Lingüística II Resumen Completo

Linguistics II 2012
Resumido por Matas Argello Pitt y Anala Zanelli 1

COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND SEMANTICS

Cognitive linguistics is steeped in the belief that there's no separation of linguistic knowledge from general
thinking or cognition. Linguistic behavior is just another part of the general cognitive abilities that allow learning,
reasoning, etc. (Saeed)

Objectivist Semantics is the basic metaphysical belief that categories exist in objective reality, together w/their
properties and relations, independently of consciousness (Lakoff).
Lakoff characterizes this approach under three "doctrines":
a) The doctrine of truth-conditional meaning: Meaning is based on reference and truth.
b) The "correspondence of theory" of truth: Truth consists in the correspondence btw symbols and states
of affairs in the world.
c) The doctrine of objective reference: There's an "objectively correct" way to associate symbols with
things in the world.

Cognitive Semantics is a reaction to Objectivist Semantics (meaning is based on reference and truth, categories
have fixed boundaries). According to the studies of Objectivist Semantics, language is a reflection of reality
(assoc of concepts with ways of naming). However, according to Cognitive Semantics, natural languages are not
a direct reflection of reality. The relation between language and reality is mediated by cognition.

Access to reality, then, is indirect. Reality influences our perception of the world. Cognition helps us make sense
of reality.
The structure of reality as reflected by language is a product of the human mind. The mind categorizes the
world. That is to say, concepts are not in isolation. Theyre organized conceptual structures
Linguistic truth and falsity must be relative to the way an observer construes a situation, based on his or her
conceptual framework and how language use reflects them (Saeed).

The structure in the semantics of a language is the reflection of the mental categories that speakers of that
language have in their minds.

Ungerer & Schmidt The boundaries of entities like knee trunk are vague. Yet in spite of their vagueness, we
have the impression that these boundaries exist in reality (a kneecap cannot be included in the thigh; a mountatin
top can never be part of a valley).
The temperature scale and the color continuum don't provide natural divisions like those of books, cars, or even
knees or valleys. Therefore, the classification of temperature and colors can only be conceived as a mental
process. Physical properties, and colors especially, have served as the starting point for the psychological and
conceptual view of word meanings which is at the heart of cognitive linguistics.
This mental process of classification is called CATEGORIZATION, and its products are the COGNITIVE
CATEGORIES
1
(e.g. the color categories red, yellow, green, etc).

1
cognitive categories = mental concepts
Unit 1:
Language, Cognition and Interaction:
conceptual structures, figure-ground and frames

Categorization:
the mental process of
classification

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Some facts related to category
Different members of one category can be more salient/representative than others
Categories include prototypes (most representative elements)
Categories have fuzzy boundaries
Categories are structured
Cognitive semantics admit that there are some Aristotelian categories
2

The internal structure of categories: prototypes, attributes, family resemblances and gestalt

ATTRIBUTES
3

In the classical view a category is defined by a limited set of necessary and sufficient conditions, which are
conceived as clear-cut "discrete" features (or essential features) which can be either present or absent. For
example: in the case of BIRD, this means that a creature os only a bird if it has two wings and two legs, a beak,
feathers, and lays eggs; if, on the other hand, a creature hass all these essential features, this is also sufficient for
classifying it as a bird.
Robins, parrots and ostriches have properties which serve to tie them to the common category BIRD but also
properties that distinguish them from one another. Collecting both the shared and the distinctive properties
seems to provide a feasible way of describing the internal structure of categories.
Intermediate and bad examples of BIRD differ from prototypical examples either by deviating to a moderate
degree with regard to one or more attributes (the legs are shorter) or by lacking some attributes altogether (it
cannot fly).
a yes/no representation of attributes (which would correspond to the classical view) cannot adequately render
the attributes of birds and has to be modified to include intermediate judgements.
THE PRINCIPLE OF FAMILY RESEMBLANCES
It opens up an alternative to the classical view that attributes must be category-wide (common to all category
members)
Family resemblances: a network of overlapping similarities. Items 1 to 4 belong to the same category even
though they don't all share the same attributes, because 1 has attributes AB, 2 has BC, 3 has CD, and 4 DE.
The explanatory potential of the principle. What is decisive is that family resemblances can explain why
attributes contribute to the internal structure of the category even if they are not common to all category
members; i.e. if they aren't essential features according to the classical view.
Attribute-based typicality ratings (previously called "measure of family resemblance"): the terms refer to the
ratings of category members as "more prototypical" or "more peripheral", according the attributes the member
shares with others.
This kind of rating (introduced by Rosh and Mervis (1975)) could be used to support the notion of prototype
categories in two ways:
the hypothesis that categories consist of good and bad members was no longer solely dependent on the
intuitive judgments of the goodness-of-examples-ratings,
4
but could now be related to a large range of
attributes.
The notion of good and bad examples could be used to explain why attributes are so unevenly distributed
among category members. While good examples have many attributes in common with other members of the
same category, bad or marginal examples share only few attributes with members of the same category.
Equally important is the question of distinctive features, i.e., whether the members of a category, both good
and bad examples, share attributes with members of neighbouring categories. To understand the importance,
consider that a prototypical car, say a saloon, has fewer attributes in common with a prototypical truck than an
estate car does.

2
According to this view, categories are homogenous i.e. all of them have the same status. Example: Dean of the School of Languages not fuzzy, theres
only one dean
3
It's better to consider them as descriptive tools more than as part of the mental representation of a category.
4
The type of rating used in the experiment with university students mentioned above.
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Summary of the attribute structure of prototype categories
Prototypical members of cognitive categories have the largest number of attributes in common with other
members of the category and the smallest number of attributes which also occur with members of neighboring
categories. This means that in terms of attributes, prototypical members are maximally distinct from the
prototypical members of other categories.
Marginal (peripheral a better word?) category members share only a small number of attributes with other
members of their category, but have several attributes which belong to other categories as well (= category
boundaries are fuzzy).

What happens with "deviant cases", that is category members whose attributes do not comply with the
expected norm?

Most of these cases involve attributes related to dimensions such as size, weight, length, thickness, width,
height, depth, shape.
Starting out from attributes which can, at least theoretically, be regarded as values on dimensions (aspects such
as "context" and "material" being treated as dimensions), we can overcome the limitations implicit in the discrete
attributes of the logical views.

INTERNAL CATEGORY STRUCTURE AND GESTALT

When we encounter, say, an animal, we hardly being categorizing by evaluating specific attributes. What we do
is take in an overall picture of the whole and use it for a first assessment of its goodness; we judge on the basis of
a gral impression. This is the first step (called holistic perception). The decomposition of the perceived whole
into individual attributes is a second (optional) step.
This holistic or "gestalt" perception can be traced back to gestalt principles of:
Proximity: individual elements with a small distance btw them will be perceived as being somehow related.
Similarity: individual elements that are similar tend to be perceived as one common segment.
Closure: perceptual organization tends to be anchored in closed figures
Continuation: elements will be perceived as wholes if they only have few interruptions.

The more a configuration of individual elements adheres to these principles, the more it will tend towards a
clear-cut and cogent organization, called Prgnaz, which lends itself to gestalt perception. Examples which show a
high degree of Prgnaz are called "good gestalts/forms". Among them are circle, square, and equilateral triangles.

More things should be said on the matter. The salient parts of an object make an important contribution to the
whole w/o at first being noticed as individual parts. Other perceptual aspects such as the overall proportions, the
material, and the color of objects interact with the overall shape and the parts to complete the holistic impression
of a gestalt.
Now, what makes one gestalt more prototypical for a category than another?
Parts not only contribute to the overall shape of an object, but are also related to its function. At the same time,
remember that the existence of most parts of an object is motivated by the particular purpose the object serves.
Well, the prototypical gestalt of an object relies on the presence of its functional parts in optimally functional
proportions. E.g. to approximate the prototype gestalt of a teddy bear it is not enough to give the outline
drawing of a teddy that coincides with its natural model, the brown bear; some indication of its softness and a
child hugging the teddy are also needed to round of the general impression of its function.
If a gestalt is organized according to the gestalt principles and includes the functional parts of an item in functionally balanced
proportions, it may be regared as a "prototype gestalt".
Summing up:
Gestalt perception seems indeed to play an important part in categorization and goodness ratings. It seems to
be as essential as the possibility of studying attributes and family resemblances and computing attribute-based
typicality ratings.
The role of gestalt in the categorization of objects and organisms need not be completely left to intuition, it can
be studied by making a selective use of the principles of gestalt psychology and by considering additional aspects
like parts and function.
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Note: for many lexical categories those loosely called "abstract" categories gestalt perception is largely
excluded.
CATEGORIZATION COLOR CATEGORIZATION

What are the principles guiding the mental process of color categorization? Two hypotheses:
a) Color categories are arbitrary
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.
b) The color continuum is structured by a system of reference points for orientation. Compelling evidence
supports this view:

After carrying out some experiments, Berlin and Kay (1969) presented the following findings:
In categorizing colors, people rely on certain points in the color space for orientation. The "best" examples in
the color space were called foci or focal colors , which consistent across different speakers and different
languages.

From a psychological viewpoint, the categorization of natural phenomena involves the following processes:
1. Selection of stimuli: Of the wealth of stimuli which are perceived by our sensory systems, only very few are
selected for cognitive processing (only very very few attract our attention).
2. Identification and classification: This is achieved by comparing selected stimuly to relevant knowledge stored
in memory.
3. Naming: Most cognitive categories are given names though some remain unlabelled (e.g. "thing to eat on a
diet).

Eleanor Rosch
Her primary aim was to find out whether focal colors were rooted in language or in pre-linguistic cognition. She
thought that a cognitive status might be claimed for focal colors if they could be proved to be prominent in the
processes mentioned above (1,2,3).
She carried out four experiments, with children and the Dani people (from Papua New Guinea) and the findings
were:
Focal colors are perceptually more salient than non-focal ones: the attention of 3-year-olds is more often
attracted by focal than by non-focal colors and 4-year-olds match focal colors more accurately to a given display
of other colors than non-focal ones.
Focal colors ar more accurately remembered in short-term memory and more easily retained in long-term
memory.
The names of focal colors are more rapidly produced in color-naming tasks and are acquired earlier by children.
-cognitive salience, which is probably independent of
language and seems to reflect certain physiological aspects of man's perceptive mechanisms.

The results encouraged Rosch to extend the notion of foci, which she now called prototypes, beyond color
categories. Combined with the findings on colors, these results suggest that prototypes have a crucial function in
the various stages involved in the formation and learning of categories.

A question arose: Could the notion of prototype be extended to entities which were less obviously perceptual?
Granted there are good and bad examples of reds and squares, are there also good and bad examples of dogs,
cars, etc?

PROTOTYPE
This concept has been defined as: best example of a category, salient examples, clearest cases of category
membership, most representative of things included in a class, central and typical members.
This is NOT the conception the authors advocate, for they want to give the concept a cognitive status; thus, the
prototype is a mental representation, a sort of cognitive reference point.

COGNITIVE MODELS
Cognitive models are

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This statement was later refuted. This was supposed to be a support to the relativist or Whorfian view of languages.
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open-ended (which is why it's very hard to describe the cognitive model of a domain and why the descriptions
we can make are never exhaustive)
not isolated cognitive entities, but interrelated: they combine to build networks.
Omnipresent: in every act of categorization we are more or less consciously referring to one or several cognitive
models that we've stored. We can neither avoid the influence of cognitive models nor function without them.

In addition, they are not universal, but depend on the culture in which a person grows up and lives. The
culture provides the background for all the sitch that we have to experience in order to be able to form a
cognitive model.
So, cognitive models for particular domains ultimately depend on so-called cultural models (these can be
seen as cognitive models that are shared by people belong to a social group). Cultural models are not static, but
changing.

Naive models and expert models
It is part of our cultural model of "dogs" that wagging their tails means "I am happy". For a biologist, this belief
is highly dubiout. In their expert models, which are based on hard scientific facts and the rules of logic, these
types of assumptions have no place. Naive cultural models (aka folk models) are based on informal observations,
traditional beliefs and even superstitions.
Now, many naive cultural models are inaccurate from a scientific point of view, but usually correct as far as their
functional predictions are concerned. What counts is that "ordinary" everyday experiences don't follow the
doctrines laid down for scientific research and the rules of formal logic, but have other, more genuinely cognitive
pples behind them.

Summary:
Cognitive categories interact with and influence each other and this can cause a shift of category prototypes, of
boundaries, and of the whole category structure.
Over and above the actual context in which the use of categories is embedded, the internal structure of
categories depends on cognitive and cultural models which are always present when language is processed.

Image Schemas (Saeed)

Image Schemas are cognitive structures that serve as links between multiple bodily experiences and higher
cognitive domains.
Given their primitive nature, image schemas serve as a basis for cognitive structures and they underlie metaphors
(metaphors are less primitive).
Because of our physical experience of being and acting in the world (through our bodies), we form basic
conceptual structures which we then use to organize though across a range of more abstract domains.
They are held to be pre-linguistic and to shape the form of our linguistic categories.

a. Containment schema
It derives from our experience of the human body itself as a container; from experience of being physically
located ourselves within bounded locations like rooms, beds, etc; and also of putting objects into containers. The
result is an abstract schema of physical containment:
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It has certain experientially-based characteristics, a kind of natural logic (a and b) and certain "entailments" or
implications (c, d, e, and f):
a) Containers are a kind of disjunction: elements are either inside or outside.
b) Containment is typically transitive: if the container is placed in another cotainer, the entity is within both.

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Though the schema has been represented in a static image, remember that schemas are in essence neither static nor restricted to images.
X
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c) Experience of containment typically involves protection from outside forces.
d) Containment limits forces, such as movement, within the container.
e) The contained entity experiences relative fixity of location.
f) The containment affects an observer's view of the contained entity, either improving or blocking it.
Note: the fact that a schema has parts which "hang together" in a way that is motivated by experience leads
Johnson (the author drawn on in this section) to call them gestalt structures (meaning an organizsed, unified whole
withing our experience and understanding that manifests a repeatable pattern or structure... experiential gestalt have internal
structure that connects up aspects of our experience and leads to inferences in our conceptual structure).
b. Path schema
It reflects our everyday experience of moving around the world and experiencing the movements of other
entities. Based on such experiences the path schema containes a starting point, an end point, and a sequence of
contiguous locations connecting them.

Implications:
a) Since A and B are connected by a series of contiguous locations, getting from A to B implies passing through
the intermediate points.
b) Paths tend to be associated with directional movement along them, say from A to B.
c) Since a person traversing a path takes time to do so, the further along the path the entity is, the more time has
elapsed.

c. Force schemas (p 369 370 in Saeed's)
c.1 Compulsion: a force vector F acts on an entity u, causing movement along a trajectory. The dashed line
represents the fact that the force may be blocked or may continue.

c.2 Blockage, where a force meets and obstruction and is diverted, or continues on by moving the obstacle or
passing through it.
c.3 Removal of restraint, where the removal (by another cause) of a blockage allos an exertion of force to
continue along the trajectory.

Metaphor (Croft & Cruse / Saeed)

Metaphors are abstract, systematic, asymmetrical (unidirectional relationship), and conventional

Metaphor involves comparison.
It involves a relationship btw a source domain (the source of the literal meaning of the metaphorical
expression) and a target domain (the domain of the experience actually being described by the metaphor).
The choice of metaphor to describe a sitch in a particular domain construes the structure of that domain in a
particular way that differs depending on the metaphor chosen
Not a property of individual linguistic expressions and their meanings, but of whole conceptual domains.
Metaphorical meaning is not a special kind of meaning. Metaphor is the result of a special process for arriving
at, or construing, a meaning.
Involves an interaction btw two domains construed from two regions of purport and the content of the vehicle
domain is an ingredient of the construed target through processes of correspondence and blending. In principle,
any concept from the source domain the domain supporting the literl meaning of the expression can be
used to describe a concept in the target domain the domain the sentence is actually about.

Lakoff and Johnson use the formula TARGET DOMAIN IS SOURCE DOMAIN to describe the
metaphorical link btw the domains.
Mappings: metaphorical relations btw conceptual domains.
a metaphor is a conceptual mapping btw two domains. The mapping is assymetrical (the expression is about a
sith in the target domain using concepts mapped over from the source domain.
the mapping btw source and target domains involves to sorts of correspondences:
A
Path
B
F
u
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- ontological: corresponcendences btw elements of one domain and elements of the other.
- epistemic: correspondences btw relations holding btw elements in one domain and relations btw elements in
the other domain.

Example: ANGER IS HEAT OF A FLUID
Source: HEAT OF FLUID Target: ANGER
Ontological
correspondences
Container
Heat of fluid
Heat scale
Pressure in container
Body
Anger
Anger scale
Experienced pressure
Epistemic
correspondences
When fluid in a container is heated beyond
a certain limit, pressure increases to point at
which container explodes.

An explosion is damaging to container and
dangerous to bystanders.
When anger inreases beyond a certain limit,
"pressure" increases to a point at which
person loses control.

Loss of control is damaging to person and
dangerous to others.

Metaphors are conceptual structures and not merely linguistic in nature, though they're normally realized
linguistically.
The correspondences btw the domains are represented in the conceptual system, and are fully conventionalized
among members of a speech community. But, a conceptual metaphor cannot be reduced to a finite set of
linguistic expressions, since myriad linguistic expressions can tap into the same conceptual structure in both
conventional and unconventional ways.
Certain patterns of reasoning may carry over from the source to the target domain.
Metaphors may exist at different levels of schematicity, that is, an a taxonomic hierarchy. For example, we
have the schematic metaphor LOVE IS A JOURNEY; but from it we may derive three more specific
instantiations of the metaphor: LOVE IS A CAR TRIP / TRAIN TRIP / SEA VOYAGE. At the same time,
LOVE IS A JOURNEY can be grouped with A CAREER IS A JOURNEY under a more schematic metaphor
A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY
This raises a question: which metaphors are more basic to human understanding, the more specific or the
more schematic ones?
Lakoff proposes the Invariance Hypothesis as a constraint on metaphorical mappings, which posits that
these preserve the image-schematic structure of the source domain. Reasoning in the target domain
(metaphorical entailment) is governed by the image-schematic structure of the source domain.
Turner proposes an important constraint on the hypothesis: In metaphor, we are constrained not to violate the image-
schematic structure of the target; this entails that we are constrained not to violate whatever image-schematic structure may be
possessed by non-image components of the target. [Lakoff refers to this phenomenon a "target domain override"]
Example: give a kick and give an idea (I think the target domain is "give", which implies transferring sth to sb and
therefore stop having it yourself for the other to have).
- when you give sb a kick, the person does not "have" the kick afterwards: the target domain of transfer of
energy or force does not allow that energy to continue to exist after the transmission event the metaphorical
entailment doesn't hold.
- when you give sb an idea, you still have it: the target domain of knowledge does not imply that knowledge
transmitted is lost the metaphorical entailment doesn't hold.

Now, if the target domain has image-schematic structure already, which can override the metaphor, why do
we have metaphors? Likewise, if we can isolate image-schematic structure, or construct highly schematic
metaphors such as ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE, is it now simply a highly schematic
conception structure that is instantiated in both source and target domains, instead of metaphorical mapping?
Counterargument 1: Although target domains of metaphors are structured, they are not fully so; ie, they are not
clearly enough delineated in their own terms to satisfy the purposes of our day-to-day functioning.
Counterargument 2: There's an assymetry btw the domains: Love is expressed in terms of journeys, not the
other way around.

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It is likely that a far richer structure than simply compatible image-schemas is brought into the target domain
from the source domain.

In some cases, the linguistic expressions are comparable in Spanish and English (carpeta)
salvar las papas del fuego = help someone with a hot potato
an uphill task = se me hace cuesta arriba
new broom sweeps clean = escoba nueva barre bien

There are two traditional positions on / approaches to the role of metaphor in language
Classical view Romantic
a kind of decorative addition to ordinary plain
language
a rhetorical device (a departure from literal language)
used at times to gain certain effects
sth outside normal language and therefore requiring
special forms of interpretation from listeners or
readers.
Integral to language and thought as a way of
experiencing the world.
Evidence of the role of the imagination in
conceptualizing and reasoning all lang is
metaphorical (no distinction btw literal and figurative
lang)

An essential element in our categorization of the world and our thinking processes. It has a central role in
thought and language. Cognitivists argue that it is ubiquitous in ordinary language, though they pull back a little
from the strong Romantic position that all language is metaphorical.
So essential is metaphor that Sweetser makes a point that historical sematic change is not random but
influenced by such metaphors as MIND-AS-BODY. Thus metaphor, as one type of cognitive structuring is seen
to drive lexical change in a motivated way, and provides a key to understanding the creation of polysemy and the
phenomenon of semantic shift.
Related to other fundamental structures such as:
image schemas, which provide a kind of basic conceptual framework derived from perception and bodily
experience
mental spaces, which are mental structures which speakers set up to manipulate reference to entities. Such
spaces underlie the process of conceptual blending, where speakers develop extended analogies which
selectively combine existing domains of knowledge to create scenarios.
Viewpoint shifting
Figure-ground shifting
Profiling

Metaphors exhibit characteristic and systematic features:
Conventionality.
Systematicity. A metaphor doesn't just set up a single point of comparison: features of the source and target
domain are joined so that the metaphor may be extended, or have its own internal logic (See "ontological and
epistemic correspondences" for a clear example). E.g: If LIFE IS A JOURNEY, the person leading a life is a
traveller, the person's purposes are destinations, the means for achieving purposes are routes, etc.
Metaphorical mappings play a huge rule in the extention of the vocabulary, as can be seen in conventionalized
mappings from parts of the human body: Head of department/state/a page/a queue; face of a
mountain/building/watch; eye of a potato/needle/hurricane; lip of a cup/jug/plate; nose of an
aircraft/tool/gun.
Assymetry. Metaphors are directional; they dont set up a symmetrical comparison btw two concepts,
estblishing points of similarity, but provoke the listener to transfer features from the source to the target. For ex,
LIFE IS A JOURNEY is assymetrical in that we don't conventionally describe journeys in terms of life (the
mapping works the other way around).
Abstraction. Related to the asymmetry. A typical metaphor uses a more concrete source (JOURNEY) to
describe a more abstract target (LIFE). Mind that this is not a necessary feature of metaphors: the source and
target may be equally concrete or abstract, but this typical viewing of the abstract through the concrete is seen in
cognitive semantics as allowing metaphor its central role in the categorizing of new concepts and in the
organization of experience.
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Metonymy (Saeed)

Like metaphor, it is a conceptual process, it may be conventionalized, it is used to create new lexical resources
in lang, it is productive in creating new vocabulary, and it shows the same dependence on real-world knowledge
or cognitive frames.
But, whereas metaphor establishes a mapping across conceptual domains, metonymy establishes a conection
within a single domain.

Types of metonymic relations
PART FOR WHOLE (SYNECDOCHE). All hands on deck
WHOLE FOR PART (SYNECDOCHE). Brazil won the world cup.
CONTAINER FOR CONTENT. I don't drink more than two bottles.
MATERIAL FOR OBJECT. She needs a glass
PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT. Ill buy you that Rembrandt.
PLACE FOR INSTITUTION. La Casa de Trejo distingue a los mejores promedios.
INSTITUTION FOR PEOPLE. The senate isn't happy with this bill.
PLACE FOR EVENT. Hiroshima changed our view of war.
TIME FOR EVENT. 9/11 was momentous in the history of terrorism.
CONTROLLED FOR CONTROLLER. All the hospitals are on strike.
CAUSE FOR EFFECT. His native tongue is Hausa.
BRAND FOR PRODUCT. Can you pass me a Kleenex?

Langacker suggested a general notion of salience, where items are graded for relative salience, for example
(where > = more salient): human > nonhuman, whole > part, visible > nonvisible, concrete > abstract.
Metaphor and metonymy both involve a vehicle and a target.

INTERACTIONAL PRAGMATICS
FRAME, CONVERSATIONAL EXCHANGE,
CODE CHOICE, SPEECH EVENT, LANGUAGE ECONOMY

Notas de clase

Code choice: choice of language OR of language variety.
Frame:
Cognitive
When there's a change of activity, there's a change of frame (Ramaciotti)
Short-lived
Cannot be imposed unilaterally; they're established bi- or multilaterally.
It's important for people to synchronize: they must acknowledge what activity they are jointly taking part in.
A frame can be interrupted by another frame and then resumed.
There're elements that signal what frame we're in.

In her paper, Carranza applies three levels of analysis:
Conversational exchange:
Pairs of contributions by which participants do sth.
They occur in speech events
1
2 3
2
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Note: what happens here might affect the bigger levels.

2) Speech act: a social happening in which language has an essential role.
characterized by the roles the participants have
typically take place in an institution, at particular times and places
norms of interaction (what can be done or not) are also specific to different speech events.

3) Language economy
We're interested in the different values languages have in different societies.
Unlike 1 and 2, this is analyzed at the level of society.
The relative values different languages have affect how they languages are used in speech events and
conversational exchanges.

Multilevel analysis of two-way immersion classroom discourse.
Carranza, Isolda (1995).

(Interactional) Frame: the terms in which social actors experience to be organized
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. Participants come to an
understanding of what is going on, what the sitch is, and act accordingly (Goffman and Bateson).
Interactional sociolinguistics make use of the concept of "frame" cos verbal interaction is a social event and
because talk is interpreted according to the frame it occurs in and, at the same time, can be employed as one of
the signals indicating what the current frame is.

In this paper, there are two frames: official (evoked by all talk produced in or about "doing school") and
unofficial (evoked by al talk unrelated to academic topics).

The official frame manifested itself as
- talk that is itself a classroom talk (an oral presentation)
- talk that is an inherent part of the performance of a classroom task (ss talking about what they find in the
textbook as answers)
- talk that is instrumental to the performance of a classroom taskl (asking for instructions)
- talk which is off-task but still about "doing school" (buying school lunch that day).
The unofficial frame manifested itself as non-academic and non-school talk.
Ss went back and forth from official to unofficial frames, just as interactants in a conversation make swift
changes of frames.
Characteristics of frames:
Ephemeral (Goffman)
They are co-constructed in that the interlocutor may confirm the task, the metatask, or the nonacademic talk.

Code choice is applied to do the conversational work of marking the current frame. As situational factors
change, the balance of rights and obligations changes (meaning what language can be used in what context
remember research was carried out in a two-way immersion program and analyzed Ss' interactions)
Factors influencing code choice by students:
1) The Ss' proficiency level in L2
2) Addresse ("addressee design")
3) Classroom rules

Note: there's also an interplay w/another social dimension, since the effect of these factors varies according to
the ss's relationship to their interlocutor, which can be asymmetrical or symmetrical
Asymmetrical interactions Symmetrical interactions
1 If Ss' can't fully convey meanings in L2, they use L1 Ss simply go for the lang they feel most comfortable
with. Smts, this factor cannot account for code choice.
2 The influencing factor is the S's expectations and When 1 is not a factor and Ss "know" they can use

7
People don't perceive experience in social life as chaotic.
Linguistics II 2012


hypothesis about the addreesse (in reality, S may
not know who the addreesse really is). First, there's
an "exploratory choice": the S uses a language until
a decision is negotiated (this step is omited when
the expectations are clearly determined; eg, in the
classroom)
either lang, it's the "peerness" of the addresse that
determines the choice of English (chosen generally).
3 Depend on what the teacher enforces; unless
there's an emergency, in which case Ss use the lang
they feel most comfortable with
Choice depends on the degree to which a lang is
enforced; and also w/physical setting and instructor's
vigilance.

Speech event: What elements characterized the lesson as a speech event?
1) The ritual aspects of classroom management: turn-taking and turn-allocation, and the marking of transitions.
2) Use of metatalk and indirect language
3) Degree of saliency of form

Language economy
The format of bilingual-education programs is undeniably influenced by the sociopolitical situation they're in.
The analysis of discourse must attend to its location in a sociohistorical context.
The aspects described at this level of analysis touch upon issues that are at the core of diversity in the
population.

The minority-language
8
(=MinL) in the school
Teachers need to be supported in their efforts to keep up the non-English language of immersion.
- indication for this came from the written form of the MinL (Spanish) used at school: posters and class lists
(these written by teachers) had spelling mistakes innacuracy in the spelling's of Ss' names don't send a
message of respect for the MinL.
- the language spoken also provided examples of MajL interference: in the Spanish section of the programs,
some teachers are balanced or English-dominan bilinguias; others are native English speakers with good
command of Spanish.

IMPLICATIONS FOR INSTRUCTIONAL AND INSTITUTIONAL PRACTICES
At the conversational-exchange level:
if we accept the premise that habitual use of an L2 in spontaneous contextes and vents promotes the
acquisition of the new language, it's important to facilitate the use of an L2 accross frames and addressees.
"Get Ss to associate both languages of immersion with the interpersonal balance existing in multiple situations

At the speech-event level:
Giving feedback on both content and language (is an advantage because it) draws attention to, and thereby
stimulates, the acquisition of the language being used. In the case of the MinL, it send the message that the lang
is important and valued.
Another important aspect of "focus on form:" English-section teachers should be very sensitive to the
comprehension needs of the Spanish-background half of the class. since we acquire languages only by receiving
comprehensible input (Krashen), the benefit of mere exposure is lost if the child cannot process what she/he
cannot understand.
The author questions the need for rigid turn-taking rules: Ss' self-selection to speak isnot necessarily disruptive.
It often confirms the interation frame established by the teacher, and it's an opportunity to check the child's
language proficiency level in spontaneous, voluntary conversational contributions.

