AUTHOR: Ray Jackendoff
TITLE: A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Stephen Stanley Lucek, Trinity College Dublin
INTRODUCTION
From the outset, Ray Jackendoff intends for A User’s Guide to Thought and
Meaning not to be a reference volume for linguists and cognitive scientists,
but rather to be “accessible to anyone curious about thought and meaning” (p.
ix). While there is a considerable amount of linguistic theory in the chapters
that follow, there is very little that a reader without formal training will
struggle to understand.
SUMMARY
In Part 1, Language, Words, and Meaning, Jackendoff sets out the parameters
for this guide. Starting with basic notions of what is language and what is
thought, Jackendoff introduces his audience to the cognitive perspective (the
“‘brain’s eye view’ on speaking and thinking” (p. 3)), to which he assumes
readers will have had very little previous exposure, as a way of understanding
meaning. Making sense of thought and meaning will require “figuring out how a
collection of neurons could give rise to our experiences” (p. 4).
In Chapter 2, we first encounter a central question of this guide: What is a
language? Jackendoff teases out the crucial elements that make up a language:
it must be spoken or signed by a group of people in a certain place; it must
allow users the ability to creatively form new words and ways of combining
words; and it must allow users to link meanings with sounds. Jackendoff
presents two approaches to adopting the rules of a language: some consciously
follow rules of a language, while others unconsciously adopt these rules. The
choice between following rules or not following them accounts for the
possibility of variation amongst notions of correctness. Conforming to the
structural rules of a language demonstrates an adherence to the socially
dominant variety of an area, while nonconformity can be a different kind of
social marker, allowing a speaker to show their “solidarity with [their]
rebellious (or cool) peers” (p. 13).
Chapter 3 turns to Perspectives on English, asking the question “is there such
a thing as English?” This is where we start to see a dichotomy between the
ordinary perspective, which is how the question is interpreted by the general
public and the neural perspective, which is how the question is interpreted by
the Neuroscientist. While the more sophisticated investigation of the neural
perspective can lead to more satisfying solutions, the ordinary perspective
can’t be discounted, as “we can’t explain everything we might want to know
about language from looking at neurons” (p. 16).
In Chapter 4, the ordinary perspective is further examined using sunsets,
tigers, and puddles as instances where the ordinary perspective is more
satisfying than other perspectives. Sunsets don’t exist according to an
astronomical perspective; tigers are differentiated from other large felines
through DNA analysis that was not possible until the late 19th century; and it
can be incredibly difficult to define in scientific terms what constitutes a
puddle and what does not.
We turn our attention to the question of “what’s a word?” in Chapter 5. A
series of sounds make up a word that has one or several meanings, which are
sometimes dependent upon context. Words can live and die. Ultimately, words
are just elements of a system of communication that utilises sound and meaning
to convey ideas between individuals.
The focus of Chapter 6 is this connection between sound and meaning. How can
one collection of sounds (a word) have many related and unrelated meanings? Do
different meanings signal different words? This is how Jackendoff introduces
his audience to polysemy through different uses of ‘smoke’.
In Chapter 7, we see different meanings of meaning (e.g. X means Y). This can
take the form of translations (“‘Rauch’ means smoke”), definitions (“‘Slithy’
means lithe and slimy”), demonstrations (“‘Osculation’ means doing this”), and
explanation of symbols (‘A red light means you should stop’) (p. 33). This
simple grammatical frame can be extended in linkage relationships between
subjects and objects (e.g. “Smoke means fire; This means war”).
Chapter 8 addresses objective and subjective meaning, building on the
established meaning discussions above. There are two types of subjective
meaning: subjective interpretation of words, phrases, or sentences; and
subjective linkage between two situations. Subjective interpretation involves
the listener or reader interpreting meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.
On the other hand, subjective linkage requires the interpretation of separate
situations to establish fact in the first instance, and apply the factual
information to further statements. This second kind of subjective meaning is
more focussed on the speaker rather than the interpreter.
In Chapter 9, Jackendoff establishes 6 essential properties for meanings: 1.
Meanings are linked to pronunciations; 2. Meanings of sentences are built from
the meanings of their parts; 3. Translations should preserve meaning; 4.
Meanings have to connect language to the world; 5. Meanings have to connect
with each other; and 6. Meanings are hidden. Taken together, these properties
provide meaningfulness to language and lead to three further questions: How
are meanings hidden from awareness? How do meanings connect with the world?
and How can meanings be in the head?
Chapter 10 addresses the question of how useful visual images are to meaning.
While images are helpful for perception, they cannot express crucial
information about time, types of discourse, or statements of fact versus
possibility.
We turn to categories in Chapter 11. In the ordinary perspective, category
boundaries are sharply drawn, whereas in the cognitive perspective, smooth
transitions between elements of scales are more widely accepted.
We are introduced to Enriched Compositionality in Chapter 12, which states
that “The meaning of a compound expression (a phrase, sentence, or discourse)
is a function of the meanings of its parts, of the grammatical rules by which
are they combined [sic]–and of other stuff.” (p. 63) Jackendoff spends the
remainder of the chapter considering the “other stuff” that affects Enriched
Compositionality (implicature and discourse connection; ellipsis; reference
transfer; and aspectual coercion) with easy to understand examples.
Chapter 13 intends to start to answer one of the central questions of this
book: What’s the connection between language and thought? While not all
concepts are expressed through language, all concepts have meaning, and paired
with pronunciation, a connection between language and thought exists.
The final chapter of Part 1 asks the question, “Does your language determine
your thought?” Here, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see Carrol (ed.) 1956) is
introduced and explained through the famous example of Tzeltal, which does not
have words that mean ‘left’ and ‘right’, but rather ‘uphill’, ‘downhill’, and
‘transverse’. This is possibly due to the fact that the speakers of Tzeltal
live on the side of a mountain where uphill and downhill are crucial concepts,
but we cannot say much about the way Tzeltal speakers think based on their language. Cultural differences are far more fruitful for understanding
cross-linguistic variation.
Part 2, Consciousness and Perception begins with Chapter 15, where Jackendoff
asks deeper philosophical questions about eternal essences and meaningfulness.
He describes conscious thoughts from the ordinary and cognitive perspectives.
The ordinary perspective considers only the conscious mind where a thought is
the interpretation of meaningfulness through a visual image in the mind.
However, there is a linkage between the conscious mind and the unconscious
mind in the cognitive perspective, using pronunciation as a marker of meaning.
This leads to the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis (UMH) to highlight the
complex inter-workings of pronunciation, meaningfulness, and meaning.
Chapter 16 continues to explain the UMH, two sentences can represent the same
unconscious thought using two phonological handles to connect them. Everyday
phenomena such as having a name on the tip of one’s tongue are explained
through a missed connection between two elements of the UMH.
The focus of Chapter 17 is the difference between consciousness and
unconsciousness. In the ordinary perspective, consciousness equates roughly to
experiential awareness and response to stimuli. This focus continues in
Chapter 18 where consciousness is further examined from the point of view of
psychologists and philosophers. What Jackendoff terms the “modern view of
linguistics” (languages being governed by principles in their heads that are
inaccessible to speakers) presents an example of unconsciousness in language.
This is a question, though, that is better understood in the cognitive
perspective, despite the lack of a clear answer yet.
Chapter 19 deals with three cognitive correlates of conscious thought:
phonology, syntax, and semantics. Each of these systems organises an area of
language, but also can be considered as a cognitive correlate of experience
(or conscious thought). The UMH is expanded to include the unconscious areas
of conscious thought through the addition of a meaningfulness monitor and an
image monitor, both of which are bridges between the conscious and unconscious
minds in processing thoughts which are associated with sounds.
Some theories of consciousness are summarised in Chapter 20, recalling the
neurological and philosophical perspectives on consciousness and how they
relate to the UMH. However, none of these theories appropriately deals with
language, and for that reason, UMH is a necessary endeavour.
Chapter 21 considers how we see objects, and what that can say about our
overall experience of consciousness. Visual understanding also utilises a
conscious/unconscious linking system similar to how language works. Visual
understanding is also completely hidden from our conscious mind, which
reinforces the UMH, through visual media.
In Chapter 22, we find two components of thought and meaning: spatial
structure (how objects are arranged and how they move), and conceptual
structure (all the things that you know, categorised and encoded for
everything we know about them that does not deal directly with language).
These two components inform a further elucidation of the UMH, as they help to
link the visual surface and pronunciation, respectively.
We continue with visual perception in Chapter 23, asking what happens when we
see a fork. This step-by-step approach culminates in Jackendoff’s conclusion:
“We can understand things in the world as belonging to categories only because we (or our minds) construct the categories” (p. 132).
Spatial perception is the focus of Chapter 24, with descriptions of how each
area of spatial perception is experienced. As spatial structure is perceived,
it is encoded for size and shape through haptic perception, and output as
language. There are, of course, limits to haptic perception, and vision is
used in conjunction with haptic perception to form spatial perception.
Chapter 25 concentrates on character tags and content features, which affect
the character of experience and the categorical organisation of objects. The
experience of reality is thus informed, leading to the conclusion that “The
presence of a link between input from the eyes and the visual surface is
(normally) what makes the world look real” (p. 142).
The final chapter of Part 2 identifies other pairs of characteristics or
“feels” that are affected by perception: familiarity and novelty; positive and
negative; sacred and taboo; and self-controlled and non-self-controlled. These
binary relationships help to build conscious experience, incorporating the UMH
to help us understand how the mind works.
Part 3, Reference and Truth, begins with Chapter 27, where the focus returns
to meanings, specifically the referential function of meanings. Everything
that we know about an individual is stored as a detailed reference file that
can be recalled at little notice. These reference files are not limited to
people and physical objects, but rather can be applied to virtual matter.
Jackendoff is able to conclude that “A linguistic expression refers to
something if it’s linked to a reference file” (p. 160). The breakdown between
reference and meaning is the focus of Chapter 28, where reference between two
speakers leads to misunderstanding.
