Situated Meaning: Social Languages and Cultural Models.
Confronting VJ9 with the James Gee phd-workshop.
Social practices are inherently political, since by their very nature they involve social roles or positions that have implications for potential social goods such as who is an "insider", and who is not, to the practice (and the social groups). Since critical discourse analysis argues that language in use is always part one or more specific social practices, language-in-use is itself “political”. (Gee…)
Introduction
From November 23rd to November 25th a workshop on Discourse Analysis took place at the Centre for Discourse Studies in Aalborg (Denmark). The workshop was led by James Paul Gee, founding member of the so called New London Group[i]. James Gee is Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at University of Madison-Wisconsin (USA). Gee’s recent work has extended his ideas on language, literacy and society to deal with the so-called “new capitalism” and its cognitive, social and political implications for literacy and schooling. More recently his work started to focus on digital literacies and publications on the theories of learning embedded in video and computer games. He has published extensively in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.[ii]
The course was concerned with “a ‘family’ of approaches to discourse analysis that seek to illuminate the significance and implications of social, cultural and political practices based on a close examination of language in use” (McIIveny 2005). An important part of VJ9 actually focused on these social, cultural and political implications of language in use. During the festival I reported the workshop on the VJ9 blog, here I want to bring some of the issues that where tackled during the workshop together in an overview of Gee’s theory starting from three concepts that are central in his work: situated meaning, social languages and cultural models.
Discourse Analysis (DA) is an interdisciplinary field of research that was founded at the end of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s out of disciplines such as linguistics, literature, anthropology, semiotics, sociology, psychology, communication and others (Van Dijk 1988:17). There are many different advocates and personalities in DA and twice as many different concepts (often meaning the same thing). The theory and concepts that I will be presenting here are those used and developed by Gee, other DA theorists might use different concepts or have different foci. But there is one guiding idea that would be recognized by (almost) all DA researchers, the fact that all language-in-us is context related. And this is what Gee calls the ‘magical property’ of language.
Language in context
At the beginning of the workshop Gee asked two questions based on the premises that DA comes down to the analysis of language in context: What is “context”? and Why bother?
If we want to understand a ‘particular use of language’ then we have to find out “what social identity the speaker or writer is adopting and what social activity the speaker (or writer) thinks he or she is accomplishing” (Gee …).
To illustrate that the same words uttered by the same person mean different things in different contexts Gee uses the expression “getting down to business”. This expression will mean a very different thing when uttered by a professor in a formal advising session or when the same person is being in the role of an informal chat session. So, what is context and why bother?
"Who" we are and "what" we are doing, where we are doing it, what has already been said and done, as well as the knowledge and assumptions that we assume we share with those with whom we are communicating, are all part of "context".(Gee …)
This is why language in context has a “magical” property according to Gee. “The words we utter (or write) simultaneously reflect (are shaped by, are determined by) the context within which we utter them and create (shape, determine) the context”. (Gee…) Or, as Edley and Wetherell would have it: “people are simultaneously the products and the producers of discourse” (Edley and Wetherell, 1997, p. 206). A lot of Gee’s work is concerned with what this idea means for education and teaching:
“…elementary school teachers talk (and act) the way they do because they are in classrooms and they are teaching, but their classrooms count as classrooms and they as teachers teaching because they talk (and act) that way. The "world" both pre-exists and shapes how we talk about it (and act in it) and it means what it means and has the shape it does because we talk about it (and act in an on it) as we do.” (Gee …)
Situated Meaning
In education Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has often been limited to anecdotal reflection. Gee’s work however is very much of use for thinking about language as an educational scientist, a teacher, a social worker… because Gee pays attention to “education through not always in schools (Gee 1992, Gee 1996) and “the relevance of Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis to controversial issues in education” (Gee 1999, 2005).
For Gee there are two tasks a (critical) Discourse analysis can undertake. The first task is what he calls the utterance-type question. It studies the “correlations between form and function in language at the level of utterance-type meanings.” (Gee…) Form is understood as things like morphemes, words, phrases or other syntactic structures. Function is understood as meaning or the communicative purpose a form carries out. The other task is referred to as the utterance token meaning (or situated meaning) task. It studies the “correlations between form and function on language at the level of utterance-token meanings. It is aimed discovering the situation-specific or situated meanings of forms used in specific contexts of use” (Gee…).
When we use language we have certain expectations, language always has a certain meaning potential. A meaning potential is a range of possible meanings that the word or structure can take on in different contexts of use. Gee uses the word ‘Cat’ as an example. When we just mean the animal that is known as a cat then we can speak of an utterance type meaning. “Utterance type meanings are general meanings, not situation-specific meanings (though we could say that they are, in reality, connected to the prototypical situations in which a word or structure is usually used.” In the actual language use words or structures get more specific meanings within the reach of their ‘meaning potentials’. This can be described as ‘utterance-token meaning’ or ‘situated meaning’. Using the same example of Cat then we could say ‘the world’s big cats are all endangerd”. Here ‘cat’ refers to Lions and Tigers. We could say; “The cat was a sacred symbol to the ancient Egyptians.” Cat here refers to real cats and pictures of cats. We could say: the cat broke. Here cat refers to the image of a cat.