At the language-economy level:
For both English-background and Spanish-background Ss, Spanish should not be the language for some
lessons, but the language of the "real" business of everyday school organization, rules, and communication with
staff about small matters. Only by acknowledging the power of institutional practices can we make them serve
the goal of valuing all Ss' cultural capitals.

8
For some Ss, their L1 is not necessarily their "home language," reason why the concepts "school language" and "home lang" are not useful. "Majority
lang" and "minority lang", which denote the relative status of languages and their speakers in the society, are more appropriate.
Linguistics II 2012


attitude-forming practices affect future language choice and maintenance.

Discourse Markers

Notas de clase
DM are not clear-cut but fuzzy categories
DM are typical of conversation and abundant in talk among friends.
Talk among friends: symmetrical relationship, feeling of intimacy, closeness

Redeker DM indicate relations between Dx units at multiple planes (building sequences) of Dx organization.
There are three planes
1. the sequential plane
2. the speech-act plane
3. the ideational plane

1. THE SEQUENTIAL STRUCTURE PLANE (no s si tengo bien armado este primer cuadro)

They are pairs (part one, part two):
A How are you? B Very well, thank you!

You are Sheldon Cooper, arent you? B Im doctor Sheldon Cooper.
Questions tags are additions that trigger a corresponding/relevant second part

A How are you? B Well, one of my front teeth broke in two.

In the sequential structure plane, well signals the beginning of a turn/of a response.
It has a mechanical function. It gives floor and its a place holder (its my turn to talk now)

2. THE SPEECH-ACT PLANE

A So, the other day I was at Pimpinelas concert, right? And guess who I find! Gary was sitting right next to
me. He had Pimpinela written on his forehead!

Right is pacing the story, cutting it in pieces. It signals progress, moving ahead. It has rising intonation.

A I was told you landed a big job opportunity!
B Well, it helps me make ends meet.

Well signals a mild disagreement. What B is trying to say is that the job opportunity he/she got is not that big.
Well, as well as uhh, I mean can also signal restriction, self-repair (falta ejemplo)

Linguistics II 2012


DM in the SA plane are associated with particular actions: telling a story, an anecdote, stating a disagreement, etc.

3. THE IDEATIONAL PLANE

This plane is related to INFORMATION. Info is assumed to be shared.
Ideational structure refers to propositional relations or ideas connected by the markers and includes cohesive
relations, topic relations, and functional relations
9
:
The sun is shining but its really chilly this morning

Its conversation, talk for talk sake.

A- Hey, yknow Sophies address?
B- Well I went to Sophies place once by bus I think I know it

Well signals that what Im going to say is somehow relevant and not expected. Well, signals orientation to
relevance:

A- You are from San Francisco, right?
B- Well, I was born in Pasadena and then when I was a teenager I moved to

The primary plane of use for and, but, or, so,because, now and then is ideational structure
10

(En clase dieron un ejemplo con now pero yo no alcanc a copiarlo. Agrguelo el que lo tenga)
Now signals divergence, change of direction

DM on the SA plane are associated with certain speech by virtue of usually occurring with those SA. DM dont
perform the speech act, they signal it.
DM are completely superfluous. They only serve to guide the interlocutor and indicate what type of block is
coming. Ppl realize what they have to do next with or without a DM.
All DM signal transition, progress.
The same form may function in two planes simultaneously*
DM act like glue: they keep all info together Cohesion (Redeker). Cohesion is, however, the least important
function.
DM have limited semantic meaning.
The semantic load of DM is negligible.
Discourse deictics: signals of relationships on the 3 planes of Dx. They are signals of social relationships.

A We love Franz Ferdinand!
B The only Franz I love is Schubert.

Languages are egocentric. The location of entities is dependent on a center-the origin of all points of view. The
one entity that is at the center of enunciation is the one who determines the meaning of I. As seen in the
example above, centers can be expropriated. The full meaning is acquired on every occasion of use
contextually determined.
* IMPORTANTE!!! DM OCCUR IN ALL THREE PLANES. HOWEVER, IT IS IN ONLY ONE OF
THEM THAT THEY ARE MORE SALIENT. POR ESO, CUANDO NOS PREGUNTEN, TENEMOS
QUE CONTESTAR X occurs MAINLY in Y plane and it signals

9
Brasdefer, J. Csar Flix. 2006. Pragmatic and Textual Functions of o sea: Evidence from Mexican Spanish. Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville,
MA.
10
(Schiffrin, 1987, p. 316).
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The most often described aspect of DMis their contribution to cohesion since they indicate relations between
Dx units at multiple planes of Dx organization the ideational, the sequential, and that of speech acts (Redeker
1991) and they can act at more that one plane simultaneously (Schiffrin 1987). They have been characterized
as deictic due to the fact that these forms take on unique, situated meanings in the particular context in which
they are produced, and focus the interlocutors attention on the basis of a common orientation (Carranza). It also
involves modal and social deixis, which justifies a conception of these markers as Dx deixis of a type that includes
those dimensions of their function in situated Dx (Carranza)

DM are typical of non-institutional Dx of of a conversational kind and produced by participants with a close
and symmetrical social relationship. However, they are not absent from speech events that are not
conversations.
Courtoom Dx is a type of oral institutional Dx characterized by a high degree of formality. This register and the
pre-established turn-taking characteristic of courtroom Dx are factors that discourage the appearance of DM
since they are forms that have, by definition, a function negotiated, emergent production and interpretation of
Dx.
Ahora
it has cataphoric orientation.
it has a focusing effect that can be applied to initiate a new move or a new ideational unit (Eso fue lo que dijo
Ahora, el barrio...).
The beginning of a new subtopic is marked with ahora, but the activity of examining a witness is kept constant.
The participant whose utterance is initiated with this marker exerts control over the direction and the
development of the Dx.

The occurrence of bueno initiates the participants engagement in the task of questioning the witness who is
sitting in front of him and to whom he addresses his next utterance. In this case, the shift marked with bueno is
an instance of what Goffman called a change of footing and signals the establishment of the frame initial stage
of a witness testimony. The shift is an alteration in the social capacities in which the persons present claim to be
active. When a change of gears occurs among more than two persones, then a change commonly occurs
regarding who is addressed.
The other Dx marker in the example text y in question-initial position. Y is typical of institutional dialogues.
Heritage and Sorjonen have noticed that questions preceded by and are common in the Dx of the institutional
representative when that participant is acting ad incumbent of her or his particular social role. These authors
noticed that the and-prefaced question may be linked either to a previous question or to its answer, and that its
fundamental task is to invoke the sense that the question it prefaces are either routine, or agenda-based parts of
some larger course of action. And-prefacing is primarily used by professionals to establish and maintain an
orientation to the course-of-action character of their talk across sequences of question/answer adjacency pairs.
Some Dx markers (like y or ahora) do not mark a change of footing, but signal a type of footing bacause they
are cues of the speakers capacity as addresser and principal
Extract 3 Cross-examination Mire
The analysis of mire in E3 must acknowledge the social meaning of distancing and disafiiliation signalled with
mire that goes beyond a frequent association of the marker in utterance-initial position with the speech act of
disagreement or warning (No... mire, yo soy tan cuidadoso con las palabras). The occurrence of mire in this extract is
conditioned by the power-differential between the witness and the trial lawyer, and at the same time, it
contributes to the construction of a superordinate participant position.

A truly integral treatmenf DM cannot be provided by approaches restricted to the referential function of
language, nor by those restricted to the semantic system of a language. By contrast, interactional approaches
offer a more complete understanding of a DM because, in addition to the metatextual and expressive aspects of
this phenomenon, they account for its relation to the dimension of activity. Interactional approaches comprise the social
meanings this phenomenon conveys both situational, and macrosoail as in the use of DM in code-switching.

EXTRACT:
Annotating discourse markers in spontaneous speech corpora on an example for the
Slovenian language
Darinka Verdonik, Matej Rojc, Marko Stabej
Linguistics II 2012


2.1 COHERENCE-BASED APPROACH
One of the first detailed and broadly cited studies on discourse markers was carried out by Schiffrin (1987). She
uses the term discourse marker for English expressions oh, well, and, but, or, so, because, now, then, I mean, yknow and
analyses the usage of these expressions in conversation. Her approach is coherence-based. She proposes a model
of coherence in talk, distinguishing five planes of talk: exchange structure (turns, adjacency pairs), action
structure (speech acts), ideational structure (semantic units: propositions or ideas), participation framework
(social relations between speaker and hearer (e.g., teacher student), also influenced by the relations of
speaker/hearer to talk and ideas, presented in talk), information state (cognitive capacities of speaker/hearer
organization and management of knowledge and meta-knowledge). As a result of her analysis, Schiffrin (1987)
concludes that discourse markers are used on these different planes of talk. All markers can indicate more than
one plane of talk, however she distinguishes primary planes of use from secondary. The primary plane of use for
discourse markers oh and yknow is information state, the primary plane of use for well and I mean is participation
framework, and the primary plane of use for and, but, or, so, because, now and then is ideational structure (Schiffrin,
1987, p. 316). She suggests that markers select and then display structural relations on different planes of talk,
rather than create such relations.
Further she concludes that markers with (referential, semantic, linguistic) meaning, such as conjunctions (and, but,
or, so...) and time deixies (now, then), have their primary functions on ideational planes of talk, and those without
meaning, such as lexicalized clauses and particles (well, oh), show the reverse tendency. This suggests that as an
expression loses its semantic meaning, it is freer to function in non-ideational realms of discourse (Schiffrin,
1987: 319). We see this conclusion as an indicator that there may be a broader differences between discourse
markers functioning primarily on ideational planes, and all the other discourse markers. In conclusion she
proposes additional expressions that should be analysed as discourse markers in some of their uses: see, look, listen,
here, there, why, gosh, boy, say, anyway, anyhow, whatever, meta-talk such as this is the point, what I mean is...

Expresiones pragmticas Carranza

Las expresiones pragmticas no pueden ser categorizados como partes de la oracin pero presentan
heterogeneidad formal. Entre las expresiones pragmticas encontramos verbos (digamos, viste, escuchame),
adverbios (ahora bien, despus, no?) y oraciones (qu se yo, te das cuenta?). Son elementos opcionales y
sintcticamente independientes (no cumplen una funcin en la estructura sintctica de la oracin). No agregan
contenido proposicional. Provocan inferencias acerca de la actitud de enunciacin y por tanto, es posible
analizarlas desde la perspectiva de la modalidad.
Heterogeneidad funcional en la ocurrencia de una expresin pragmtica puede predominar su funcin
relacional, interaccional o expresiva:
relacional: pueden sealar relacin de contradiccin en el contenido ideacional (ahora, lo que pasa), o un
cambio de actividad o de direccin del tpico (bueno), o la apertura o el cierre de una secuencia de intercambios.
Interaccional: pueden sealar el rol de emisor (che), destinatario (ah, mir vos), o coautor (digamos).
Expresiva: pueden ser expresiones de nfasis (mir, escuchame, pero) exageracin (te juro), certeza (te digo), o
incertidumbre (digamos), y tienen aplicaciones en la manifestacin de la cortesa.
Las expresiones pragmticas
tienen escasa carga semntica y son sumamente frecuentes y predecibles.
Son segmentos que sirven de fondo o segundo plano para otros segmentos que exigen mayor esfuerzo de
comprensin por su contenido referencial y proposicional.
Son tpicas del habla espontnea entre hablantes socialmente cercanos.
Son consideradas decticos

Vertientes tericas como confluyen en el tratamiento de las expresiones pragmticas porque stas son
decticos del discurso y porque los enfoques interaccionales son adecuados para su estudio. Las expresiones
pragmticas orientan la atencin del oyente a segmentos de texto y a la relacin entre ellos, es decir tienen
carcter metatextual.y actan en diversos planos de estructuracin textual (el ideacional, el de la estructura
secuencial y el de los actos del habla). Son decticos porque adquieren significacin nica, situada, en el contexto
en que son producidas, y su funcin es la de enfocar la atencin del interlocutor sobre la base de una previa
orientacin comn.
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Es preferible hablar de deixis del discurso y abarcar tanto los planos de organizacin textual como la dimensin
interaccional y social del discurso en situacin.

DX
MARKER/
EXPRESIN
PRAGMTICA

AUTHOR

FUNCTIONS/USES/SIGNALS/PREFACES
Ahora Carranza Anuncia un movimiento discursivo que constituir una adicin o cambio en el
discurso que se vena desarrollando. Se crea un efecto de focalizacin en la
subparte que est por comenzar.
Y (bueno)
despus de
pregunta
Carranza Mecanismo de entrada (aseguran el turno de habla).
Y seala que las prescripciones de la Mxima de Cantidad (exhaustividad) o la
Mxima de la Calidad (informatividad) no se cumplirn. El participante no est
en condiciones de dar una respuesta completa o una respuesta que no resulte
obvia.
Bueno presenta la nueva contribucin conversacional como una respuesta. En
gral, es seal de avance o paso hacia una nueva unidad en diversos planos del
discurso.
Ah (bueno)
despus de
pregunta
Carranza Mecanismo de entrada (aseguran el turno de habla).
Ah indica que se ha recibido info nueva.
Bueno (idem)

Lo que pasa
(es) que
Carranza La emisin que sigue a lo que pasa (es) que se separa del material inmediatamente
anterior. La orientacin catafrica del pronombre lo centra la atencin del
oyente en lo que vendr a continuacin.
Con la combinacin ahora lo que pasa (es) que el contenido ideacional de la
emisin siguiente se presenta como informacin nueva. Adems, el hablante se
compromete como autor de su discurso y lo produce desde una posicin
autorizada. Se presenta el contenido de manera asertiva y ms bien impersonal.
Bueno Carranza (self-repairs) Bueno seala el alejamiento de la posicin expresada con la
emisin inmediatamente anterior y con el paso a una posicin, parte o etapa
diferente, y es una expresin tpicamente orientada a la pertinencia, es predecible
su distribucin iniciando autocorrecciones. Tambin resulta predecible que, en
combo con bueno, pero lo que pasa (es) que sirvan para indicar que se retoma
la direccin que se estaba desarrollando.
Seal contextualizante. Se orienta a la pertinencia.
Porque Carranza (background repair) Es posible usar esta conjuncin con referencia no al
contenido sino a la enunciacin de la emisin precedente.
Son frecuentes los pares porqueno?, porque viste? y porqueentonces. No?
y viste? controlan la comprensin de la audiencia del relato, mientras que entonces
retoma la complicacin. Una evaluacin externa o una reparacin de fondo suele
terminar con la combinacin contigua de viste? Entonces En ella, viste?
cierra la digresin y entonces seala el comienzo de una nueva seccin en el relato.
Porque acta sobre el valor de evidencia otorgado a toda la narrativa y sobre la
dimensin argumentativa del texto en su globalidad, es decir, la imbricacin de
la narrativa en la interaccin en curso.

Che Carranza Seal contextualizante. Se orienta a la pertinencia.
Solidaridad acta como apelativo y sirve para asegurar la atencin del oyente
definindolo como destinatario de la emisin. Esto hace que se vea comn
encontrar che al comienzo de preguntas y al comenzar un nuevo tpico. En
ambos casos existe una imposicin sobre el interlocutor, quien debe acceder a
producir la respuesta o debe ratificar el nuevo tpico. Hay un cambio marcado
de tpico en una conversacin en curso cuando el quiebre tpico se anticipa con
che reconociendo as que la expectativa a la que se orientan los participantes es
la de seguir con el tpico que se vena desarrollando (che como marca de
Linguistics II 2012


cambio de tpico, entonces, se usa para requerir la atencin de un destinatario).
Con che, se expresa deferencia indicando proximidad en el eje horizontal de la
distancia social, es decir, es una realizacin de cortesa positiva, es una
manifestacin de solidaridad. Cortesa positiva es aquella basada en la comunin
de intereses y la identificacin con el otro.
Intimidad Se portaron bien las chicas che? (al beb) Che cierra una emisin que
pretende ser expresin de complicidad, de tono jocoso, y dirigida a quien no
puede delatar a los adultos sobre los que se les pregunta. El vnculo sealado
tambin se basa en otros elementos de la situacin comunicativa.
Intimidad e inters Hay cine seguido che? Al cerrar una pregunta con la
expresin che, se confirma la intimidad de la relacin y adems se puede
enfatizar el inters por la respuesta. Adems, sirve para ratificar la atencin a las
intervenciones precedentes del destinatario, pero en general puede afirmarse que
se utiliza como marca de inters.
Posicin jerrquica Usar che como marca de cambio de tpico perime
establecer una posicin de superioridad y una relacin marcadamente
asimtrica. En el eje vertical de poder el hablante expresa tener mayor jerarqua
que el destinatario. Sin embargo, una relacin jerrquica dada (madre-hijo) no
siempre se manifiesta con che en actos de habla impositivos. Che, seal de
intimidad, puede aparecer como reforzador en emisiones que realizan una orden
u otros actos amenazantes a la imagen social del destinatario, por ejemplo, el
reproche.
Mir Carranza Manifestacin de cortesa en relaciones interpersonales: posicin final de
emisiones que realizan evaluaciones
no? Carranza Manifestacin de cortesa en relaciones interpersonales: reproches
eh? Carranza Manifestacin de cortesa en relaciones interpersonales: agradecimientos y
amenazas
I mean (it) Schiffrin The literal meaning of this expression influences its function in participation
frameworks: I mean marks a speakers upcoming modification of the meaning
of his/her own prior talk.
It prefaces an expansion: I mean, when I started working for the government
Mean can have an ideational meaning in both meaning and I mean, such that both
can preface expansion.
Another sense of mean is speaker intention. Meaning and I mean both preface
explanations of intention, particularly when the intended force of an action is
deemed to have been missed by a recipient.
The predicate mean has parallel uses in two different expressions: both
meaning and I mean preface explanations of speaker intention.
I mean it and I mean can preface specification of speaker key. I mean it can preface
the serious key: (everyones joking) I mean it, Im serious about this.
I mean it has remedial function (serving to clarify a possible misinterpretation)
and thus helps to reestablish the mood of the interaction as a whole.
I mean is also used to reestablish the tone of a conversation by establishing a
serious speaker key.
I mean also prefaces a speakers intended key even when that key is consonant
with prior talk; i.e. when no clarification or reestablishment of frame is required:
It was very annoying to sit there. I mean, really disgusting.
I mean is used not only to preface intended key when a prior interactional mood
has been disrupted, but to preface speaker key in general: Well, if I say mixed
marriage, what does that mean tyou? I mean marrying you out of what? I mean clarifies
the request for information intended through the question.
I mean focuses on the speakers modification of his/her own talk (contrast you
mean, which allows a speaker to propose a modification of anothers talk).
I mean is used when the speaker focuses attention on him/herself, and that I
mean is also adding to that focus on self.
Linguistics II 2012


So Visto en
clase
So how far along is Pam? (.) + so + (.) + question
In the sequential plane, so signals the beginning of a turn.
In the ideational plane, so signals the introduction of a new idea.
In the speech-act plane, so signals a request for information

Carranza, Isolda E. 2000. Contribuciones y desafos para la comparacin y la enseanza de las lenguas
Todas las expresiones pragmticas son seales de la estructuracin del discurso en mltiples planos.
Las autocorrecciones (self-repair) revelan que el hablante revisa su propia produccin para hacerla apropiada y
para que sea comprendida con el sentido que se pretende.
En el anlisis de la estructura del relato, el trmino reparacin de fondo (background repair) designa el segmento
que interrumpe la accin dramtica para proporcionar informacin que se omiti dar en la seccin de
orientacin. Es info necesaria para comprender las acciones del relato o para interpretarlas del modo en que lo
pretende el narrador.
Las reparaciones de fondo se dan en los relatos y las autorreparaciones en las argumentaciones.
Las expresiones pragmticas son importantes en la comprensin y produccin de narrativas y
argumentaciones orales en situacin.
Goffman tom de Bateson el concepto de marco para referirse a cmo perciben los actores sociales que
est organizada la experiencia. Goffman se ocup del tema de la definicin de la situacin segn los principios de
organizacin que parecen gobernar los hechos sociales. Desde entonces, la sociolingstica interaccional ha
aplicado el concepto de marco porque la interaccin verbal es un hecho social. La actividad conversacional se
interpreta segn el marco en el que ocurre y al mismo tiempo puede emplearse como una de las seales que
indican cul es el marco vigente.

Linguistics II 2012


Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. Chapter 1. The linguistic facts of life

In this article, Lippi-Green makes a difference btw popular ideas (which are stereotyped, prejudiced, and
unfounded) and facts (things linguists have evidence for)

A. All spoken language changes over time
Languages change inevitably. Attempts to stop spoken language from changing have occurred, but have never
been successful (unless they're instituted by means of genocide = unless the language is murdered).
Languages die when its community of speakers disperse, succumb to plague, or are forcibly assimilated into
dominant cultures. Also, languages are born, for example through the processes of pidginization and
subsequente creolization. (En Historia de la Lengua decamos " Languages are living organisms")

B. All spoken languages are equal in linguistic terms
All are equally capable of expressing a full range of ideas and experiences, and of developing to meet new needs
as they arise.
- All are incredibly flexible and responsive to social tool; we make or borrow what we don't have. In this
flexibility and ability to change and adapt when necessity or will arises, all are equal.
Each language is suited to its community of speakers and each changes in pace as that community and the
demands of the speakers evolve We can't compare languages in terms of which is better or more efficient.
Even when a languae does not have an overt strategy for dealing with a grammatical or semantic distinction, it
will have other ways of doing just that. So all language, even standardized and idealized language, will cope with
ambiguity of all kinds, bur discourse and intonation resources, body-language, and other strategies will come into
play to aid communication.
Still, there are misconceptions about language, which are held by non-linguists, by laymen. What's important
to keep in mid is that these misconceptions have less to do with inherent qualities of language than they do with
Unit 2:
Language Use and Society: Sociolinguistic Variation

Extra info de un resumen que hice para Historia de la Lengua.

Pidgins: Its makeshift language. marginal languages created by people who need to commnicate but have no
common language. Simplified grammar and a small vocab (700-2000 words). Made up from two source languages, but
with much fewer functions. They are made for a specific purpose such as trade. Often when the original need for
communication is no longer important the pidgin language dies. Some, however, become so useful that they develop a
more formal role, gaining official status and expanding. This is an expanded pidgin or a lingua franca

Creoles
1
: when a pidgin becomes the main lang of a community, it has to become more complex and be able to fulfil a
wider range of functions. When later generations lear it as a first lang, we speak of a creole. These lang can develop in
different ways, for ex: if pidgin speakers can no longer use their first lang, the pidgin becomes a primary (rather than
auxiliary) lang and the future generations acquire it.
1

For a pidgin to become a creole, certain criteria must be met:
- the vocab has to be expanded,
- grammatical structures must be able to communicate more complicated meanings
- style has to be adaptable.

Creoles have no education status, little social prestige and are usually spoken by people in the poorer social classes. As
theyre linked to slavery and subjection, users are under pressure to adopt standard forms of lang instead.
1
As speakers
adapt their language use, the original creole then exists in a variety of forms, all varying in different degrees from the
standard (this range of varieties is called post-creole continuum). In some cases, speakers automatically reassert the
value of their first-language creole to challenge the superiority of the standard lang. This results in hypercreolisation
(speakers use pure creole forms to emphasize their ethnic and cultural background).
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a preoccupation with functional aspects of language use, which in turn originates in part with struggles over
authority in the determination of language and social identity.

C. Grammaticality and communicative effectiveness are distinct and independent issues

GRAMMATICALITY
Linguists use the term grammatical to refer to any utterance which could occur in a given language. The term
ungrammatical is used to refer to those constructions or usages which do not occur in the language at all (they can't
be generated from its grammar).
When linguists talk about grammar, they're conceptualizing the internalized, rule-driven structure of a language
which facilitates the generation of all possible sentences for that particular language. For non-linguists, grammar
rules are usually socially constructed, having more in common with norms that forbid men to wear skirts in
public, for example.
Example: "I gotta pee" uttered in mass and "I ain't got none" while talking to a stranger. Although the two
instances invite correction for different reasons, none of those reasons have to do with linguistic
grammaticality, since both utterances are completely viable for English. It is social conventions around
language that is less tolerant: their "inappropriateness/incorrectness" has to do with socially constructed
grammaticality.

CONTENT
Linguists differentiate btw language system and language use, which may be loosely interpreted as the
acknowledgement that each utterance, while grammatical, may or may not fulfill the purpose for which it was
conceived.
Thus, to determine linguistic grammaticality, the question "Can this utterance be generated by the grammar of
the language?" is enough, but an evaluation of content and socially-constructed well-formedness or efficiency
moves to issues of intent, composition, and delivery.

The five possible responses provided for the question could be judged on the basis of clarity, logic, conciseness,
persuasiveness, and delivery, but only after we have gathered information of the situation, since the
communicative intent of both the question posed and the answer received are multidimensional. But if
effectiveness in language is the sum of all those more specific qualifiers (clarity, logic, etc), calculation of
effectiveness is complicated by the fact that these are subjective rather than objective measures.
Anyway, the author argues that the evaluation of language effectiveness while sometimes quite relevant is
often a covert way of judging not the delivery of the message, but the social identity of the messenger.
It is a basic truth that the variety of the language spoken cannot predict the effectiveness of the message. But it is also true
that the variety can predict some of the social evaluation the listener brings to the message, and their willingness
to listen.

D. Written language and spoken language are historically, structurally, and functionally fundamentally
diffferent creatures: Hay un cuadro en la pgina 8 (copy store number) / 20 (original numbering).

Written and spoken language lend themselves differently to standardization.
A: Can I have your phone number?
B1: I'll have a beer.
B2: Uh, well, I'm not sure what is my phone number, it's ah I don't
B3: What's a phone, and why does it have a number?
B4: When hell freezes over
B5: It's 0-800-QUIERO VACACIONES
En clase nos dijeron:
The popular idea is that writing and speaking are the same.
But people value writing more The Literacy Myth: people who can write are superior.
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Writing systems are a strategy developed in responde to demands arising from social, technological, and
economic change. We write cos our memories are not capable of storing such masses of information for
ourselves, or those who come after us. The demands made on written language are considerable: we want it to
spant time and space and to do that in a "social vacuum" (w/o the aid of paralinguistic features and w/o shared
context). Thus, the argument goes, written language needs to be free of excessive variation: it must be consistent
in every way, from spelling to sentence structure.
While spoken language is usually unplanned, written writing predominates on the planned side.
Unplanned speech fulfills a wide range of possible functions:
1) Pragmatic functions, in which commands or requests are made, things are sold, warnings are issued, etc.
Newspaper!
2) Emotional components, which serve to express an internal state of the encoder or instill an emotional state
on the decoder. I could just spit!
3) Cognitive aspects, in which the speech is used to convey info associated with though, theory, date: Giraffes
have longer necks than turtles.
4) Speech as a tool to establish, maintain, and reaffirm social roles. Eg: salutations.

E. Variation is intrinsic to all spoken language at every level
Spoken lanuage varies for every speaker in terms of speech sounds, sound patterns, word and sentence
structure, intonation, and meaning, from utterance to utterance.
Sources of variation:
- language-internal pressures, arising in part from the mechanics of production and perception.
- Language-external influences on language, as social behavior subject to normative and other formative social
pressures.
- Variation arising from language as a creative vehicle of free expression

Structured Variation:
The Hidden Life of Language
We exploit linguistic variation available to us in order to send a complex series of messages about ourselves and
the way we position ourselves in the world we live in. We perceive variation in the speech of others and we use it
to structure our knowledge about that person.
The parameters of linguistic variation are multidimensional: social, stylistic, geographic, or temporal. They work
simultaneously and together with language-internal influences on variation.
When we choose among variants available to us, we take those that will effectively mark us as belonging to
specific social groupings (even when we're trying not to): gender, age, socio-economic class, geographical
loyalties, etc, are often coded by means of language variation.
Language serves to mark different kinds of identity.

