Never Say the Same Thing Twice: Johnstone 1994

Probably what struck me the most about Johnstone's article was this notion that we repeat verbatim to say something different, but when we want to say the same thing, we make changes. I had never really thought about it before, but it's beyond correct. Reading Johnstone, I recalled something I read in an in-flight magazine about repetition: it was an article on 11 tips for good management strategies, the first of which was repetition. The suggestion was that managers and subordinates repeat what their manager or subordinate said to them as a way of not only acknowledging what was said, but also as a way of projecting, "I'm going to act on this and hold you to what you said." I was struck by the way the repetition itself adds this layer of meaning, a la Johnstone's discussion here.

This, I think is an interesting part of intertextuality, and probably the one I am most fascinated by. Although one can focus on the ways in which the texts themselves interact and therefore produce meaning, I feel like it is the "gap" between two texts, even two identical texts, which ultimately gives a great deal of insight into the ways in which the text is to be interpreted. In the case of direct repetition, there seems to be the anticipated question of, "Why is this being repeated?" whose answer provides the meaning given by the repetition: It is being repeated to show solidarity, as a request for clarification, sometimes even as a face threat to the person to whom it is being repeated. This to me is what Dr. Tannen is referring to as "abduction" the way meaning is created "on the side" of the texts; not by anything that can be directly deduced from their content but from the way in which they interact.

In the case of internet exchanges, I think a lot of these sorts of abductive ideas surface as people respond not only to what another said, but also to what she didn't say, and to the meaning she might be creating by not saying other kinds of things. I find Johnstone's article, for that reason, to be helpful in my own framework of discussion, as the discussions on which I will focus my own research are by their natures abductive rather than deductive or inductive--the choice to quote directly vs. to paraphrase is a salient one, and after reading Johnstone, I realize it is perhaps a more salient one than I might have originally realized.