We turn to cognitive metaphysics in Chapter 29, which asks questions about
“how people understand the world,” and “what sorts of entities people’s minds
populate the world with” (p. 166). This allows a simple conclusion that “if we can understand something as an instance of a type, then we must understand the world to contain types” (p. 167).
Chapter 30 brings us back to images and the reference files that are stored
for them. The spatial structure of an image has conceptual structure,
character tags, and linked pronunciations just like those of an object that
exists virtually, so depictions of a virtual pipe and an actual pipe only differ in the character tag “real”.
Our second chapter focusing on cognitive metaphysics continues with Persons in
Chapter 31. This chapter ponders philosophical questions such as. “What is the
soul? And is there a God?”
In Chapters 32 –34, Truth is examined from a variety of perspectives, starting
with the linguistic point of view (Chapter 32), followed by the ordinary
perspective (Chapter 33), and the conceptual perspective (Chapter 34).
Jackendoff describes objective truth and contextual truths before considering
the conceptual process of judging a statement as true. While it is a basic
statement of truth that ‘snow is white’, it is far less clear that ‘Hank is
bald’. Upon hearing these statements, we conceptualise them as true statements
or false statements.
Chapter 35 looks at what happens when there is a disconnect between two or
more areas of perception. Here, competing character tags result in a “huh?”
experience, which is the perceptual equivalent of the ambiguous images in
Chapter 21.
Part 4, Rationality and Intuition takes us in a different direction, beginning
with Chapter 36 where rationality is the focus. Logical forms are described as
prerequisites for rational thoughts that allow rational judgments that are
informed by intuition. Two linked systems for reasoning are proposed: System 1
that is “fast, effortless, automatic, and non-conscious” (p. 214); and System
2 that is “slow, effortful, controlled, linear, conscious—and unique to
humans” (ibid.). Thus, intuition (System 1) and rational thought (System 2)
exist in the mind simultaneously.
But how much rational thinking do we actually do? Jackendoff suggests in
Chapter 37 that since intuition is a byproduct of evolution, it is far more fruitful than rational thinking as we rarely have the time, capacity or information necessary to act rationally. In Chapter 38, Jackendoff explains
the role that rational thinking plays in the overall perception of meaning. By
making a series of judgements about statements and the connections between
them, we create a rational thought process. There are some pitfalls of rational thinking in Chapter 39, as grammatically correct sentences can lack meaningfulness, just as the illusion of authority can influence truth
judgments.
We have a nonlinguistic example of intuition and rational thinking working
together in the example of chamber music in Chapter 40. Interpreting how sheet
music should be played cannot be accomplished by simply reading the notes and
playing them in sequence; it also requires intuition. When an understanding of
the composer’s intentions is linked to intuition, the music “feels right”.
Chapter 41 asks if rational thought can be a craft that is perfected over
time. Musical training involves a teacher imparting their own intuitions and
demonstrations which train the learner to develop their own intuitions. But
knowing when to apply these intuitions involves rational thought, a set of
“feels” that inform your intuition when you encounter a “huh?” moment. In
essence, “The craft is in the proper mixture of intuition and rationality” (p.
235).
Chapter 42 discusses the differences between the sciences and the arts. While
science “seeks abstraction from the surface of appearances”, art “revels in
the character of the surface” (p. 240). It is the blend of rationality and
intuition that makes the humanities (and fine arts, in particular) so
appealing, as we strive to understand more and more about the human condition
through the arts.
In the book’s final chapter, Jackendoff tries to sum up his theses.
Consciousness and unconsciousness, rationality and intuition are are examples
of different areas of the mind that can be blended, and work together through
language. As tempting as it would be to disregard the ordinary perspective for
the cognitive perspective, it’s important to keep these perspectives in
balance. We need both perspectives to understand our world, just as we need
consciousness and unconsciousness, rationality and intuition.
EVALUATION
Perhaps the greatest success of this book is that Jackendoff shows linguists
and nonlinguists alike that while the conceptual perspectives are very
important to what we do, there is certainly value to the ordinary perspective.
As a bridge between practitioners and the general public, this book is
extremely successful. There are elements that linguists who are unfamiliar
with the cognitive will find illuminating, while the pace and structure of the
book lend it to comprehension by a wide range of readers. Some rather detailed
philosophical material is explained in simple terms while Jackendoff’s own
theories on meaning are elucidated in a non-threatening manner.
Perhaps the most effective example in the text is that of chamber music as a
meeting point of rational thought and intuition. Jackendoff has written on
this topic extensively (see, inter alia, Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1982;
Toivonen, Csuri, and Van der See (eds) Forthcoming). It would have been
beneficial to use music examples earlier in the text, leading to the case
study in Chapter 40 as this is an area of expertise for Jackendoff.
The extensive endnotes guide the reader toward more technical works while the
footnotes offer further musings on the issues at hand. There are fewer
typographical errors than we have come to expect in modern publishing, and
none are distracting.
REFERENCES
Carroll, John B. (ed.) 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings
of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, Ray and Fred Lerdahl. 1982. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Toivonen, Ida, Piroska Csúri, and Emile Van der See (eds). Forthcoming.
Structures in the Mind: Essays on Language, Music, and Cognition in Honor of
Ray Jackendoff. Cambridge: MIT Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Stephen Lucek recently completed his Ph D in Linguistics at Trinity College
Dublin. His dissertation explored spatial language in Irish English and its
links to Conceptual Metaphor Theory. He is currently a Research Assistant with
the EUROMEC network (http://www.euromec.eu/). His research interests include
spatial cognition, metaphor variation, and varieties of English.
Noam Chomsky’s new book makes some big, and dubious assumptions about how language evolved.
WHEN the Linguistic Society of Paris was founded in 1873, it famously included in its constitution a prohibition against speculating on the evolutionary origins of language. A few years later, the London Philological Society followed suit. This admonition against positing what, then, amounted to no more than “just so” stories held for well over a century.
In the last couple of decades, the situation has changed, and with good reason. Discoveries in archaeology, cognitive science, primate behaviour, dating of ancient DNA and computational modelling of how languages have evolved mean we can now do significantly better than merely speculate.
Against this backdrop, linguist Noam Chomsky has teamed up with Robert Berwick, a computer scientist. In Why Only Us, they address precisely the question of how language evolved. But at times it feels as if they are still given to speculation.
Chomsky’s global reputation was established in the 1950s and 1960s, when relatively little was known about how children acquire language. Chomsky argued that language – by which he means grammar – can be likened to a mental organ. This “language faculty”, he claimed, provides any normally developing human infant with a genetically determined blueprint for grammar. The idea was that, despite the differences between the world’s 7000 or so spoken languages, they all operate on a common “universal grammar”.
Chomsky has been working on a simplified version of this universal grammar proposal. For early modern humans to have evolved language, the genetic leap that made it possible must have been as simple as possible. This he boiled down to the capacity for a relatively simple grammatical operation that he called Merge back in the early 1990s, which allows words to be combined.
“It’s quite a stretch to suggest that language didn’t evolve to enable communication“
In Why Only Us, Chomsky and Berwick argue that this pared- down version of universal grammar is what would have enabled early humans to make the evolutionary jump from language-less creatures to the loquacious beings of the Upper Palaeolithic, some 40,000 years ago. This, in turn, would have resulted in the unheralded rich cultural explosion around that time, including cave art, jewellery and ritual burials.
Their argument goes like this. As our capability for grammar is genetically programmed, and as no other species has language, it stands to reason that language emerged fairly suddenly, in one fell swoop, because of a random mutation. This is what the authors refer to as the “gambler’s-eye view” in contrast to a “gene’s-eye view” of evolution. The sudden appearance of language occurred perhaps no more than 80,000 years ago, just before modern humans engaged in an out-of-Africa dispersion.
But to be convinced by this, the reader has to swallow a number of sub-arguments that are debatable at best. For one thing, the authors presume the Chomskyan model of human language – that the rudiments of human grammar (or syntax) are unlearnable without an innate knowledge of grammar. Its position seems less reasonable today that it once did.
Developmental and cognitive psychologists now have a clearer sense of the ways in which conceptual and linguistic learning works. A human infant seems to have a range of both primate and species-specific learning mechanisms and abilities that enable the acquisition of language. The emerging consensus is that language acquisition can occur without an innate blueprint for grammar.
Second, the authors make dubious assumptions about the evolutionary trajectory of language, and attempt to convince the reader that Darwinian theory breaks down when applied to language. The issue, they claim, is that no other species has language, and that the cognitive abilities of all extant species simply couldn’t be scaled up to achieve the capability.
In short, as language exists only in our species, without precedent elsewhere, then it did not evolve from some simpler form of communication. Hence, it must have evolved fairly quickly and in one discontinuous jump. As the hallmark of language is a simple, computational syntax-engine, then, so the argument goes, this sort of species-specific event is not at all improbable.
However, this ultimately paints Homo sapiens, a species no more than about 200,000 years old, into a corner. Modern humans become an evolutionary curiosity, isolated from the 2.8-million-year evolutionary trajectory of the genus that led to us. It also amounts to a highly selective and partial presentation of the recent research literature.
Although Berwick and Chomsky are dismissive, recent evidence points to Neanderthals, who died out around 30,000 years ago, as having been, more or less, our cognitive equals. Recent archaeological findings suggest that they possessed a material culture approaching that of late StoneAge humans. And they may have had the anatomy, acoustic facility and cognitive smarts that made language possible.
Moreover, there is clear evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. The implication is obvious: both species must have had language. That being the case, this pushes the origins of spoken language back much further, perhaps even to half a million years ago.
In addition, research in primatology and animal behaviour suggests that some of the precursors for language do exist in other species, ranging from European starlings to chimpanzees – with the latter using a sophisticated gestural form of communication in the wild. In fact, gesture may well have been the medium that incubated language until ancestral humans evolved the full-blown capacity for it.
An influential, alternative view of the evolution of language is to take a bigger-picture perspective from the one that Berwick and Chomsky espouse. The alternative sees language as an evolutionary outcome of a shift in cognitive strategy among ancestral humans, fuelled by bipedalism, tool use and meat-eating.