Hughes, Arthur & Peter Trudgill. 1979. Chapter 1: Variation in English

This author uses the following terminology
Dialect: varieties distinguished from each other by differences of grammar and vocabulary.
Accent: varieties of pronunciation

VARIATION IN PRONUNCIATION
RP: Received Pronunciation
GRAMMATICAL AND LEXICAL
VARIATION
Standard (British) English
General
features / info
/ facts
Spoken by the upper classes (as
measured by education, income,
profession, or title).
Essentially the accent of those
educated at public schools: it's here that
The dialect of educated people
throughout the British Isles, and the one
normally used in writing, for teaching in schools
and universities, and heard on radio and
television.
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the accent is perpetuated.
Not associated with any region.
Spoken by only about 3%
Used (though not necessarily,
nowadays) on the BBC radio and TV
stations.
Unlike RP, standard English
- is not restricted to the speech of a
particular social group. Most users of standard
English have regional accents.
- Exhibits some regional variation.
Subsumed under standard British English are
Standard English English (England and Wales),
standard Scottish English, and standard Irish
English.
Language
change
Accents (like all components of living
languages) change over time. These
changes can be reflected to some degree in
the pronunciation of speakers of different
ages.
All components of a variety, including
its grammar, change over time.
Lexical change is more rapid than
grammatical change.
Stylistic
variation
Variation in an individual speaker, conditioned by a person's perception of the
situation in which they are speaking, especially in terms of how formal or informal they feel
the situation is.
Changes are made consciously or unconsciously.
The speaker's judgment of formality will depend on different factors, such as the
relative status of the person they're talking to, how well they know each other, what they are
talking about, to what purpose and in what place.
The speaker's personality also influence the style. Some people are very sensitive to
what they regard as the demands of a situation on their speech style, while others appear
indifferent.
The style (more casually or more formally) is not a matter of correctness, but of
appropriatenes.
As for the style of PRONUNCIATION

- In situations perceived as
FORMAL, the speaker will tend to speak
more slowly and carefully. Individual
sounds will be given their full value and
none will be omitted.
- In situations perceived as
INFORMAL, the speaker is like to
articulate more quickly, less carefully, and
some sounds will either have their value
changed or be omitted entirely.
----------------------------------
Unconditioned
variation
Within RP there're differences of
pronunciation which cannot be explained
in terms of a change taking place or of a
speech style. For example, some speakers
say while others
simply say
----------------------------------
Regional
variation
In order to describe regional
variation it is convenient at times to speak
of accents as if they were entities to be
found within certain well defined limits
(though, of course, reality is not that neat).
Speakers of RP are at the top of
the social scale, and their speech gives no
clue to their regional origin. People at the
bottom of the social scale speak with the
"broadest" regional accents.
Not all people stay in one social
Not everybody speaks the dialect of the
area they belong to.
There's a relationship btw social class
and dialect similar to the one btw social class
and accent: the higher a person's position on the
social scale, the less his speeh is regionally
marked.
In may cases, it is true that the longer a
child stays at school, and the more successful
they are, the less regionally marked,
grammatically and lexically, will be their speech.
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position throughout their lives. Those who
climb the social scale will tend to modify
their accent in the direction of RP, thereby
helping to maintain the existing
relationship between class and accent.
Some people can be regarded as hving
two dialets, speaking standard English in certain
company and their local dialect in other
company. In this way they make a claim to
belong to more than one social group.

Downes, William. 1984. Extract from Language and Society.

One particular variety of English, the standard, is superordinate, raised above the other subordinate varieties.
The standard variety is not considered by the speakers to be a dialect. Rather, it is "English" to those who
speak it.

Standardization
is a social behavior towards language, deeply integrated into such historical actors as the development of
literacy, the growth of nationalism, and the evolution of centralizing states. A standard language is a social
institution and part of the abstract unifying identity of a large and internally differentiated society.
Has an ideological dimension and is intimately related to the slow process of nation-building.

....

The standard language has more prestige than other varieties.
One source of this prestige is related to its role in the symbolic integration of the larger national society. The
language serves as a symbol of the society, a reprsentation of its identity and unity.
Another source is derived from its use by the dominant groups within the society. In most cases, the standard
is associated with a national elite, the most powerful and prestigious group in the nation. The elite runs the major
institutions of the society and the standard is central to the indentity of the state. Accordingly, it is
characteristically used in the institution of government.

There is language management.
Those people w/in the society who are professionally involved with language such as teachers, journalists,
writers, and so on, assist in both the creation and preservation of the standard.
The codification
11
is implemented through dictionaries, grammars, and manuals of usuage; standards of
correctness evolve.
The written language is very important in this process of "language making". It becomes the vehicle for the
intellectual (literature), administrative (bureaucracies) and political life of a society.

GRANTED, the standard language has utilitarian value in allowing people to communicate with each other
over the whole extent of the state without the impediment of divergent dialects. It facilitates internal
communication networks, too, and the dissemination of ideas. The practical and the symbolic meet, also, in the
"vitality" of most standards: their use in the maximum of situations.

Notes:
A standard variety need not be pronounced with any particular accent.
The attitude of individuals to the group is encoded in their attitude to the language. In turn, attitudes to
subordinate dialects and minority languages within a national society reflect the level of diversity which will be
tolerated in a given society in particular historical periods

11
An attempt to create a uniform norm of usage, to identify one variety as "really" the language. it follows that standardization tends to be conservative. A
language is institutionalized and not viewed as an essentially dynamic process. Change is often slowed down somewhat because competing variation is
smoothed out.
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What is language?
From one perspective, a dynamic process, a continua in many dimensions.
From another, it is an institutionalized entity deeply identified with the life of a society, and intricately involved in
both its policital and historical development and its social structure. In this view, the language is a codified set of
norms in which the ongoing processes of variation and change are partially repressed from general social
consciousness.

Downes, William. 1984. Chapter 4. Discovering the Structure in Variation.

A variety / code / dialect is a "clustering together" in terms of co-ocurrence rules of linguist features into a
ingle coherent linguistic object.
Our rapid fluctuation, therefore, could be considered to be simply the resut of a mixing of dialects in
communities and individuals.

Labov's research provided a paradigm for research into variation. Earlier explanations of variation feel
into two categories: namely, that it is the result o dialect mixture, or that it is a case of free variation.
Labov's aim was to study the language in use in the speech community. His intuition was that large-
scale variation was not without pattern, but that it was socially determined. It could only be explained
by social and historical factors interacting with factors within the linguistic system.

Sociolinguistic variables
The hypothesis is that variation is socially conditioned. A structure wil emerge if the variation is
studied socially Labov introduced the concept of the linguistic variable. If a variable can be
correlated with a non-linguistic variable of social context such as class, style, sex, or age, then it can be
called a sociolinguistic variable.
The variable is written in brackets (ing). The variants are the values of the variable. Each variant has a
number that is written within the brackets (ing 1) [in'] , (ing 0) [ing].

Sociolinguistic structures
The sociolinguistic variable is a tool which allows us next to establish average index scores for any
group or sub-group within a larger population. After systematizing the data obtained, sociolinguistic
structures are discovered, which are determined, for example, on the dimensions of class (social
stratum) and style ("reading", "careful", or "casual")
In many cases, there are connections btw two (or more) social factors. For example, in Labov's study,
it would seem that the form produced with the highest frequency by the upper middle class in all
contexts, including the most casual (the "ing" variant), is also the form aimed at by all social classes the
more attention they pay to their speech. Therefore, style-shifting suggests that relatively lower (ing)
scores (a higher percentage of the "ing" variant) not only characterizes the speech of the highest class,
but marks the standard of prestige for the community as a whole presumably because of the social
meaning of that variant. The "ing" variant is the prestige form, at least overtly, and the "in" variant is
stigmatized, and this seems intuitively correct.
One of the most important points to make is that the difference btw pronunciation of social groups is
a question of relative frequencies, not of absolutes.

Variability (which is for the most part systematic
12
, apparently) is central to the process of change.
Language is variable, both individually and collectively.

12
There are patterns of distribution in the frequencies of variants conditioned by social, including stylistic, factors.
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Linguistic constraints on variables
Variables are usually also conditioned by internal linguistic factors (e.g. the phonetic environment
affects the choice of variant).
Such variation is termed inherent variability (Nota: tengo la sensacin de que a Javier no le
convenca este concepto).

Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2006. Chapter 2: Variation and Language. Chapter 3: Variation and Style In Introducing
Sociolinguistics.

C CH HA AP PT TE ER R 2 2: : V VA AR RI IA AT TI IO ON N A AN ND D L LA AN NG GU UA AG GE E

Variable: the general or abstract feature that varies.
Variants: the different realizations, actual instantiations, of a variable.
Constraints: If the distribution of variants is neither random nor free, and isntead shows sytematic correlations
with independent factors, those factors can be said to constrain the aration or to be the constraints of the
variable.
Free variation: the idea that some variants alternate with each other without any reliable constraints on their
occurrence in a particular context or by particular speakers. Nowadays, linguists don't really speak of free variont,
cos sociolinguistic studies of language in use have shown that variation is always more or less constrained by
some factor relevant to the context in which a speaker is using their language. Sociolinguists have shown that a
lot of what appears to be free variation can be accounted for if linguists take social factors into account as well as
(internal) linguistic factors.
Sociolinguistic variable: a linguistic variable that is constrained by social or non-linguistic factors.

Regional dialectology: the identification and mapping of boundaries btw different varieties on the basis of
clusters of similar and different features in particular regions, towns, or villages.

Note: One problem with the methods used by dialectologists is that they depend almost entirely on speakers'
reports of what they think they say. People may not be very accurate in reporting what they actually do say..

Reallocate / reallocation: Reassignment or reanalysis of forms in contact in a systematic way, e.g., as
allophonically distributed variants of a phoneme.
Intermediate forms: forms emergin following contact btw closely related varieties that fall in btw the various
input forms.
Shibboleth: a linguistic variable that can be used as a diagnostic of where someone comes from.

Social dialectology: the study of linguistic variation in relation to speakers' participation or membership in
social groups, or in relation to other non-linguistic factors.

Standard English is a set of norms that are shared across many localities and which have acquired their own
social meaning. In general, they are the norms that are associated with education, and they may function as
gatekeeping norms, establishing who will and who won't be able to exercise authority or power. They may be
eployed as sign of upward mobility (or aspirations of upward mobility).
The process of standardization involves a community of speakers converging on a shared sense that some
forms (spoken or written) are valued more than others and are therefore more appropriate in sitchs where people
are speaking carefully and the exercise of social power is relevant.

Internal factors interact with external
factors
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Interspeaker variation. Variation between individual speakers. Differences and variation that is measured btw
differen speakers (individuals or social groups).
Intraspeaker variation. Variation within individual speakers. Differences in the way a single person speaks at
different times or with diferent interlocutors or even within a sentence. intraspeaker variation is a necessary
corollary of inherent variability in grammars.

FACTORS MOTIVATING VARIATION

Variation in how people use language is often attributed to the following four motivations:

General motivation Associated aphorism
1
A desire (most often uncounscious) to show how
you fit in with some people
Fit in with ome people;
differentiate from others.
Life's a balancing act.
2
A desire to do things that have value in the
community (and associate yourself with that value)
Do what has value Accentuate the
positive
3
A desire not to do things that are looked down on
in the community (and have others look down on
you)
Avoid what has costs Eliminate the negative
4
A desire to work out how others are orienting
themselves to the concerns in 1 and 3. (It involves
testing hypothesis about others)
Try to work out what others
are up to
It's a jungle out there.

Note: It's interesting to notice that instead of being centered on the speaker's needs and desires, number 4 stems
from our intuition that others are motivated by the same things as we are. It's also worth noting that language
not only reflects social and interpersonal dynamics, it also constitutes them.

C CH HA AP PT TE ER R 3 3: : V VA AR RI IA AT TI IO ON N A AN ND D S ST TY YL LE E

CHALLENGING STYLE AS ATTENTION TO SPEECH

Giles suggested that all stylistic variation is actually caused by speakers' attuning or accomodating to the norms
associated with different addressees. i.e., speakers fine-tune the way they talk according to the sitch they find
themselves in. Learning to make the expected attunements to others is part of the proces of becoming socialised
in a community of speakers.
An important factor in determining how speakers make adjustments to their speech is who they're talking to.

Style as "attention to others"
The way speakers shift btw foregrournds the importance of the speaker's and addresse's relationship and their
attitudes towards one another. It presents a picture of speakers in which they come across more as thinking
agents with interpersonal goals and desires than they do in the attentin to speech model.

Audience design
The term both classifies the behavior (the speaker is seen as proactively designing their speech to the needs of
particular audience) and encapsulates the presumed motie for the behavior (who is the speaker's audience).
An individual's style-shifting (intraspeaker variation) derives from the differences probabilistically associated
with diferent groups of speakers (interspeaker variation).
It's a model of style-shifting.

Different audience types
Bell built on Giles ideas and proposed a framework for analyzing principles of accommodation and
convergence to sociolinguistic variation. He suggested that different types of audiences/ listeners that a speaker
may be thinking about (from 1 to 4, each kind of listener has progressively less and less impact on the way you
speak).
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Bell proposed a system for distinguishing btw the four differnent kinds of addressee by using three criteria:
- Known to be part of the speech context
- Ratified: the speaker acknowledges their presence in the speech context
- Addressed: the speaker talks to them

Criteria Known Ratified Addressed
1
Addressee + + +
2
Auditor + + -
3
Overhearer + - -
4
Eavesdropper - - -

Audience design predits that the speaker will attune their speech most to an addressee, next to an auditor, and
then o any overhearers who the speaker thinks might be lurking around. The speaker will attune their speech less
to 2, 3, and 4 because the speaker's relationship with them is more attenuated, and consequently the spaker has
less clear relational goals. The speaker may also have much less detailed ideas about what kinds of people their
auditors and overhearers might be the speaker will have less specific ideas about how they might attune their
speech.

Note: Coupland talks about speaker design (another model of style-shifting). It differns from audience design
in what kinds of motives or goals are ascribed to the speaker and which are assumed to drive variation. It's more
compatible wih the accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative motives, but less it's a jungle out there. It stresses the
speaker's desire to represent themselves in certain ways.

Relationship btw social and linguistic constraints
Bell claimed that there's a relationship btw SOCIAL VARIATION (variation btw groups of speakers) and
STYLISTIC VARIATION (variation in a single speaker). According to him, intraspeaker variability derives from
the variability that differentiates social groups:

(variation btw groups) > (variation in individuals)
13

Individuals display less variants than the ones displayed in the group.

Bonvillain, Nancy. 1993. Extract. Chapter 6: Societal segmentation and linguistic variation: class and race.

THE STRUCTURE OF BLACK ENGLISH

Reduction of word-final consonant clusters
Speakers of AAVE
14
are most likely to
retain the /s/ at the ends of words when it marks plurality.

13
Other research findings, for ex Baugh's, show that the contrary is true.
14
African-American Vernacular English. Bonvillain actually speaks of BEV (Black English Vernacular), but this is an undesirable label, both due to the
negative associations that might spring up with "black" and because the label is too general (it includes all "Blacks" when the author is actually spoken by
African-Americans). Note: BEV, the author says, is a national, not a regional, dialect.
Range (rango / amplitud / franja) of variation btw
speakers from different social groups (intersp
variation)
........................................................................................

.........................................................
Range of variation in an individual sp.
(intrasp variation)
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Omit the /s/ when in possessives and 3
rd
person singular.

Variation of /r/
Post-vocalic /r/ is quite often deleted.
Inter-vocalic /r/ is sometimes omited, especially when a preceding vowel is stressed (Crol C'ol; nterested
nte'ested).

Contraction and deletion of the copula
Deletion of present tense forms: "She smart"
This case is related to its contraction in standard English. As a rule of thumb "wherever SE can contract,
AAVE can delete is and are and viceversa."
The deletion is also sensitive to syntactic context. It is the deleted if the copula is followed by:
- noun phrase: She the first one started us off.
- Predicate adjective: He fast in everything he do.
- Locative: We on tape.
- Progressive (verb): He always coming over.
- Future "gonna" (or "gon"): He gon' try to get up.
Women and the higher classes tend to retain the copula more frequently than men and the lower classes,
respectively.

Hypercorrection
The process of extending linguistic rules in an overly generalized and regularized fashion.
AAVE know that they sometimes delete /-s/ and /-id/ on verbs. In an attempt to "correct" their speech, they
outdo standard norms by overextending the grammatical rule, and include /-s/ and /-id/ in linguistic
environments where they don't belong: I really likes doing that; I loveded her.

Complex aspectual semantics in the verb system
AAVE contains many more kinds of aspect marking than are available in SE, and it continally expands on
aspectual meanings using contemporary forms.
1. Invariant be: Use of be generally marks habitual and/or durative aspect.
- They don't be on the on the streets no more
- She say, "Why you be runnin in the street so much?"
- The teachers don't be knowing the problems like the parents do.
- It's just not convenient, cause the office be closed on weekends.

2. Perfective done:
- The teacher done lost her keys.
- We done told him bout these pipes already.
- It don't make no difference, cuase they done (=already) used all the good ones by now.

3. Future perfective be done:
- We be done washed all the cars by the time Jojo gets back with the cigarettes.
- I'll be done bought my own radio watin on him to buy me one.

4. Stressed been: Stress on the word been marks an event that began in the past, and which might be over or not.
- We been lived here.
- I been had that job.

5. Aspectual steady: It functions as an intensified continuative, emphasizing consistent and persistent
continuation of an event. It usually occurs with progressive verbs and always take an inanimate subject:
- He all the time be steady complainin bout somethin.
- Them fools be steady hustlin everybody they see.

6. Multiple negation:
- They didn't never do nothing to nobody.
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- He ain't not never gon say it to his face.
- They can't do nothing if they don't never try.

Settings and Contexts: Speakers of AAVE are sensitive to situational requirements and adapt their linguistic
performance to context. People employ stylistic alternatives depending on the degree of familiarity and
solidarity
15
with co-participants in speech events. Features of AAVE occur with greatest frequency in informal
contexts when speakers share life experiences, expectations and values. In sitch of formality and social distance,
standard forms are used.

Hoover distinguished btw
Black Standard English: characterized by standard syntactic constructions but contains some of the
phonological features mentioned above. It also has distinctive intonational patterns and some specialized
vocabulary.
Black vernacular (what's explained above).

Bonvillain, Nancy. 1993. Extract. Chapter 7: Language and Gender: English and English Speakers.

Generic "He" and "Man"

In all societies, gender distinctions are expressed through language. they may be realized as differences in linguistic form: Women and
men use alternatives in pronunciation, word selection, and grammatical construction. Gender-appropriate styles of communicative
interaction further mark the separation of women and men. Finally, words and expressions in a language itself may reflect gender
difference by the ways that they symbolize males and females (...)
The English language contributes to gender inequality by the ways that women and men are labeled and their actions
described. Recurrent messages convey derogatory, subsidiary, or disvalued images of women.
Through communicative processes, cultural models of gender are both portrayed and reinforced, contributing to the
socialization of females and males into their expected roles and also creating their ideas about themselves and each other.

Using male terms in their "gender-neutral" sense induces people to think of males even in contexts that are
explicitly gender-neutral.
Using, he/him/his does the same.

Aunque ahora trata de usarse person en vez de man (chairman > chairperson, business man > business
person), there's currently a tendency to restrict person nouns to females, retaining man for males. Spokesperson
therefore has replaced spokeswoman, but not spokesman.

The title "Ms." was introduced to eliminate labeling women according to their marital statu. Although intended
as a replacement for both "Miss" and "Mrs.", it has come to be employed (if at all) to refer solely to unmarried
women.
Vast research has shown that there's a pervasive, covert ascription of positive and normative qualities to males
and negative or secondary ones to females. Continual repetition of English words and expressions, both as
speakers and hearers, reinforces cultural evaluations that enhance male's status and disvalue females. These
judgments don't originate in the language but arise linguistically to express, supplement, and justify entrenched
cultural models.

Accent and Discriminatory Pretext in the Courts

15
Solidarity involves the speaker's showing they consider themselves to be like the interlocutor: "I'm like you."
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Rosina Lippi-Green

Accent, generally speaking, loosely refers to the sets of distinctive differences over geographic or social space,
most usually phonological and intonation features. In L2 learning, accent may refer to the carryover of native lge
phonology and intonation into a target lge.
According to linguists, all naturally occurring lges are equally functional and have the same potential to develop
further functions as necessary.
IMPORTANT CONCEPT: Communicative competence the ability to use and interpret lge in a stylistically
and culturally appropriate manner.
Much of linguistic variation is structured around social identity. Accent, then, becomes both manner and means
for exclusion. When ppl reject an accent, they reject an identity of the person speaking: his/her race, ethnic
heritage, national origin regional affiliation, or economic class.
According to Lippi-Green, when associated with racial, ethnic or cultural minorities, accent is likely to pose a
barrier to effective communication when two elements are lacking: communicative competence on the part of
the speaker and the listeners goodwill. Prejudiced listeners cannot hear what a person has to say b/c accent as a
mirror of social identity and a litmus test
16
for exclusion is more important.
Accent discrimination LTF language-trait focused discrimination

STANDARD LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY (SLI)
SLI is a set of social practices on which ppl depend w/o close analysis of underlying assumptions. This
institutionalization of behaviors which originate with the dominant bloc (an alliance of those who see their
interests as tied to capital and capitalism) functions to keep separate the powered and the disempowered.
The SLI is one major route to establishing consent (ppl adhere to this ideology so it becomes natural, common
sense). (SLI is imposed through consent and coercion)

DADO EN CLASE: Standard Language Ideology
beliefs about one standard, abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken lge
the most salient feature is the goal of suppression of variation of all kinds

4 identifiable proponents of SLI, all of which are part of the dominant bloc:
the educational system;
the news media;
the entertainment industry;
corporate America

The educational system
Much of what Am educational system teaches children about lge is incorrect. The overwhelming majority of
Ams have been instilled that certain linguistic forms are correct, while others are wrong.
For the most part, teachers are bound by the SLI. The schools provide the first exposure to SLI, but the
indoctrination process does not when students are dismissed.

Non-standard English is linked to a lack of logic or clarity
There is one correct way to speak and write English
There is overt authoritarianism

The media
The media have taken the job of defending the national culture, which means the propagation of a
homogeneous nation-state, in which everyone must assimilate or be marginalized. The media is perhaps the most
pervasive representative of SLI by means of language conscious reporting, which is prescriptive w/o factual
basis. It is sometimes also overtly discriminatory.
There is an underlying message that is clear: there is a right and wrong way to talk, and it is perfectly acceptable,
even judicious, to censor and punish those who do not conform.
The media may become complicit in the process of discrimination (see page 170, on Lippi-Greens chapter)

16
a crucial and revealing test in which there is one decisive factor.
Linguistics II 2012


Many individuals do not recognize the fact that, for spoken lge, variation is systematic, structured and inherent,
and that the national standard is an abstraction. More surprising is the fact that many (democratic) individuals,
hold to a SLI which attempts to justify restriction on individuality and rejection of the other.

Corporate America (the workplace)
EN CLASE:
Theres discriminatory hiring and promoting practices.
By way of excuses, employers claim they have trouble understanding the candidate and therefore they claim that
the candidate is not qualified for the post.

ACCENT AND COMMUNICATION
Two models of communication
A traditional (simplistic) model: speakers are the only party responsible for success
Employers present to the courts a model of communication in the workplace:
a) Good communication skills are necessary for job X
b) Accent Y impedes communication
c) The applicant speaks with accent Y
d) Conclusion: the applicant does not possess a basic skill necessary for job X
An alternative model: mutual responsibility, negotiation of meanings (repairs, expansions, replacement), a
predisposition to listen. This new cognitive model was proposed by Herbert Clark includes participants that
collaborate in the establishment of new info. Listeners and speakers will work harder to find a communicative
middle ground and foster mutual intelligibility when they are motivated, socially and psychologically, to do so.

The burden of communication is shared, on every level by both participants.
The full communicative burden might be placed on the speaker if
the consequences of miscommunication are grave;
the job is primarily oral in nature;
the setting is stressful, and time is of essence;
interaction is contextless, and restricted to one-time exchanges
(see FIGURE 1 in p. 187, Lippi-Green)

Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar
Ann Bodine

Introduction
Descriptive grammar is dominant among theorists.
Prescriptive grammar is taught in the schools and exercises a range of social effects.
Bloomfield and Newmark discuss P grammar as the linguistic manifestation of rationalism, of neo-classicism,
and of status anxiety accompanying changes in social structure. They also trace the indirect contributions
(through the rise of the vernacular) to the origins of P grammar by such diverse forces as nationalism and the
anti-Latinism of the protestant revolution. These writers all see the inception of the P grammar movement as a
whole as having significant social and psychological causes and consequences, but the specific choices of the P
grammarians are rarely explored and are therefore treated as unmotivated and arbitrary.
Androcentrism in the 1920s was apparently not discussed with regard to language, despite the attention to sex
roles which was generated by the suffragists.
Because of social significance of personal reference, personal pronouns are particularly susceptible to
modification in response to social and ideological change.

Singular they, sex-indefinite he, and he or she

Some grammarians state just as categorically that he is the English sex-indefinite pronoun. This matter has
taken a new turn recently with the insistence of many feminists that he should not be used when the referent
includes women, and that speakers of English should find some substitute. Invariably the feminists demand is
viewed as an attempt to alter the English lge.
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The movement against sex-indefinite he is actually a counter-reaction to an attempt by prescriptive
grammarians to alter the lge. English has always had other linguistic devices for referring to sex-indefinite
referents:

Anyone can do it if they try hard enough mixed-sex, distributive
Who dropped their ticket? sex unknown
Either Mary or John should bring a schedule with them mixed-sex, disjunctive

This usage came under attack by P grammarians.
(SEE CHART ON BODINE, 127)
Prior to the 19
th
cy. singular they was widely used in written, therefore presumably also in spoken, English.
This usage met w/ no opposition.
In the definition of they as exclusively plural is accepted, then they fails to agree w/ a singular, sex-indefinite
antecedent by one feature: number. Similarly, he fails to agree w/ a singular, sex-indefinite antecedent by one
feature: gender.
Of the 3 forms which existed in English for a sex-indefinite referent, one was selected as correct while the
other two were proscribed. Although the grammarians felt they were motivated by an interest in logic, accuracy,
and elegance, it is revealed that there is no rational, objective basis for their choice. It would appear that the
choice was dictated by an androcentric worldview; linguistically, human beings were to be considered male unless
proven otherwise.

17
th
and 18
th
centuries
Androcentrism was present, it had not yet resulted in the proscription of singular they, which was still freely
used along with he or she and sex-indefinite he
Kirby (1746) Rule 21 the masculine Person answers to the general Name, which he comprehends both Male
and Female; as Any Person, who knows what he says. (early attack on the singular they)
Act of Parliament of 1850 (19
th
cy.) explosion of condemnation of singular they. It legally replaced he or
she with he: in all acts words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females.
Kirbys rule 21 and the Act of Parliament manifest their underlying androcentric values by handling very
differently linguistically analogous phenomena (number and gender) and by not allowing singular they, since if
the plural takes the singular, they includes she and he, and he or she.

White His is the representative pronoun, as mankind includes both men and women. To use his or her
seems very finical and pedantic.

19
th
and 20
th
centuries
Although in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries the masculine gender was generally no longer championed as the
worthier gender, there has remained an underlying realization of the social implications of sex-indefinite he.
Fowler The use of sex-indefinite he involves the convention that where the matter of sex is not
conspicuous or important the masculine form shall be allowed to represent a person instead of a man.
McCawley sex-indefinite he carries no overtones of its primary, masculine meaning if it is used
consistently in sex-indefinite contexts. He implies that the phrase he or she is sexist in that it makes women a
special category of beings by mentioning them in addition to people (i.e., he)
Roberts Grammatically, men are more important than women.
These writers appear to be the docile heirs to the androcentric tradition of the P grammarians, failing to
confront, if not implicitly subscribing to, the androcentric motive.

Did everyone say they missed you like mad yesterday? Some grammarians are unable to the frequent singular semantic
content of the word they and are unable to see the frequent plural semantic content of words like everyone
and everybody.
The persistence for almost two centuries of the original movement to eradicate he or she and singular they
suggests that the counter-movement against sex-indefinite he is unlikely to disappear. Since the counter-
movement has more explicit social and ideological buttresses as well as a larger number of supporters than the
original movement had at its inception, it is reasonable to predict that the countermovement against sex-
indefinite he will affect English pronominal usage.
Pronominal systems are particularly susceptible to alteration in response to social change.

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Implications
Careful observation of change in English pronominal usage could contribute to our understanding of a number
of issues of general importance within linguistics including:
continuing linguistic enculturation: post-childhood vocabulary learning. Because the particular lge forms
under discussion here have ties with age-related concerns and awareness they are a likely source of info on
continuing lge acquisition.
conscious vs. unconscious change: free variation is not so free and sound change is not so unmotivated nor
always so unconscious. As English pronominal usage is increasingly affected by the feminist countermovement
discussed in this paper, it will provide an ideal opportunity to study differences in lge change among those who
make a conscious decision and deliberate effort to change, among those who are aware that the change is taking
place but have no particular interest in the issue, among those who are oblivious to the change, and among those
who are consciously resisting the change.
compensatory adjustment within the linguistic system: baseline description of present day English 3
rd
person
pronominal usage coupled w/ continual monitoring of usage trends offers another such opportunity for the
detailed investigation of systematic change in progress.

Conclusion
With the increase of opposition to sex-based hierarchy, the structure of English 3
rd
person pronouns may be
expected to change to reflect the new ideology and social practices, as 2
nd
person pronouns (thou-thee) did
before them. Analysis of the processes and results of this change can further elucidate the contributions of social
forces to language development.

