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.

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).