Rahman 2008

Rahman, Jacquelyn. 2008. Middle Class African Americans: Reactions and Attitudes Toward African American English. American Speech 83 (2).

Rahman's 2008 article attempts to fill a gap in sociolinguistic study of African American English (AAE) by examining middle-class (Kerbo 1991) black speech. She argues that both AAE and standard English (SE) features are employed by middle-class African Americans, and explores the use of these features in the significance of "sounding black" in the judgments listeners make with regard to standardness, class, and appropriateness of speech styles. Conducting a two-part experiment among middle-class African Americans at a university, comprised of a survey of 66 African Americans about their attitudes toward AAE and their understanding of it, and also a perception study of 28 speakers, Rahman finds significant effects of phonological and syntactic features of AAE. She argues for a classification of Black Standard English (BSE), a variety which employs the phonological features of AAE with SE syntactic features. Like other studies, Rahman finds there is a continuum in AAE feature use, but also in the perceptions of situational appropriateness, standardness, and social class which it conveys. She concludes that at the base of every style stands a dialect, and that many African Americans are bidialectal, able to style-shift AAE features and SE features to convey solidarity with race-peers or to demonstrate level of education and social class.

Robinson 2010 Disintegration

Robinson, Eugene. 2010. Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America. New York: Doubleday.

In his 2010 book, Robinson, a staff writer for The Washington Post examines how although "black America" is still discussed as though it is a unified group, it actually comprises four distinct segments of society, each of which has different agendas than the others. He labels these four groups the transcendents, or the people like President Obama and Oprah, who represent wealth and power of the highest order, the mainstream, or the increasingly college-educated middle-and-upper-middle class whose focus is no longer on bootstrapping out of poverty but on maintaining a quality of life once ascribed to whites, the abandoned, the lower-income increasingly single-parented, high-school or lower-educated community, and the emergent, the immigrants from Africa who often still have claim identities of their home countries, but whose children increasingly are known simply as African American rather than Nigerian American or Ethiopian American, etc.

This book is particularly useful to my work as it discusses many socioeconomic and racial shifts within various segments of D.C., with a particular focus on the race riots of 1968. Much of Robinson's argument is that during Jim Crow segregation, there was racial segregation and socioeconomic integration in Washington D.C. communities, with areas like U Street being meccas for black citizens of all socioeconomic levels. In the wake of the destruction of the race riots, new settling patterns in D.C. have moved far more along economic lines than racial ones, so that mainstream and transcendent black populations live alongside comparably economically situated whites. This could have profound impact on language practice, especially in the gentrifying neighborhoods which I wish to study

DuBois and Horvath 1998

DuBois, Silvie and Barbara Horvath. 1998. Let's tink about dat:

Interdental fricatives in Cajun English.

Language Variation and Change, 10 (3), 245-261.

Dubois and Horvath examine the realization of the English interdental fricative among a community of fluent French-bilingual Cajun English speakers in Louisiana. They examine the degree to which the voiced (dh) and voiceless (th) English interdental fricatives are realized in the speech of the Cajun English speakers (as stops or as fricatives). Their analysis accounts for the age and sex of the speakers as well as whether or not the speakers have closed or open social networks. Ultimately they find the best predictors of fricative stopping is the combination of social network and sex, with somewhat opposite results--men with open social networks are more likely to stop, whereas women with closed networks are more likely to stop. They conclude that this is due to the stopped variant being particularly salient to indexing male identity in the community, whereas for the women, it is more mutable and more likely to change as they interact with non Cajun-English speakers.

Some important points about method for my own use:

D and H found four times as many (dh) as (th)

coded all words, but only analyzed fully dental variants

coded all words for the following linguistic features:

• stress
• # of syllables
• lexical category
• if function word, type of function word
• preceding phonological variant

Thomas 2007

Thomas, Erik R. 2007. Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistics Compass 1/5 (2007): 450–475.

In his very thorough article, Thomas outlines a large number of phonological and phonetic variables in African American English (AAE) and suggests ways we might study these variables in the comparison and contrast to European American varieties, particularly Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE). Thomas argues that although a great deal of research on AAE has dealt with morphosyntactic variation, phonological and phonetic variables represent the richest information source for how AAE is changing.