This new biocultural niche required a different cognitive strategy to encourage greater cooperation between early humans. Building on the rudimentary social-interactional nous of other great apes, an instinct for cooperation does seem to have emerged in ancestral humans. And this would have inexorably led to complex communicative systems, of which language is the most complete example.
Ultimately, Why Only Us is something of a curiosity. It takes a reverse engineering perspective on the question of how language evolved. It asks, what would language evolution amount to if the Chomskyan proposition of universal grammar were correct? The answer is language as a mutation that produces a phenotype well outside the range of variation previously existing in the population – a macromutation. This flies in the face of the scientific consensus. Indeed, the book attempts to make a virtue of disagreeing with almost everyone on how language evolved. To see language bucking the kind of gradual evolutionary change that Darwin proposed is surely a controversial perspective.
“Gestures may have incubated language until humans evolved the full-blown capacity for it“
The reader is asked to swallow the following unlikely implication of their logic: language didn’t evolve for communication, but rather for internal thought. If language did evolve as a chance mutation, without precedent, then it first emerged in one individual. And what is the value of language as a communicative tool when there is no one else to talk to? Hence, the evolutionary advantage of language, once it emerged, must have been for something else: assisting thought.
But this conclusion seems unlikely. The structure and organisation of the world’s 7000 or so languages indicates that its primary function is for communication between individuals. It’s quite a stretch to suggest that language didn’t evolve to enable this sort of interpersonal interaction.
Ultimately, the reader is left with a paradox: the evolutionary view entailed by Chomsky’s stripped down, minimalistic universal grammar calls into question the very account of language Berwick and Chomsky attempt to provide us with.
“This book totally redefines the debate on the evolution of language. By judiciously incorporating recent advances in the theory of evolution and in linguistic theory, Berwick and Chomsky present a decisive case for the rapid emergence of language in the species. A witty and engaging introduction to language from a biological perspective, this is science writing at its best.”
—Stephen Crain, Distinguished Professor, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders
AUTHOR: Chris Featherman
TITLE: Discourses of Ideology and Identity
SUBTITLE: Social Media and the Iranian Election Protests
SERIES TITLE: Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
As the latest volume of the Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse Series,
“discourse of ideology and identity” by Chris Featherman aims to explore the
ways in which ideologies and identities are discursively constructed during
social movements. Based on a case study of the opposition movement against the
2009 Iranian presidential election results, the book questions the master
narratives offered by Western legacy media on Iran and its 2009 post-election
crisis and argues that new media discourses such as Twitter tweets and Flickr
uploads by activists re-entextualize the crisis in a reticulated,
transnational public sphere. The book also examines how English, as a borrowed
language for many Iranian protesters, contributes to the construction of
transnational imaginaries by shaping the protesters’ online identifications.
The book consists of six chapters and two appendices, with Chapters Three,
Four and Five presenting the major research findings.
Chapter One “Opening: Protesting the Results”
Chapter One introduces the research’s general theoretical and socio-political
contexts and the book’s overall structure. The chapter begins by discussing
the increasing importance of social media in social movements, which leads to
two competing views within current academic debates on social media’s
democracy-promoting potential: cyber-utopianism and cyber-skepticism. Instead
of simply picking one side, the author argues that “at the nexus of these
(utopian or skeptic) discourses are, among other notions, ideology, identity,
and the ways in which social actors can generate both communication and
counter-power, particularly in relation to language and technology” (p. 3). In
other words, it is crucial for us to critically examine the contingent links
between knowledge and politics through the lens of discourse as the
connections between language and globalization become increasingly complex,
multifarious, and intrinsic. Another interesting point addressed in this
chapter is the author’s assessment of classic sociolinguistics’ analytical
foci on distinctions and biases. According to the author, such foci are no
longer able to capture how emerging new media discursive practices are infused
by global cultural flows. Thus, there is a need to construct a revised
sociolinguistic approach that frames linguistic analysis in terms of
transnational flows, networks, and social movements, especially during social
protests and conflicts when linguistic tactics are adopted and manipulated for
the purpose of promoting new ideas and new identities.
Chapter Two “’Down with Potatoes!’ Theory, Methods, Contexts”
Chapter Two continues to outline the macro-contexts of the 2009 post-election
crisis and discuss the research’s theoretical and methodological frameworks.
The chapter views the intensified atmosphere during the run-up to the 2009
Iranian presidential election and the protests following it as a result of
three important factors: (1) the Khatami-led cultural reforms during the late
1990s, which, with a vision for Islamic-Iranian modernity, ended up opening a
space for dissent within the Iranian public sphere; (2) the rise of the
Iranian youth population, who, under the growing influence of Western cultural
flows and information and communication technologies (ICTs), becomes the
leading force against the current Iranian governance; and (3) the development
of new media, which offers the information infrastructure for Iranian civil
groups and dissidents to circumvent Iran’s internal media censorship and
blockades against foreign journalists. Building from these insights, the
chapter further addresses how the post-election crisis in Iran demonstrates
that the control of information has become the fundamental struggle in
networked societies. Under this circumstance, discursive practices can
function as power of institutions as well as counter-power of individual
agency (Castells, 2009). In this regard, communication has become an essential
form of network power and, increasingly, communication power is contested in a
globalized context, with English being the dominant lingual-franca
facilitating transnational and transcultural interconnections. Based on the
above theoretical ground, the chapter ends by proposing critical discourse
analysis (CDA), as an appropriate venue to examine the complex theories and
phenomena employed in the networked and transnational discursive practices.
Specifically, the author discusses how the socio-cognitive approach (van Dijk,
2008) and corpus linguistics would address the weakness of the mainstream CDA
framework, especially in terms of traditional CDA’s questionable reliability
and overt political stance.
Chapter Three “Constructing the Protesters’ Identities in the U.S. Media”
Chapter Three examines the discursive construction of ideologies and
protesters’ identities during the 2009 Iranian post-election crisis by U.S.
legacy media. Following key theories on media discourse (e.g. ideology, news
framing, metaphor, etc.), the quantitative electronic analyses presented here
demonstrate how leading U.S. newspapers, through various discursive and
communicative strategies, framed the post-election crisis and the opposition
movement as a conflict between tradition and modernity, with “Iranian politics
as irrational” being a fundamental metaphor throughout the analyzed news
coverage. Another prominent news frame consistently presented by the analyzed
reports was the linkage between protesters and social media, which showed the
general cyber-utopian views currently held by news media. Overall, the shift
of news frames along with the prevailing of the post-election crisis not only
legitimized the U.S. public’s existing biases toward Iran and but also opened
the discursive space for discussing U.S.’s potential intervention in the
crisis. The author locates these findings in terms of the contentious
U.S.-Iranian relations since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and the key role
played by legacy media in maintaining the hegemonic institutional interests in
the government-media nexus (Entman, 2004).
Chapter Four “Borrowed Language: Reentextualizing Symbolic Resources and
Discursively Constructing Stance”
Chapter Four expands the analysis of Iranian activists’ discursive practices
on social media by focusing on the inter-textual and inter-discursive aspects
of these discourses and the ways in which the activists’ tactical use of
social media brought their voices across rhizomatic digital networks.
Specifically, the chapter examines three major discursive tactics by the
activists (i.e. retweeting, hyperlinking, and image re-entextualization) and
argues that these tactics not only facilitated communication coordination and
information dissemination among local protesters, but also sparked “networked
effervescence” that brought the opposition movement in Iran across global
networks and made it part of the transnational political public sphere.
Meanwhile, given English’s prestigious status as a global lingua franca and
its ideological connection to Western modernity in Iran, the Iranian
activists’ tactical borrowing of English in their new media discourses also
suggests the complex cultural politics bound up with English and how it could
function as symbolic resonance for the disempowered to generate counter
communicative power.
Chapter Five “Collective Action and Networked Identifications”
Chapter Five extends the arguments of the previous two chapters by further
discussing the various identifications made by Iranian protesters through
their discursive practices on social media, especially the use of collective
lexical forms and the building of connections between the Iranian opposition
movement and other ongoing social movements. The chapter argues that the
dynamic links within the traditional place-identity nexus (Dixon & Durrheim,
2000) have become increasingly complex due to the growing social media usage
and globalization. Accordingly, the traditional linkages between social
identities and culture, ethnicity, and place are being challenged by an
emerging call for transnational imaginaries and public spheres. English
functions as a transnational vernacular along this process of trans-local
identification. As shown in the new media discourses by Iranian activists, the
logic of collective agency and participation was a central aspect of these
activists’ collective identification and when such logic was echoed by
activists across the globe, the sense of “togetherness” and “global
solidarity” became evident, offering critiques against the nation-state
ideologies held by legacy media.
Chapter Six “Effervescence or Resonance? Closings”
Chapter Six concludes the book with an re-engagement of the key findings in
relation to the theoretical and methodological framework established in
Chapter One. The chapter revisits the key discussions in previous chapters,
such as Iran’s ambiguous attitudes toward Western modernity and technologies,
the compatibility between network theories and a socio-cognitive approach
toward CDA, the role of English in a globalized world, the logic of
participation and its key role in the generation of counter communicative
power, and so on. A profound question emerging from these discussions is the
question of belongingness: how do we define belongingness when meanings become
less embedded in their local contexts and new mobilities are created by
transnationalism and advancing ICTs? This question, among many others, points
out possible directions for future research on new media language and
globalization.
EVALUATION
Overall, this book effectively demonstrates the immense complexity of
discourses of ideology and identity and also reveals how English, as a global
language, is challenging the traditional place-identity nexus when the world
is gradually transformed into rhizomatic organizations. Indeed, discourse
offers us a valuable lens to examine the multiple layers of linguistic
practices and social organizations and the interesting case study on Iran
makes a strong argument or language’s critical role in contemporary social
movements.
The mixed-method adopted by the book is perhaps one of its strongest
attributes; it offers a valuable lesson for future CDA research since it
effectively aids the author in justifying the various findings’ validities and
trajectories. In particular, the discussion of “conceptual blending” in
Chapter Three will be interesting for researchers looking for corpus-based
research designs on news framing analysis.