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Individuals Voices
Author of the content Textual subjects -
Discourses ideologies oral
texts: intonation, prosodic,
imitation
Composer of the form
The principal (el poderdante)
The spokesperson (vehicle)

The principal is the mastermind, the person liable for the content and the actions performed through the text
(Javier)

Goatly, Andrew / Johnstone Barbara

Generic structure each discourse type or genre has a more or less conventionalized generic structure, a kind
of template into which we can fit out words and sentences.

There has been a misguided emphasis on narrative, if we assume that writing in schools should be a
preparation for writing in the real world. However, there are other genres that surface in the classroom for
curriculum development purposes:

Narrative To tell a story as a means of making sense of events and happenings in the
world. It can be entertaining and informing.
Recount To construct past experience by retelling events and incidents in the order
in which they occurred
Information
report
To represent factual information about a class of things usually by first
classifying them and then describing their characteristics
Discussion To present information and opinions about more than one side of an issue:
it may end with a recommendation based on the evidence presented.
Explanation To explain why things are as they are or how things work
Exposition To advance or justify an argument or put forward a particular point of view
Procedure To show how something can be accomplished through a series or steps of
action to be taken

Narrative, recount, and procedure involve sequences of events, so that the ordering of clauses which
represent these events is going to be a crucial part of their structure. They are likely to make extensive use of step
(and chain) structures.
Information report, exposition, discussion, and explanation involve things or ideas rather than events. An
info report will obviously structure itself around categories and subcategories. Exposition will argue only one
side of an issue while a Discussion will have different sections to do with the opinions for and against and will
need to develop some Balance structures. Explanation, if involving a series of causes and effects, might well
make use of chaining devices.

Structure of the genre conversational story of personal experience
The most influential model of the structural schema underlying spontaneous conversational narrative has been
the one developed by William Labov. According to Labov, any narrative includes at least two narrative clauses.
Authorship
The term
author will be
avoided
Instead, the terms
individuals and
voices will be used.
Unit 3:
Discourse in Private and Institutional Settings
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A narrative clause is clause that cannot be moved without changing the order in which events must be taken to
have occurred. If two narrative clauses are reversed, they represent a different chronology.
Most personal experience narrative is more complex, including more narrative clauses as well as free clauses
that serve other functions. A fully developed narrative may include clauses or sets of clauses with one or more
of six functions. Each of these six elements serve of narrative serves a double purpose, making reference to
events, characters, feelings, and so on that are understood to have happened or existed outside of and previous
to the conversation in which the story is being told, and at the same time structuring the ongoing interaction by
guiding the teller and the audience through the narrated events and ensuring that they are comprehensible and
worth recounting
Ideational Elements Structural Elements
Beginning (Human character with a
goal)
(Abstract) Orientation Evaluative
Elements
(internal or
external)
Middle (conflict) Complicating Action
End (change) Resolution (Coda)

I
D
E
A
T
I
O
N
A
L

E
L
E
M
E
N
T
S

B
e
g
i
n
n
i
n
g

Abstract a short summary of the story that narrators generally provide before the narrative
begins. It encapsulates the point of the story, or what the story exemplifies. It is not compulsory,
but it provides a signal narrative is about to commence. The abstract announces that the narrator
has a story to tell and makes a claim to the right to tell it, a claim supported by the suggestion that
it will be a good story, worth the audiences time and the speaking rights the audience will
temporarily relinquish.
Orientation it gives info about the time, place, persons and situation/activity type that are
engaged in. Typically, this section will include adverbials of time and place and relational verbs like
to be which describe states/relations rather than actions describing the place, time, weather or
characters. It is not compulsory but is normal in written narratives. Orientation often occurs near
the beginning, but may be interjected at other points, when needed. The characteristic orientation
tense in English is the past progressive.
M
i
d
d
l
e

Complicating Action essential element in a narrative (as well as the resolution). All a narrative
needs is two or more clauses describing a pair of linked events or actions, ordered chronologically.
Complicating Action clauses recapitulate a sequence of events leading up to their climax, the point
of maximum suspense.
E
n
d

Resolution the resolution is provided by the last of the narrative clauses which began with the
Complicating Action, bringing the sequence of actions and events to an end.
Coda the coda is the means by which the narrative is completed and the listener is brought out
of the past back into the present time. This is a bridge out of the narrative and signals that the
speaker no longer has the right to the floor. Often it is changes of tenses and time adverbs that
bring us back to the present.
Evaluation Evaluation may occur at any point in the narrative, scattered throughout the text.
Evaluative elements state or underscore what is interesting or unusual about the story, why the
audience should keep listening and allow the teller to keep talking. Labov defined evaluation as
those clauses which dont belong to the narrative action, but which, on the contrary, delay its
forward movement. They comprise:
NPs
comments by narrators
evaluative comment of character
evaluative comments attributed to a third party
emotive devices (exclamations, interjections, swear words, emotionally laden vocabulary)
comparators (if/counterfactual clauses, comparisons, modals, negatives, futures, questions)

(ABSTRACT^)(ORIENTATION^)COMPLICATING ACTION^RESOLUTION(^CODA)+(EVALUATION).

A minimum narrative consists of two linked clauses: the complicating action and the resolution

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The generic structure of news reports (Van Dijk)
The structure of news reports in serious newspapers is quite different from narrative, though popular
newspapers tend to be more narrative like. Van Dijk shows that print news stories can be described in terms of a
sequence of structural slots, starting with summary in the headline and lead, moving to the main story
(organized as one or more episodes, each consisting of the report of events, followed by consequences and/or
reactions), and ending with evaluative or predictive comments. This macrostructure reflects and realizes writers
and readers cognitive schema for such articles, a set of pre-formed expectations about structure and content
that simplifies information-processing.

G
e
n
e
r
i
c

S
t
r
u
c
t
u
r
e

o
f

N
e
w
s

R
e
p
o
r
t
s

Summary
It announces the
main topic, and
also includes a
concise version of
the main point, the
main event.
Headline
It is usually graphologically prominent, in bigger or bolder type.
Lead
It is usually graphologically prominent, in bigger or bolder type. The Lead should
contain information about who did what, when, where and how.
News story Episode Events

Main events
The last important event constitutes the
Main Event. In short reports, the Main
Event and the Lead may be one and the
same paragraph or sentence.

Background
It helps us activate or update the
knowledge held in memory, thereby
making the news intelligible. Here, we find
references to previous events sometimes
stretching back even into history, and
details of the physical circumstances in
which the event took place.
Consequence
Anything which was
caused by the main
event, namely
another event or a
human physical
reaction or verbal
reaction
Event/Reaction

Verbal Reaction
Comments
Evaluations of the other elements and speculations about what might happen next.
These comments are made by the reporter or the editorial team producing the
newspaper, and are different from the verbal reaction of eyewitnesses, politicians, etc.

Van Dijks model is strictly applicable to News Reports, not to other articles in the newspaper such as editorials
and features.
Among the optional elements, we can find the dateline, which intervenes between the headline and the Lead,
and the attribution which comes at the very end, and identifies the news agency from which some reports are
compiled.

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Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural
Gnther Kress

Kinds of Texts: Genre

From an aesthetic, social or educational perspective it is the text which is the significant unit of language. Texts
arise in specific social situations and they are constructed with specific purposes by one or more speakers or
writers. Texts are the material form of language; texts give material realization to discourses.
The social occasions of which texts are a part have a fundamentally important effect on texts. The characteristic
features and structures of those situations, the purposes of the participants, the goals of the participants all have
their effects on the form of the texts which are constructed in those situations. The situations are always
conventional. The occasions on which we interact are conventionalized and structured. They range from
entirely formulaic and ritualized occasions. The structures and forms of the conventionalized occasions
themselves signify the functions, the purposes of the participants, and the desired goals of that occasion. The
conventionalized forms of the occasions lead to conventionalized forms of texts, to specific GENRES. Genres
have specific forms and meanings, deriving from and encoding the functions, purposes and meanings of the
social occasions. Genres provide a precise index and catalogue of the relevant social occasions of a community at
a given time.
The meaning of texts are derived not only from the meanings of the discourse which give rise to and appear in
particular texts, but also from the meanings of the genre of a particular texts. Both discourse and genre carry
specific and socially determined meanings. DISCOURSE carries meanings about the nature of the institution
from which it derives; genre carries meanings about the conventional social occasions on which texts arise.
Texts are therefore doubly determined: by the meanings of the discourses which appear in the text, and by
the forms, meanings and constraints of a particular genre. Both discourse and genre arise out of the structures
and processes of a society: discourses are derived from the larger social institutions; genres are derived from the
conventionalized social occasions on and through which social life is carried on.

1. CONVERSATION
Certain features of conversation have to do with the nature and structure of speech.
The syntax is that of clause-chains since clauses tend to be adjoined, coordinated, conjoined in a sequence
rather than being subordinated, embedded, integrated in the hierarchical structure of sentences.
There are hesitations, which indicate that the speaker is thinking on the spot in a situation that is informal
and without being classified as inarticulate
Turns are taken on the initiative of the one who wishes to speak, and are taken by establishing overt cohesive
links with the text of the preceding speaker.
The textual strategies employed by the participants are exemplification, (minor) modification, reformulation,
and development, of the previous speakers text.
Conversations are motivated by difference. When overt disagreement determines the mode of interaction, we
are dealing with a different genre (argument or debate)
All speakers perform on their own behalf and take turns on their own initiative, without being directed by any
member of the group ( lesson & interview)
The forms and functions of the social occasion and the purposes of the participants are what give rise to this
particular genre, and those meanings are part of the genre conversation.

2. INTERVIEW
In contrast to the conversation, the interactional nature of the occasion is much more foregrounded, and a
number of formal features are present to structure the interaction.
Turns are taken at the instigation of the interviewer, who indicates also what the interviewees turn is to be
about
Greater power lies with the interviewer
The form of the text of the interview is overtly motivated by difference, and is not developed by agreement
but by direction.
The textual strategies are direction and questioning (interviewer), and response, information, and definition
(interviewee)
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Linguistic forms: (see Lesson)
certain interviews have a formalized section where the interviewee is encouraged to ask questions

3. LESSON
Not all lessons are alike; there is variation between teachers, between subject areas, and variation and change
across the years of schooling.
There is great differential in power, which is used by the teacher to control and structure the interaction: the
teacher holds greater power over the student participants since the teacher nominates which individual is to be
the interactant.
The lesson is motivated by a difference of knowledge and power which are interrelated and both dependant on
each other.
The formal features used to structure the interaction are questions and commands that serve as scene-settings
and serve to focus the pupils attention.
The teacher is not interested in the info (unlike the interviewer), but in the pupils performance/utterance of
this information. The teacher validates and accepts the information.
The teacher not only controls the content, and the sequence of interaction, but also controls who is to be a
participant.
Linguistic forms ( interview):
the teacher uses direct commands more frequently (nominations)
the students response is more narrowly confined or constructed in and by the teachers questions
the teacher validates the info (interviewers don`t)
the teacher occasionally provides a summary of the information as an end, or a prelude to an episode in the
interaction
in lessons, power is less concealed than in interviews
in lessons, there is one participant that cannot ask questions-other than confirmatory questions
In lessons, the mechanism of interaction is formally more foregrounded and content is less emphasized

WITHOUT THE NOTION OF TEXT IT WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE TO DIFFERENTIATE
BETWEEN GENRES

NOTAS DE CLASE

Linguistic Features Textual Features Interactional
Mechanisms
CONVERSATION Reformulation
Different sentence-types
(question-tags)
Chains of clauses
Exemplification
Modification
Hesitations
Turn-taking (a speaker takes
the initiative)
Topic-management
(spontaneous and
negotiated) >topic change
& topic shift
Question tags
INTERVIEW Coordination
Subordination
Cohesion (coord &
sub)
Turn-allocation
Overlapping (simultaneous)
Follow-up turns
Interruptions
Closing remarks
LESSON

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The sources of texts

Texts are the relevant units of language. The forms and meanings of texts are determined by discourse
systems of meanings arising out of the organization of social institutions and by genres formal conventional
categories whose meanings and forms arise out of the meanings, forms and functions of the conventionalized
occasions of social interactions. Therefore, texts are given form by discourse and genre.
Texts are the product of individual speakers who are themselves formed in discourses through texts, attempting
to make sense of the competing, contradictory demands and claims of differing discourses. Each individual exists
in a particular set of discursive forms deriving from the social institutions in which she or he finds her/himself.
No one individuals discursive history can be exactly that of another, no matter how similar their personal and
social histories. This difference always has linguistic form, and leads to dialogue, and hence to text. Texts are
constructed in and by this difference. In texts the discursive differences are negotiated, governed by differences
in power, which are themselves in part encoded in and determined by discourse and by genre. All texts show the
traces of differing discourses, contending and struggling for dominance. Texts are the sites of linguistic and
cultural change. Individuals are the bearers and the agents of that struggle.

Los gneros en la vida social: la perspectiva fundada en las prcticas sociales
Isolda Carranza

1. INTRODUCCIN
Gnero: configuracin relativamente estable de contenido, estructura y estilo, asociada con cierta situacin
comunicativa y vinculada a las condiciones histricas en las que tiene vigencia.

El gnero no es una propiedad de los textos, sino que constituye un conjunto de recursos sociales. Se considera
al gnero como escenario para la produccin de significado social. Esta mirada establece un vnculo entre el
gnero y una ocasin social convencionalizada. Tambin reconoce en los gneros su aspecto accional por lo
tanto, tiene en cuenta su asociacin con un tipo de actividad. Con esta visin de los gneros, adquieren
importancia los participantes que producen y reciben discurso, y los acontecimientos en los que se inscriben los
intercambios verbales. Los aspectos fundamentales de un gnero discursivo son los rangos de posibilidades y
restricciones que se instauran mediante la produccin y la recepcin de discurso.

2. POSTULADOS TERICOS Y ASPECTOS DEL OBJETO DE INVESTIGACIN
El sujeto es visto como agente. Los actores sociales no solo actualizan sino recrean un gnero.
Briggs [los hablantes y los receptores] hacen elecciones concernientes no solo a qu gnero(s) seleccionar sino tambin qu rasgos
del gnero usar y en qu grado stos deben ser puestos en primer plano. / [speakers and receivers] make choices regarding not only
which genre(s) to select but which generic features to use and to what degree they should be foregrounded.

Los gneros pueden ser considerados organizaciones convencionalizadas pero sumamente flexibles de medios
y estructuras formales que constituyen marcos complejos de referencia para la prctica comunicativa.

Se enfatiza que son marcos, no son esquemas puramente formales, ni son una estructura unitaria. La inherente
flexibilidad de los gneros abre vas para su transformacin.

Posibilidades combinatorias:
a) elementos de un estilo reconocido como asociado a cierto gnero pueden ser empleados en un
entorno al que le otorga un tinte evocador de aquel gnero.
b) Rasgos emblemticos de cierto gnero pueden ser combinados con los de otro gnero, para
transformar el segundo (parodia)
c) Gneros mnimos pueden ser incorporados en otros, como ocurre cuando una balada contiene una
adivinanza o una leyenda contiene una poesa.
d) Puede existir un dilogo entre configuraciones genricas si coexisten a lo largo del desarrollo textual,
ya sea que se mantengan definidas con lmites claros entre ellas o que se intersecten y transformen
mutuamente.

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Posicin de sujeto en genero y discurso ROL DEL SUJETO

TODOS LOS AUTORES DE ESTA PERSPECTIVA PROMUEVEN ESTUDIAR EL DISCURSO COMO
REPRESENTACIN Y COMO ACCIN, ESPECIFICAMENTE EN ESTE NIVEL INTERMEDIO DE
LA PRACTICA DISCURSIVA A LA QUE PERTENECE EL GENERO.
Kress todo gnero construye posiciones o roles que son ocupados por los participantes en cada manifestacin
concreta de ese gnero.
Al elegir cierto gnero, un productor textual reclama cierta identidad y la autoridad de conectar su texto con
otros textos y sus circunstancias sociales, y a la vez, al ubicar al interlocutor en el rol de receptor de cierto gnero
se instauran modos de interaccin social y las correspondientes responsabilidades de recepcin.

Briggs invocar las relaciones de gnero implica estructurar las relaciones sociales la ubicacin del
productor textual y de los receptores es usualmente proyectada a relaciones entre los grupos sociales
involucrados.
Se reconoce la conexin entre la configuracin de un gnero con su dinmica de poder y las formaciones
sociales, ideolgicas e histricas.
Bauman los investigadores necesitan concebir el gnero como marco para abordar la practica discursiva.
Fairclough El componente discursivo de una prctica sociocultural se articula con otros componentes de la
prctica y tambin se dirige reflexivamente sobre la prctica misma. Toda prctica social existe en una red de
prcticas.

Los MODOS en los que el proceso de relacionar un texto con un gnero o con mezclas o fusiones de
gneros no es automtico, sino ideolgicamente motivado y vinculado a las condiciones sociales, polticas y
econmicas de recepcin.
El anlisis de produccin y recepcin de los gneros tendr en cuenta los modos en que los gneros se relacionan
con otros elementos de la prctica social y las condiciones contextuales de produccin, distribucin, recepcin y
circulacin de los textos en los gneros que examinamos.

El gnero acta en al menos 3 MODOS
1. Como dispositivo para controlar la interaccin a travs del tiempo, el gnero nos permite rastrear las
continuidades y las relaciones intertextuales en la historia
2. Como dispositivo de ordenamiento para articular discursos de modos particulares, el gnero regula la
heterogeneidad y la interdiscursividad
3. Como dispositivo para constituir grados particulares de aislamiento entre sujetos, el gnero distingue los
grupos que poseen competencia en cierto gnero de los grupos que no la poseen.

CONJUNTOS DE ORIENTACIONES PARA LA INVESTIGACIN EMPRICA DE LA FUNCIN DE
LOS GNEROS EN UNA CULTURA DADA
1. Perspectiva sincrnica El registro de repertorio de gneros proporciona una base de comparacin entre las
sociedades. No obstante, la existencia del mismo gnero en dos comunidades diferentes no presupone idnticos
significados sociales en ambas.
Perspectiva diacrnica las transformaciones en los gneros son mejor comprendidas en trminos de contactos
culturales, influencias o luchas por la hegemona que dejan huellas en aspectos de algunos gneros.
2. Admitir el funcionamiento de los gneros en un sistema social conduce a tomar en cuenta no solo las
categoras concebidas a priori por el investigador, sino tambin las categoras de gneros que parecen reconocer
los actores sociales mismos en la comunidad estudiada.

El juego de restricciones y posibilidades, o regulacin y transgresin a las convenciones, y de la
heterogeneidad interna a los gneros lleva a considerar:
a. La diversidad de prcticas sociales rastreables desde la heterogeneidad interna del genero y la conexin entre
esas prcticas y las relaciones entre los grupos sociales
b. Los conflictos entre actores que intervienen en diferentes redes de practicas
c. Los cambios en las practicas

3. RECURSOS Y RELACIONES ENTRE LOS GNEROS
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Los gneros son recursos sociales de rango medio, permeables a los condicionamientos de redes de prcticas.

Ciertas manifestaciones de elementos del componente estilstico son comunes a la oratoria poltica
(alocucin pblica del lder poltico), oratoria eclesistica (el sermn en el servicio religioso), y la
oratoria forense (alegato final en un juicio final). Esto se debe no solo a que surgen de las necesidades
inherentes de interaccin cara a cara con el auditorio destinatario sino tambin a que reflejan condiciones de esas
esferas de actividad y sus correspondientes campos sociales, los cuales se hallan estrechamente vinculados entre
s.
Elementos en comn entre los tres gneros:
empleo de frases o elementos lxicos en conjuntos de tres (tripletes): (alegato) todos estos hechos se fueron
uniendo, se fueron agrupando, se fueron asociando...
utilizacin estratgica de la narrativa de experiencia personal, la cual, al invocar confianza y revelacin de
informacin que pertenece a la esfera privada, introduce heterogeneidad en esos gneros de la esfera pblica.

4. LA FLEXIBILIDAD (O INTERTEXTUALIDAD SELECTIVA) Y LOS MRGENES

Es posible reconocer que ciertos elementos son constitutivos de un gnero mientras que otros
componentes (opcionales), se encuentran ms distantes del ncleo, que contiene caractersticas
distintivas. Algunos de los componentes opcionales pueden ser completamente atpicos. Las fuentes para la
expresin de significado social radican justamente en las expectativas acerca de lo que reviste el
carcter de tpico. Los productos textuales que se apartan tan abiertamente de lo habitual y esperable pueden
ser descriptos como marginales.
Briggs & Bauman Brecha intertextual: relacin entre un texto-producto dado con otros textos sincrnicos o
antecedentes diacrnicos del mismo gnero. Esta brecha es concebida como cuestin de grado, de modo que
puede presentarse en algn punto de un continuo que va desde la distancia mnima hasta la distancia mxima. Al
considerar, entonces, el ajuste de un texto al gnero, desde el punto de vista del sujeto actuante individual,
estamos ante un proceso de intertextualidad selectiva.
El proceso de entextualizacion consiste en la articulacin entre las convenciones genricas y la emergencia del
texto a partir del contexto situacional, el cual incluye: los actores, sus acciones y los entornos sociales y
espaciotemporales. Para dar cuenta de tal articulacin, se requiere tener un enfoque abarcador, es decir, tener en
cuenta a los participantes del encuentro social en tanto sujetos agentes y socialmente situados. Los beneficios de
este enfoque se comprueban al examinar un sistema social particular y la distribucin de los derechos de los
participantes cuando, en la interaccin verbal producen textos que se distancian del canon de un gnero.
Es indispensable considerar a los participantes de la interaccin ya que su identidad es dinmica y resulta
construida en la accin situada por medio de los recursos discursivos y los mecanismos interaccinales
disponibles. Algunos actores sociales individuales movilizan recursos de su repertorio discursivo, aprovechan el
potencial en la configuracin del gnero y producen textos con rasgos poco convencionales, que a la vez son
interpretables como indicios de su posicionamiento y construccin identitaria.

Oratoria forense los alegatos no constituyen una clase homognea: el alegato final en los juicios finales
exhibe un formato tripartito: relato argumentacin solicitud de sentencia, con alguna variacin en los alegatos
de defensa que dan ms lugar a la categorizacin de las acciones y circunstancias dentro del orden legal y moral.
En ocasiones, los productos textuales de los actores autorizados a producir textos del gnero alegato se ubican
en los mrgenes del gnero.
Un rasgo particular constitutiva del genero alegato y que tiene carcter opcional en la configuracin
genrica es la presencia de la primera persona singular referente al enunciador (inscripcin del yo del hablante).
La presencia del yo tiene dos funciones:
la descripcin del momento en el que se habla, incluyendo los estados mentales del enunciador (me resulta
sorprendente)
la narrativa de acontecimientos en la biografa del participante que no estn relacionados con el juicio (tuve que ir
al velatorio).
La referencia a un estado mental privado, la aparente falta de pertinencia del contenido y las caractersticas de la
relacin intertextual de gnero que exhibe este fragmento coexisten junto a rasgos tpicos del gnero observables
en otros fragmentos del mismo alegato. La referencia que el participante hace a sus propias asociaciones
mentales que no involucran contenido relacionado con el mbito de la jurisprudencia o de la ley y el alto grado
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de personalizacin que exhibe su alegato se contraponen a las expectativas establecidas para el gnero y, a la vez,
recrean el gnero.

POTENCIAL DE VARIACIN DE INTERPRETACIN DE GNERO
Est presente el ejercicio de poder en la distribucin y aplicacin de gneros con determinados grados de
clausura (significacin unvoca). Al receptor le queda abierta la posibilidad de la reinterpretacin, revisin o la
complecin de los significados en los textos de un determinado gnero. Lograr una significacin univoca es a
menudo problemtico y temporario.
LOS GENEROS DIFIEREN EN EL GRADO EN QUE MANIFIESTAN ESTE POTENCIAL DE
VARIACION DE INTERPRETACION Y ES POSIBLE CONTRASTAR GENEROS SOBRE LA BASE DE
ESTE PARAMETRO.

5. RELACIONES INTERPERSONALES E INTERGRUPALES

Todos los gneros estn situados en condiciones histricas y culturales que los moldean. Sus aspectos
sociales, ideolgicos y poltico-econmicos son susceptibles de ser examinados tanto en el nivel
interaccional como en el macrosocial.
El gnero no solo regula el habla de los actores habilitados para practicarlo, sino que refuerza la autoridad de
esos actores e interviene en la construccin y reproduccin del contexto institucional. Los gneros
institucionales juegan un papel en el control de las prcticas profesionales e institucionales.
Es posible abordar esta dimensin interaccional en trminos de roles inherentes de cada gnero. Un gnero a
la vez posibilita y restringe los lugares desde los que se enuncia y recibe. La tradicin derivada de Goffman los
denomina roles de participacin o footings:
Hanks una parte integral de la funcin social de los gneros discursivos es regimentar el espacio de
posibilidades. Este espacio abarca tanto los roles interactivos y los arreglos posicionales en los que son llevados a
cabo.

El gnero entrevista, por ejemplo, habilita dos roles situacionales: entrevistador y entrevistado.
El gnero alegato de la defensa abre lugares especficos de representacin para el defensor productor del texto,
el cliente y la contraparte.
El concepto posicin del sujeto (subject position) es til para describir lugares del yo enunciador que son
inherentes al gnero. Blommaert explor las posiciones de enunciacin (speaking positions) en gneros
globalizados. El gnero alegato final hace disponible para el abogado defensor posicionamientos
contradictorios del S Mismo con relacin a los colegas que representan la contraparte y los clientes cuyos
derechos promueven.
Los gneros proporcionan una mirada valiosa sobre las relaciones al interior de un grupo social y entre
grupos sociales, o al interior de una institucin o entre instituciones.
Los gneros poseen un potencial de reproduccin y a la vez de transformacin de las relaciones sociales. Por
ejemplo, entre los jueces y los defensores que no son miembros del poder judicial existe la mxima distancia
social. Es por eso que se recurre a la estrategia del elogio.
Las instituciones imponen restricciones ideolgicas y de conducta a los sujetos y a los grupos que actan en ellas
y lo hacen a travs de los gneros ya que en estas prcticas discursivas los sujetos ocupan posiciones de sujeto
que eventualmente resultan naturalizadas.
Un gnero puede evidenciar la estratificacin social y a la vez contribuir a hacerla perdurar. Los gneros tienen el
efecto de naturalizar la realidad cultural que representan.

6. LA BSQUEDA DE CONTENIDOS IDEOLGICOS O CULTURALES

Los gneros pueden distinguirse por articular diversos discursos sociales. Otros gneros abren espacios
discursivos a la expresin de otros contenidos con carga ideolgica o cultural. Aqu se pone en nfasis en la
utilidad de los gneros como herramienta heurstica
17
. Dado que existen gneros que se caracterizan por
vehiculizar determinados discursos como parte de su configuracin adems de los discursos del dominio
especifico al que pertenecen, el nivel analtico del genero permite descubrir conexiones desconocidas entre
discursos y gneros, entre ellos y los grupos sociales, y entre contenidos ideolgicos de distintas instituciones.

17
arte, tcnica o procedimiento prctico o informal para resolver problemas
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Hanks por ser habituales y estar infundidos con el poder de los agentes, los gneros pueden hacer que ciertas
maneras de pensar y experimentar sean tan rutinarias que parezcan naturales.
El gnero posee un valor heurstico para el anlisis del discurso porque proporciona el marco para rastrear
sistemticamente los indicios de los presupuestos culturales o ideolgicos compartidos por categoras de los
participantes en el gnero.

7. ECOLOGA DE LOS GNEROS: DESAFOS PENDIENTES PARA LA INVESTIGACIN

Se ha establecido que los gneros juegan un papel en la vida de la sociedad y que producir textos dentro
de un genero es tambin un proceso sociocultural, no solo lingstico.
Un problema afn al del origen de nuevos gneros y que espera ser tratado en trminos de repertorios
comunitarios y globales es el de las relaciones entre los gneros dentro de una ecologa de gneros. Si cierto
genero se caracteriza por ser en si mismo ndice de cierta tradicin, tipo de relacin social o perspectiva
ideolgica, otros gneros pueden coexistir con l a veces conflictivamente y en competencia por legitimarse
como tal ndice. Ciertos terrenos comunicacionales presentan una coexistencia inestable entre gneros. Tal es el
caso de conferencias de prensa convocadas oficialmente frente a los programas televisivos polticos, las
entrevistas periodsticas frente a los blogs personales de las personalidades pblicas, etc. Asimismo, se hace cada
vez ms indispensable en el anlisis trascender el lmite de una comunidad en particular y ocuparse de
comunidades globalizadas.
Dado el rol del discurso en las prcticas socioculturales, ocuparse de este tipo de problemas de investigacin
sobre gnero tambin contribuir de manera provechosa al estudio del cambio social y cultural. La perspectiva
presentada concibe la actividad, los roles y las practicas como base de los gneros. Se ocupa adems de
la relacin de los gneros con el ejercicio de poder y la construccin de identidades, y los reconoce en
su situacin histrica y cultural.