Thomas examines a number of consonental variables:

• consnential lexical variations (sk, sp metathesis)
• Rlessness and l-vocalilzation
• Interdental Fricative realization
• Consonant Cluster Simplicificaion/ -t/-d deletion
• rarer features, such as /skr/ for /str/

and also vowel veatures

• lack of HAPPY tensing
• PIN-PEN merger
• AAE shift
• GOOSE-GOAT fronting

Most interestingly, Thomas also includes other phonological variables beyond the most commonly studied AAE variables, such as voice quality, tone (using the ToBI system), prosody, and timing. I thought this was one of the most instructive areas in which he extended his research. Ultimately, Thomas calls for approaches which look at AAE variables on all levels of phonetics and phonology, and suggests that such an approach would have broad application not only within sociolinguistics but within other realms such as applied and educational linguistics as well.

Ethnolects and the city: Hoffman & Walker 2010

Hoffman, M. and Walker, J. A. 2010. Ethnolects and the city: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language, Variation and Change. 22. 37-67.

In their 2010 article, Hoffman and Walker question whether we can assume some homogeneity within an ethnic group; whether, as Corlock and Wolick (1981) argue, there is evidence for an “ethnolect” in use across a given ethnic group. They highlight two competing requirements of variationist sociolinguistic studies, that is, that there be socially meaningful explanations for variation, and that the study of social factors be replicable. At the same time, the authors argue that much of sociolinguistics has relied on etic, externally-determined categories for determining and delineating ethic groups, and argue for an approach which combines both social psychology and variationist sociolinguistic techniques.

60 informants were chosen from Toronto, stratified for ethnic origin and generation. Data were taken from sociolinguistic interviews. The data were examined for two sociolinguistic variables, the Canadian Vowel Shift and t/d deletion. In addition to the sociolinguistic data the researchers also performed an ethnic orientation survey, judging how closely given speakers identified as a member of their ethnic group.

Through the use of multivariate statistical analysis, the authors determine significant differences between groups, but more importantly, they find significant differences within groups that are not attributable only to generational differences (i.e., time /distance from the ethnic native language). Thus they conclude that ethno linguistic variation within a multilingual, multiethnic community has less to do with imperfect acquisition, but is better understood as part of speakers’ agentive construction of identity.

Moral Geography: Modan 2007

It's interesting to think about a place having moral geography (Hall). The way the place and its use reflect the moral landscape of the people who use it--and the kinds of assumptions they make about themselves and others based on their use of the space. She specifically speaks of how spaces become characterized, and characterizes Takoma Park in particular as "lesbian space" which I find interesting and may be useful to my own projects.

Gal refers to fractal recursivity, or the ability of the same distinctions to be mapped onto increasingly smaller and smaller or larger and larger domains, in that, for example, there might be the public space of the main street compared with the private space of the residential streets, but then on the residential streets the public space of the street vs. the private space of the houses, and in the houses, the public space of the front porch vs. the private space of the back, etc. etc.

One thing I find interesting is the creation of the city as heterogeneous space, which, as Modan points out, is not entirely valid, given that much of Mt. Pleasant is made up of identical rowhouses built in large blocks, where really, any one person in the neighborhood is living in the same house as any number of her neighbors. Yet the suburbs are conceived as being homogeneous space in contrast to the heterogeneous space of the city--ethnically, architecturally, etc. This is an interesting thing to explore in terms of Takoma, because Takoma is a place where a rejection of the homogeneity is part of the ideologies of place that create Takoma; for example, the rejection of Subway and CVS, the feeling that CVS should not be a place that people see right away on Cedar St. when someone comes in.

An additional note: in this chapter, Modan looks at the cat-calling men in Pigeon Park in Mt. Pleasant and what they say to women who pass. I found some value in connecting this back to Marcyliena Morgan's work on Signifiying, and wonder how looking at this talk through Morgan's lens might be useful.

Intertextuality Definition

Intertextuality is the way in which a text (of any medium) forms its meaning by its relationship to other texts (of any medium). This may include juxtaposition to another text, repetition either verbatim or in theme only of another text, anticipating a new text which may be created in response to the text, or laminating new ideas on the framework of an old text. New focus texts are created by their moment of departure from a prior text, which often requires a draw on the prior text to see, and then are often recontextualized into a new form, which allows them to become intertexts in and of themselves. The focus text and its intertexts form a puzzle of complete pieces—while each can often be understood, or at least have some meaning on their own, the fullest expression of all the texts is reached by exploring their relationships to one another.