Additionally, the book’s in-depth theoretical discussions on globalization,
language and identity, and ideology and media discourse provide a sound
theoretical framework addressing both historical and contemporary debates on
the complex interactions among language, media, and society. As such, the book
is most suited for upper-level graduate students and researchers with
backgrounds in sociolinguistics and a good grasp of critical social theories.
On the down side, the book falls short of providing a comprehensive reputation
of the cyber-skeptic arguments. Although the author managed to refute skeptic
arguments such as Morozov (2011) and Dean (2005) by emphasizing the
participatory aspect of discursive practices on social media, this
counter-argument is still not able to address the central concerns offered by
cyber-critics: how can social media be a true democratic tool when the
ideologies circulated through it tend to be biased toward Western modernity,
letting alone the fact that the communications on it are ultimately captured
for profit? Another potentially contentious point is the link established by
the author between the Iranian opposition movement and other social movements.
The question is: “what do they protest against?” If we view the 2009
post-election crisis in Iran as a call for modernity by the Iranian youth
population, then arguably it is fundamentally different from many other social
movements that are fighting against Western modernity.
To conclude, the book provides a good opportunity for those interested in new
media discourse to obtain a comprehensive reading of how discourse functions
as a crucial force shaping ideologies and identities in contemporary
societies. The book’s interdisciplinary orientation would make it interesting
reading for scholars both inside and outside linguistics.
REFERENCES
Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dean, J. (2005). Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of
politics. Cultural Politics, 1(1): 51-74.
Dixon, J., & Durrheim, K. (2000). Displacing place-identity: A discursive
approach to locating self and other. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39,
27-44.
Entman, R. (2004). Projections of power: Framing news, public opinion, and
U.S. foreign policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morozov, E. (2011). The net delusion: The dark side of Internet freedom. New
York: Public Affairs.
van Dijk, T. (2008). Discourse and context: A socio-cognitive approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sibo Chen is a PHD student in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
University. He received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the Department of
Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada. His major research interests are
language and communication, critical discourse analysis, and genre theories.
EDITOR: Dwi Noverini Djenar
EDITOR: Ahmar Mahboob
EDITOR: Ken Cruickshank
TITLE: Language and Identity across Modes of Communication
SERIES TITLE: Language and Social Processes [LSP] 6
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Andrea Eniko Lypka, University of South Florida
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
Linguistic approaches to interconnection among language, identity, and
societal power structures have received significant scholarly attention;
however, few studies explore these interconnections across various modes of
communication. Contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship stretches the
conventional linguistic orientation to identity by conceptualizing it as a
perpetual social sense-making process and a struggle to articulate membership
in a community of practice. Communication in traditional and informal spaces,
including public speech, learning in mainstream schools or heritage language
schools, is impacted by individuals’ (un)conscious ability to negotiate who
they are, how they discursively validate certain positions and avow or resist
socially ascribed identity positions (Davies & Harré, 1999), such as
non-native speaker status, race, minority or ‘other’ status within social
norms, ideologies of majority language and culture, and institutional
discourses that tend to marginalize certain groups or individuals. Depending
on their agency, individuals can choose to contest belonging to a community of
practice by not-participating in the discourse community when marginalized by
normative discourses or by choosing alternative modes of self-presentation in
web-mediated, visual or artistic spaces.
Drawing from the social semiotic view of identity, the fifteen chapters in the
volume edited by Dwi Noverimi Djenar, Ahmar Mahboob, and Ken Cruickshank
expand the earlier language-based definition of identity to multimodal,
semiotic contexts, advocating for a layered approach to examine the dynamics
of identity constitution on a continuum, as opposed to viewing identity as
fixed and pre-established variable. The contributors in this edited
collection, faculty and scholars in the field of language and identity,
recognize identity as a perpetual, strategic, relational, and
multi-directional meaning-making process and action shaped by social norms and
conventions, meta narratives, multimodality, style, and genre. They recognize
that identity is negotiated across various modes of communication, via
different modalities, and semiotic resources, in and through language.
Specifically, identity-in-action emerges in various modes of communication,
such as verbal (Meyerhoff, Cruickshank, Tsung, and Rubino), written (Mahboob
and Wang), visual (Paltridge), or combination of modes, such as images,
speech, gaming, and facial expressions (Bucholtz) or writing, layout, and
speech (Lipovsky). The chapters highlight the fact that identity is both
conditioned and enabled by a web of factors linked to interactional contexts,
existing power relations, and social norms. Because of this interdependence,
identity performance requires strategic orientation toward a set of semiotic
resources.
In line with this multimodal approach to identity, authors problematize
simplistic definitions of identity and uncover the complex process of
constituting a language learner self while maintaining multiple identities as
a student, researcher, adviser, mother, worker, or housewife, for example.
Particular attention is paid to identity-in-action or identity-in-interaction;
how the actions enacted by an individual to belong to a community of practice
intersect with multiple other identities, languages, cultures, and
geographical spaces. The chapters examine how identity is strategically
negotiated in a particular time frame and in various interactional contexts,
i.e., web-mediated communication, media environment, and face-to-face
communication; in informal and formal modes of communication, and hybrid
modalities, such as blogs (Liu), popular fiction (Noverini Djenar), women’s
magazines (Jarkey), general interest magazines (Wang), editorial
communications (Starfield), curriculum vitaes (Lipovsky), and Business English
writing (Zhang), among other modalities. Identity is studied in relation to
majority languages, such as Standard English, host-country language, such as
English or Chinese, and heritage languages, such as Rarotongan (in the chapter
by Cruickshank) and Bequia English (Meyerhoff) across the globe, such as
Australia (Paltridge, Rubino, and Cruickshank), Caribbean (Meyerhoff),
Pakistan (Mahboob), Japan (Jarkey), China (Tsung, Wang, Zhang, and Liu),
Indonesia (Noverini Djenar), France (Lipovski), and the US (Bucholtz,
Starfield, and Nelson). These studies associate identity with topics,
including communities of practice, style, minority languages, code switching,
language variation, social class, ethnicity, race, and mainstream educational
norms.
In the introduction chapter, “Identity and mode as a frame for understanding
social meanings”, the editors provide an overview of identity research, modes
of communication, and the theoretical framework of social semiotic approach
(Kress, 2001) that guides this volume. This section includes thematic and
methodological evaluations of the chapters included in this volume and
furthers the call for interdisciplinary approaches to identity inquiry.
The first two chapters are of particular interest for emerging scholars; these
chapters synthesize identity research and discuss terminology connected to
other chapters, including migrant identity, online identity, language
learning, and blogging. In Chapter One, Brian Paltridge discusses visual
representations of Princess Mary of Denmark and Kylie Kwong, Asian-Australian
celebrity chef. His analysis of news images and of existing research on
identity negotiations illustrates the socially ascribed dimension of identity
embodied both in linguistic repertoires, such as labels, choice of language,
proficiency, and accent and non-linguistic terms, such as clothing and makeup,
to demonstrate or refute an individual’s belonging to a certain community.
Drawing on the “imagined communities” and “imagined identities” concepts
(Norton & Toohey, 2011) in second language acquisition classrooms, Paltridge
concludes that the power of imagination and multimodality to claim membership
in a community of practice can provide a more nuanced approach to identity
inquiry.
From a multimodal perspective, in Chapter Two, Mary Bucholtz conceives style
as a multidimensional negotiation process and action to negotiate identity.
Using sample transcripts and analyses from previous research, the author
demonstrates how a group of high school students construct their identities
within historical, social, or political contexts, by choosing among a wide
range of stylistic markers, such as voice quality, standard, super-standard or
nonstandard language, clothing options, and participating in certain
activities. The complex interactions among these elements create distinctive
identities among groups. The adaptations of certain stylistic elements, such
as designer fashion, strategically index belonging to a particular community
of practice, as well as stance and expertise in the context of interaction.
Inspired by Bucholtz’ definition of style, in Chapter Three, Miriam Meyerhoff
explores frequencies of the variable “be” in past tense marking and
existential constructions in urban sojourners’ Bequia English, using
quantitative research methods. Analysis of interviews with sixty speakers born
in Bequia and field notes reveals that linguistic patterns regarding the
absence or presence of the ‘be’ and past tense marking differ across groups of
speakers from various villages in a Caribbean island.
In the next chapter, Ken Cruickshank examines learner identity negotiation in
non-traditional learning contexts in Australia. Analysis of interviews with
principals and teachers, focus group interviews with 38 students, and field
notes reveal that learners at Chinese, Arabic, and Cook Island Maori heritage
languages schools adopted various strategies to legitimize their membership in
a community of practice or distance themselves from metadiscourses. For
example, to contest racism against Asians in mainstream schools, Asian
participants adopted the label “Chinese” as their ethnic and language identity
marker. The more inclusive Arabic marker was used to unify students from
different ethnic backgrounds in the Arabic language school. Arabic learners
are reported to have used the same marker to contest repressions against
minorities in mainstream schools. Students at Cook Island Maori school are
reported to have developed stronger linguistic and cultural identities in the
community languages schools by participating in cultural performances, such as
dancing and drumming and collaborating with teachers who were less fluent in
the community language, Rarotongan.
In Chapter Five, Linda Tsung uncovers Chinese language learning opportunities
of South Asian migrants, in Hong Kong, using an ethnographic approach.
In-depth interviews with 23 Pakistani, Nepali, Bangladeshi, and Indian
students reveal that even though participants perceived learning Chinese as a
means for achieving upward social mobility, their Chinese learning
opportunities were stifled by teachers and peers who perceived them as less
competent in Chinese, by traditional teaching methods, and by institutional
discourses that devalued participants’ first languages and English language
competency and emphasized participants’ lack of fluency through the
“non-Chinese speaking” label.