NOTAS DE CLASE

Text Concrete unit made up of a concrete substance
It has a beginning and an end ( time (continuum)
Texts are coherent (they make sense)
There are structural and semantics relations within the text.
Language is not found in abstraction. Language is found in texts.
Texts are not produced in a vacuum: we produce them in institutions

Genre More abstract than texts
Carranza Genre is a relatively stable configuration of format, context and style.
Relatively: not fixed. Some genres are more fixed than other (una resolucin es ms fixed que una publicidad)
format: the way it is structured
content: each genre is related to a particular content sonnet: love, epic poems: battles
style: recurrent features (rasgos) sonnet: use of an elevated vocabulary, flamboyant words and structure;
ballad: everyday language
Sets of restrictions and possibilities
Genres change across time. There can be new genres. Genres mutate, take different shapes and some genres fall
out of use.
Conventionalized (social) occasion in institutions (graduation ceremony)
Activities (eg. teaching and learning genre: lesson, exam, feedback)
Practices habitual ways of doing sth, habitual ways that a group has for doing something Fairclough
Changes in social and cultural practices are reflected in genre evolution
Since practices are culture-specific, genres are also culture-specific
Each genre creates different subject position for people who are involved. Eg. genre: mail subject position:
addresser and receiver // genre: lesson subject position: lecturer and audiences // genre: story SP: storyteller
and audience
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A certain text may be prototypical of a certain genre. Some other texts incorporate elements that are not
typical of that same genre DIVERGENCE
Certain text producers can innovate, get creative powerful text producers, ppl with prestige power given
by their institutional function.
Deviation intertextual gap/brecha intertextual
Marginal vs. Prototypical powerful text producers can produce marginal texts
Genres have elements that are constitutive and others that are optional
Some genres are hybrid: hybrid genres are different from parent genres Informercials are half ads, half tv
show. Informercials are the exception (?)

Discourses perspective from which a particular domain or institution constructs a representation of reality.
Example of domain: economy subdomain: liberals
Values, assumptions, ideas, rationalities, meanings of an institution or a domain
In a particular text, a certain discourse is expressed.
Different perspectives are different discourses. Different discourses can be expressed in one text, which leads to
a conflict.
Discourses give meanings to texts. Genres shape/mold texts
Some genres are typically associated with some discourses (journal articles give info about a scientific event.
They express the Dx of science)

Critical Analysis of Media Discourse
Norman Fairclough

THEORY OF CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
FOCUS: Media discourse

THEORY OF DISCOURSE

a recognition that our social practice in general and our use of languages in particular are
bound up with causes and effects which we may not be at all aware of under normal
conditions.

habitual way of carrying sth out in a social group

spoken or written language use, including other types of semiotic activity such as visual
images and non-verbal communication.

Use of language as discourse as a form of social practice.
Viewing discourse use a social practice implies that it discourse is action. It also implies that language is socially
and historically situated mode of action, in a bidirectional relationship (socially shaped, socially shaping) with
other facets of the social.
Language
18
Discourse use is simultaneously constitutive of
social identities
social relations
systems of knowledge and belief (ideologies)
Language Discourse use is constitutive both in

18
Javier dijo en clase que lo cambiramos.
Critical
Discourse
Social
Practice
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conventional ways which help to reproduce and maintain existing social identities, relations and systems of
knowledge and belief
creative ways which help to transform them
Whether the conventional or the creative predominates in any given case will depend upon social circumstances
and how the language is functioning within them.

The relationship b/w any particular instance of language use any particular text and available discourse
types may be a complex and creative one.
Many texts may involve complicated mixtures of different discourse types.

Critical discourse analysis approach thinks of the discursive practices of a community its normal ways of using
language in terms of networks or orders of discourse
19
. The order of discourse of a social institution or
social domain is constituted by all the discursive types which are used there. The point of concept of order of
discourse is to highlight the relationships between different types in such a set: whether a rigid boundary is
maintained between them, or whether they can easily be mixed together in particular texts. The same question
applies to relationships between different orders of discourse: do they commonly overlap and get mixed together
in language use, or are they rigidly demarcated?
Social and cultural changes often manifest themselves discursively through a redrawing of boundaries within and
between orders of discourse. These boundaries are sometimes a focus of social struggle and conflict. Orders of
discourse can be seen as one domain of potential cultural hegemony, with dominant groups struggling to assert
and maintain particular structuring within and between them.

Two main categories of discourse type which are constituents of orders of discourse:

a use of language associated with and constituting part of some particular social practice, such as
interviewing people. Genres can be described in terms of their organizational properties.

language used in representing a given social practice from a particular point of view.

The analysis of any particular type of discourse involves an alternation between twin, complementary focuses,
both of which are essential:
A. communicative events (particular)
B. the order of discourse (general)

A. Analysis of communicative events
Critical discourse analysis of a communicative event is the analysis of relationships between three dimensions or
facets of that event: text, discourse practice, sociocultural practice.

Texts
Analysis of texts is concerned with both their meanings and their forms. Meanings are necessarily realized in
forms, and differences in meaning entail differences in form.

Multifunctional view of text any text as simultaneously having three main categories of function, each of
which has its own systems of choices: ideational (systems of knowledge and belief), interpersonal (social relations
and social identities), and textual.

Analysis of text needs to be multisemiotic analysis in the case of the press and television, including analysis of
photographic images, layout and the overall visual organization of pages, and analysis of film and of sound
effects. A key issue is how these other semiotic modalities interact with language in producing meanings, and
how such interactions define different aesthetics for different media.

Discourse Practice
The Discourse Practice dimension of the communicative event involves various aspects of the processes of text
production and text consumption.

19
Choice of the author
Discourse
s
Genres
perspectives within a critical discourse analysis of
the media

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Analytical framework of critical discourse analysis
The visual representation of the relationships between the three dimensions
of communicative events is significant since discourse practice mediates
between the textual and the social and cultural, between text and
sociocultural practice, in the sense that the link between the sociocultural
and the textual is an indirect one, made by way of discourse practice:
properties of sociocultural practice shape texts, but by way of shaping the
nature of discourse practice, i.e. the ways in which texts are produced and
consumed.

The Nature of Discourse Practice polarity between broadly conventional and broadly creative
discourse processes, involving either a normative use of discourse types (genres and discourses) or a creative
mixture of them. This is where the two perspectives within critical discourse analysis intersect.

QUESTION!
What effect does the communicative event have upon the order of discourse? Does it help it reproduce its
boundaries and relationships, or helps restructure them?

Creative discourse practice can be expected to be relatively complex, in terms of the number of genres and
discourses mixed together and the way they are mixed together. But complex discourse practice may also become
conventionalized.

A conventional discourse practice is realized in a text which is relatively homogeneous in its forms and
meanings, whereas creative discourse practice is realized in a text which is relatively heterogeneous in
its forms and meanings.
One would expect a complex and creative discourse practice where the sociocultural practice is fluid, unstable
and shifting, and a conventional discourse practice where the sociocultural practice is relatively fixed and stable.

Textual heterogeneity can be seen as a materialization of social and cultural contradictions and as important
evidence for investigating these contradictions and their evolution.

the media play a significant role in reflecting and stimulating more general processes of change.
Creativity in discursive practices is tied to particular social conditions conditions of change and instability.
Discursive creativity is an effect of social conditions.

Linguistic analysis of texts vs. intertextual analysis of texts

Intertextual analysis focuses on the borderline between text and Dx practice in the analytical framework.
Intertextual analysis is looking at the traces of the Dx practice in the text.
Intertextual analysis aims to unravel the various genres and discourses which are articulated together in the
text.
Intertextual complexity in the mixing of genres and discourses is realized linguistically in the heterogeneity of
meaning and form.

Linguistic analysis descriptive in nature
Intertextual analysis interpretative in nature interpretation of the evidence provided by linguistic features
of texts
cultural interpretation b/c it locates the particular text within the facet of the culture that is constituted by
orders or discourse the analyst is more dependent upon social and cultural understanding.

Linking the linguistic analysis of texts to an intertextual analysis is crucial to bridging the gap between text and
language on the one hand, and society and culture on the other.
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Sociocultural Practice (social and cultural going-ons which the communicative event is part of)

Analysis of the sociocultural practice dimension of a communicative event may be at different levels of
abstraction from the particular event. These layers may be relevant to understanding the particular event and
indeed particular events cumulatively constitute and reconstitute social and cultural practice at all levels.
Many aspects of sociocultural practice may enter into critical discourse analysis but it may be useful to broadly
differentiate three: economic, political (power and ideology) and cultural (value and identity)

B. Analysis of the order of discourse
How is the order of discourse structured in terms of configurations of genres and discourses, and shifts within
the order of discourse and in its relationship to other socially adjacent orders of discourse?

The mediating position of the media (the positioning between public and private orders of discourse) is the key
to understanding the media order of discourse and the internal relations between its constituent genres and
discourses. The order of discourse of the media has been shaped by the tension between its contradictory public
sources and private targets, which act as contrary poles of attraction for media discourse; it is constantly being
reshaped through redefining its relationship to these public and private orders of discourse.

The negotiation and renegotiation of the relationship b/w public and private discursive practice which takes
place within the order of discourse of the media has a general influence on the relationship between these
practices, and between the public and the private in an overall sense, in other domains of social life.

Different institutions come to share common discursive practices, and a particular discursive practice may have a
complex distribution across many institutions (advertising may be rooted in the orders of dx of production and
distribution but it has come to be an element in the orders of dx of diverse institutions like education, medicine,
etc.)

Dx analysis should always attend to relationships, interactions and complicities between social
institutions/domains and their orders of discourse, and be sensitive to similarities in social organization and
discursive practices between different institutions.

Media discourse may shape socially adjacent orders of discourse as well as being shaped by them.

Analysis of orders of discourse
Media discourse also influences private domain discourse practices, providing models of conversational
interaction in private life which are originally simulations of the latter but which can come to reshape.

The distinction between external relations between orders of dx, and internal relations bw discourses and genres
within the media order of discourse is useful.

Internal and external relations include choice relations and chain relations.

Choice relations choice implies that selection among alternatives is generally socially conditioned.
Externally the issue is how the order of discourse of the media chooses within and appropriates, the potential
available in adjacent orders of dx.
Internally the issue is to describe the paradigms of alternative discursive practices available within the order of
discourse of the media, and the conditions governing selection amongst them.

Chain relations a comm. event can be regarded as a chain of comm. events. Such chains are partly internal
(the process of text production)

Choice relations and chain relations intersect in an account of the order of discourse: one needs to specify the
choice relations that apply at each link in the chain.
The distinction between choice and chain relations suggests a refinement of the intertextual analysis of texts
discussed in the sections on a discourse practice.
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Part of the intertextual analysis of a text is concerned with unravelling mixtures of genres and discourses
which are in a choice relationship in the order of discourse. But the intertextual analysis of a text is also
concerned with embedding.

two questions:
a) how unitary, or how variable, are media discursive practices?
b) how stable, or how changeable, are they?

The questions are linked: typical of a settled and conservative society are unitary and stable discursive
practices, typical of an unsettled society are variable and changeable discursive practices.

In describing the order of discourse, one is trying to capture the particular balance that exists between
centripetal (unitary and stable) and centrifugal (variable and changeable) pressures.
Where there is variability, selection between alternatives may involve political and ideological differences and
struggles, attempts to cater for different niche audiences, as well as differences of professional or artistic
judgment.

Change can be conceptualized in terms of shifting external or internal, chain or choice relations.

Discourse type relatively stabilized configurations of genres and discourses within the order of discourse.
Particular genres are predictably articulated with particular discourses. Discourse types also standardly involve
configurations of genres.

Mass media interrelated set of orders of discourse (the orders of discourse of television, radio, and the press
are distinct in important ways which relate to differences of technology and medium while also having significant
similarities.

The media order of discourse can be examined as a domain of cultural power and hegemony.

One common picture of contemporary media stresses cultural diversity a view of the media as highly
pluralistic in practices, with no single web of power running through the whole system a mosaic of
practices
Another possible approach is to ask how the relative diversity and pluralism of the media might itself operate
within a system of domination.

Hegemony (Gramsci) a theory of power and domination which emphasizes power through achieving
consent rather than through coercion, and the importance of cultural aspects of domination which depend upon
a particular articulation of a plurality of practices.

NOTAS DE CLASE

CHAIN RELATIONS
(a chain in a sequence of texts)

Presidential
Speech
News Article
Opinion
Column
Letter to the editor
Column
Presidential
Speech Conversation
Characterization of
the media order of
discourse
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We can detect a chain in the way newspapers produce a text
Different texts are linked in an intertextual text
Chain relations are internal or external, in relation to the domain of activity
Some links of the chain dont belong to the same domain (public vs. private)
Texts dont finish at one domain; texts belong to multiple domains

CHOICE RELATIONS
Genres, discourses, generic conventions

Each text producer is conditioned
by different institutional factors
and social factors that
sometimes determine what
sort of texts and meanings
they can produce and
express

condition what genres
and discourses you can
choose from

The Rhetoric of the Extraordinary Moment: the Concession and Acceptance Speeches of Al Gore and
George W. Bush in the 2000 Presidential Election
Robin Tolmach Lakoff

Lil Abstract
Their speeches represent a type of political speech that is virtually unique and spontaneous. The focus is placed
on the relationships between their forms and what their speakers feel they have to do, and finds similarities and
differences in style and content between them.

Introduction
There is a tradition of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough)

Laura Nader Control Processes: use linguistic and other devices to get electorates and consumers to believe
that they have made a free choice, when in fact their behavior and opinions have been manipulated and
controlled by forces beneath their awareness.

Language choice legitimizes power, and power permits the blanketing of all conduits with the messages of
one group, to the exclusion of others. The fact that the group has power and social authority means that the
form of language in which it communicates will be accepted by the local speech community without much
hesitation as the preferred, authoritative mode of communication.
Forms used in non-dominant communities, which might be more comfortable to the speakers and writers,
hearers and readers, in those communities, will be excluded from authority and acceptance with the justification
that such language is illegitimate, illogical and irrational, and therefore whatever ideas it expresses need not be
taken seriously.

Genres

Discourses

D
i
s
c
o
u
r
s
e
s

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Power provides its possessors with language authority
and language authority in turn provides its possessors with power.

Making language creators and consumers more aware of the linkage b/w language and power is one way to
attenuate this lge-power relationship in order to offer language users real options.
When choices become marked (conscious and intentional) and once we understand the relation between the
forms we encounter and the functions they perform, lge that is not obviously persuasive can be properly
identified as persuasive and indeed manipulative and controlling.

Utterances produces by public figures have a boiler-plate
20
feel and campaign debates follow prefabricated
formats. Words have an intended pragmatic effect rather than a semantic one.

The background
Election night media coverage was problematic.
Election 2000
Election 2000: What Really Happened In Florida (Part 1)

The Speeches
George Bushs Speech
Al Gores speech

General Remarks The two speeches are remarkably similar in general and specific content. Despite their
similarity, they expressed their ideas in different ways pragmatic synonymy
21

pragmatic homonymy use of similar strategies or linguistic devices for different ends

Examining The Speeches

Bush's speech
via the first person plural, the connectedness of the candidates is stressed. gave it our all
Unity is claimed via claimed identity unity is predicated implicitly on an assertion of common ground
Paragraph 3: condescending position (I understand). He is the one who understands Gore
Paragraph 4: heal our country the medical metaphor elevates the speaker: the country is wounded or ill, and
must be healed by someone with the special skills to do so. There is (finally) someone in charge who can be
trusted to make it all right, as long as we can get together.
Preponderance of the personal pronouns We, us, our
exclusive (Gore and I, my friends/family/etc. And I)
inclusive (you, the American people, and I)
the repeated words resemble a chant or mantra: we can get together, we will get together, we are together
Common heritage, common history of Americans by invoking canonical names and events in the nation's history
(Thomas Jefferson)

George W. Bush is a true believer in the potency of the performative speech act. He appears to believe that by
talking about unification you achieve it. You don't have to do anything conciliatory you just have to say
bipartisan a lot.

Gore's speech
His speech is as ambivalent and complex as Bush's. He cannot express too much pride, but cannot appear totally
crushed and humiliated; cannot be seen as refusing to bring the protracted dispute to a close, but should not
preclude future possibilities.

Self-effacing (modest) jokes express commonality as well as humility.

20
Inconsequential, formulaic, or stereotypical language
21
use of different strategies or linguistic devices for similar ends
Compare: (a) It is raining in Pittsburgh, and (b) It is raining in Pittsburgh now. They express different propositions but have the same truth value.
Linguistics II 2012


He must somehow express unification (like you)
He expresses a need to heal the country.
Paragraph 2: heal the divisions of the campaign
Paragraph 4: heal our country after the campaign

Both politicians make significant use of the first person plural pronoun. Both move between (unambiguous)
exclusive we and (ambiguous) inclusive we, as though to cement the identification between themselves and their
audience another move in the direction of unity.

Gore merely says that they will attempt to start to heal the divisions

Pragmatic homonymy the superficially similar use of the utterances of venerated statesmen, but for
significantly different purposes.

UNITY While Bush is urging a reuniting of the country, Gore says that its not easy: Words are not enough.
He doesn't resort to the mantra-like, hypnotic repetition of the concept of unity.When Gore discusses unity,
he tends to do so by discussing explicitly those things that unify us. In a way this strategy is even more
manipulative than Bush's. Gore assumes it already exists and implies that we can and should make use of this
pre-existing consensus: our great law schools, our democratic liberties

GOD It is Gore who makes the most references to God another means of suggesting unity: God is sth in
which all of us believe: By repeatedly invoking God, Gore repeatedly reminds us of the religious faith we
purportedly share, and therefore another way in which we are unified as a nation.

Paragraph 8: ingenious twist link between the election's closeness with the virtuous theme of closeness
people with a shared history and a shared destiny. However, the logic is flawed since the closeness of the vote
suggests a deep division.
Paragraph 10: he warns other countries. Gore is positioning himself as still an actor, and not leaving the picture
I'm here to help you, I'm not going anywhere. He sounds very presidential.
He is speaking in the voice of America; metonymically he is America.
Paragraph 15: the personal quickly turns political. Gore moves to his political plans.
Paragrahps 15 - 17: he becomes pugnacious with words such as fight, battle, defeat, victory, loss.
Paragraph 20: he appeals to American unity by familiarity.

Summary
These speeches are means toward the same end of creating the appearance of unity and thereby seducing
harmony. By their insistence on the Americanness of togetherness, they make the public expression of any other
emotion. Both try to achieve it performatively, by the word alone. Neither is willing or able to mention any actual
behavior that would create true consensus, even less to initiate such behavior.
Both were highly successful speeches. Harmony had been seduced.

Conclusions
Language is still important. Had the speeches not been made, had they not be composed to appeal to our need
for both comforting and self-aggrandizing, the outcome might have been otherwise.
Its a bit scary how predictably [INSERT ANY GROUP OF PEOPLE HERE] can be massaged into falling
behind a message of be nice, whatever it takes and whatever the outcome.

NOTAS DE CLASE

Carranza follows
this pattern of
analysis. Lakoff
doesnt
Culture
Discourse Semantics
Text
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1
st
level Text

2
nd
level Discourse Semantics

3
rd
level Culture

Strategic Political Communication: A Leaders Address to the Nation
Isolda Carranza

Palabras claves/Key words: retrica presidencial/presidential rhetoric, identidad nacional/national identity, ritual
institucional/institutional ritual

I. INTRODUCTION
The contribution of discourse analysis to revealing how carefully crafted and strategically designed non-
literary texts can be, and shows the utility of findings of discourse analysis for getting insights into cultural,
historical and political issues.

Object of Analysis George Bushs speech on 2005, on the occasion of beginning his second term (the
thrust of the analysis will lie on the representation of the American Nation)
Genre Alocucin inaugural/Inaugural address

II. ANTECEDENTS GUIDING THE CHOICE OF FOCUS AND DATA
In the social practice of govt language is a large part of action. The communicative style of political leaders,
the discourse associated with a particular political party, and the way language is used in the processed of
governing have been recognized as major objects of study for what they can reveal of contemporary politics
and the salience of language.
Fairclough Govt communication through the new common genres is essentially monologic and
promotional.
Hill In the vernacular discourse of truth, truth is located in the utterances of an intentional individual who
is the source of true information. Intentions and the notion of character are central to the discourse of
truth and express its morality.

National identity narratives narrative: in the field of ideas, an abstract configuration of a figure with a
goal confronting trying circumstances.
National narratives are produced and disseminated by social actors in concrete institutional contexts and that
their strategic reproduction can be aimed at calling up emotions to support political initiatives. An identity
narrative may transform perceptions of the past and the present, stress certain national features, or distort
their meaning and their logic.

Americanism Three general tendencies in the conception of America:
1.Advocacy of Americanism as ideological assimilation to U.S. born Americans
2.Promotion of talents and cultures of the recently arrived immigrants to the benefit of the U.S
3.Stressing democracy as the essence of national identity and associated with it, the elements of liberty, social
justice, and respect for the individual.

vocabulary pronouns rhetorical devices - triplets parallelism recurrent
forms intertextual mechanisms
Quotes of historical figures reference to national history reference to
religion oath (winner of the elections) promise (loser of the elections)
Values: unity, harmony, consensus - Image of the American nation
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Bushs and Gores speeches after the elections in 2000
central meanings: patriotism
underlying cultural assumptions: the importance given to political harmony
textual features employed:
strategic use of inclusive we
metaphors
quotations of revered figures in national history (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln).
The American nation as discursive entity was attributed the fundamental qualities of unity and indivisibility,
confidence in God, defense of democracy, and family values.

The association of event and language use
a methodological criterion for selecting what texts to study because the uniqueness of the texts
concomitant with landmark events allows for particularly illuminating case studies
a theoretical perspective to understand textual phenomena because texts are conceived as instantiations of
discourse genres
Genre Inaugural Address an integral part of an institutional ritual carried out every four years. Because
it is part of a ritual and a public performance, the genre inaugural address does not realize only one
language function. There can be some parts of the speech where the referential function of language is likely
to be predominant and other parts of speech where the poetic function of language may prevail.

III. DOING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Text producer its complexity and multiplicity is known as the theoretical problem of authorship. An
individuals involvement in the concrete production of a text may consist in one or more than one of these
roles (Goffman & Levinson):
being composer of the form
originator of the content
subject responsible for the action performed
ghost writer
mere transmitter
relayer
Given that these ways of participating in a text may not be carried out by a single individual (someones idea
may get expressed in terms decided upon by a different person), and a text can be delivered on someone
elses behalf it is not convenient to think of the speaker as the downright author of a text, but as the one
who produces the oral delivery of a certain text.

Bakhtin a text may incorporate, recreate, echo, allude to, or evoke other texts.
Acknowledging the existence of multiple texts leads to admit that there are multiple authors involved in?
the concept of voice. This opened a way for exploring various degrees and forms of heteroglossia in a text.

The fallacy of the subject

Once we avert it, we can admit the fuzzy limits between behavior that can be considered automatic and
behavior that can confidently be called strategic.
Automatic and strategic choices of linguistic forms may combine and coexist in a single text.
Inaugural address is likely to display the realization of discourse strategies because it is the work of a team
of political analysts and language specialist, and every layer of its textual organization as well as its oral
delivery are the object of deliberate design and careful rehearsal.

The linguistic choices, the discursive meanings, and the rhetorical resources are not a mere conduit to convey
meaning. Due to its elaborate, rhythmical, and aesthetic character, form in a presidential speech is always at
the service of persuasion.
Analyzing discourse is a heuristic means to a hermeneutical end. Discourse analysis can offer an
interpretation and a critique of the meanings of a text in its interplay with the local and broader contexts of
production and reception.

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IV. THE FIRST ANALYTICAL STEPS
Characterization of the nation in terms that are well-known and accepted, as well as the allusions to national
values, which are shared and lasting, take part in discourse strategies designed to induce identification with
the speaker and every co-national in a single united social body.

S
P
E
E
C
H

G
I
V
E
N

B
Y

P
R
E
S
I
D
E
N
T
-
E
L
E
C
T

G
E
O
R
G
E

W
.

B
U
S
H

I
N

T
H
E

B
E
G
I
N
N
I
N
G

O
F

H
I
S

S
E
C
O
N
D

T
E
R
M

I
N

2
0
0
5

SECTION
(PARAGRAPHS)
ASPECTS
History and
success in
other lands
(2-6)
Development of an argumentative move
Use of the 2
nd
person plural (we, us, our, ourselves) to refer to all Americans
Metaphors are abundant: the shipwreck of communism
Antithesis (years vs. a day)
Use of triplets: relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical (the rhythmic quality of
triplets is widely exploited in political oratory)
Formal parallelism: the survival of liberty (here) depends on the success of liberty in other lands
Repetition and abstraction: violence will gather, and multiply (), and raise a mortal threat.
(Repetition and abstraction enhance the persuasiveness of the texture and the
acceptability of the content for the audience due to the absence of individualized
agents of negative actions, which reduces the possibility of disagreement)
Attribution of qualities to the U.S:
unity in deep commitments and vulnerability
the U.S. must take freedom to other lands
Ending
tyranny in the
world
(7-13)
Simplistic generalizations, statements of national values bound to the
historical origins of the country, and a vague formulation of policy.
Formal and semantic parallelism: no justice without freedom, no human rights without human
liberty
Common historical background expressions: our Founding, across the generations.
(Reference to history reminds the audience of the legitimacy of the traditional, core
values of liberty, individual rights, and self-government. They serve to validate their
actions and to represent Americans as willing to defend them.)
Religious overtone: use of the word mission (see The domestic agenda)
Ideational content: support for a conclusion
To friends and
foes
(14-19)
Direct appeals to different addresses who are named in the introductory,
cataphoric utterance by the hyperonym peoples of the world.
Repetition of the syntactic structure subject + can know, where the subject varies each
time: all who live in tyranny can know, the rulers of outlaw regimes can know, all the allies of
the US can know. This repetition serves as a mold for the direct address to each of the
five sets of players in the international political stage.
Inclusion of a quote by a major figure in national history (Abraham Lincoln). It links
the text being developed and the event in which it is produced to a shared national
tradition and identity; as a consequence, this appeal to history facilitates the audiences
identification with the speaker and their convergence onto a common point of view. In
turn, the traditional values evoked contribute to legitimate the policies and courses of
action that are proposed.
To fellow
citizens
(20-23)
An appeal to Americans concerning the military interventions in progress at the
time.
Use of metonymy: honor their names and the determined faces of our soldiers
Use of antithesis: deaths that honored their lives
Use of metaphor: cause larger than your wants, hope kindles hope
Use of repetition and triplets:
The ideational content is carefully organized through the quantifiers which modify the
nominal referring to Americans: all, a few, some
Exhortation to the youngest to become part of the national cause
22
. The force of direct
address (you) is favoured in I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence.
Repetition of the words idealism, idealistic

22
La Cmpora maybe?
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The quality of honor is attributed to the US by implication on condition that war
efforts not be abandoned (p. 21)
A presidential speech is firmly anchored in the historical and political context even
though it transcends the minutia
23
of the conjuncture.
The domestic
agenda
(24-28)
Remarkably abundant occurrence of the noun freedom
Propositional content: rather abstract and highly metaphorical
Phrase or clause structures organized in sets of threes: make our society more prosperous and
just and equal
Tautological, mirror-structured statement: self-government relies on the governing of the self
Formally parallel but semantically contrasting direct objects (the message of freedom and the
baggage of bigotry) share the pleasing qualities of formal balance, prosodic rhythm and
propositional value.
Use of we to mean the administration
Reference to economic prosperity, the private property of pension funds and health
insurance, family values, faith, and respect for life.
Appeal to the private morality of individuals which draws from the Christian education
of most of the population. This underscores individual responsibility along with charity
and solidarity.
Use of statements that stress the continuity of tradition (reference to the historical
foundations of the nation)
Use of lexical items like mercy, heart of the weak. This lexical choice reveals a certain
ideological perspective tinted with religious connotations of mercy.
language is far from factual or ideologically neutral
Unity and the
triumph of
freedom
Display of typical components of American presidential discourse such as reference
to God, a direct quote incorporating a text from an event in national history, and the
traditional final blessing.
Metaphors are innovative: freedom is the permanent hope of mankind
Use of contrasts: many vs. few (questions)
emotionally charged images
Negation always performs the argumentative function of incorporating an opponents
voice and opening a space for expressing the proponents view contrast
negation/assertion in the form of paratactic clauses
In the closing of the speech, an essential unity is attributed to the nation and one
ultimate goal for the nation is singled out, which is presented as a drive that defines
America throughout history: advancing the cause of freedom.

BUSHS SPEECH

V. THE ENVISIONED RECEPTION
Many of the elements that we have observed in this presidential address are familiar because they are typical
features of American presidential discourse, or because they are part of the shared cultural background.
As is usual in political discourse, the national destiny is presented as one of greatness, and in this presidential
speech, it is mainly laid out in relation to all countries of the world.

