first, second, third (or rather, third, first, second as she explains them) and then the ways in which a dialogical relationship between the writer and the text can create a layer at which the text questions itself. I actually find this to be more the domain of parody, and it is interesting that the writers like Norrick who have looked at parody haven’t necessarily used Kristeva’s explanations as a jumping-off point. It seems to be that parody and humor is in some ways a text looking at itself and commenting on itself; for example, in order for Tina Fey to portray Sarah Palin, she must not only create a performance which we recognize as invoking the text of “Sarah Palin,” she can only mark it as humorous parody by also drawing attention to the fact that it is parody by means of exaggeration—oftentimes of a features as nuances as simple prosody (I am reminded of a time when I saw Fey’s parody second and only later realized that her parody as created only by her intonation and pauses—the lack of semantic information and in and the circuitous nature of the answers which I originally perceived as being part of the parody it turned out were verbatim from the interview Palin had given the day before). This fourth level is one that I think is worth further probing—when does a text comment on itself, and how does it achieve this?