Morph-ology: Bakhtin 1981 excerpts

Bakhtin has his own poetic, and I'm struck by the ways in which he brings in a host of other analogies in his own writing to explain what it is he's talking about; in the case of the area I'm going to explore, the issue of light refracting off a lens to explain the way meaning changes as the heteroglossia surrounding a particular text changes the way we see it. Just as light in rarefaction through a lens changes the shape, focus, and perception of an object, so does a change in the dialogue in which a particular text is situated.

I'm talking here about Bakhtin's concept of re-accentuation, which to me, both actively pursuing and studying my hobby of fan fiction is a very interesting one. Fan fiction is by its nature a heteroglossic undertaking; it is adding an interpretation to a text which already exists, or extracting bits of that text and creating a new dialogue around them. In doing so, the meaning of that text is gradually changed bit by bit as people grow to understand the situation differently. For example, in the original book, Edward the vampire likes to watch Bella sleep; when he admits this to her, she finds this hopelessly romantic. Yet if a fan fiction writer writes a so-called "alternate universe" (AU) fanfiction where Edward, instead of being a chaste, moral vampire who drinks from animals is instead a traditional bloodthirsty killer, when that writer repeats the trope of Edward watching Bella sleep, the interpretation of the new version is much more sinister. And what is more fascinating is that this new interpretation affects not only the AU, but that of the original text as well, and moves readers to understand the original book's Edward's motives as being quite creepy rather than the hopelessly romantic gesture they may have originally felt them to be.

Bakhtin argues that as texts move through different historical periods and different groups, each one adds a different meaning to it and shapes it, because the heteroglossic fabric which surrounds the text changes each time it is moved. Yet perhaps this is the test of something which is lasting; a great text continues to grow and move, morphing into other meanings and interpretations as it makes its way through the dialogic imagination of new sets of readers.

The Present Absent: Irvine 2005

What I find most interesting about Irvine's commentary is that it begins to tackle a part of intertextuality that I find many other treatments of the topic seem to gloss; that is, the meaning created by what is not there, which is often every bit as profound as the meaning created by the things that are. She identifies several types of gaps/features of gaps, which I will list for my own future reference:

-that unlike chunks of text shed light on like ones; they throw into relief the similarity of other parts of the text that otherwise might be more difficult to recognize as a like
-avoidance: the question of who sees what is being avoided (the 900-pound gorilla, as it were) and why they see it creates interesting questions about what is contained in the rest of the text
-absence: what has been excluded from the text and why
-roads not taken: why one approach was chosen.

In my own work, I find Irvine's thoughts on absence quite interesting, especially this question of unlike chunks shedding light on like ones. WK is an instance of incongruity, and perhaps part of what makes it so offensive to the people who are "being white-knighted is the simple fact that the incongruous opinion of the white-knight makes them all seem more similar, and subtly implies that they are the sheep in the herd.

A Charter, Not an Answer: Bauman 2005

In Bauman's response to the papers in LA 15, he outlines the reasons for understanding and exploring interdiscursivity (his extension of the term coined by Kristeva to explain Bahktin, which in and of itself represents a through-line of prior texts informing the current.) Bauman argues that interdiscursivity helps us to understand that all utterances are ideologically informed; they all carry with them the weight of all that has been said before and in this way, all speak back to the texts around them.

Bauman puts forth three primary reasons for us to be interested in interdiscursivity. One, it helps us transcend the limits of the bounded speech event to understand the ways in which a speech event is situated within the ideology of the groups that created it and the ways in which it responds to other speech events and speaks to new speech events which may occur in the future. Two, interdiscursivity keeps us aware that all utterances are ideologically informed, that is, that they all rely on the ideologies which their speakers and hearers bring to the table; these ideologies are based on prior interpretations of other texts, which are ideologically informed and so on and so on. And last, interdiscursivity provides a discourse-centered way of "elucidating and calibrating" the terms, modes and degrees of alignment; as Agha shows, it helps us piece together exactly how something becomes enregistered, or how someone becomes known as a particular persona.