VI. THE DISCURSIVE CONTEXT
Presidents often shift the publics attention to the issue of American character and typically portray the United
States as taking action against others only in retaliation or for the defense of other goodwilled nations that
are under siege

Intertextual Relationship 2001 Inaugural Address:
biblical allusion
direct quote from of a figure of national history
metaphors
explicit oath typical of all presidential addresses

23
A small or trivial detail
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connection between the countrys political life and the morality of the individual
Major themes: civility, courage, compassion, character

Inaugural address indicates that each instantiation of the genre in a particular text displays both continuity and
strategic exploitation of discourse traditions and generic conventions, builds on national identity, and serves
specific political ends in its historical context.

Attribution of morality Klein (2005) there is no such moral superiority on the basis of the treatment to
enemies in wars far back in time, like the Korean and Vietnam wars.

VII. FINAL REMARKS
By examining Bushs speech, its been possible to observe the careful control of their rhetorical effects in the
service of persuasion and a convenient discursive construction of reality.
In the American context, texts in this genre contain significant cultural elements, reproduce traditional features
of presidential oratory, and express interested political meanings.
Identification

American Discourse on Nation and Language
Otto Santa Ana

Background
Propostion 227: English for the Children referendum designed to eliminate bilingual education in public
school classrooms dominated by Latino students. The conventional view of public education was not debated.
all children in California public schools shall be taught English as rapidly and effectively as possible.

Underlying constitutive metaphors:
Empty vessel metaphor
school as a factory metaphor
the river metaphor

The public's attention during the campaign was focused whether teaching with English alone, or a combination
of their home language and English, constitutes the best practice to educate Latino children.

This chapter will explore how the notions of language and nation are entwined.

SECTION 2
Human beings metaphorize talk. People conventionally speak about communicating in terms of two metaphors:
CONDUIT, when a speaker says something, it is as if the speaker uses the English language to encode ideas
into packages which are then sent to the listener, who automatically decodes them.
LANGUAGE AS WATER, speakers or writers eject their ideas, thoughts, meanings or feeling into an
external space. People speak as if meaning or ideas are injected into language, as into a fluid medium.

Many example of the LANGUAGE AS WATER metaphor can be found. WATER terms are plentiful:
A stream of impeccable Spanish
presenters slipped fluidly back and forth
English fluency

Ontology of LANGUAGE AS WATER
The everyday understanding of the source semantic domain WATER, that is highlighted and reinforced with
each repetition of the metaphor, includes water's fluid nature, its dynamic character, its ability to form bodies and
carry things.
Water has kinetic power that can be channeled.

The WATER metaphor is invoked to make sense of the socially complex notion, language and communication,
by way of an everyday substance with an extensive and cohesive set of characteristics. Language is an everyday
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part of the social world, but its very complex wholeness makes language hard to comprehend without some kind
of physical material in the world with sufficient complexity with which to build our everyday categories of
understanding.

With the metaphor, language can be seen to be a medium to transport, suffuse, absorb, freeze, dispense ideas,
thoughts, meanings and feelings.

LANGUAGE AS WATER in Public Discourse
Language is characterized as a stream, shifting between languages is described as occurring fluidly, and linguistic
competence and communicative competence are fluency.
The emergence of bilingualism illustrates an important use of the WATER metaphor. Educational programs
associated with teaching language fluencies are also described in WATER terms.

The two contending viewpoints in the P. 227 debate may be distinguished by different theories that they
maintain. Both theories use the term immersion, in keeping with the LANGUAGE AS WATER metaphor.

English-only instruction
total immersion in English
become fluent more quickly
an immersion language class
sink-or-swim approaches/methods
toss children into the proverbial ocean without a life vest
set afloat in a sea of English with few linguistic lifeboats.

Bilingual Education (aims to develop full proficiency in both languages)
two-way immersion
bilingual and bicultural immersion

ENGLISH AS WATER, LANGUAGE AS BARRIER
Impediment metaphors used in the texts
overcome/bridge the language barrier
insourmountable language barrier

How can language be a barrier and problem if it is commonly recognized that all normal children, by their
nature as human beings, fully acquire the languages they need to use, without schooling or any particular training
at all?
The ENGLISH AS WATER metaphor reinforces the widely accepted and terribly oversimplified view that
each child in the US rapidly and easily acquires the English language in a year or so.

The ENGLISH AS WATER metaphor contradicts language development facts 3 MISCONCEPTIONS:

1. language is acquired in real-time interaction with others: it is not passively acquired
2. the language functions, whether everyday casual conversation or high-level academic language functions, are
skills developed and refined over time by active students when they participate in what they believe to be
meaningful and useful social practices.
3. Language development is multiplex and additive, and the deepest basis for this unfolding development is on
the cognitive foundations of a home language.

The ENGLISH AS WATER metaphor is reified in everyday talk, and reinforced by references of immersion:
drop them into English-only class and they'll soak it up.
They'll be spouting English in no time.

Within the logic of the WATER metaphor, however, the formation of linguistic as well as educational
practices is as fast as it is fluid.
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1. Globalized Discourse Trends in Local Contexts
Isolda E. Carranza (2007)

Notes from class about this paper
Carranza identifies linguistic features that manifest discourse trends brought about by changes at the level of
social practices.
What the author deals with is the marketization of a global Dx. In her paper, Carranza writes:

customer training service, the increase in English product consumption including English proficiency credentials
24
, and the School of
Languages website are three local manifestations of a global norm which expresses the values, strategies, interpersonal relationships
and aesthetics of marketing. The diversity of data in this paper is meant to illustrate the uncritical acceptance or adoption, and the
spread of the observed tendency spurred by existing social, economic, and political conditions. (15)

SOCIAL PRACTICE DISCOURSE
PRACTICES
TEXTS
1. Post-traditionalization: interpersonal
practices have become post-traditional; the
agreements have been reshaped.
Informalization
Conversionalization
Preference for forms of
address that are informal;
particularly w/sb with whom
the traditional relationship
would be one of asymmetry.
2. Reflexivity (knowledge-based society) Technologization
3. Promotional /consumer culture Marketization

Globalized, knowledge-based dx trends materialize in local contexts, such as Crdoba.
The interest of the deliberate tailoring of communication that will be observed is that it is just one of the ways
in which the increasing reflexivity of contemporary society gets manifested. Reflexivity is the use of knowledge
about social life in the organization of social life (Giddens 1991). Such knowledge is obtained through research in
psychology, anthropology, science and communication studies. Its advances allow for various strategic
applications.
In her analysis, Carranza deals with the reflexive applications of knowledge about communication,
consumption of English-language products and institutional texts, and dx trends.

1. Call centers
(here, the analytical focus is on texts; as opposed to section two below, which focuses on discourse)
25

Fairclough (1999) stated: Discourse becomes commodified it becomes open to processes of calculation, it
comes to be designed for success on markets. What he said relates to two phenomena that Carranza considers
in her research concerning call centers:
The establishment of outsourced service providers comes along with the dissemination of the set of
prescriptions that the transnational company establishes for its employees verbal and non-verbal conduct. This
conduct may involve text types (e.g. e-mails), dx styles, or sequential organization features in verbal interaction.

24
The analysis on English Proficiency Tests is not that important. The only point made is that the consumers of popular culture in English are growing in
number, as is the offer of products, such as the Tests.
25
See the difference btw text and discourse (as explained in the paper) at the end of the summary.
Unit 4:
Discourse and the Social World: Global Trends and the cultural change.
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At the same time, in training manuals, we discover the calculated application of knowledge about language in
using language. The training of the employees displays the application of knowledge about communication,
dx, conversation, and grammar. More specifically, knowledge about interactional dynamics, semantic
presupposition, and conversational synchrony is reflexively applied to shape communication and direct
it towards the knowledgeable partys ends. This reflexive applications of knowledge to discourse are to do
with what Fairclough (1995) called technologization of discourse, the redesign of discursive practices of social
institutions and organizations in accordance with particular strategies and objectives this is what is seen in the
training manuals of call centers.

1.a Knowledge-based engineering of Dx by businesses.

Opening
Thank you for calling (Name of the company). My name is (employees name). How can I help today?
()
Closing
Let me go over what I did for you today. (Summarize actions taken). Is there anything else I can assist you with?
Mr./Mrs. Smith, thank you for being a (Name of the company) customer. We really appreciate your business. Have a
great day.

In a telephone interaction in the Argentine speech community the expected position for thanking tends to be
near the end of the interaction because it serves as a pre-closing move. However, in the training manual thanking
is fronted to the opening move in the interaction. What is seen here is that in the local context Argentina,
which has its own particular position for thanking, a global trend has made its way.
At the same time, Carranza notices that the employees are not simply instructed to be polite: they are given
the actual formulae that are to serve as indicators of politeness. What is seen here is the reflexive application
of knowledge about communication and language.

Intervene
It helps to clarify the story.
It confirms that you and the client are talking about the same thing.
It reorients communication.

Use interjections
They are listening signals.
They encourage the client to talk.
They support what the client is saying.
They create empathy

The so called interjections are actually back-channeling behavior. This consists in the production of a
brief turn made up of fixed expressions such as Right, I see, or verbal noises such as hum, which dont add any
new ideational content so much as contribute to develop the interaction and support the participant who has the
floor.
Compliance with these prescriptions avoids long monologues by the customer (which would amount to a waste
of the employees time and a feeling of frustration on the part of the customer) and silence. These prescriptions
aim at getting the employee to learn how to control the interaction.

Once again, what is at play here is the deliberate planning and rehearsal of tactics that are known to
induce certain responses. Thus, businesses impose training in calculated turns at talk which ensure control of
the customers conversational contributions and of the direction of the interaction.

1.b Knowledge of the interactional effects of grammar

Knowledge of the effects of grammatical constructions is applied as a planned strategy to bring out the desired
interactional outcomes. Here we will find examples of the exploitation of presuppositions, question tags, wes,
formulaic expressions, and a few semantic elements.
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Presupposition: explanation from classes
A kind of implicit meaning.
A phenomenon triggered by grammar, i.e., by the syntactic structure of an utterance
26
(by surface elements).

At the level of semantics, what we analyze are propositions, which are made up of a predicate and (an)
argument(s). the arguments are referring expressions; the predicate says something about the relation btw the
arguments. COMPLETAR CON INFO DE CONTRASTIVA
Propositions get expressed in utterances

1. Tom is Pams husband.
a. Pam is Toms wife entailment
27
, a logical implication of (1)
b. Pam has a husband presupposition triggered by the possessive case in (1)
c. Tom is no longer available assumptions.

Eg: An exemplary training manual explicitly advocates the use of an assumptive approach over a direct
approach.

Direct approach
Should we go ahead and get your order started?

Assumptive approach
All I will need to do is double check some of the information on your Long Distance account before we finalize your (Name of the
product) order, (Name of the customer).
If the customer feels any reluctance at this point, its up to her or him to stop and ask questions.

The assumptive approach relies heavily on presupposition.
Subordinate time clauses trigger the presupp. that the proposition they contain is in fact the case. Thus, instead
of asking Do you wish to order this product?, the employee is to say before we finalize your order, which
presupposes that that he or she will order the product.

Question tags
W/ confirmation requests (requests for confirmation), the expected second part
28
is a confirmatory answer.
Likewise, tags added to evaluative statements assume shared knowledge and beliefs and turn an assertion into a
request for agreement
29
. In gral, the assumption underlying the use of tags is that the addressee and the addresser
share a common point of view. In the interpersonal plane of dx, the effect is that the speaker aligns herself or
himself closer to the addressee.

Recommending an All-Inclusive Plan
Per minute Long Distance and Local Toll charges are a thing of the past! With the (Name of plan) Plan, you will receive
unlimited Local, Local Toll AND domestic Long Distance calls from home making it easier to stay in touch with the
ones who matter most to you! And, youll get 5 popular features: Call Waiting, Caller ID, Three-way Calling, Speed Dial,
and Voicemail! All this for $5.95 per month, plus applicable taxes and surcharges! Sounds great, doesnt it?

The first utterance in bold triggers a presupposition which alludes to certain social values and lifestyle.
The presence of the question tag in this model business transaction can be accounted for under the light of its
use in another type of interaction: conversation. In the verbal routines typical of everyday conv, where the
communicative goal is mere social contact, tags tend to trigger the addressees agreement almost automatically as

26
While presuppositions are triggered by grammar, (underlying/cultural) assumptions are not necessarily explicit and are not triggered by syntactic
elements/structure. They orient the way sb speaks or acts.
27
Completo con lo que tena de Lingstica I (2011). Also called logical implications by some authors. An entailment is a logical consequence. We speak
of entailment when the truth of one sentence guarantees the truth of another sentence. Entailment is asymmetrical.
28
I believe Carranza is talking about an interactional sequence, thus the second part.
29
Its beautiful, isnt it? Its beautiful = evaluative comment & assertion; isnt it? = tag.
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the result of participants tendency to maintain conversational synchrony (i.e. to keep the conversation going). In
the business talk of the example, doesnt it? would routinely be followed by addressees agreement.

Wes

Recommending an All-Inclusive Plan
You sound like someone who would appreciate the simplicity of one low rate for ALL your calls from home () 5
cents a minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all those calls is a pretty good rate, dont you think? () Why dont we get
you signed-up so you can begin saving as soon as possible?

The quality of the product gets associated to the customer and their lifestyle.
A question tag is present too.
The inclusive we grants the addressee the status of agent of the action and functions as an addressee-
involving mechanism. Formulating the step taken as if it was a joint action evokes a position from which the
process can be influenced and decided upon.

Formulaic expressions for empathy: I (do) understand your concern.

Semantic elements such as a positive action associated to the company representative (help): If you prefer,
though, I can help you you choose another Savings Plan.

2. The discourse of marketing
(here the analysis focuses on
discourse)25

In the (old) website of Facultad de Lenguas, Carranza analysed the intersection and combination of dxs in a
single text with the overwhelming predominance of one dx and at one point, the local versions of global dx
trends w/regard to identity construction.

Analysis the text (the website)

The MAIN POINTS made are the following:
The semiotic resources found in the text are prototypical of the dx of advertising and marketing (notice the
stereotypes of success in a clerical job)
This is worth noting, since in reality the dx of educational institutions can draw on a variety of semiotic
resources and meanings which may come from the fields of education, translation, citizenship, science, civil
society, communication and culture, among others. Nonetheless, FL, an Argentine public ed institution
specializing in language unnecessarily adds up to the contemporary hegemony of the dx of marketing.
The choices made for the design of the website contribute to the hegemony of a globalized, apparently non-
culturally specific dx of marketing w/the concomitant provider-customer rs it intrinsically indexes.

Note: Its a good idea to re-read the analysis found on pp 17-20 in the original (the information is important but
there was no point in transcribing the whole thing).

ANOTHER IMPORTANT POINT is the following:
Every text is viewed as having ideational, interpersonal and textual dimensions (Halliday 1978,1985)
Interpersonal meanings are always present, even in texts aimed to inform and not typically recognized as
means to establish social contact. The interpersonal dimension must be examined in its contribution to
establishing identities and social rs The multimodal texts just examined dont simply give info while making
the reading less boring by displaying images; they index social and institutional rs. AND, rather than being built
on the values of learning and citizenship, the rs btw the educational institution and the student evoked by the
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website, expresses a desire of the former to allure the latter w/a youthful, friendly image and induce them to
consume surrounded by glamour and beauty.

3. Final remarks: Resisting knowledge-based trends with more knowledge about dx

A hegemonic dx can (and does) constitute the given: those meanings and realities that are taken for granted
and considered inevitable, or the significations that become invisible when they are naturalized. The most
liberating and autonomous response to hegemonic dxs is to see through them and produce ones own
configuration and combination of semiotic elements.

English in Argentina is a commodity, promoted and marketed, and also a vehicle for the marketing of other
commodities (computers, exams). It favors cultural globalization by easing out the dissemination of cultural
products, sets of beliefs, dxs, and pre-packaged ways o carrying out verbal activities, which circulate
w/assumed neutrality.

But: Globalization does not simply colonize people; it also makes available the means for critique.

Text & Discourse

Texts
Concrete instantiations or realizations o the discourse of the domain they belong to.
Manifest the distribution, circulation, reproduction, or combination of discourses.
In a given text we can find different discourses being appropriated, echoed, reproduced and responded to.

Discourse (as a count noun)
A configuration of meanings, values and beliefs typically linked to a social field or worldvision.
A given discourse may be found to contaminate or predominate over another, or several others in society.
The relationship (hereonwards, rs) btw dx and the social, economic, geographical, historical and cultural
coordinates where it is produced and received comprises not just conceptual elements, but also formal elements.
Some forms, modes, and media prevail in a given historical period. In contemporary society, dxs are increasingly
constituted in multisemiotic ways. Today, we consume and produce texts which are multimodal, multilinear and
interactive.

2. The new Pygmalion. Verbal hygiene for women. In Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. (Cameron, Deborah;
1995)

NOTES FROM CLASSES
(completed with information from the chapter)

It deals with the genre ADVICE COLUMNS / SELF-HELP TEXTS.

Prescriptions for women:
The ideal woman speaker hasnt been defined in exactly the same way in every society & every age.
Unlike men, women have been diagnosed w/a communication problem: women worry about how they
communicate.

Advice literature:
Analyzes womens discontent w/o analyzing its systematic causes.
It confirms (rather than challenging) received ideas about gender.
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It makes proposals about lg use that are curiously remote from the problems & complexities of social
interaction.

Within advice literature, there are two strands:

1. CARRIER-ORIENTED ADVICE LITERATURE advice = imitate men (assertiveness / directness / less body lg).
Based on ideas about POWER, on the powerful/powerless model used by Lako and her followers as their
main principle for talking about mean and womens styles.
Powerless (women) vs powerful (men) speech styles. Advice is predicated on the idea that particular speech
styles are inherently powerful or powerless, which is not really true.

Robin Lakoff had described the features of female speech:
- Women use more hedges (an expression you insert to express uncertainty) than men: That shirt was kind of
blue.
- Her evidence was anecdotes: her work was not an empirical research.
Years later, sb discovered that, in trials, those witnesses who use more hedges, indirectness strategies and the
like are perceived as untrustworthy/unintelligent/unreliable.
Then, sb said: women have those features, then women are have less power than men.
What was the problem with this conclusion? That the conclusions from one field (trials) were extrapolated to
all other fields. And so indirectness, for ex, is itself a mark of ineffectual communication.

2. RELATIONSHIP-ORIENTED ADVICE LITERATURE advice = be different
Based on ideas about DIFFERENCE, on a cooperative/competitive model.
Cooperative (women) vs competitive (men) speech styles.
Women are advised to adjust to men.
Difference vs. dominance models
Men and women have difficulty communicating cos they have different speech styles. These arise, according to
Deborah
Tannen, due to different socialization patterns (You just dont understand).
Cameron says: there is a problem true but it has to do with structural inequalities in social relations rather
than with speech styles. These problems provide only a pseudo-explanation for womens
underachievement.

Cameron also criticizes dichotomic thinking, and the fact that the two poles female-male are the essence of a
persons identity (independently of whether youre a man or a woman, your qualifications and experience might
be more important).

What must be taken into account is that linguistic strategies such as indirectness and linguistic features such as
politeness tokens and hedges neither perform the same function nor have the same effect every single time
theyre used. Linguistic forms are multifunctional. Indirectness may indicate weakness or unreliability in the
courtroom, but may be a politeness strategy in another context. In the same way, silence can mean either
agreement or disagreement. So telling speakers to be direct in every conceivable situation ignores the significance
of the interpersonal as opposed to the informational function of language.

Ramaciotti (Javier) told us that the problem with all the rationale behind advice literature for women is the
following. Difference is sth that is observable. Difference does not explain difference. We cannot say
womens and mens speech styles are different simply because women and men are different. The correct
explanation would talk about the power dynamic issues.

He also told me to concentrate on the following ideas presented / implicit in the text:
There are norms, which are not necessarily the same as the actual behaviors. Camerons chapter concentrates
on norms.
There are two sets of contradictory norms in advice literature: on the one hand, women are said to imitate men
but on the other to tolerate them.
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Difference vs. dominance approaches.

SUMMARY FROM THE CHAPTER

Nowadays, many verbal hygiene practices take on the task of remodeling the whole linguistic persona of
women.
Social identities are not merely marked or reflected in verbal and other behavior; theyre performed
through the repetition of
particular acts, which in turn are subject to normative regulation.
The chapter focuses on the contradictory quality of current advice about womens speech as a symptom of
the contradictions surrounding gender identity itself.
Much advice addressed to women covertly assumes a particular (white and middle-class) model of femininity
as the norm.

VERBAL HYGIENE FOR WOMEN: TRADITIONAL ADVICE

Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age:
There existed a genre whose aim was to refine women: devotional manuals for daughters of the aristocracy,
courtesy books for would-be ladies-in-waiting, politeness texts for women of the gentry, pamphlets on marriage and
domestic life, texts on etiquette.
The court lady was required to speak; the bourgeois wife was enjoined to silence. This ideal bourgeois linguistic
femininity became the ideal for society as a whole.

19
th
cy:
The private domestic sphere was marked as the only appropriate domain for women speakers. Public speaking
was ill- advised and unfeminine, and women were in any case incompetent at it.
Women conversing in private were routinely warned to shun domestic topics along with gossip and trivial.
Moreover, women were advised to listen rather than speak whenever possible, and to leave erudition and with to
their husbands. The cleverest
woman was she who, in talking to a man, made him seem clever. Women should ask for advice and opinions, never
give them.

1970s (Anglo-American feminism arises):
The stereotypically unassertive woman of previous advice literature is no longer presented as a role model but as
a problem.
Many feminists concluded that their socially conditioned speech habits were a problem and that women were
suffering from oppre
perceived linguistic problems through assertiveness training, which focused on particular strategies for
communicating verbally. AT arose within the field of behaviorist psychology.
Assertive behavior was the mid-point btw passive behavior (abdicating your own rights) and aggressive behavior
(disregarding the rights of others). AT is a normative practice, intended to bring recipients into conformity with
mainstream societal values which really means the highly individualistic and goal-oriented value system of
white male middle-class America.
In the mid-70s, it was noted that female socialization tended to discourage such assertive traits as directness or
willingness to challenge others and to express your own needs and feelings, and it encouraged women to be use
unassertive, indirect and manipulative strategies. What happened was that grassroots self-help, sought by
individual women seeking to become more assertive, turned into top-down advice giving. AT became an
institutional, as opposed to a grassroots political, practice: in education, training and commercial self-help
publishing. AT was codified and then became institutionalized, thus helping its vast dissemination and its
mainstream distribution. AT is now in the workplace, addiction programs, and other realms.
A problem with AT is that its not only for the trainees own good but for the perceived good and interests of
their organizations.

Career advice for women: talk like a man
The advice carries the risk of trapping women in a double bind: insufficiently feminine women may be labeled
deviant; powerful women are almost by definition threatening.
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How does advice literature resolve this contradiction? By associating preferred linguistic strategies not with the
male gender, but with the domain/sphere of business. Certain values and strategies are appropriate in this
sphere, and its mere contingent historical fact that those values and strategies are also considered masculine.
Now that women have entered the business world, they must adapt to what men already know how to do.
What really goes on is that women are told, for example, to use less body language, but not because thats
intrinsically better: simply because more body language marks women out as being women.
Most career-oriented advice literature makes heavy unacknowledged use of Lakoffs conclusions, which were
not based on empirical evidence.
Career-oriented advice to women on their speech depends on a simple and negative stereotype of women as
communicators lacking authority and credibility.
Far from enhancing womens authority in the workplace, career advice may contribute to undermining it by
harping on womens supposed linguistic deficiencies. If indirectness is not the universally dysfunctional strategy
advice literature suggests, then at best, advice literature to avoid it is irrelevant; at worst, it may create a problem
by priming both women and men to read womens use of indirectness as insecure, weak, and tentative. Of
course, I youre in the business of marketing a cure, it pays to discover a disease.

Relationship advice for women: its different for girls.
Based on the difference approach. According to this, women and men find difficulty in communicating
because they have different interactional goals and styles, learned early in life. Deborah Tannen argued that men
talk to gain or maintain status (hence their liking for such competitive speech genres as boasting, ritual insults,
joke-telling and exchanging sports statistics), whereas women talk to promote intimacy and connection (hence
their preference for gossip). These differences arise from different processes of socialization.
The solution proposed by Tannen is not to change peoples speech habits but to change their responses to the
habits of the opposite sex. Its a question of understanding the differences and learning to be more tolerant of
them: if each sex becomes passively bilingual in the others language it may even avert misunderstanding
altogether.
BUT, preaching mutual gender tolerance to an audience composed overwhelmingly of women means in essence
telling women to adjust to male behavior, to accept a status quo in which their own needs for intimacy and
connection will continue to go unmet by male partners.
In recycling Tannens arguments, many magazines have explicitly recommended that women adjust their
behavior to mens expectations.

Evaluating difference
Career advice defines the public sphere of work as a masculine domain, and tells women who wish to enter that
they must therefore adopt masculine norms to succeed. Relationship advice grants women authority over
domestic life and (hetero(sexual relationships, but all women seem to be authorized to do within their allotted
sphere is to ensure things run smoothly, without conflict and misunderstanding which entails once again that
they adjust to masculine norms. Heads you win, tails I lose.
The underlying issue is that theres a structural asymmetry: the male and female spheres are not equal, the
obligations they impose are not reciprocal and the kinds of authority men and women have in their respective
spheres are not parallel.
Ultimately its men who have power 8in public and private life) whereas women have only responsibility. But in a
genre that is itself divided btw public (career advice) and private (relationship advice), it is virtually impossible to
address this asymmetry, or to discuss the connections btw a groups position in one sphere and its position in the
other
Women should be able to be different from men without being unequal to them.

Advice to women on how they should speak is incoherent. Theres advice telling them they can be more like
men; theres advice explaining to them why they cannot be more like mean and reassuring them that theres
nothing wrong with being (and wanting to be) different. in both the public and private domains, feminine
speech styles can be valued negatively or positively women may be counseled either as mens partners or as their
colleagues to embrace feminine speech (its equally valid; it embodies the values of caring or teamwork)
or to avoid it (it is powerless; its an obstacle to communication with men.
In this whole contradictory dx, the most important common factor is simply the idea of an eternal opposition
btw masculine and feminine styles. And this is the basic problem: any kind of verbal hygiene advice based on the
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a priori acceptance of an all-pervading gender duality ill end up being co-opted to reactionary ends, cos the
starting assumption is itself reactionary. Theres a problem with verbal hygiene for women and it is that its
unquestioning acceptance of femininity and masculinity as opposed and quasi-natural states from which
particular ways of being and speaking are inseparable.

.
Popular dx on gender continues to be organized around a simply binary opposition: men vs. women. Thus the
new verbal hygiene for women may be training them for changing roles, but it remains deeply wedded to the
masculine/feminine dichotomy
as an organizing principle for thinking about the world. When advice writers cast about for alternatives to
speaking like a woman the only one that occurs to them is speaking like a man: these two alternatives
exhaust all the possibilities.

The appeal of the new verbal hygiene for women may be located in a combination of two fantasies.
The linguistic fantasy that perfect communication can be achieved by following certain rules.
The gender fantasy that women and men could be made less damagingly alien to one another without
undermining the concepts of masculinity and femininity. By learning to interpret and manipulate the gendered
codes of language we can resolve the problems associated with difference while leaving difference itself intact.
..

Reading self-help: normality and normativity
It is science that provides our most privileged information about what men and women are like, and because
we take that information as objective fact, what passes for a description of normal gendered behavior very soon
becomes a blueprint for
normative gendered behavior. Scientific dx might be telling us who we are, but its authority is such that it also
tells us who to be.
Self-help trades on this conflation of the normal and the normative.
Self-help literature appears to have the function of making readers feel better by reaffirming their existing
interpretations of experience. Thus reading self-help is less a process of discovery than a process of recognition.
In this way, in many cases the point of the genre is not to change anything, but to validate existing perceptions
by recasting them in a more authoritative scientific register.
An important political reading that must be made about verbal hygiene is that it is more than just trivial
manipulation of unimportant linguistic details. In adopting particular norms of speech we construct particular
identities for ourselves.

3. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. Chapter 5. Teaching children how to discriminate. In English with an
Accent. London/New York: Routledge

Scope and focus of the chapter
The chapter is about the sociolinguistic aspects of the systematic construction of dominance and subordinance in
animated films aimed at children.

Is childrens exposure (in the movies) to bad guys who sound a certain way, look a certain way and come
from a certain place part of how they learn to assign values on the basis of variation in language linked to race,
ethnicity and homeland? to make this point, it is first necessary to demonstrate regular patterns which are
available to children on a day to day basis: Were faced first-off with indexical facts, facts of
observed/experienced social practices, the systematicity of which is part of our central problem: are they
systematic? If so, how? (Silverstein 1992).