In Chapter Six, Antonia Rubino analyzes how members of a working-class
Sicilian-Australian family alternate between the two dominant languages,
English and Sicilian, and the least dominant language, Italian, in
multilingual verbal disputes, drawing on a conversation analytic approach
(Auer, 1984) and Gumperz’s notion of code-switching (1982). The turn-by-turn
analysis of mother-child disputes reveals the complexity of identity and
agency-in-interaction embodied in various linguistic strategies. Family
members drew on a variety of linguistic and cultural resources to perform
their identities during disputes, including transforming the severity of the
discussion into a joke, code-switching to invoke negative evaluations or
contest identity positions, and modifying certain words, such as the Sicilian
‘fummaggiu’ to sound like the Italian ‘formaggio.’
Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics, Ahmar Mahboob in Chapter Seven
unpacks how English language textbooks in Pakistani schools reinforce
ideologies and limit access to global knowledge by including local variants of
English and excluding global English from the educational curriculum. The
analysis of the content and language in textbooks for grades 9 and 10 reveals
that by providing more local content about local culture and national
religious or military heroes and by privileging the genre of biographies,
textbook discourse normalized a national religious and political identity and
limited the development of alternative identities, such as global English user
or academic/professional identity development.
The constitution of housewife identity in the Japanese women’s magazine, The
Housewife’s Companion, is investigated in Chapter Eight by Nerida Jarkey.
Drawing on Bucholtz’ notion of style, Jarkey highlights example excerpts from
articles published in the magazine to discuss textual strategies employed in
the magazine to construct and legitimize the identity of the housewife,
including the use of poetic devices, such as metaphors and simile as well as
the use of honorific language to communicate the role and the persona of the
housewife embodied in the labels of “self-discipline,” “care” and “practical.”
In the next chapter, Wei Wang makes the same point in her analysis of
narrative identities of ordinary people in a collection of 100 most popular
articles in Duzhe, a Chinese general interest magazine with a circulation of 9
million, using positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990). Findings reveal that
the magazine employed a variety of storytelling strategies to increase its
audience and construct an ordinary reader identity through educational
stories. Strategies employed in stories included family-themed narratives,
resolution to the conflict, reflective stance from the protagonist’s
standpoint, and dramatic plots predominantly related to Confucian ethics.
From a sociostylistic approach, Dwi Noverini Djenar defines writer identity as
a negotiation among the writer, genre, and audience. She adopts stylistic
analysis to study authorial stance in teen popular fiction in Indonesia by
examining the use of different negative forms. Using interview data and a
corpus of 6,000 words from two novels by Ken Terate, Noverini Djenar suggests
that Terate’s choice of using different negatives is representative of her
attempt to ease reading for audience and contest standard forms in teenlit.
In Chapter Eleven, Sue Starfield emphasizes the process of her writer and
researcher identity negotiations in academic writing contexts. The analysis of
samples of unpublished and amended texts by editors, as well as responses from
editors on her encyclopaedia entry on researcher reflexivity in applied
linguistics research, reveal that the two texts establish different
relationships with the audience. Starfield suggests that her “non-negotiation”
of use of the first person singular pronoun, “I”, in academic contexts
diminishes her authorial identity: she perceives that the shift of her stance
from a personal style toward a more impersonal style signifies an acceptance
of academic writing norms. The reflexive stance on this non-negotiation
process as well as reflections of her student advising and pedagogy transform
this chapter into an ongoing reflection and contestation of academic writing
norms and positivist research paradigms, revealing that such negotiations
influence identity negotiations beyond the context of a research article.
Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics Theory, in Chapter Twelve, Caroline
Lipovsky provides a case for professional identity construction in applicant
curriculum vitaes (CVs) for a management position at a food company in France,
arguing that the purpose of curriculum vitaes (CVs) is to strategically
establish a relationship between the writer/applicant, recruiter, and
discourses on profession. The comparison of CVs of participants selected for
job interviews and those not selected, reveals that CVs selected for job
interviews strategically utilized nominalizations, bullet points, extended
qualifiers, such as adjectives and prepositions, noun forms, and bolded terms,
as well as synonyms, hyponyms, repetitions, exemplifications, technical terms,
a clear statement of objective, and headers to clarify specific information,
emphasize experiences and skills related to the advertised position. Such
strategies provide coherence, and legitimize applicants’ professional
identities, as opposed to using full clauses and general language used in CVs
not selected for job interviews. The author concludes that such strategic use
of language creates lexical cohesion, increases the readability and clarity of
information, and thus increases the possibility of an applicant to be selected
for a job interview.
A Business English student’s evolving identity as an international business
professional is the topic of Chapter Thirteen by Zuocheng Zhang. The analysis
of the student journals, interviews, classroom observations, samples of the
student’s (Nan’s) writing in business genres, and professionals’ evaluations
of this student’s writing at a university in China suggests that professional
identity is both reflexive and co-constructed between the individual and the
social world. Through this reflective and enacted socialization process, Nan
internalized specific linguistic and rhetorical resources and used these
structures strategically to constitute his professional identity. During this
process, Nan gained understanding of disciplinary norms and practices, genre
knowledge, and developed beliefs in and awareness of what it means to be an
international business professional.
In the next chapter, Jianxin Liu explores the identity development of a female
migrant domestic worker in China using a virtual ethnography. Drawing on
Butler’s performativity theory (1990), the author analyzes blogposts and photo
collages on gender performance posted by blogger Liuman Yan and media reports
on her blogging. Findings reveal the complex nature of Yan’s evolving identity
as a female: blogging and using profane language created opportunities for Yan
to disrupt power relations, censorship, and discourses on heteronormativity
and traditional views of women.
Inspired by performativity theory, theatre studies, and arts-based methods, in
the final chapter, Cynthia D. Nelson focuses on researcher identity
performance in applied linguistics research. The author analyzes scripted
multimodal research performances to further calls for more performative
approaches that engage public audience in applied linguistics research through
arts, poetry, theatre, and other participatory methods.
EVALUATION
Taking a social semiotic approach (Kress, 2001), the authors in this edited
volume, offer a comprehensive perspective on the intersections among identity,
language, socialization across modes of communication. From a
multidisciplinary, performance-based stance, these chapters challenge
reductionist definitions of identity, culture, language, and ideology. They
emphasize a nuanced approach to study interrelations between micro- and macro
contexts, such as language preferences, perceived linguistic, cultural, and
professional competence, family, culture, race, ethnicity, religion, learning
spaces, media, and institutional discourses on language and communication,
arguing that these factors shape identity positions and normalize status quo
in everyday interactional contexts.
The aim of this edited book is to offer a multimodal approach to identity
inquiry from an international perspective. Chapters are an essential read for
educators, students, applied linguists, communication scholars, and
researchers interested in identity and language. The first two chapters
introduce readers to existing identity-related research and operationalize
relevant definitions. The remaining chapters address identity in a variety of
areas, including language learning, mundane interactions, and web-mediated
communication contexts. Investigated are the discursively and semiotically
constructed social identity negotiations of various groups or individuals,
ranging from more visible public figures (Paltridge) to marginalised voices of
ethnic minorities or individuals, such as Mexican migrant youth and high
schoolers in California (Bucholtz), South Asian migrants in Hong Kong (Tsung),
working class multilingual families (Rubino), school students (Mahboob),
housewives (Jarkey), middle-class families (Wang), and researchers (Starfield
and Nelson), among others. Findings reveal that identity is (re)enacted,
(re)interpreted, and sometimes (re)inforced, depending of encoder and decoder
across various cultures, modes of communication, and social contexts, such as
mainstream schools, universities, media, community language centers, peer
pressure, and family as well as genres, such as textbooks, women’s magazines
and digests, popular fiction, business writing, academic writing, CV writing,
and blogs, among others.
This collection of research highlights that identity negotiation is a struggle
for both visible and less visible communities. However, identity negotiation
becomes more nuanced for less visible communities, such as newcomers, migrant
workers and second language learners, who might not have the linguistic and
cultural capital to refute master discourses that construct them as “the
other.” The focus on less visible communities, individual experiences, and
identity negotiations in everyday conversations make this book insightful, as
migrant language learners, community perspectives, and mundane conversational
contexts remain less studied in research. For example, in-depth analyses of
evolving individual identities, such as a female migrant blogger in the
chapter by Liu or the professional socialization of a Business English student
in the chapter by Zhang, are examined in blogs or CV writing, that blur the
distinction between the voices of the creator or writer and audience or user.
For language educators, some chapters provide valuable insights into the way
that social experiences by second language learners mediate their second
language acquisition.
The exploration of language and identity from the perspectives of the majority
and minority community could be more emphasized. To include both perspectives
of majority and minority community, for example, Lipovsky invites recruiters’
comments on CVs and Zhang includes comments by business professionals in his
data collection procedures. Other chapters would have enriched understanding
of identity negotiations by emphasizing this two way interactional process
between the minority group and host society.
To account for a multimodal approach to study identity-in-action, chapters
utilize a wide range of methodologies, including multi-sited video ethnography
(Bucholtz), virtual ethnography (Liu), performed research (Nelson),
conversation analysis (Rubino), narrative analysis (Wang), and a combination
of content analysis and genre analysis (Mahboob), and discourse and narrative
analyses (Zhang), among others. Some chapters provide a more in-depth
examination of methodologies. For example, Meyerhoff foregrounds her study on
linguistic variables from Bequia English by cautioning against privileging
certain research methods in sociolinguistics. The author provides rich
sociohistorical context of the Caribbean villages and clear rationale for
using 100 hours of recorded interviews with sixty speakers born in Bequia and
field notes in a Caribbean island to analyze frequencies of the existence of
“be”, past tense marking, and existential constructions. However,
methodological approaches, including analytical frameworks, could be explored
more in-depth in other chapters. For example, it is unclear how analysis
frameworks and codes from identity research are conceptualized in the
analytical framework in the chapter by Paltridge. A more in-depth discussion
on themes that emerged in the literature and data and the resulting concept
maps could also enrich the methodology section of the chapter by Cruickshank.
Reflexive statements about researchers’ cultural and language backgrounds as
well as their insider/outsider positions related to the participants are
noteworthy in the chapters by Cruickshank and Tsung, as researcher reflexivity
about the research process and researcher-participant power hierarchy provides
another relational dimension to identity inquiry.