Bauman calls Bakhtin's work "a charter, not an answer," and perhaps this is the most useful of all. Intertextuality, it seems to me, is a jumping-off point for understanding a host of phenomena, whether it be internet etiquette and behavior (my study), the creation of register (Agha 2005), alignment in a family (Tovares 2006), legal history and precedent (Raisch 2008), and many others, each as seemingly different as the next. Interdiscursivity lays the groundwork by which the workings of our communication are better understood; it gives no answers, only a map.

Sure Footing: Agha 2005

Perhaps the most useful part of Agha's article is his careful picking apart of the way that enregisterment happens, and so it is there that I'd like to focus my own thoughts, as it is also the most useful for me in my own work. He describes the following three-step process:

contrastive individuation, where by one voice is recognized as contrasting against another

biographic identification, or the "naming of voices," where the voice becomes typified

and

social characterization - assigning an individual voice to a social character.

This process in many ways is similar to Bauman's concept of entxextualization. In this, Agha essentially breaks down the process of entextualization even further, showing exactly how one instance comes to be known as a typification of a larger pheonmenon. Once a text (a voice in this case) goes through Agha's three stages, it has been entextualized as characteristic of a particular social persona, and then is free to be decontextualized and recontextualized at will.

For my own work, this makes good sense. White knighting is nothing if not a process by which one voice is isolated as not being a part of the broader conversation, and then typified as not only outside of but also an antagonist to that conversation. This process helps narrow down and identify the precise moves that are made to make that happen.

Laura's Presentation

Laura’s topic is, in terms of medium, closest to mine, and yet we’re exploring two very different phenomena. I greatly appreciated the insight from Baym with regard to repetition in the creation of internet humor and solidarity. The idea of the way that humor is an interstice in a text that is ostensibly about something else (for example, the daily show summaries) I think has a lot of value for my own research—much of what I’m looking at has a great deal to do with the ways in which individuals add their own voice to the text at hand.

I thought, too, that Laura’s request for us to reexamine Becker was a good one. Much of what happens in internet discourse is about repetition—what gets repeated and what does not, as well as what is picked up as relevant to the conversation and what stances are taken towards that information. Repetition has a lot to do with the creation of meaning on the internet.

Most interesting about Laura’s data were the ways meaning was being created out of very, very little. For example, the wall posts about Michael Moore might have been taken in a completely different way had the person not have been a conservative. I also was fascinated by the transformation of the word “Sicko” from a movie title to a possible reference to Moore himself. The ways in which single turns like that can be manipulated is a really fruitful area to look at on Facebook, and it seems like that is an area Laura is beginning to cue into in her analysis.

One of the things I wanted to know more about in Laura’s presentation was the way intertextuality functions in the socialization of these older FB users. I wasn’t completely clear on that, and I didn’t entirely get that reverse socialization out of the data we looked at (although we eschewed an entire set of data, so that may be why). I have a feeling much of this socialization happens in the responding to texts, for example, the example Laura gave of people going, “There’s a button for that” to someone who simply replies “I like this” to a post. I would be very interested to see some of that in action.

Sam's Workshop

One of the things I thought was a most interesting point brought up by Sam’s readings was the concept of “ownership” as it applies to health information. This was brought up in the Hardey reading, and yet I feel has a lot to do with what Sam is looking at in the birth control commercials. The question of who “owns” the medical information that was presented has a lot to do with how the information in the commercials is presented—do we view the speaker presenting the risks and benefits of the drug as something that an average person should have in her purview? I found that to be a very interesting question as we examined Sam’s data.

I was also particularly struck by the ways in which the data that Sam presented really did represent the “postmodern” commercial, or perhaps a mix of the modern and postmodern. Although much explicit information was given in the commercials (as was necessary per FDA standards), much information relied on other connections we could make, often intertextual ties to our understanding of women’s history, what a birth control pill pack looks like, what women’s bathing attire indexes, etc. The goal of the commercial was not entirely to sell us on the benefits of the product but rather to sell us on a particular feeling that we ought to have about the product—that it makes us freer, sexier, more modern, etc. (Incidentally, it was also very interesting given Pat’s presentation, to go back to the kinds of ideologies about manhood that his focus texts evoke.) I think the way these themes play out, in accordance with the kinds of ideas that Proctor put forth, might be a really interesting spot of exploration for Sam. I was very intrigued by the ways the two sets of commercials “talk back” to each other, and exploring the ways the talking back incorporates some of these concepts of how we’re meant to “feel’ could be very useful (for example, the correction Yaz commercial still uses the same actress in the same swanky bar instead of say, a doctor in a lab coat).