The authors claim is that while the practice of stereotyping that occurs in childrens films is smtms mild and
no obvious or direct harm follows from it, there are always repercussions. Her hypothesis is that animated films
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entertain, but they are also a way to teach children to associate specific characteristics and life styles with specific
social groups, by means of language variation.
30

About the use of accent in movies
Actors undergo accent training of various kinds in an attempt to teach them to imitate what they need for a
particular role. More than whether they succeed or not, whats interesting and relevant is that actors attempt to
manipulate language primarily as a characterization tool, although sometimes theres a motivation in establishing
the setting of the story. Consider the following illustrations. A contrived accent is used:
- As a tool in the construction of character. For instance, accent can be used as a dramatic strategy to establish
the origin of the character when the story is about sb who goes to the US from another country.
- To signal place and context. To show that the action and dialogue spoken in English would NOT be taking
place in English. For ex, in a Nazi concentration camp in Schindlers List, the commanding officer (portrayed by
British actor Ralph Fiennes) speaks English with a contrived German accent to alert viewers to the fact that he
would, in reality, be speaking German. In such a case, though, it would make most logical sense to have all actors
contrive the same accent.
- As a shortcut for those roles where stereotypes serves as a shortcut to characterization.

Sometimes, the use of accent in such ways results in stereotyping: Dialect actors must avoid [ethnic or linguistic
stereotypes, since] language or dialect background does not dictate character actions. Characters with accents
must have the same range of choices available to them as characters [with no accents] But, do they?

In animated film language is widely used as a quick way to build character and reaffirm stereotype.
There are patterns in the way we project pictures and images of ourselves and others which are available to
anyone who watches and listens carefully.

Some background information before the main focus

Female characters are almost never shown at work outside the home and family; where they do show up, they
are mothers and princesses, devoted or (rarely) rebellious daughters. When they are at work, female characters
are waitresses, nurses, nannies or housekeepers. Men, conversely, are doctors, waiters, advisors to kings, thieves,
hunters, servants, detectives, and pilots. In the universe shown to children, then, is one with a clear division btw
the sexes in terms of life style and life choices. Traditional views of the womans role in the family, then, are
strongly underwritten, and in Disney films, the female characters see or come to accept their first and most
important role in life as that of wife and mother.
Disney films rely heavily on common themes of good and evil, and generally on happy endings. There are good
and bad characters, and those who are bad but become good. Female characters are more likely to show positive
motivation and actions. Unlike male characters who smtms are bad and then become good, bad females show no
character development.
The overall representation of persons with foreign accents is far more negative than that of speakers of US or
British English. From the total of US English-speaking characters, about 20% are bad characters; while from the
total of non-native characters who speak English, about 40% are evil (proportionally twice as much).

Main focus

THE AUTHOR FOCUSES ON THREE ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE IN THE FILMS:

30
The author explains how she carried out her research. Whats important is that before jumping to any conclusions, she made sure that there were
patterns that supported her claim. She considered not just any film, but Disney films (the Disney corporation being the largest producer of the kind of film
analyzed for children; fully animated). When analyzing each character, she considered phonetics, typical syntactic structures, and marked lexical items.
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1. The representation of African Americans (by means of language in Disney films vale la aclaracin
jaja)
Most AAVE-speaking characters appear in animal rather than humanoid forms. Granted, given the low overall
number of AAVE speakers, its hard to draw any inferences from that fact. The issue is further complicated in
that every character w/a southern accent appears in animal rather than humanoid form, too.
More disturbing than that, though, is the configuration of stereotypes: The male characters seem to be
unemployed or show no purpose in life beyond the making of music and pleasing themselves. Notice, for ex, the
orangutan King Louie from The Jungle Book who sings in the scat-style made popular by African American
musicians and convinces the audience that his one goal in life is to be that which he is not (a man) and compare
him w/ the reality that African American males who are not linguistically assimilated to the sociolinguistic norms
of a middle and colorless U are allowed very few possibilities in life, but are allowed to want those things they
dont have and cant be.
In this way, children who have little or no contact with African Americans are exposed to a fragmented and
distorted view of what it means to be black, based on characterizations which rest primarily on negative
stereotype linked directly to language difference.
31

2. The representation of lovers and mothers
The author mentions that the portrayal of young men and women seems extreme and unrealistic -doe-eyed
heroines w/tiny waists and heroes w/bulging necks and overly muscular thighs- but she focuses on the language
spoken by lovers. Despite the setting of the story or the individuals ethnicity, lovers speak mainstream varieties
of US or British English, with a few exceptions.
There are no male romantic leads with foreign accents, though we do get, for example, OMalley (a stray cat
from The Aristocats) and Jock (a stray dog from Lady and the Tramp), who speak with a typical working class
accent (simplified consonant clusters, double-negatives). Both of these characters are prototypical rough lovers,
men with an edge who need the care and attention of good women to settle them, and both are rewarded with
such mates females who speak non-stigmatized varieties because they prove themselves worth it.
Theres even less variation among the female romantic leads. (El ltimo prrafo de la pgina 96 del original
hable de dos excepciones, pero me parece que no es relevante).
To be truly sexually attractive and available in a Disney film, a character must not only look the idealized part; but he or she must
also sound white and middle-class American or British and this is usually the case for fathers and mothers, as well.

Other info
- In Disney movies, parenthood and romance dont usually intersect.
- Lovers marry, smtms at a very young age. Young or middle-aged married couples w/growing families are
seldom seen.
- Young lovers are presented in idealized form both physically and linguistically, while in later life stages these
same kinds of characters are not so narrowly drawn.
- The picture of motherhood portrayed in these animated films excludes careers and work outside family and
home, and clings very closely to language varieties associated with middle-class norms and values. When seen at
all, mothers are presented w/out a hint of ethnicity, regional affiliation, color, or economics.
- Fathers, often comic or droll characters, have in their language (as in work, preoccupations and interests) a
wider set of choices available to them.

3. The way that even positive stereotyping can be negative and limiting
The Aristocats and Beauty and the Beast are set in Paris. Of the many French characters, only few speaks French in
Beauty&Beast. Only one of these is female: Cherie (the feather-duster from Beauty and the Beast). Her primary
purpose seems to be that of a romantic foil for Lumiere (the candelabrum); her only line (uttered when she and
Lumiere are cuddling behind the draperies) is Oh no! Ive been burn by you before! The subtle but
unmistakable message is quite simple: there may logically be several characters (38 to be precise) who are French,
but the truly French, the prototypical one (the French-speaking character) is that with a special talent for

31
Its worth clarifying that we are talking about the accent the characters have, and not saying that the movie explicitely says that the characters are of black
origin or sth. What children unconsciously perceive is the accent of AAVE speakers.
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lighthearted sexual bantering. Another French-speaking character is the chef in The Little Mermaid, and he
accommodates to the other stereotype: that associated with food presentation or preparation.
The domain of life experience for things French is as narrow, if not as overtly negative, as that for AAVE
speakers.

The cultural stereotypes for specific national origin groups are perpetuated in a systematic way in these
stories created for, and viewed primarily by, children.

Summary
The animated films provide material which links language varieties associated w/specific national origins,
ethnicities, and races w/social norms and characteristics in non-factual and smts overtly discriminatory ways.
Characters w/strongly positive actions and motivations are overwhelmingly speakers of socially mainstream
varieties of English; characters w/strongly negative actions and motivations often speak varieties of English
linked to specific geographical regions and marginalized social groups.
Whereas male characters who speak mainstream USEnglish or a non-stigmatized variety of British English
have the widest variety of life choices and possibilities, for females or those with marked features the world is
a smaller place. The more negatives a character has to deal with (gender, color, stigmatized language, less
favorable national origin) the smaller the world.
Even when stereotyping is not overtly negative, it is confining and misleading, as shown by the analysis of
French-speaking characters.

Other conclusions
Even films which are made specifically for the purpose of illuminating and exploring racial and other kinds of
social injustice are not free of the very subtle effects of standard language ideology.
What children learn from the entertainment industry is to be comfortable with same and to be wary about other,
and that language is a prime and ready diagnostic for this division btw what is approachable and what is best left
alone. For adults, those childhood lessons are reviewed daily.

4. Hill, Jane H. Language, Race, and White Public Space

This is what the abstract of the paper presents. Its good to read it before and after the rest of the summary:

White public space is constructed through:
1. Intense monitoring of the speech of racialized populations such as Chicanos and Latinos and African
Americans for signs of linguistic disorder
2. The invisibility of almost identical signs (=linguistic disorder) in the speech of Whites, where language
mixing, required for the expression of a highly valued type of colloquial persona, takes several forms.
- One such form is Mock Spanish, which exhibits a complex semiotics. By direct indexicality, it presents
speakers as possessing desirable personal qualities. By indirect indexicality, it reproduces highly negative
racializing stereotypes stereotypes of Chicanos and Latinos. In addition, it indirectly indexes whiteness as an
unmarked normative order. Mock Spanish is compared to the White crossover uses of African American
English.

The paper starts by speaking about racism. Why, if neary all scientists concur that human races are imaginary,
do so many highly educated, cosmopolitan, economically secure people continue to think and act as racists?
These apparent irrationalities are actually quite rational, being rooted in history and tradition and functioning
as important organizing principles for complex and ambiguous human experiences. Race is a worldview a
cosmological ordering system structured out of the political, economic, and social realities of peoples who had
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emerged as expansionist, conquering, dominating nations on a worldwide quest for wealth and power (Smedly
1993).

Then, some questions are posed
What kinds of dxs count (or not) as racist, and by what (and whose) cultural logic? (in what kinds of
contexts?)
What are the different kinds of racializing dxs, and how are these distributed in speech communities? (in what
kinds of contexts?)
What dx processes socialize children as racial subjects? (in what kinds of contexts?)
What are the dxs of resistance, and what do they reveal about the forms of racism? (in what kinds of contexts?)
What dx processes relate the racialization of bodies to the racialization of kinds of speech? (in what kinds of
contexts?)

Background/previous analyses
The author builds on an analysis by Urcioli, which focuses on bilingual Puerto Ricans (=PR) living in New York.
Urcioli argues that the PR experience language as differentiated into two spheres.
- Inner sphere of talk among intimates in the household and neighborhood: the boundaries btw Sp and Eng are
blurred and ambiguous, both formally and functionally.
- Outer sphere of talk w/strangers and especially w/gatekeepers
32
like cour officers, social workers, and school
teachers. As for the difference btw Sp and Eng, boundaries and order are everything. The pressure from
interlocutors to kep the two languages in order is so severe that people who function as fluent bilinguals in the
inner sphere become so anxious about their competence that smtms they cannot even speak.
One of the most poignant of the inextricable ambiguities of the above explained duality, is that they worry
about being disorderly is never completely absent from the intimacies of the inner sphere, and people who
successfully negotiate outer-sphere order might be accused that they are acting White, thus betraying their
friends and relatives.
Whites accept Spanish in the outer sphere only in contexts such as folk-life festivals (as part of a process of
ethnification that works to validate difference). Other publish Spanish is perceived, by Whites, as impolite and
even dangerous. Spanish-speaking bilinguals experience complaints about using Spanish in public place; those
bilinguals are also worried when they speak English, since the (Spanish) accent is still there. What is more, if
Whites can detect signs of a racialized identity, they will hear accent even when there is no accent. The
speakers even worry about cursing or using vocabulary perceived (by Whites) as uncultivated. Thus, mediated by
cultural notions of correctness and good English (Cf. standard language ideology), failures of linguistic order
become, in the outer sphere, signs of race.

The authors thesis
While PR, for ex, experience the outer sphere as an important site of their racialization, the opposite is true
for Whites. Whites permit themselves a considerable amount of disorder precisely at the language boundary that
is a site of discipline for Spanish-speaking populations in the US the boundary btw Spanish and English in
public dx. There is a contrast: White uses o Spanish create a desirable colloquial presence for Whites, but uses
of Spanish by Spanish-speaking groups in the US are disorderly and dangerous. This contrast is one of the ways
in which language use is constituted as part of what Page and Thomas (1994) have called White public space.

White public space:
- a morally significant set of contexts that are the most important sites of the rpactices of a racializing hegemony,
in which Whites are invisibly normal, and in which racialized populations are visibly marginal and the objects of
monitoring range from individual judgment to Official English legislation.
- An arena in which linguistic disorder on the part of Whites is rendered invisible and normative, while the
linguistic behavior of members of historically Sp-speaking populations is highly visible and the object of constant
monitoring.

32
Establish who will and who won't be able to exercise authority or power.
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The authors analyses

White linguistic normalcy: orderly disorder
While PR are extremely self-conscious about their Spanish accents in English, heavy English accents in
Spanish are perfectly acceptable for Whites. It even seems that its somehow inappropriate for Whites to try to
sound Spanish; they can speak Spanish but sounding English.
While PR worry about the cultivation of their English, the public written use of Sp by Whites is often grossly
nonstandard and ungrammatical.
While PR code switching is condemned as disorderly, Whites mix their Eng with Sp in whatever context they
want. The incorporation of Spanish-language materials into English in order to create a jocular or pejorative
key results in whats called Mock Spanish.

Mock Spanish
The practices of Mock Spanish (=MSp) include:
1. Semantic pejoration of Sp loans: the use of positive or neutral Sp words in humorous or negative senses. Eg:
macho, adios, hasta la vista.
2. Borrowing of obscene or scatological Spanish words for uses as MSp euphemisms. Eg: the handwritten sign
Casa de Pee-pee on the door of the womens restroom in a Tucson clinic. Cojones
3. Borrowing of elements of Spanish morphology, mainly the suffix o, often accompanied by Spanish
modifiers like mucho or el, with a view to creating jocular and pejorative forms like el cheap-o, numero two-o,
or mucho trouble-o
33

4. Use of hyperanglicized and parodic pronunciations and orthographic representations of Sp loan words.
Eg. Grassy-ass (gracias), Hasty lumbago (hasta luego), Fleas Navidad.

MSp has become an important part of the middling style, a form of public language that emerged in the
19
th
cy as a way for elites to display democratic and egalitarian sensibilities by incorporating colloquial and even
slangy speech. Relaxations of proscriptions against public vulgarity have made even quite offensive uses w/in
MSp acceptable at the highest level of public dx.

The SEMIOTICS of MSp

MSp accomplishes elevation of whiteness through direct and indirect indexicalities, and pejorative
racialization of Sp-speaking groups through indirect indexicality.
Direct indexicality the production of nonreferential meanings (or indexes) that are understood and
acknowledged by speakers. Through direct indexicality, MSp projects the message that the speaker possesses a
congenial persona, for example because the use of Sp expresses their loyalty to and affiliation with the
Southwest; or because its just funny.
Indirect indexicality the production of nonreferential meanings that are NOT acknowledged by speakers.
The messages projected through it involve profoundly racist images of Sp-speaking groups. Whites almost always
deny that MSp could be in any way racist; yet, in order to make sense of MSp, interlocutors require access to
very negative racializing representations of Chicanos and Latinos as stupid, politically corrupt, sexually loose,
lazy, dirty and disorderly. One can only understand Hasta la vista, baby if they have access to a representation of
Sp speakers as treacherous. It is through indirect indexicality that using MSp constructs White public space.

MSp is a covert racist dx,
34
because it accomplishes racialization of its subordinate-group targets through
indirect indexicality, messages that must be available for comprehension but are never acknowledged by
speakers.

33
Notice the negative connotations of these expressions. MY GUESSES are that el cheap-o means a cheap, stingy person, and numero two-o makes
reference to someone whos in second place.
34
Compare it with: vulgar racist discourse, which uses the direct referential function (Mexicans dont know how to work!); hate speech, which seems
to operate through the performative function as a direct verbal assault (Lazy greaser!); elite racist discourse (van Dijk), which presents the speaker as a
desirable persona: since being a racist is undesirable, tokens often begin w/qualifications such as Im not a racist, but and then continue w/a racializing
argument (which, again, uses the direct referential function). MSp is used w/these types of dxs, as when a sign in a demonstration supporting anti-
immigration laws reads Adis, Jos.
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Because of its covert property, MSp may be an exceiptionally powerful site for the reproduction of White racist
attitudes. In order to be one of the group among other Whites, collusion in the production of MSp is
frequently unavoidable.

Homogeneous heterogeneity
Whites practice the constitution of whiteness as an invisible and unmarked norm, which is built as a
transformist hegemony: its construction results in a national process aimed at homogenizing heterogeneity and
which is fashioned around assimilating elements of heterogeneity through appropriations that devalue and deny
their link to the marginalized others contribution to the patrimony
Urcioli showed that precisely this kind of heterogeneity is not permitted to PR. On the other hand, linguistic
heterogeneity and even explicit disorder is not only permitted to Whites, but its in fact an essential element of
a desirable White public persona. To be White is to collude in these practices, or to risk censure as having no
sense of humor or being politically correct. And the linguist disorder in their use of Spanish is not understood
as such after all, they are not, literally, speaking Spanish.

The incorporation of linguistic elements into the linguistic homogeneous heterogeneity of White public
space also draws on the crossover of forms from African American English (AAE), though nowadays AAE
and White English are so thoroughly entangled in the US that crossover is extremely difficult to discover. Still,
the richest examles of linguistic incorporations are MSp and AAE crossover.

Can mock forms subvert the order of racial practices?
Authors such as Hewitt, Gubar, and Butler have argued that usages that in some contexts are grossly racist
seem to contain an important parodic potential that can be turned to the antiracist deconstruction of racist
categorical essentializing. For example, some Black children would tease White friends as nigger and the White
teens would reply with honky or snowflake. This practice turns racism into a kind of effigy, to be burned up
in an interactive ritual which seeks to acknowledge and deal w/its undeniable presence whilst acting out the
negation of its effects.
These kinds of games, however, remain reserved to childhood, unable to break through the dominant voices of
racism. Apart from that, the truth is that the kind of subversions just mentioned can be seen simply as one more
example of orderly disorder reserved to elites in White public space, rather than as carnivalesque inversions.
Rampton discussed crossing, the use of out-group linguistic tokens. While these retain some potential to give
offence, often seem simply to acknowledge what is useful and desirable in the space of urban diversity. Again, it
appears that crossings dont survive childhood.

5. West, Candence, Michelle Lazar and Cheris Kramarae. 1997. Extract. Chapter 5: Gender in
discourse. In T. van Dijk (ed.) Discourse as Social Interaction. London: Sage.

The text deals with samples of different types of analysis

1. Content analysis
(McRobbie 1982) The content in picture stories of a magazine popular with adolescent girls idealized
heterosexual romantic partnerships, ruled out other forms of rs btw girls and boys, eliminated the possibility of
strong supportive rs among girls themselves, and obscured the option of being single and happy; thus conveying
the unambiguous message that romantic love is central to a girls identity.
(Fowler 1991) British newspapers categorize women and men very differently through the noun phrases used
to describe them. Men in gral are more often described in terms of their occupational roles, while women are
typically described in relation to their marital and family responsibilities (wives, mothers).
(Simpson 1993). He adds that its not unusual to see noun phrases describing women vis--vis their rs to men
(spinster, wife) but very unusual to see corresponding descriptions of men.

Textual analysis: tudies the means of assembling text such as sentences, grammatical structures and genres.
These studies are more concerned with form of discourse than with its content.
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Cameron (1990) addresses the sentence structure of British newspaper reports of violence against women.
These reports:
- Depict the man affected by the rape of his partner as the grammatical subject of main clauses: A man... and A
terrified 19-stone husband
- Mention the raped woman at the ends of complex sentences and only describe in relation to the man: his
wife.
- Present the rape at the end of sentence, only after descriptions of the mans personal injuries: A man who suffered
head injuries when attacked by two men who broke into his home in Beckenham, Kent early yesterday, was pinned down on the bed
by intruders who took it in turns to rape his wife.
Clark (1992) observes that rape reports tend to obscure the guilt of the rapist and transfer blam to the victim or
sb else, through:
- The use of passive structures that delete the rapist as the agent or that attribute responsibility for the rapists
actions to sb else: Sex killer John Steed was set on the path to evil by seeing his mother raped when he was a little boy.

Textual analyses of the media reveal competing ways of representing social life, which work insidiously to
maintain inequality btw women and men.
Lazar (1993) analyses a pair of Singapore government advertisements one targeted at women, the other
targeted at men promoting marriage btw well-educated Asians, with a view to changing the conservative
attitudes of Asian men, who prefer not to marry their intellectual peers. The ads covertly reproduce the status
quo.
- The ads support womens career interests (Its wonderful to have a career) while at the same time they present a
sexist discourse. For ex, they use but disclaimer to qualify their support of womens career interests: Its
wonderful to have a career But is your self-sufficiency giving men a hard time?
- They refer to women as girls but not to men as boys.
Lazar shows that the juxtaposition of these contradictory dxs serves to subtly shift the origins of the problem
and responsibility for change from men to women.

Textual analyses show the workings of power dynamics not only through the presence of particular textual
markers, but also through their systematic absences.
Etter-Lewis (1991) examines elderly African-American womens experiences with sexism and racism by looking
at what they dont say in the texts of their oral narratives. Many silences and indirect references in these texts are
not merely routine space holders or fillers; instead, they mark the suppression of criticism a characteristic of
the speech of people who are oppressed.
- One of the women, while describing her experience of having been turned down for a university teaching
position, avoided saying They didnt hire me by falling silent: And so they did not they had

Textual analyses also show that particular genres of dx focus readers or viewers reading or viewing in
specific ways. Like a wide-angle or zoom lens on a camera, the genre determines what those who look through
it will see and the angle from which they will see it.
In most Western narratives, the causal sequence of events in soap operas is premised on viewers
unproblematic acceptance of conservative ideologies about gender, race and class ideologies which encourage
viewers to take for granted that thats the way things are.

Coda (summary/conclusions)
From those who study the content of discourse, wee been given a richly detailed picture of the normative
conceptions of appropriate womanly and manly behaviors that pervade a variety of mass media.
From those who analyze the formal features of texts, weve developed a deep appreciation for the power of
specific practices that allow us to see the world as a gendered place. Textual analyses expose the mechanisms
that provide us, the readers and viewers of texts, with our sense of context in the first place. They show, for
ex, how the arrangement of building blocks such as nouns and verbs, the choice btw voices such as active and
passive, and the juxtapositioning of competing dxs, can construct a background against which existing patterns
of gender inequality seem only natural to those who look at them.

6. Renkema, Jan. 2004. Discourse & Culture. In Introduction to Discourse Studies.
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Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
35

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Culture is the deposit of knowledge, beliefs, values and attitudes a group of people share. In relation to it, three
questions are important:
- Can we detect cultural values from dx?
- If so, what can dx tell us about how people are influenced by culture?
- Is it possible to change cultural values by changing dx?

At the heart of the study btw dx and culture lies the well-known and often criticized Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
36

whose main tenet is that language influences our worldview. This hypothesis has raised many violent and smts
chaotic discussions about the relation btw lg and worldview. Three obscurities have to be clarified:

1. What is meant by language?
2. What is meant by worldview? Is it a way of thinking? Is it the perception of reality or is it the way sth is
memorized? Or is worldview sth like attitudes or beliefs or behavior? Most proponents of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis in dx studies seem to restrict themselves to attitudes.
3. The term relation is rather vague. It can mean influence, but many researchers admit theres some kind of
non-causal relation. This is the weak form of the hypothesis, aka linguistic relativity principle, which gives
only a kind of parallel btw language structure and the structuring of reality.

Critical Dx Analysis (CDA)
The most prominent approach to dx and culture. It pays much attention to power relations and ideology which
are precipitated in dx, and force the reader or listener to perceive reality in a specific, biased way. The focus is on
the legitimacy of the powerful to present reality as they do in dx.

Critical means that an analysis cannot be neutral or free of values.
Dx is studied from a Sapir-Whorf viewpoint, with reference not to differences btw lg systems, but to
differences in lg use w/in one lg, while the broad concept of worldview is defined as an ideological perspective.
Dx is seen as a reflection of the power relations in society; and as a form of social action or a political act that
can be criticized.
Dx is seen as a vehicle of meaning in a social context and as a constitutive factor of social relations and belief
systems.this view is based on the socio-semiotic approach, in which lg performs not only the ideational function
of representing the world and the textual function of relating dx and context, but also the interpersonal function
of enacting social identities and relation.
The critical dx analyst sees dx as an instrument to gain insight into societal problems. CDA aims at detecting
manipulation and discrimination but also at understanding the essence of these societal problems; it must also
have the aim of empowering powerless groups or minorities.
The central question it asks is Why is a given content formulated in the way it is and not in another possible
form?

Even though CDA has gained prominence, some still question it; so more and more attempts are being made to
ground analyses and interpretations of power relations on systemic descriptions of dx. Some of these attempts
are developed below.

a. Halliday proposed analyzing clauses in a discourse starting w/the events or actions, and then making all the
participants explicit.

35
Summary 7 completes this info.
36
Sapir claimed that the language system (apart from being an instrument for communication) creates schemata for analyzing our world. If, for ex, a lang
has a dualis (a verb form for we both), then the speakers of said language will probably more easily differentiate btw two groups and groups of more than
two.
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Many presents were given. The pattern of give involves 3 semantic roles: actor, affected (whats given) and
beneficiary (to whom the thing is given) [=transivity]. Analyzing dx in terms of actions and participants has the
benefit that the analysis is independent of whether the participants are verbally mentioned. In the example only
the action (give) and the affected (many presents) are mentioned, which could mean that the writer thinks that it
is of less importance to mention the actor and the beneficiary (and which could lead us to estimate to what
extent the participants are being discriminated against).

b. Van Leeuwen. Here its the social actors not the events that are in focus.

An intake of 50000 skilled immigrants is expected this year. The actor of expected is skipped (who expects?)
Australians feel they cannot voice legitimate fears about immigration. Theres one overt actor (Australians) but also
another nearly completely hidden actor nearly only, because a trace o its presence can be detected in the special
kind of adjective legitimate, an adjective in which a process is congealed: who is the actor of legitimizing fear?
Australia is in danger of saddling itself up w/a lot of unwanted problems. Theres an overt actor (Australia) and one
actor that has totally disappeared cos its been depersonalized as a problem, and the adjective unwanted leaves only
a trace of the actor that does not want this problem.

Gender & Dx
How do we describe women and men? Can we put the possible differences in an ordered model? Do these
differences really have anything to say about the way men and women differ?

Here are a few things mentioned about two texts about toys:

Autumn Glory Barbie Action Man Bungee
Autumn Glory Barbie doll from the enchanted Seasons
Collection is a stunning tribute to the wonders of fall. Her fitted,
metallic appliqud bodice transitions to long, chiffon gown
shimmering in hues of copper and auburn, adonerd with fall
leaves, and accented with hints of purple and gold. Her earrings
are shaped like graceful golden leaves. Atop her long, auburn
hair sits a dark, wine-colored hat, embellished with feather and
leaves, adding the final touch to this wondrous autumn portrait.
Action Man is the greatest hero of them all! Action Man leaps
into the unknown with his fabulous bungee jumping kit, which
includes a two-stage harness, grappling hook and super-cool
sunglasses.
Presented as static: is, wears
Sentence structure: long nominal groups referring to
parts of her body (face) or clothes (bodice, earrings) with
many evaluations from the aesthetic domain: stunning,
shimmering.
The description suggests shes had no influence on
the way she looks: as if she were a fashion model
whose style and clothes are decided by sb else.
This text belongs to a genre the author dubs
catwalk texts, which describe models to people
interested in features and attributes.
Presented as dynamic (leaps) and as controlling his
own actions, even into the unknown.
Hes evaluated using terms belonging to social
judgments: fabulous, super cool.

The action man looks more like a television ad
urging the audience to watch the next episode of a
series.

Analyzing is one thing, but interpreting is another: Its difficult to find such analyses claiming the following:
owmen use more mitigated dx and back-channel elements (hm, oh yeah, etc.) and men are not focused on
verbalizing their feelings and they often play macho behavior. Much has been published on gender and dx
studies; many intriguing phenomena were described in terms of difference and dominance. However, it is not yet
definite whether these dx phenomena are only gender-bound, and even if they are, it remains unclear how they
should be interpreted. Of course, this doesnt say anything about the possible dominance of men. The results
only show that this cannot be proved by dx analysis alone.

Racism

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Typically defined as prejudice or stereotyped belief that discriminates against a minority group (regardless of
race) or a group with less status than the group in power. Its usually mied w/ethnicism and xenophobia, it
manifests and (re)produces itself in dx.

Van Dijk (1984) says that discrimination can become manifest in seven Ds: dominance, differentiation,
distance, diffusion, diversion, depersonalization, deconstruction. no lo explica, osea qno sera importante.

Flowerdew, Li and Tan (2002) found that in the various schemes of analysis, four main discriminatory dx
strategies could be discerned (the author points out that it depends on context whether these strategies are
really racist):

a. Negative other presentation: the minority receives negative attributions in a scheme of positive us and
negative them. Eg. People are becoming less tolerant towards mainland immigrants and regard them as uneducated and
unhygienic, according to a survey. () The survey found new arrivals were generally seen as uneducated, dirty and with little
understanding of the rule of law.

b. Scare tactics: the extensive attention to the alleged threat by the minority to the privileges of the dominant
group. The arrival of thousands of migrant children could have a serious and adverse impact on education for Hong Kong
students.

c. Blaming the victim: here the most salient figure is scapegoating, mixed with a general strategy of accusing a
minority group of causing bad developments. Government economist Tang Kwong-yiu said mass immigration would pull
down the standard of living, wage levels, push unemployment and thin out resources for economic development and improvement of
living conditions.

d. Delegitimation: a minority group is discredited and disempowered. These immigrants have no right to enter Hong Kong
illegally or to remain in Hong Kong in breach of the conditions of stay, Mr. Justice Young added.