Other authors point out the importance of reflecting on research paradigms and
advocate for combining quantitative and qualitative methods to effectively
study a phenomenon. Particularly, Meyerhoff calls for a reflexive examination
of research methods and the interconnections among participant, assumptions
behind methods, and semantics: “our research paradigms should be absolutely
clear about what they think we are explaining, because ultimately this clarity
will fine-tune the connections between what are sometimes seen as quite
disparate fields of enquiry: (i) how speakers operationalize identities; (ii)
the assumptions underlying different sociolinguistic research methods; and
(iii) the workings of formal semantics” (p. 64). Novice researchers might find
the author’s use of clear language to provide her rationale for the
statistical analysis (multivariate analysis) employed in the study noteworthy.
Most chapters establish clear connections with concepts mentioned in other
chapters, easing the reading process for the reader. For example, the chapters
by Paltridge, Meyerhoff, and Noverini Djenar are inspired by Bucholtz’ notion
of style. Other chapters explore similar concepts related to identity in
different contexts. For example, race, traditional practices, language
learning, and educational experiences thematically unite the chapters by Tsung
and Cruickshank. A focus on linguistic strategies in magazines connects the
chapters by Jarkey and Wang, and professional identity negotiations within
academic genres connects the chapters by Starfield, Zhang, and Nelson.
Contributors in this book expand the examination of identity in social spaces,
such as traditional learning contexts, that reinforce existing power hierarchy
and against the backdrop of monolingualism, to multiple socialization
contexts, such as non-traditional learning environments and mundane
interactional contexts. By highlighting the importance of various learning
contexts, modes of communication (spoken, written, visual, or a combination of
these), media (photography), and register (language choice dependent on the
situation) for identity negotiations and positions, they advocate for more
nuanced micro and macro level approaches to the study of identity. In these
chapters, identity as an ongoing meaning-making interactional process is
examined across multiple learning contexts, traditional and nontraditional,
“in-between” spaces, such as community language schools (Cruickshank),
villages (Meyerhoff), or mother-children conflict talk (Rubino) that create
possibilities for identity negotiations within less established power
struggles among ethnicity, culture, family, generation, places of origin, and
religion. For example, by examining identity negotiations in non-traditional
learning environments, such as community languages schools, Cruickshank
suggests that these language schools create possibilities for alternative
identity positions, positions that might allow learners to contest ascribed
labels in mainstream schools. For example, through the more inclusive Cook
Island Maori term, traditional literacy-based language learning shifted to
language learning through cultural activities, an approach that has mitigated
the teacher-student power hierarchy and created opportunities for less fluent
students to adopt this identity maker to preserve their culture and language.
Such findings could enlighten pedagogy in mainstream education and second
language acquisition as well as language policy.
REFERENCES
Auer, P. (1984). Bilingual conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s
Publishing.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of gender. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Davies, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of
selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 20(1), 43-63.
Davies, B. & Harré, R. (1999). Positioning and personhood. In R. Harré & L.
van Langenhove (Eds.), Positioning Theory (pp. 32–52). Oxford: Blackwell.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Kress, G. (2001). Sociolinguistics and social semiotics. In P. Cobley (Ed.),
The Routledge companion to semiotics and linguistics (pp. 66-82). London, UK:
Routledge.
Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (Eds) (2001). Multimodality. London: Sage.
Mantero, M. (Ed.). (2007). Identity and second language learning: Culture,
inquiry, and dialogic activity in educational contexts. Charlotte, NC: IAP
Information Publishing.
Norton, B., & Toohey, K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social
change. Language Teaching, 44(04), 412-446.
Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation.
Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Norton, B. (2001). Non-participation, imagined communities, and the language
classroom. In M. Breen (Ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New
directions in research (pp. 159–171). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Andrea Lypka is PhD candidate in the Second Language Acquisition and
Instructional Technology (SLA/IT) program at the University of South Florida
(USF). Her research interests include learner identity, discourse analysis,
and digital storytelling.
AUTHOR: Ursula Wingate
TITLE: Academic Literacy and Student Diversity
SUBTITLE: The Case for Inclusive Practice
SERIES TITLE: New Perspectives on Language and Education
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Laura Dubcovsky, University of California, Davis
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
The book “Academic literacy and student diversity. The case for inclusive
practice” poses the question of academic literacy in four Anglo speaking
countries: United States, United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. Ursula
Wingate takes into account a diverse student population, with special emphasis
on international students, whose admission is currently a popular trend in
modern universities around the world. The author offers a linear and clear
structure, moving from a general state of the art of academic literacy at the
university level (Chapter 1), to specific models and instructional approaches
(Chapters 2-3). She describes principles and features inherent to
discipline-based approaches (Chapters 4-5) and classifies major themes among
students’ academic experience (Chapter 6). Finally Wingate proposes an
inclusive model of academic literacy for all, considering content, methodology
and evaluation (Chapter 7). She concludes with challenges and institutional
changes embedded in current force market (Chapter 8).
In the first chapter, “Academic Literacy and Student Diversity: What is the
problem?” Ursula Wingate attempts to define academic literacy. She starts by
departing from superficial features of grammar and style that have dominated
the scene through discourses of deficiency and remediation. She also proposes
to reach all students, claiming that although universities show higher numbers
of underrepresented students, there are still persistent inequalities and
serious disadvantages that need to be overcome. Then the author outlines her
epistemological and sociocultural understanding of academic literacy, drawing
on communicative competence parameters (Hymes 1972), community of practice
models (Lave & Wenger 1991), and language socialization theories (Duff 2010).
Finally the author addresses the instructional aspect of academic literacy,
arguing that university professors and lecturers rarely give explicit
explanations to improve their advanced literacy skills in the specific content
area to students. They either overlook language use as they feel responsible
for teaching subject content only, or they send “struggling” students to
remedial classes, which mainly focus on language skills and generic academic
English. In her view, students from all backgrounds need to be taught how to
communicate competently in academic language to be successful in their study
programs.
In the second chapter Wingate focuses on the writing aspect of “Approaches to
academic literacy instruction.” First she provides a general overview that
includes skills, processes, genres, social practices, and socio-political
approaches. She also presents clear “Classifications of approaches to
teaching academic literacy” (Table 2.1 p. 16) and exemplifies with distinctive
models (Lea & Street 1998, Ivanič 2004, Hyland 2002). Then the scholar
analyzes three genre traditions in-depth, comparing and contrasting types of
orientation, teaching aims, and theoretical and contextual underpinnings (Hyon
1996). While Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has a sociological orientation,
it is interdisciplinary in nature and questions the explicit teaching of
genres in the classroom, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and English for
Specific Purposes (ESP) share linguistic orientation, believe in social
functions of genres and promote a visible pedagogy. After her detailed
examination of genre-based approaches, the author advocates for a joint effort
among different genre traditions and an added socio-political layer to textual
analyses in order to improve current teaching of academic literacy.
In the first part of Chapter 3, titled “Current practice in academic literacy
instruction,” Wingate addresses four main limitations observed in university
classrooms: generic teaching, trivialization and marginalization, exclusive
targeting of specific learner groups, and inadequate distribution of
responsibilities between writing experts and subject teachers. The author
provides evidence of reductive practices from thirty-three curricula of
British universities. These programs mostly limit the teaching of academic
literacy to a set of grammatical structures, spelling errors and syntax, focus
on skills and accuracy, and employ fixed templates disengaged from the content
areas. Additionally teachers provide neither explicit instruction nor
systematic and formative feedback. In the second part Wingate revises goals,
methodologies and scope of transformative practices, typically concerned with
nontraditional, non-native and international students. The author concludes
that challenging pedagogies, such as Academic Literacies, Critical English for
Academic Purposes, English as Academic Lingua Franca, and Multilingualism,
call for deeper transformation to embrace more seriously linguistic and
cultural diversity. Among other suggestions, she proposes to abandon dominant
monolingual and one-directional policies, accommodate the needs of all
students, enable minorities to express their views, and incorporate new genres
and social media.
Chapter 4 “Discipline-specific approaches to academic literacy instruction”
discusses the need for collaboration and integration in order to enhance the
quality of academic teaching for all students. As Wingate explains, the
stronger and more consistent the relationship between the writing expert and
the subject matter instructor is, the more successful the academic literacy
instruction will become. To illustrate this joint effort, the scholar traces
a continuum from lower to higher involvement, showing stages of ‘cooperation,’
‘collaboration,’ and ‘team-teaching.’ She also draws examples from Australian
and South African curricula and presents a table with “Increasing levels of
integration” through ‘extracurricular, additional, curriculum-linked, and
curriculum- integrated’ programs (Table 4.1 p. 60). Later in the chapter
Wingate resumes the genre-based literature review, limiting it to empirical
studies based on instructional settings only (Tardy 2006). Although the author
seeks for evidence, she acknowledges that data-driven studies may lack a
strong theoretical framework, show only indirect applications, and employ
authority, rather than experience, as the basis for pedagogical interventions.
Finally Wingate focuses on two effective teaching practices. She finds that
popular textual modeling and explicit teaching may not always be effective.
For example, students often receive inauthentic, limited or less suitable
models, while teachers sometimes implement a “visible pedagogy” that turns out
to be too prescriptive and normative, or driven by monolithic forms and linear
transmission. To overcome theoretical and practical limitations the author
advocates a genre-based approach that combines an informational corpus with
qualitative text analyses in addition to socio-political layers (Adel & Reppen
2008, Biber 2006, and also Chapter 2).