Social Languages
When we use language we have some specific expectations. How language “normally” is being used and how language has a certain “meaning potential”. Meaning potential: a range of possible meanings that the word or structure can take on in different contexts of use.
The second distinction is between vernacular styles of language and non-vernacular styles. Most linguists believe that this process of native language acquisition is partly biological. People use their native language initially and throughout their lives to speak in the vernacular style of language, that is, the style of language they use when they are speaking as “everyday” people and not as specialists of various sorts (e.g., biologists, street-gang members, lawyers, video-game adepts, postmodern feminists). Everyone’s vernacular style is as good as anyone else’s.
This claim bears important issues for education. From a linguistic point of view no child comes to school with a worse or better language than any other child’s. A child’s language is not lesser because that child speaks a so-called “non-standard” dialect. These claims are not politically contentious in modern linguistics, they are simply empirical.
Nearly everyone comes to acquire non-vernacular styles of languages later in life, styles used for special purposes, such as religion, work, government, or academic specialties. We can call these “social languages”. People usually go on to acquire different non-vernacular social languages connected to different social groups.
Cultural Model
So, in addition to situated meanings, each word is also associated with a cultural model. A cultural model is a usually totally or partially unconscious explanatory theory or “storyline” connected to a word or concept – bits and pieces of which are distributed across different people in a social group – that helps to explain why the word has the different situated meanings and possibilities for more that it does have for specific social and cultural groups of people. For example, many people in the USA accept what has been called the “success model” (D’Andrade 1984). This cultural model (theory, storyline) runs something like this: “Anyone can make it in America if they work hard enough” and helps make sense of things like “success” and “failure” to many people. Of course, this model backgrounds elements like poverty and can lead to blaming poor people when they fail to make a “success” of themselves, even leading to claims that they are “lazy.”
“Discourse models” are “theories” (storylines, images, explanatory frameworks) that people hold, often unconsciously, and use to make sense of the world and their experiences in it. They are always oversimplified, an attempt to capture some main elements and background subtleties, in order to allow us to act in the world without having to think overtly about everything all at once.
Discourse models are simplified, often unconscious and taken-for-granted, theories about
how the world works that we use to get on efficiently with our daily lives. We learn them from experiences we have had, but, crucially, as these experiences are shaped and normed by the social and cultural groups to which we belong. From such experiences we infer what is “normal” or “typical” (e.g., what a “normal” man or child or policeman looks and acts like) and tend to act on these assumptions unless something clearly tells us that we are facing an exception.
It is difficult to appreciate the importance and pervasiveness of Discourse models, or to understand how they work, if we stick only to examples from cultures close to our own. So let me give an example of Discourse models at work adapted from William Hanks’ excellent book Language and Communicative Practices (1996). This example will also let us see that Discourse models are at work in even the “simplest” cases of communication and in regard to even the simplest words. When we watch language-in-action in a culture quite different from our own, even simple interactions can be inexplicable, thanks to the fact that we do not know many of the Discourse models at play. This means that even if we can figure out the situated meanings of some words, we cannot see any sense to why these situated meanings have arisen (why they were assembled here and how).
Example1:
In the first case below a young woman was telling her parents about how she had ranked some characters in a story she had heard in a class she was taking at a university. She is telling her boyfriend the “same thing” in the second case :
Well, when I thought about it, I don't know, it seemed to me that Gregory should be the most offensive. He showed no understanding for Abigail, when she told him what she was forced to do. He was callous. He was hypocritical, in the sense that he professed to love her, then acted like that.
What an ass that guy was, you know, her boy friend. I should hope, if I ever did that to see you, you would shoot the guy. He uses her and he says he loves her. Roger never lies, you know what I mean?
These two texts are both in versions of the vernacular, in neither case is the young woman trying to speak like a specialist in some specialized social language.
However, the first text is more formal and creates a certain sense of deference in talking to her parents, while the second text is more informal and creates a certain sense of solidarity with her boyfriend.
Some of the grammatical markers that create these distinctions in these two texts are: To her parents, the young woman carefully hedges her claims:
"I don't know"
"it seemed to me"
To her boy friend, she makes her claims straight out.
To her parents she uses formal terms like
"offensive", "understanding", "hypocritical" and "professed"
to her boy friend, she uses informal terms like "ass" and "guy".
She also uses more formal sentence structure to her parents ("it seemed to me that ...") than she does to her boy friend ("...that guy, you know, her boy friend").
The young woman repeatedly addresses her boyfriend as "you", thereby noting his social involvement as a listener, but does not directly address her parents in this way. In talking to her boy friend, she leaves several points to be inferred, points that she spells out more explicitly to her parents.
While different dialects would mark such distinctions in formality and deference differently, all people have vernacular forms of language in which they can and do do such things.
Important educational issue arises here. Formal forms of the vernacular in the style of above, more formal forms of "standard English", are often well utilized and privileged in school as a bridge to academic social languages. Formal forms of the vernacular in other dialects are usually poorly utilized and unprivileged, if not even demonized.