research proposal assignment

2 Discourses and social languages

2.1 Building things through language

Language has a magical property: when we speak or write we craft what we have to say to fit the situation or context in which we are communicating. But, at the same time, how we speak or write creates that very situation or context. It seems, then, that we fit our language to a situation or context that our language, in turn, helped to create in the first place.

This is rather like the “chicken and egg” question: Which comes first? The situation we’re in (e.g. a committee meeting)? Or the language we use (our committee ways of talking and interacting)? Is this a “committee meeting” because we are speaking and acting this way, or are we speaking and acting this way because this is a committee meeting? After all, if we did not speak and act in certain ways, committees could not exist; but then, if institutions, committees, and committee meetings didn’t already exist, speaking and acting this way would be nonsense. The answer here is that this magical property is real and language and institutions “boot strap” each other into existence in a reciprocal process through time.

Another way to look at the matter is this: we always actively use spoken and written language to create or build the world of activities (e.g. committee meetings) and institutions (committees) around us. However, thanks to the workings of history and culture, we often do this in more or less routine ways. These routines make activities and institutions, like committees and committee meetings, seem to (and, in that sense, actually) exist apart from language and action in the here and now. None the less, these activities and institutions have to be continuously and actively rebuilt in the here and now. This is what accounts for change, transformation, and the power of language-in-action in the world.

We continually and actively build and rebuild our worlds not just through language, but through language used in tandem with actions, interactions, non- linguistic symbol systems, objects, tools, technologies, and distinctive ways of thinking, valuing, feeling, and believing. Sometimes what we build is quite similar to what we have built before; sometimes it is not. But language-in-action is always and everywhere an active building process.

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Whenever we speak or write, we always and simultaneously construct or build six things or six areas of “reality”:

1. The meaning and value of aspects of the material world: I enter a plain, square room, and speak and act in a certain way (e.g. like someone about to run a meeting), and, low and behold, where I sit becomes the “front” of the room.

2. Activities: We talk and act in one way and we are engaged in formally opening a committee meeting; we talk and act in another way and we are engaged in “chit-chat” before the official start of the meeting.

3. Identities and relationships: I talk and act in one way one moment and I am speaking and acting as “chair” of the committee; the next moment I speak and talk in a different way and I am speaking and acting as one peer/colleague speaking to another.

4. Politics (the distribution of social goods): I talk and act in such a way that a visibly angry male in a committee meeting (perhaps it’s me!) is “standing his ground on principle,” but a visibly angry female is “hysterical.”

5. Connections: I talk and act so as to make what I am saying here and now in this committee meeting about whether we should admit more minority students connected to or relevant to (or, on the other hand, not connected to or relevant to) what I said last week about my fears of losing my job given the new government’s turn to the right.

6. Semiotics (what and how different symbol systems and different forms of knowledge “count”): I talk and act so as to make the knowledge and language of lawyers relevant (privileged), or not, over “everyday language” or over “non-lawyerly academic language” in our committee discussion of facilitating the admission of more minority students.

In Chapter 5 I will elaborate these “building tasks” and their relevance for discourse analysis. But in the next three chapters, I want to develop several “tools of inquiry” (ways of looking at the world of talk and interaction) that will help us study how these building tasks are carried out and with what social and political consequences. The tools of inquiry I will introduce in this chapter are primarily relevant to how we (together with others) build identities and activities and recognize the identities and activities that are being built around us. However, the tools of inquiry introduced here are most certainly caught up with all the other building tasks above, as well, as we will see progressively in this book. The tools to be discussed in this chapter are:

a. “Situated identities,” that is, different identities or social positions we enact and recognize in different settings.

b. “Social languages,” that is, different styles of language that we use to enact and recognize different identities in different settings; different social languages

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also allow us to engage in all the other building tasks above (in different ways, building different sorts of things).

c. “Discourses” with a capital “D,” that is, different ways in which we humans integrate language with non-language “stuff,” such as different ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, believing, and using symbols, tools, and objects in the right places and at the right times so as to enact and recognize different identities and activities, give the material world certain meanings, distribute social goods in a certain way, make certain sorts of meaningful connections in our experience, and privilege certain symbol systems and ways of knowing over others (i.e. carry out all the building tasks above).

d. “Conversations” with a capital “C,” that is, long-running and important themes or motifs that have been the focus of a variety of different texts and interactions (in different social languages and Discourses) through a significant stretch of time and across an array of institutions.

2.2 Whos and whats

When you speak or write anything, you use the resources of English to project yourself as a certain kind of person, a different kind in different circumstances. You also project yourself as engaged in a certain kind of activity, a different kind in different circumstances. If I have no idea who you are and what you are doing, then I cannot make sense of what you have said, written, or done.

You project a different identity at a formal dinner party than you do at the family dinner table. And, though these are both dinner, they are none the less different activities. The fact that people have differential access to different identities and activities, connected to different sorts of status and social goods, is a root source of inequality in society. Intervening in such matters can be a contribution to social justice. Since different identities and activities are enacted in and through language, the study of language is integrally connected to matters of equity and justice.

An oral or written “utterance” has meaning, then, only if and when it communicates a who and a what (Wieder and Pratt 1990a). What I mean by a “who” is a socially-situated identity, the “kind of person” one is seeking to be and enact here and now. What I mean by a “what” is a socially-situated activity that the utterance helps to constitute.

Lots of interesting complications can set in when we think about identity enacted in and through language. Whos can be multiple and they need not always be people. The President’s Press Secretary can issue an utterance that is, in fact, authored by a speech writer and authorized (and even claimed) by the President. In this case, the utterance communicates a sort of overlapping and compound who. The Press Secretary, even if she is directly quoting the speech writer, must inflect the remark