In Chapter 5 “Reading and writing” Wingate complements the construct of
academic literacy by focusing on reading activity. Equally important as
writing (already described in Chapter 2), the reading aspect is nevertheless
often taken for granted (Swales 2002). To compensate for this common
disregard, the author enumerates the beneficial components of skilled reading:
automatic recognition skills, vocabulary and structural knowledge, formal
discourse structure knowledge, content/world background knowledge, synthesis
and evaluation skills/strategies, and metacognitive knowledge and skills
monitoring (Grabe 1991). Then she summarizes three models that include
relevant reading epistemologies: transmission, translation and transaction
(Schraw & Brunig 1996). After claiming that reading and writing are strongly
related, Wingate selects source-based activities that involve both literacy
components to succeed in academic literacy, such as identifying sources,
selecting relevant information from these sources, and evaluating and
integrating sources in arguments (McCulloch 2013). Finally the author shows
examples of academic reading courses from different universities, emphasizing
academic skills of referencing, paraphrasing and summarizing. Above all she
praises the teaching of academic reading and writing within the context of the
subject area, and the opportunities such teaching affords for practicing
academic skills, socializing in the academic language, and appropriating
literacy behaviors.
In Chapter 6 “Academic literacy development and the student experience”
Wingate describes students’ difficulties as they become novice writers of
academic discourses, especially focusing on international students, because
they constitute an appealing population for universities. The scholar follows
three major themes from the student’s perspective. First, interviewees agree
in the frequent mismatch between academic requirements and student life
experience. Usually instructions are not very explicit, or critical policy
measures, such as plagiarism and attributions, are not clearly spelled out to
foreign students (Lillis & Turner 2001). The second theme refers to critical
thinking and argumentation, closely related to students’ prior knowledge and
background experiences, as well as to their further language and rhetorical
socialization, as expected at the university level (Turner 2011). For most
foreign students identity is the third theme, as it affects how they position
themselves in the classroom, express themselves in their own voices and gain
agency (Morita 2004). Interestingly, these themes are also reflected even in
support-oriented programs that fail to recognize differences in time
management and uses of sources, or in well-intentioned lecturers who offer
superficial feedback and do not facilitate reasoned stances, among other
failures. The scholar claims that these themes demonstrate the need for
explicit teaching, supporting the notion that academic literacy is in fact a
very complex phenomenon that involves technical, conceptual and
epistemological underpinnings.
In Chapter 7 “Towards an inclusive model of academic literacy instruction”
Wingate first shows various literacy models rooted in exemplary practices, and
then introduces her own study, conducted in a UK university across four
disciplines: Applied Linguistics, History, Management and Pharmacy. She
describes her intervention and includes achievements and limitations of “An
inclusive model of academic literacy instruction” (Figure 7.1 p. 128). Through
the visual representation and further explanations, the author clearly
connects the inclusive model to the four principles of (1) focus on genres and
their social context, (2) broad range for all students, (3)
discipline-specific and integrated curriculum, and (4) collaboration between
writing and subject experts. Additionally Wingate describes the content of her
approach, which follows particular SFL features of rhetorical moves (Chang &
Schleppegrell 2011), discourse-semantics (Martin 1992, Ravelli 2004) and
lexico-grammar (Schleppegrell 2004). She also points at the methodology of
her approach that facilitates the teaching/learning cycle of deconstruction,
joint construction, and independent construction. Overall the model embraces
constructivist theories (Vygotsky 1978) and creates scaffolding conditions to
favor genre awareness and critical awareness, especially through group
discussions and tutors’ guided conversations.
The last chapter moves “Towards the implementation of an inclusive model of
academic literacy instruction.” Wingate links the theoretical principles and
arguments developed throughout the chapters to the practical intervention
conducted in her study. She confirms some limitations of the model that
conflict with the cited principles. For example the low number of participants
inhibits the availability for all students, the “add-on” workshops recommended
interfere with an integrated curriculum, and the lecturers’ extra volunteer
work do not reflect institutional support and cooperation. In light of these
findings, Wingate urges for changes at the institutional level, so that
students and instructors receive structural, financial and organizational
support, while universities benefit from a broader and more varied spectrum of
students, as expected in current highly competitive markets. On the one hand
faculty and staff need better preparation for teaching academic literacy in
the content area, high qualitative feedback, as well as better defined defined
working roles and load (Sadler 2010). On the other hand the “inclusive model”
should reach not only typically “needy” students, but a broader diversity of
home and international, native and non-native English speakers, traditional
and non-traditional, first college generation and high-fee paying students.
Finally the “literacy for all” model should tap all aspects of academic
literacy, including communicative competence, the literacy process and text
production (Wingate et al. 2011).
EVALUATION
“Academic literacy and student diversity. The case for inclusive practice” is
a straightforward account of current academic literacy at the university
level. Ursula Wingate reviews relevant literature and summarizes main topics
that affect the epistemology and practice of advanced literacy for a diverse
population. The clear and straightforward tone will capture the interest of
university professionals, especially writing experts and subject lecturers who
work with international and non-English speaking students.
The author presents a neat organization, where goals, contents, methods and
intervention are clearly developed. The accompanying tables and figures
throughout the chapters contribute to the overall tight structure. Moreover
Wingate strengthens her proposed model by including data-driven studies and
anecdotal examples from different experiences in Anglophone countries. The
book has, however, some limitations, as the scholar recognizes, mainly given
by the low-scale of her intervention. It also presents information which is
not entirely new for scholars and practitioners in the field of academic
literacy. However novice instructors and researchers will find the
hierarchical organization and the literature review helpful for deepening and
up-dating understanding. Furthermore they could extract ideas for a practical
manual, useful for collaborative teaching between subject lecturers and
writing experts.
REFERENCES
Adel, A. and R. Reppen (eds.) 2008. Corpora and discourse: The challenges of
different settings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Biber, D. 2006. University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and
written registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chang, P. & M. Schleppegrell. 2011. Taking and effective authorial stance in
academic writing: Making the linguistic resources explicit for L2 writers in
the social sciences. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10(3). 140-151.
Duff, P. 2010. Language socialization into academic discourse communities.
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30.169-192.
Grabe, W. 1991. Current developments in second language reading research.
TESOL quarterly 25(3). 375-406.
Hyland, F. 2002. Teaching and researching writing. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Hymes, D. 1972. On communicative competence. In J. Pride & J. Holmes (eds).
Sociolinguistics (269-293) London: Penguin.
Hyon, S. 1996. Genre in three traditions: Implications for ESL. TESOL
quarterly 30(4). 693-722.
Ivanič, R. 2004. Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and
Education 18(3). 220-245.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral
participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lea, M. & B. Street. 1998. Student writing in higher education: An academic
literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education 23(2).157-172.
Lillis, T. & J. Turner. 2001. Student writing in higher education.
Contemporary confusion, traditional concerns. Teaching in Higher Education
6(1). 57-68.
McCulloch, S. 2013. Investigating the reading-to-write processes and source
use of L2 postgraduate students in real- life academic tasks: An exploratory
study. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12(2).136-147.
Martin, J. 1992. English text: System and structure. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Morita, N. 2004. Negotiating participation and identity in second language
academic communities. TESOL quarterly 38(4). 573-603.
Ravelli, L. 2004. Signalling the organization of written texts: Hyper-Themes
in management and history essays. In L.J. Ravelli & R. Ellis (eds) Analysing
Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks. (104-129) London: Continuum.
Sadler, D. 2010. Beyond feedback: Developing student capability in complex
appraisal. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 35(5). 535-550.
Schleppegrell, M. 2004. Technical writing in a second language: The role of
grammatical metaphor. In L.J. Ravelli & R. Ellis (eds.) Analysing academic
writing: Contextualized frameworks. (172-189) London: Continuum.
Schraw, G. & R. Brunig.1996. Readers’ implicit models of reading. Reading
Research Quarterly 31(3). 290-305.
Swales, J. 2002. Integrated and fragmented worlds: EAP materials and corpus
linguistics. In J. Flowerdew (ed.) Academic Discourse. (150-164) Harlow:
Pearson Education.
Tardy, C. 2006. Researching first and second language genre learning: A
comparative review and a look ahead. Journal of second language writing 15(2).
79-101.
Turner, J. 2011. Language in the academy: Cultural reflexivity and
intercultural dynamics. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Vygotsky, L. 1978. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological
functions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wingate, U., Andon N. & Cogo, A. 2011. Embedding academic writing instruction
into subject teaching: A case study. Active Learning in Higher Education
12(1). 1-13.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Laura Dubcovsky is a lecturer and supervisor in the Teacher Education Program from The School of Education at the University of California, Davis. She has a Master’s in Education and a PhD in Spanish linguistics with special emphasis on second language acquisition. Her areas of interest combine the fields of language and bilingual education. She is dedicated to the preparation of prospective bilingual Spanish/English teachers, especially on the use of Spanish for educational purposes. She collaborates as a reviewer with the Linguistic list serve and bilingual associations, as well as with teachers, principals, and specialists at the school district. She has taught a course that addresses Communicative and Academic Spanish needed in a bilingual classroom for more than ten years. She also published the article, Functions of the verb decir (”to say”) in the incipient academic Spanish writing of bilingual children. Functions of Language, 15(2), 257-280 (2008). Laura continues working on uses of Spanish by bilingual teachers , bilingual home/school connections , and academic language across school disciplines.
EDITOR: Bernd Heine
EDITOR: Heiko Narrog
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis
SUBTITLE: Second Edition
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of South Africa
SUMMARY
When I was a teacher of linguistics, in the 1970s and 1980s, our students
would hear about transformational–generative grammar from the theoreticians,
about Michael Halliday’s systemic–functional grammar from the
language-teaching experts, and maybe about one or two other approaches.
Sometimes they would ask us to dispel their resulting confusion by providing
some kind of comparative guide to linguistic theories, perhaps a document
which showed how one or a few specimens of English would be treated by the
respective theories. I don’t think we ever did what they asked, and it seems
to me that we probably could not have compared the theories by reference to
common examples, because different theories tend to be interested in different
kinds of example. But, far too late for my own students, the book under
review could be seen as an attempt to satisfy that request. (Though, at more
than a thousand pages before the bibliography is reached, I doubt if the
students would have thanked us if we had been able to refer them to it.)
Linguistic theories have multiplied since the 1980s. After the editorial
introduction, the book contains 39 chapters each presenting a different
approach to language description and analysis. (In a few cases, two or three
chapters are devoted to separate aspects of one theory.)