Connecting the concepts back to my own work; I think probably the most interesting piece I came across in Sam’s workshop were some of the ideas about ownership that Hardey explored. This concept of the internet making knowledge more communal, and knowledge being weighed not against its validity but against the availability of other knowledge, is one I think is particularly useful to my own work. WK to some degree deals with the question of whether one person’s reading of a particular text is valid vis a vis anothers’, and much of this has to do with the presence or absence of both opinions and the prevalence of one versus another. So I think some of the same things apply, e.g. people growing skeptical of skewed information because there simply is a lack of volume.

Pat's Workshop

Pat’s topic is quite interesting to me from the standpoint of using a really very subtle intertext. I didn’t expect to be using such a subtle intertext myself; my original thought was simply to examine message board speech precisely because the intertext is usually so overt. Yet I’ve found that what I’ve ended up looking at is very subtle.

Were I to watch Pat’s Ford commercials, I would likely not recognize the “Dirty Jobs” intertext at all, as I’ve never seen the show and certainly don’t recognize its host. Yet at the same time, I would undoubtedly recognize the ideologies of masculinity and strength and the personification of those ideologies onto a machine. I thought this was perhaps one of the more useful connections of Pat’s workshop for me; thinking about how to pick apart an intertext and to see different intertexts based on what one has experience with. In my own work, much comes from people understanding a situation in the same way, or understanding that a certain set of behaviors constitutes a white-knighting frame in the same way that Anna Trester’s improv artists could recognize a set of behaviors as a game frame. Pat’s focus texts helped me think about how an intertext could be recognized with very little, and also how people with different experiences might cue in to different intertexts.

The readings Pat chose I thought were complementary. Irvine and Gal emphasized a great deal about group formation, and very importantly, intragroup diversity. Thinking about how we might hegemonically assign characteristics to single groups is an interesting thought, especially when it comes to understanding their linguistic practice. I find these concepts to speak back to Ana’s work on linguistic metadiscourse, and wonder if that might not be a good area of exploration for her as well. I was intrigued by Actor Network Theory, and it seems that Latour and Irvine and Gal are saying a great deal of the same things about the ways networks and groups are created intrinsically and must be understood as such to understand how different pieces of their worlds can carry meaning. One spot I thought about particularly was the concept of certain features being mapped on to social qualities, a la the nylon vs. silk example that Latour gives. This could be brought to bear on some of Pat’s work—we already have many of the ideologies of what it is to be masculine, and the way they do or don’t get

The one thing I was surprised was missing from Pat’s workshop was more information about Dirty Jobs itself. There was a LOT to work with simply exploring the intertextual ties between the commercials themselves, but I found I wanted to know more about the Dirty Jobs intertext and the way in which it played into or didn’t play into the focus texts. However, I found the process of identifying the actors and intermediaries in each was a very good method of analysis for Pat’s work.
 

Corinne's Workshop

I found Corinne’s workshop to be strangely one of the more useful ones for my own work, perhaps because we are both working with such distinctly written media. The definitions that Thetela and Porter put forth for intertextuality itself I found particularly useful, especially Porter’s concept that intertextuality consists of both tierability and presupposition. Iterability of course takes us right back to Johnstone and Becker—the way a text becomes a second text by virtue of its repetition. And then there is presupposition, which to me brings back some of the ideas of an intertext anticipating other texts. Presupposition reminds us that the text is always speaking to other texts, responding to other texts, and positioning itself relative to other texts. I find this concept very useful in my own research. I was also more than a little interested in Thetela’s discussion of relational processes arising out of intertextual relationships, as I think this is something that is going on in my own data quite a bit.

One of the things I found most interesting about Corinne’s workshop was the use or lack of use of quotes. I found it fascinating to follow the trajectory of the quotes that were put forth in the original article and the ways in which they resurfaced in subsequent discussions of the same material. (I thought Corinne made a great choice in doing her model analysis on the first article and letting us navigate our way through the subsequent ones.) The discussion of when something gets quoted, even to the extent that “nonissue” was not put in quotes in a headline, I thought was a very fruitful one, and brings back many of the ideas that both Sclafani and Tannen put forth about double-voiced discourse.