Reisigl and Woak (2001) developed a model for analyzing the presentation of social actors in a dx.

1. Referential strategies How are persons named and referred to?
2. Predicational strategies Which characteristics and features are attributed to them?
3. Argumentation strategies What kind of argumentation schemes are used to discriminate btw us and
them?
4. Perspectivization strategies From which point of view are the nominations (1), attributions (2) and
arguments (3) used?
5. Intensifying strategies How are the discriminating utterances formulated; overtly, intensified or mitigated?

Sample analysis
Background info: In Austria, the head of the province of Carinthia, Mr. Grasser, has ordered that public building
projects be carried out exclusively by Austrian workers; and this sparked heated debated. The following what
Grassers party leader said in an interview:

1. Theres depersonalized actors in cheap labor but an individual mentioning of the Austrian construction worker.
2. Compare the positive we who acts in harmony in public and the socialist guild master who is implicitely accused
of being an unsocial, capitalist socialist in hiring cheap labor from abroad.
3. In the argumentation that leads to the last sentence Then one must understand theres an unspoken argument,
namely, that foreigners are robbing native Austrians of their jobs. It is this argument that has to be proved firt.
We never thought differently and will continue to do so. The indignation, of course, just
comes from the side of those like Carinthian guild master for construction, a socialist,
who makes money out of cheap labor from Slovenia and Croatia. And if, today, one goes by
one of Hans Peter Haselsteiners Illbau building sites, and there, the foreigners, even down
to black Africans, cut and carry bricks, then the Austrian construction worker really
thinks something. Then one must understand, if there are emotions.
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4. The perspective is somewhat diffuse. If one goes and one must point to an indefinable man from whose
perspective the words are uttered.
5. In presenting the actors, intensification and mitigation are used. Intensification is present, for ex, in the
addition of black to Africans, since it emphasizes the visual difference btw Austrians and foreigners and implies
that theyre even worse than other evil foreigners. Mitigation is seen in the wording emotions, in which the overt
hostilities to foreigners are euphemistically toned down.

Intercultural communication
The study of dx in its social and cultural context conceivably leads to the study of communication patterns
dependent on differences btw cultures.

Hofstede (2001) carried out a research about cultural values and from his findings, after surveying thousands of
different companies employees, he concluded that the differences in answer could be explained by the
assumption of five dimensions.

1. Power distance: the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations accept and
expect that power is distributed unequally. The more inequality is accepted, the greater the power distance.
2. Uncertainty avoidance: the extent to which members of a culture feel comfortable in unstructured situations.
If uncertainty avoidance is high, formal rules and procedures are highly estimated; if not, people can tolerate
more chaos and differences are welcome.
3. Individualism vs collectivism: the extent to which individuals are supposed to look after themselves and the
extent to which the behavior of an individual is influenced by others.
4. Masculinity vs femininity: refers to gender roles in a culture. In more masculine cultures, values such as self-
assertion, competition and success are important, with a clear distinction btw the gener roles. In more feminine
cultures, values like un pretentiousness, solidarity and orientation towards quality are important, with more
diffusion btw the gender roles.
5. Long- vs short-term orientation: the extent to which people esteem virtues oriented towards future awards,
like perseverance and thrift. In a culture w/short-temr orientation, values like respect for tradition and keeping
face are of high importance. From a western point of view, short-term orientation is seem as more easter or
more African.
Scollon and Scollon (2001) presented a framework for functional analysis of dx btw participants from different
cultures. They showed that theres much more at stake in intercultural communication than Hofstedes cross-
cultural study could bring to light. They incorporated other aspects such as the politeness principle.

7. Johnstone Barbara. 2002. Discourse and the world. Discourse Analysis. Oxford, UK / Walden, US:
Blackwell.

The consensus among dx analysts is that dx is both shaped shaped by and helps to shape the human lifeworld,
or the world as we experience it. People bring worlds into being by talking, writing, and signing.
Words refer to ideas which are created and contested as people name them and talk about them.
Paraphrase, usually understood as saying what a text is about, is not really a process of saying sth in a different
way, and of referring to sth that necessarily exists but a process of evoking and creating a different sth in a
different world.

This chapter explores some of the ways in which dx and world are related.

A. Linguistic categories, minds, and worldviews
Though, language, and being human are aspects of a single activity.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
37
Two versions:
- Linguistic determinism (extreme version) Categories of language determine categories of perception, so
that a person would not be able to imagine things in any other than the way dictated by his or her language. Most

37
In Sapirs words the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.
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scholars have not taken this strong position, pointing out that people are, after all, able to recategorize things and
to create new ways of talking that reflect their recategorizations.
Linguistic relativism (mild version) the ways in which people categorize things in the world are affected
by the ways in which their language categorizes things grammatically. Categories of language influence, but not
necessarily determine, how people construct the world. Under this version, a person would tend to categorize
things their language did, but categorization systems, and languages, could change. This is the more widely held
version.

ANALYSIS OF NOUN CLASSIFICATION IN TWO DIFFERENT LANGUAGES

In some lgs, noun classification involves the distinction masculine-feminine and theres some grammatical
element (classifier eg. Articles - , suffix) that indicates the gender. In lgs such as French or English, in most
cases were speaking of a grammatical gender, but in some, this grammatical gender coincides with sociological
gender. It could be argued that dividing people into masculine or feminine, into two categories associated
with a supposedly two-way distinction, is one of the ways in which lgs categorization systems encourage
speakers to view biological sexes and cultural sex roles as categorical and binary; that systems like this predispose
speakers to imagine that people are either essentially male or essentially female and that theres one prototypical
male way of acting and one prototypical female way of acting, rather than imagining, for ex, that maleness and
femaleness are matters of degree or that a persons maleness or femaleness could fluctuate and change.
In the Burmese noun classification system, a speaker must indicate number but also choose an accompanying
classifier. Eg. The classifier sin means pair of animals, so it can be used w/oxen and buffalos, but no with
mosquitos or horses, since in Southeast Asia oxen and buffalos are used in agriculture in yoked pairs, while
horses are not. The classifier for pairs is acceptable, too, with sarongs, which are sold in sets of two, but not with
shirts. Burmese classifiers correspond to Burmese reality to the way the world is (or at least traditionally was)
for the Burmese.
Is the different btw French (in which the grammatical noun classifiers appear to be arbitrary in many cases
38
)
and Burmese (in which the grammatical noun classifiers appear to be meaningful in most cases) a difference btw
two different kinds of classifier systems,
39
or is the difference simply that were looking at the same phenomenon
at two stages in its development? This question leads us to grammaticalization.

GRAMMATICALIZATION
Bits of lg line noun classifiers typically originate as bits of meaning. But with repeated use, their meaning may
become bleached, and they may come to serve purely grammatical functions. That is, they may come to be
used to connect parts of sentences and phrases and to show how words in various places in dx are related. Via
this process, grammaticalization, meaning in dx come, over time, to be the source of structures of grammar.
This process is always underway, so that a linguistic form may be somewhere in btw two poles. Furthermore,
speakers can call attention to a form which usually serves a structural function in such a way as to highlight its
potential to be meaningful. For ex, French speakers may use the generic masculine of le soldat for male and
female soldiers alike, but the potential for the article to signal sociological gender (maleness or femaleness) is
always present.
40
Le soldat can, in other words, sound as if it encodes the sexist claim that the normal soldier is
male. When meaningless grammatical categories influence perception, then, it may be because they once were
meaningful perceptual categories and their potential as meaningful perceptual categories has never completely
disappeared.

B. Discourse, culture and ideology
Three key terms in the formulation of the SW hyp are language, thought and reality.
- We cannot observe languages. The only thing we can really observe is discourse. Each individual makes a
different set of generalizations, over a lifetime, based on a different set of experiences w/dx, about what the
possibilities are for adapting to the world via lgg. Each individuals knowledge about lg is different, and each
individuals actual utterances are different.

38
Le lait (milk) is masculine.
39
To gain better insight into the problema thats being presented, heres another example question mentioned in the chapter: Does the gramatical
distinction btw mass and count nouns correspond to a distinction in the worlds of speakers of English? In other words, are we talking here about a way of
segmenting reality that is specifically English? Does it reflect English-speakers perceptual tendencies in some way?
40
APPARENTLY (no entiendo bien), suele usarse el masculino para soldier y el femenino para guard.
Linguistics II 2012


- Thought can refer to a variety of process, and each way of defining thought is incomplete and to some
extent innacurate, cause none can really capture all that it involves.
- Whorf apparently assumed that theres a level of reality that is independent of lg, so that while ones
worldview might depend on features of ones lg, the reality described by physics would be independent of lg.
But to a solipcist or a philosophical relativist, for ex, the definition of reality is different.
A way to to think about the rs btw lg and world that avoids some of these problems is to think about dx rather
than about lg: to study actual instances of talk, signing, and writing rather than an idealized description of the
knowledge that enables people to talk or write. The idea would be to ask about how the things that people do
when they talk, sign, or write influence and are influenced by their knowledge about lg and the world as they
experience it.

SAMPLE ANALYSIS (of the opening sentences of Sun and Moon by Katherine Mansfield):

In the afternoon the chairs came, a whole big cart full of little gold ones with their legs in the air. And then the flowers came.

Among many possibilities for a part of the first sentence, we have the chairs were delivered, they brought the
chairs, the catererers delivered some chairs, or some people arrived with 100 chairs. Yet, Mansfield chose a
different option and, because this is carefully planned, highly edited literature, we expect every choice the author
has made to be significant. In this case, the authors choices encourage the guess that the narrator is a young
child (a guess that is confirmed as one reads the story). Why? Every grammatical choice reflects the narrators
world and creates this world for the reader:
Contrary to adults, who would classify things such as chairs by style or period, children often classify and
describe things by size and color: a whole big cart; little gold ones.
Choices about cohesion
41
create a world in which things happen one after another (And then the flower
came) w/no explicit logical relationship to one another. The shortness of then the flowers came and In the
afternoon the chairs came sounds like a childrens book, in which there often is a great deal of syntactic
parallelism.
Non-transactive language creates a world in which things happen rather than being caused to happen. The use
of non-transactive language represents a non-analyzed model of the world like that of a child: notice that the
chairs are the subject of come, that the chairs are presented almost as if they had shown up of their own volition.

In this analysis we see how fiction writers create worldviews for their narrators and characters via choices of
what and how to say things. Language creates fictional worlds.
We also see that, each time a particular choice is made, the possibility of making that choice is highlighted; i.e.
each use of an element of grammar in one text makes it more salient (more available for another or a slightly
different use in another text) and each use of one choice makes the whole range of potential alternatives the
grammatical paradigm more salient. Particular choices can come to stand for whole ways of seeing things,
whole ways of being, and those ways of seeing things can come to see natural, unchallengable, and right. Every
linguistic choice is a choice about how the world is to be divided up and explained.

Two important approaches to dx and world have focused on two different aspects of this process:
One focuses on the ways dx and lg, particular speech events and reusable ways of speaking create and
reinforce one another.
The other focuses on the ways dx and ideological dxs create and reinforce one another.
In both approaches, close attention to the details of dx displays how the relatively fixed, unchanging aspects
of lgs and social reality constantly sediment out of and serve as resources for dx and other kinds of social activity,
in a constant cyclical process.

C. Discourse, language and verbal act

It is dx that creates, recreates, modifies, and finetunes both culture and language and their intersection, and it is especially in
verbally artistic discourse such as poetry () and political rhetoric that the potentials and resources provided by grammar, as well as

41
How the semantic connections among sentences are signalled.
Linguistics II 2012


cultural meanings and symbols, are exploited to the fullest and the essence of language-culture relations becomes salient. (Sherzer
1987)
As people construct dx, they draw on the resources provided by lg and on the resources provided by culture
(=patterned organizations, perceptions of, and beliefs about the worlds in symbolic terms). But dx is not just the
automatic result of the application of lg and culture; acts of dx are creative: each instance of dx is another
instance of the laying out of a grammatical pattern or the expression of a belief, so each instance of dx reinforces
the patterns of lg and the beliefs associated w/culture. Furthermore, people do things in dx in new ways, which
suggest new patterns, new ways of thinking about the world

D. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

The controlling theoretical idea behind CDA is that dx is one of the principal activities through which ideology
is circulated and (re)produced. Ways of talking produce and reproduce ways of thinking, and ways of thinking
can be manipulated via choices about grammar, style, wording, and every other aspect of language.
Its goal is often explicitly political. CDAnalysts begin as advocates of social change (most often from a leftist
perspective).
Its goal is to uncover the ways in which dx and ideology are intertwined. Every linguistic choice is strategic, in
the sense that every utterance has an epistemological agenda, a way of seeing the world that is favored via that
choice and not via others.

Here are some of the choices dx producers make:

1. Choices about the representation of actions, actors and events. Who or what is presented as an agent?
Who or what is acted on?
The choice btw passive and active voice is one of a set of choices which speakers inevitably make in
representing actions and events having to do with how semantic roles are mapped onto grammatical structures.

- A man rapes a woman every 6 minutes The role of agent
42
in the active sentence is mapped onto the position of
sentence subject (A man), and the role of patient (acted-upon) is mapped onto the position of grammatical object
(a woman). The sentence is transactive cos an action is represented as having an origin (agent) and a receiver
(patient).
- A woman suffers a rape every six minutes A woman = grammatical subject / semantic experiencer; the semantic
agent is not present. This sentence is non-transactive (the semantic patiente of the active sentence is here the
semantic experiencer)
- A rape occurs every six minutes A rape = grammatical subject; both the semantic agent and patient are absent.

Nominalization - the use of noun words that can also be used as verbs, adjectives, or adverbs - is another way
in which the representation of events, actions, and actors can be manipulated.
- A woman suffers a rape / A rape occurs These choices represent rape as an event, rather than as an action.
Choices involving the assignment of semantic roles and nominalization can represent people as being out of
control of their destinies in the most fundamental ways. Or, for example, passive-voice sentences, in which the
agents and experiencers who might otherwise occupy the grammatical subject slot are omitted, are one of the
ways in which science writers can highlight the belief that scientific activities and observations would be the same
no matter who performed them.

2. Choices about the representation of knowledge status. Many languages provide ways for speakers to
represent their relationships to the claims they make. The use of epistemic forms that indicate certainty can be a
way of discouraging debate; epistemics that indicate uncertainty can make speakers appear to lack intelligence or
confidence.
Adverbials such as clearly/without a doubt/possibly/maybe are evidential or epistemic in this sense.
The use of be in the Simple Present Tense is a way of presenting a claim as universally and hence
incontrovertibly true: Global warming is the result of industrialization; God is good.

42
Were speaking about semantic roles here.
Linguistics II 2012


Verbs such as know, suspect, claim, or think can indicate the level of a speakers confidence about the truth of a
claim.

Speakers can also be represented, via descriptions or reconstructions of their speech, as making epistemic
claims.

3. Choices about naming and wording. Deciding what to call smth can constitute a claim for it, and it
involves a choice among many possibilities. Choices from among existing terms reflect claims about the world.
Euphemism, the use of a supposedly less objectionable variant for a word w/negative connotations, is a
frequent kind of rewording. Dysphemism is the opposite. Choices btw genocide, ethnic cleansing, and
murder are choices on a euphemism-dysphemism scale.
Overwording refers to the use of many different synonyms or near synonyms. The use of many words for sth
suggess its ideological significance.
Choices about the metaphorical representation of people and events both reflect and create ways of imagining
what is normal. Eg. Debate is often characterized metaphorically as war: you marshall your evidence, put up a
fight, and win the argument.

4. Choices about incorporating and representing other voices. All dx is heteroglossic (multi-voiced), i.e.,
discourses incorporate or are constructer from bit and pieces of other discourses, other styles, other voices.
Every representation of dx involves choices that have to do with indicating what was said and how but also
choices about how to create a representation of another voice that fits the purposes of the present discourse.
Such choices are choices about how to represent other people or groups of people and the worlds they inhabit.

Quotatives are words or particles that signal that what follows is to be taken as represented discourse.
Quotation takes the perspective of the represented voice.
Alternatively, other voices can be described from the perspective of the voice that represents the dx of those
other voices.
There are also mixed possibilities.

5. More choices. Any choice about what to say and how to say it can function strategically, or can be
interpreted as having a strategic goal. Here are a few more areas in which strategic choices are possible.

How do pronouns help position speakers, addresses, characters in dx?
What are the effects of negation?
What are the effects of questions?
How do choices about tense and modality work?
How do adjectives, adverbs, and other modifiers create systems of classification?
What are the effects of choices about cohesion?
What is suggested by patterns of turn-taking, turn allocation, repair?
How is ethos (as social identity and as personal authority) created?
What is suggested by choices about politeness, forms of address, honorifics, indirectness?
What other texts and ways of talking are alluded to or used?
What are the ideological effects of manipulating expectations about genre and medium?
How are explicit purposes and implicit ones related?
E. Language ideology

The sets of assumptions, beliefs, and ways of talking about language that help shape what language is like and
how it functions in society. It has to do with the ways in which language is conceived of and thought to articulate
with other aspects of social life. Beliefs about how lg corresponds to reality, about how communication works,
and about linguistic correctness, goodness and badness, and articulateness/inarticulateness are all aspects of lg
ideology, a are beliefs about the role of lg in a persons identity, about how lgs are learned, and about what the
functions of lg should be, who the authorities on lg are, whether and how should lg be legislated, etc.

Linguistics II 2012


Consider, for example, the dominant image of the communication process in the Western tradition - the
conduit metaphor and how this predisposes peoples beliefs.
Ideas are objects to be packed by words and sentences and sent, as if through a tube, to addresses, who unpack
the containers, removing the ideas from the packaging of words.
Thinking about interaction in this way predisposes people to other beliefs about lg and dx. The conduit
metaphor privileges referential uses of language so that its non-referential functions are difficult to keep in sight.
Because of language ideology, were predisposed to see different ways of speaking as different social customes
rather than different ways of being different forms of life.

F. Silence
The worlds that shape and are shaped in dx involve absences as well as presences, but only when silence
becomes the foreground and dx the background do we routinely notice silence and its roles in dx and the world.
Political processes often involve the creation of silences. Struggles over power and control are often struggles
over whose words get used and whose do not and over who gets to speak and who does not.
Silences and the ways in which certain people are silenced can be very difficult to notice.
Learning to notice silence requires learning to imagine alternative worlds and alternative ways of being,
thinking, and talking. The questions involved are: What else could have happened? How would this have looked
in another setting?

G. Ideas presented in a summary section at the end of the chapter
Dx and ideology create and perpetuate one another.

9. Lakoff, George and the Rockridge Institute. 2006. Thinking Points.
Communicating our Americal Values and Vision. New York: Farras, Straus and Giroux. Excerpt on
frames.

Frames and Brains

Frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality and sometimes to create
what we take to be reality. Frames facilitate our most basic interactions with the world they structure our ideas
and concepts, they shape the way we reason, and they even impact how we perceive and act. They structure and
define social institutions, and also define issues. For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and
automatic. Frames have an internal logic.
Social institutions and situations are shaped by frames which determine how we behave in those institutions
and sitch.
All of us know thousands of frames for everyday conventionalized activities.
Many frames come w/language thats meaningless outside that frame (for example, if theres no surgery, a
surgeon is meaningless)

To describe the phenomenon, Goffman used the metaphor life as a play: in social sitch and institutions there
are roles, locations, props and conventional actions.

The hospital frame
Roles Locations/scenario
structure
Props Conventional
actions
Doctor
Surgeon
Nurse
Orderly
Patient
Visitor
Receptionist
Janitor
Operating room
Emergency room
Recovery room
Patient rooms
Waiting area
Operating table
Scalpels
Bandages
Wheelchairs
Operations
Taking temperature
Taking blood pressure
Checking charts
Emptying bedpans

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Internal logic: there are fixed relations and hierarchies among the
roles; theres a fixed logic and order for the scenarios
Certain behavior is rules out, cos the frame determines whats
appropriate and what isnt.

Frames structure our political institutions elections, courts, and legislative and administrative structures for
example; but frame structres appear on a smaller scale too. Fillmore has studied how everyday frames work at
the level of sentences. Eg:
- The verb accuse is defined with respect to an accusation frame, with semantic roles: accuser, accused,
offense, and accusation. The offense is assumed by the accuser to be bad.
- The word spying also comes with a frame. Theres a spy, a spied-upon person, and an act of spying (a
surreptitious attempt by the spy to get incriminating or strategically useful info about the spied-upon person).
The spy brings his or her own framing to the everyday activities of the spied-upon person: an activity that is
innocent from the perspective of the person performing it may be suspicious or incriminating to the spy.

Both Goffmans institutional frames and Fillmores sentence frames have the same structure: semantic
roles, relations btw those roles, a typical scenario.

Its not too crazy to say that political framing is applied cognitive science.

How can we apply the discoveries in linguistics and cognitive science to politics? Is framing ever used to serve political ends
without public awareness? By reframing, can we help reveal important truths about political issues?

Deep frames: The war on terror

For 4 decades conservatives have constructed a system of think tanks and training institutes staffed by right-wing
intellectuals, have managed to dominate the framing of issues and have profoundly changed American politics in
the process. How have they done this?

Through the effective use of surface frames. These build on lexical frames the conceptual frames
associated with words (eg war in is ordinary sense and terror in its ordinary sense). Surface frames are
associated with phrases like war on terror that both activate and depend critically on deep frames. These are
the most basis frames that constitute a moral worldview or a political philosophy. Deep framing involves the
framing of moral values and principles. Deep frames define ones common sense. Without (long-term) deep
frames, theres nothing for (short-term) surface frames to hang on to.

The war on terror frame
Its a conservative frame
After 9/11, there was brief discussion of treating the terrorist acts as an international police problem (take it to
the International Criminal Court, forge an international coalition to find al-Qaeda members, devote American
resources to diplomacy and intelligence gathering, etc. The idea didnt last long. The Bush administration and the
right-wing message machine started promoting war on terror.
The conceptual frame associated with war has semantic roles: armies, a fight, a moral crusade, a commander
in chief, a capture of territory, the surrender of an enemy, and patriots supporting the troops. War implies the
necessity of military action. When in war, all other concerns are secondary.
When terror is added to war, a metaphor is produced in which terror becomes the opposing army. This
enemy has to be defeated. BUT, as it turns out, terror is not an army its a state of mind. As such, it cannot
be beaten on a field of battle. Moreover, the war on terror frame is self-perpetuating, merely being in a war
scares citizens, and reiteration of the frame creates more fear theres no end to the war on terror, cos you
cant permanently capture and defeat an emotion.
Since according to the constitution the military can bring criminals to justice, the military just shoot to kill
cos in a war you assume the enemy is guilty.
Linguistics II 2012


This frame works because it relies on conservative deep frames. The war on terror resonated loudly; when
sth resonates or makes sense, it engages your deep frames. Conservatives have long advanced the idea that
the American military can and should be used to shape foreign policy; American strength equates with the
size and capacity of their military. Conservatives have advanced the idea that wrongdoers should be punished;
theres no need to look at systemic causes of crime. The war on terror activates these deep frames.

The other possible scenario
If progressive (as opposed to conservative) deep frames had been present in the public mind, the idea of a war
on terror never would have made sense. If Americans viewed their strength as their diplomatic ability to forge
international consensus and coalitions, and if they recognized that killing and maiming civilians creates more
terrorists and fosters terrorism, they wouldnt have looked at their military to solve the problem.

How are deep frames embedded in the public mind?
To cultivate new deep frames requires going on the offense with your values and principles, repeating them
over and over again. It must be done over a long period, planned in advance, and perhaps as part of many short-
term campaigns; and it must be done by many organizations working in concert across issue areas.

Issue-defining frames
They characterize the problem, assign blame, and constrain the possible solution; and they block relevant
concerns if those concerns are outside the frame.
They exist at an intermediate depth, btw the surface frames that conceptualize slogans about issues and the
deep frames, those for values, principles, and fundamental concepts that go across issues.

Conservatives have taken the framing initiative and continue to call whats going on in Iraq a war. This frame
has very real implications. If whats happening in Iraq is seen as a war, it has to be a just war, despite how and
why Americans got into it. It has to be a war against evil, or they wouldnt be in it. And Americans have to fight
to the finish.

The war frame not only defines whats happening in Iraq but also constrains the solutions. In this frame, the
cut and run approach
43
applies. The conceptual frame associated with cut and run is: Theres a war being fought
against evil. Fighting requires courage and bravery. Those fully committed to the cause are brave. Those who cut and run are
interested in saving their own skins, not in the moral cause; theyre cowards. The cut and run approach endangers both the moral
cause and the lives of the brave troops who are fighting for it. Those with courage and conviction stand and fight. The cut and
run frame presupposes a war against evil

Americans must reframe whats going on in Iraq and tell the truth: its an occupation, not a war.

Note: for another illustrative issue-defining frame, go to page 34 (original).

Frames not only define issues problems, causes, and solutions;
They also hide relevant issues and causes. Moreover,
Policies and programs make sense only given issue-defining frames.

10. Hrman, Hans. 1973. Psicologa del Lenguage. Madrid: Gredos

La tesis de Whorf ha tenido xito, en parte, porque su autor la hizo verosmil y convincente mediante la
comparacin de idiomas heterogneos. Contrapuso lenguas de los indios de Norteamrica con SAE (Standard
Average European), que comprende la comunidad indiferenciada del alemn, francs, ingls, italiano, etc.
En SAE se emplea una misma palabra para designar la nieve que cae, la nieve en el suelo, la nieve apelotonada,
etc. A un esquimal (para quien la nieve es mucho ms importante) esto le parecera asombroso. A la inversa, los
aztecas, para quienes la nieve era presumiblemente menos importante, comprendan este sector de un modo

43
A typically conservative response to reasonable proposals of withdrawing troops, or setting a timetable or goals in Iraq
Linguistics II 2012


correspondientemente indiferenciado: fro, hielo y nieve se representaban con la misma raz con diferentes
terminaciones.
As, mediante una comparacin intercultural se utiliza aqu una prueba de que no se puede adquirir
probablemente el idioma de una comunidad sin aceptar tambin las diferencias perceptivas que existen para esa
comunidad.

An ms expresivas que las diferencias en el vocabulario de una lengua son los ejemplos de diferencias estructurales
reunidos por Whorf. PREGUNTAR SI HACE FALTA LO DE LA DIFERENCIA ENTRE SAE Y HOPI

La tesis de Whorf, de la relatividad y el determinismo verbales, no dice nada sobre la naturaleza de la relacin que
habla, ni dice de dnde deben esperarse estos paralelos. Este material terriblemente impresionante slo tiene hasta
ahora el carcter y el valor cientfico de la ancdota. Sin embargo, no puede dejar de apreciarse su valor indicativo.

La crtica a la tesis, es que se refieren caos que son plausibles, pero no se tiene en cuenta si existen otros casos
que no lo son.

La psicologa y la etnologa han intentado colocar los datos de Whorf junto a la investigacin emprica. Se
coordina una variacin de un hecho verbal (I) con una variacin de hechos no verbales (C):
I
1
...C
1

I
2
C
2

I
3
...C
3

I
4
C
4

1. Criterio de la variacin: hay que definir lo que vara en I y en C
2. Criterio de la universalidad: aquello a lo que se refiere la investigacin debe existir en las culturas
correspondientes. Por ej: la cuestin de si los alemanes han desarrollado su filosofa a causa de su idioma no tiene
ninguna lgica formal.
3. Criterio de la simplicidad. Por ej: se pueden comparar bien los pesos de algo, xq slo varan en una sola
dimensin, pero para describir las acciones sociales que pueden ser designadas con la palabra justicia se
necesitar un gran nro de parmetros, un sistema muy complejo.

Lenneberg indica que existe una esfera que satisface estos 3 criterios y que, por tanto, es apropiada para la
comprobacin exacta de la tesis de Whorf: el lenguaje de las sensaciones, es decir, las palabras y estructuras que
se emplean para designar la temperatura, la humedad, la claridad, el color.

En el ejemplo de nieve se indic que en SAE se codifica unitariamente un cierto sector de la naturaleza, es
decir, se le comprende en una palabra, mientras que en otros idiomas, no es as. Brown y Lenneberg hablan de la
diferente codificabilidad en este sector en los distintos idiomas. El concepto de codificabilidad puede emplearse
tambin en las operaciones con estructuras verbales (x ej, en las variedades de organizacin de las especies de
palabras ESTO ES LO QUE QUIERO PREGUNTAR SI SIRVE) y con las realidades no fsicas (como las
estructuras de parentesco).

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