Situated Meaning: Social Languages and Cultural Models.

Situated Meaning: Social Languages and Cultural Models.

Confronting VJ9 with the James Gee phd-workshop.

Introduction

From November 23th 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 Gee, member of the so called New London Group who launched the concept of Multiliteracies with their ground braking article ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures’ first published in the Harvard Educational Review in 1996. James Paul 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. Yet more recently he has begun work on digital literacies and has published a new book on the theories of learning embedded in video and computer games. He has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

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. Since this last description also could be a legitimate description of VJ9 ‘The Language of Sharing’, I reported the workshop on the VJ9 blog. Here I want to bring some issue that where tackled during the workshop together with what happened during VJ9 starting from three concepts that are central in Gee’s work: situated meaning, social languages and cultural models. But I will start with what Gee call’s the ‘magical property’ of language.

Language in context

Discourse analysis is basically the analysis of "language in context". But this simple statement begs two questions: What is "context"? and Why bother?

To understand a particular instance of language, we have to know what social identity the speaker (or writer) is adopting and what social activity the speaker (or writer) thinks he or she is accomplishing. For example, the same words uttered by the same person will mean quite different things if taken to have been spoken in her role as a professor in a formal advising session as against her role as a friend in an informal chat before getting down to "business". "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".

Language in context has a quite "magical" property. 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. For example, 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.

Situated Meaning

Discourse analysis of any type (whether critical or not) can undertake one or both of two related tasks. One task is what we call the utterance-type meaning task. This task involves the study of correlations between form and function in language at the level of utterance-type meanings. “Form” here means things like morphemes, words, phrases or other syntactic structures. “Function” means meaning or the communicative purpose a form carries out. The other task is what we call the utterance-token meaning (or situated meaning) task. This task involves the study of correlations between form and function in language at the level of utterance-token meanings. Essentially, this task involves discovering the situation-specific or situated meanings of forms used in specific contexts of use. Critical approaches go further and treat social practices, not just in terms of social relationships but also in terms of their implications for things like status, solidarity, the distribution of social goods, and power (e.g., how language in a job interview functions as a gate keeping device allowing some sorts of people access and denying it to others). Critical discourse analysis argues that language in use is always part of specific social practices and that social practices always have implications for inherently political things like status, solidarity, the distribution of social goods, and power. 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”. So the issue is: Is it enough to leave the analysis of the social at the level of how talk and texts function in social interactions or do we need to go further and consider, as well, how talk and text function politically in social interactions? Does this render discourse analysis “unscientific” or “unacademic”, a mere matter of “advocacy”? Gee’s view is that there are solid linguistic, even grammatical grounds, on which to argue that all language-in-interaction is inherently political and, thus, that all discourse analysis, if it is to be true to its subject matter (i.e., language-in-use) and in that sense “scientific”, must be critical discourse analysis.

Link with brave new words

Brave new words

"We take home and language for granted; they become nature and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience". (Edward Said, Reflections on Exile) Brave new words investigates labeling, naming and demarcation in public places. The day starts with looking at urban practices of representation, and ways to re-imagine routines of public remembrance. In the afternoon we tour through personal anecdotes, empirical theory and its alternatives, public spaces such as history, internet, geography and also ethnicity and its migrating potentiality, to ask the question: How to name another person in public? How can my 'self' be an alien? Which words formulate you as me? What to call you when I am the other?

Social Language

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.

Link with irregular expressions:

(Ir)regular Expressions

In the computer world, “a regular expression (regex or regexp for short) is a special text string for describing a search pattern” [1] A regexp doesn't look for a meaning but for the way we express it. Regular expressions reveal contexts and conventions, and treat language as a body. They can catch its hesitations, its stutters and hiccups. (Ir)regular expressions is a journey through chat rooms, misspellings and misunderstandings, the Perl language, telematic performance and the disintegration of speech. Your guide: Nicolas Malevé. And Regional dialectics On this day we would like to take you on a journey and cross a few linguistic borders. We will "view source" to find out about universal webstandards, twist our tongues and trigger our memories through the movement of our bodies, but also physically move from bilingual Brussels to French speaking Liège. We attempt to impurify, crossbread and bastardize otherwise isolated forms of speech; linguistic borders, difference and contradictions are the breeding grounds for transformation, ex(change) and play. 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).

link with stich&split:

Stitch and Split / Selves and territories in Science Fiction http://www.stitch-and-split.org/ In 2005 and 2006 Constant is programming experimental and popular Science Fiction films mixed with lectures and presentations by filmmakers, theoreticians and fans in the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerpen (MuHKA_media). This month's programme coincides with V/J9. What are the terms and conditions applied by Science Fiction to narrate the future? Will we proceed to describe and imagine the future and possible elsewheres according to western norms and perspectives? Stitch and Split approaches Science Fiction as a strategy for transformation and reflection, not as the beginning or an end of a fixed reality. Stitch and Split proposes to use a language based on other myths and creative criteria. The most fruitful debates originate from interspaces, interdisciplinary and gender- and genre crossovers. The first dat of V/J9, we bring together presentations and reflections on artificial languages. Be it a extra-terrestrial language, a robotic discussion partner or language as we know it transposed into a future and environment in which it is no longer a means of communication but representative of the superior humanistic values

Conclusion

A situated meaning is the meaning a word or phrase is given in an actual context of use (e.g., “Get the mop, the coffee spilled” versus “Get the broom, the coffee spilled”). A cultural model is a (often tacit) theory or story about how things work in the world (e.g., children throw tantrums because they are undergoing stages towards greater independence).

A social language is a pattern of grammatical devices associated with a given social practice, activity, or socially-situated identity (e.g., “Experiments show that Heliconius butterflies are less likely to oviposit on host plants that possess eggs or egg-like structures”).  

A Discourse is a “whole package”: a way of using, not just words, but words, deeds, objects, tools, and so forth, to enact a certain sort of socially-situated identity (e.g., a Latino street-gang member in L.A.).