I was interested as well in the way Thetela discussed the stance creation in her text, and I thought this would be a very useful area for Corinne. Obviously the ways these texts are quoted or not quoted create certain alliances between the text and the reader, encouraging the reader to side or not to side with a particular point of view. This is very prevalent in a discussion such as the one Corinne is reading, and obviously, each piece we looked at took this stance creation to a different degree.

The one part of Corinne’s workshop I would’ve liked to see more of were any sort of opposing viewpoints. Particularly with regard to what I mention above about stance creation on the part of the audience, it would be interesting to see how similar quotes are used to encourage people to take a different stance than the one originally presented by the SF Chronicle.

Marni's Presentation

I’ve always thought Marni’s question to be a very interesting one, and I was interested to see the way in which she ultimately decided to operationalize it by looking at cancer narratives. I do think that shared experience does constitute a type of prior text, especially because often shared experience often creates a distinct text within itself—I’m reminded of Tovares’s recent work on athlete narratives, when certain phrases become the norm for discussing things, like in “mile 20 is when the real race begins” is an instance of “real race” being used to describe the inner battle to finish versus the physical battle of fatigue.

Particularly interesting in Marni’s readings I thought was this use of intertextual (and intratextual in the case of Hamilton) ties in the construction of identity. The ways in which identity is co-constructed is a particular research interest of mine as I’m currently looking at audience design in the sociolinguistic interview. At the same time, Hamilton’s construction is working a little differently in that the author’s responses and interactions with the patient serve to help construct the patient’s “patient” identity, which is different from the audience and referee design theory that I’m working with.

I also find interesting Bakhtin’s notion that we are influenced by incorporating another’s words into our own discourse. This seems to me to be one of the major factors in the narratives that Marni is looking at. Although I did not get the chance to explore the narratives themselves, this question of taking on others’ words seems to me to be a prime site for understanding the ways in which intertextuality allows them to develop the identity of cancer survivors. In what ways to they adopt the “language” of cancer survival? In medical anthropology in undergrad, we often talked about how cancer is framed as a battle—the cancer battling the body and the patient battling the cancer, as though there is anything the patient can do to actually effect change on the cancer . In fact, the mere presence of all of these stories on Livestrong is to some extent an intertextual tie itself—Lance Armstrong is known for his bravery in battling his cancer and for going on to win many more races after his treatment. By positioning themselves with Livestrong, the authors of Marni’s narratives tap into the experience of Armstrong.

Most useful to me from Marni’s work is probably this idea of being influenced by the incorporation of others’ words. I believe part of WK is the taking on of a voice and a stance that others have already identified, and sometimes it is even taking on words such as “baww” or “butthurt” which shape the world of an additional interlocutor so that they understand and respond to the situation as an instance of WK instead of a different reaction they may have had otherwise.

Ana's Presentation

Notes on Ana’s Presentation (from readings and ppt)

Metalinguistic study has always been a rather fascinating topic for me, and so I was quite sorry to have missed this presentation in person. I think the ways in which people create solidarity or distance by talking about the ways they talk is fascinating—I always think back to the first time I saw the “I’m not having any Southern Babies” monologue in American Tongues.

I am also particularly interested in the ways in which Ana is relying on much of the same framework as I am in looking at the issues of en-, decon- and recontexualization of the instance of metalinguistic commentary. I have personally found this to be a good area of intertextuality for my own work, as the process a text moves through as it moves from one of these to the next is frequently highly visible.

I was particularly interested in Coupland and Jaworoski’s discussion of language as innocent, in the idea that it is somehow removed from the social process and ideologies in which it is embedded. One thing I think keeps being broken down in this course is the idea of language as being separate from the social situations from which it arises. It is used to create identities and to shape them, and to move ideas from one sphere into another. If language were “innocent,” the rekeying that Tannen talks about would be impossible; there would be no social connection for that language to be able to move from a discussion about the return of a box to a discussion about spousal support in hardship.

Although language ideologies do not manifest themselves in my own research and there is not much in the way of metalinguistic commentary, I think the ways in which Ana is engaging with the same framework as I am to uncover the sites of her explorations forms a useful juxtaposition to my own work

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.