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.