This is a new edition of a book first published in 2010; it has been expanded
to include seven additional chapters. The new chapters are about topics such
as language acquisition, neurolinguistics, phonetics, phonology, and
semantics, whereas the chapters carried over from the first edition mainly
focus on the central linguistic topic of grammar. (There is no indication
that chapters which appeared in the first edition have been revised for this
edition.) Rather more than half of the contributors are based in North
America, most others in Europe, with a sprinkling from Australia, New Zealand,
and Japan. I shall not take the space to list every chapter, but references
to individual contributions as the review proceeds will give an impression of
the overall range of topics and theories covered.
As one might infer from the topics of the new chapters just mentioned, not all
contributions are concerned with rival theories of the same subject-matter.
Patrice Speeter Beddor’s “Experimental phonetics”, for instance, appears to be
entirely compatible with any particular theory about syntax. (Indeed,
although this chapter is a very informative and interesting one, it is not
obvious how it and some of the other new chapters belong in a book about
“linguistic analysis”. It may be that the editors decided that their new
edition should cover the language sciences more comprehensively than the first
edition but were reluctant to modify the book title to reflect that.) The
bulk of contributions, though, offer competing theories about the same or at
least largely overlapping topics. Some authors make this rivalry quite
explicit, for instance Vilmos Ágel and Klaus Fischer (“Dependency grammar and
valency theory”) discuss the question “Is D[ependency] G[rammar] the best of
the theories presented in this handbook?”
Contributions differ, too, in the extent to which they are partisan. Some are
not; for instance Eric Pederson (“Linguistic relativity”) is admirably
even-handed in discussing both arguments for and arguments against what is
often called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (a term which Pederson regards as a
misnomer). A larger number of contributors, though, see their chapters as
opportunities to put their pet theories in the shop window and win converts.
Some are more assertive about this than others. Many 21st-century linguists
may not be surprised to hear that the highest levels of self-confidence are
displayed by the generative grammarians. Cedric Boeckx (“Linguistic
minimalism”) makes no bones about telling us that “There is no question that
the minimalist program is the right strategy to account for properties of FL
[i.e. the language faculty]. Its conceptual/methodological legitimacy can
hardly be questioned …” Readers will no doubt make their own minds up about
that.
Another respect in which contributions vary is in terms of how much prior
knowledge they assume. Probably no-one would consult this kind of book unless
they had at least embarked on undergraduate study of linguistics, but many
contributions could be read by people with no deeper acquaintance with the
subject than that. Several contributions, though, seem to expect readers
already to know a fair amount of linguistic theory of the type relevant to the
respective chapter. Thus, Yan Huang (“Neo-Gricean pragmatic theory”) remarks
that “the constraints on Horn-scales … proposed by Levinson, successfully
rules [sic, for ‘rule’] out [a given symbol-sequence] as forming a genius
Horn-scale”. The term “Horn-scale” is eventually explained on a later page,
for the benefit of those like myself who have never read Levinson, but “genius
Horn-scale” appears nowhere else in the chapter, so far as I have seen, and I
am sure I am not the only linguist who will be baffled. Or again, Guglielmo
Cinque and Luigi Rizzi’s “Cartography of syntactic structures” chapter is
dense with references to journal literature, many of which are far from
self-explanatory. They write that
The very simplified structural representations often assumed in the
minimalist literature, expressed by the C-T-v-V system, are sometimes
taken
literally … but the structure of the arguments rarely implies a literal
interpretation, and often is compatible with an interpretation of C-T-v-V
as
a shorthand … with C, T, and v taken as ‘abbreviations’ standing for
complex
zones of the functional structure.
C, T, etc. seem to be explained nowhere in Cinque and Rizzi’s chapter; to me
their statement is totally opaque.
One “grammar” chapter, Martin Haspelmath’s “Framework-free grammatical
theory”, differs strikingly from others, in that it argues that linguists
should avoid allowing their descriptive metalanguage to embody assumptions
about universal features of human language. If there are such universals,
they should emerge from empirical descriptions of individual languages rather
than being imposed on them. Haspelmath notes that “outside the field of
linguistics, metalanguages do not seem to have the role of excluding
impossible phenomena”. (Balthasar Bickel’s “Distributional typology:
statistical inquiries into the dynamics of linguistic diversity” makes a
related point when Bickel writes “There is no need to formulate one’s
explanatory theory in a metalanguage that is full of notions that are unique
to linguistics … and totally insulated from the rest of the cognitive and
social sciences”.) Many other chapters concerned with grammar do appear to
take for granted that an aim of general linguistic theory should be to devise
a notation for grammatical description which permits only those languages
deemed to be learnable by humans to be defined.
One consequence is that these chapters bristle with diagrams and formalisms of
many different kinds: apart from familiar tree structures, various
contributors also use boxes linked by arrows of diverse sorts, algebraic
symbols, data-structure diagrams of the kind used in software engineering, and
other things. A prize for most complex diagrammatic notation should probably
go to Alice Caffarel-Cayron (“Systemic functional grammar and the study of
meaning”), for a diagram labelled “Register variation and instantiation” which
contains pairs of tangent circles, spreading rays, double-headed arrows in
different orientations, and a curly bracket. (Whether all these elements have
well-defined meanings in this author’s theory, or are intended just to suggest
relationships in a more intuitive, vaguer fashion, is not entirely clear.)
The editors write that they found it impossible to organize the contributions
into any logical thematic sequence, so they simply arranged them in
alphabetical order of the main word in the title. This has produced an odd
jumble of topics, for instance after the editors’ introduction the first two
chapters are Eve Clark’s “Linguistic units in language acquisition” and Talmy
Givón’s “Adaptive approach to grammar”, because “acquisition” and “adaptive”
both begin with A. (In fact this scheme is not carried out entirely
consistently. Francisco Yus’s “Relevance theory” is placed among neither the
Rs nor the Ts, but next to the thematically-related chapter by Yan Huang
mentioned above.)
EVALUATION
For anyone wanting to look into some current linguistic theory which he has
heard of but knows little about, this volume would be a good place to start.
It will show what issues seem important to advocates of the theory in
question, and in most cases will point the reader towards other publications
that allow him to go deeper than is possible in a single chapter.
Nevertheless, the book as a whole left me rather depressed. The overall
picture it presents of the current state of linguistics is probably an
accurate one, but it is not a pretty picture.
Linguistics is supposed to be a scientific discipline – a standard one-line
definition of the subject is “the scientific study of language”. Cedric
Boeckx justifies the linguistic theory he presents here in terms of how
natural sciences such as physics and chemistry work. But the evidence of this
book makes it hard to take the scientific pretensions of linguistics
seriously. It is normal and healthy, of course, for a science at any given
moment to contain plenty of disagreement and rival views. But alongside
differences about some issues, one expects to see progressive convergence
towards agreement in other areas. At least, surely, one expects a substantial
degree of agreement about the nature of the data to be accounted for, and
about what would count as acceptable explanations, if they should be
empirically supported. With this book, I have problems both with the
contributors’ concept of linguistic data, and with their ideas about what
count as good explanations of data. If I give specific examples, readers
should please believe that I have no wish to pillory the particular
contributors I quote; they happen to offer particularly clear examples of
tendencies which pervade the book, and pervade much of present-day linguistics
generally.
As an example of the data problem, Vilmos Ágel and Klaus Fischer claim that
one difference between Hungarian and English is that the English verb ‘lie’
(tell an untruth) cannot take a complement clause expressing the content of
the lie. Can it not? I googled ‘lied that’ and was offered “about 328,000
results”, beginning with ‘Have you ever lied that you had a boyfriend …’ and
‘Kelly Baker lied that a young member of her family had cancer …’ In what
sense should these examples not count as English? They look perfectly normal
to me. (A few of the Google examples were irrelevant because they used the
noun ‘lied’ meaning a type of song, but those cases were a small minority.)
At one time questionable claims about “starred sentences” could be refuted
only by reference to purpose-built electronic corpora to which many linguists
had no access, but nowadays Google supplies anyone with information like the
above in seconds. I realize that some linguists will want to say something
like “the ‘lied that’ construction may be frequent in performance but is not
part of native speakers’ true linguistic competence”. However, I just do not
see what sense to make of such a statement. It is like a statement “No true
Englishman fears death in battle”; it is mystical rather than scientific.
Turning to the issue of satisfactory explanation: Yan Huang remarks that “we
can say ‘They summered in Scotland’ [but] cannot say *‘They falled in Canada’
”, and he explains this via a linguistic principle of “pre-emption”: the fact
that ‘fall’ has the verb sense “drop down” blocks it from being used as a verb
similar to ‘summer’ meaning “spend the relevant season”. It is characteristic
of modern linguistics to posit abstract linguistic principles in order to
explain facts which can readily be explained without reference to linguistic
theory. In England we do not use ‘fall’ as the name of a season, we call that
season ‘autumn’ (a word which has no alternative sense), but we too would be
unlikely to say ‘They autumned in Canada’. (NB “unlikely”, not “cannot say” –
I have just said it, or rather written it.) The reason is that there are (or
at least have been) recognized, established social institutions, among those
whose circumstances allow(ed) it, of spending whole summers, or whole winters,
away from home in places with pleasanter weather; hence ‘to summer’ and ‘to
winter’. In spring and autumn the weather is not extreme, so there has been
no established custom of spending those seasons away. Consequently we do not
usually say ‘to spring’ or ‘to autumn’, and Americans do not usually say ‘to
fall’ (in that sense). But if a new custom should arise (presumably for some
non-climate-related reason) of spending whole autumns away from home, very
likely Englishmen would begin saying things like ‘They autumned in Wigan’, and
Americans would start using ‘falled’ the same way.
Noam Chomsky’s ‘Aspects of the Theory of Syntax’ (1965) posited a complex
system of linguistic “selection rules” and “subcategorization rules” in order
to enable his transformational grammars to disallow sentences like:
the boy may frighten sincerity
John amazed the injustice of that decision
the book dispersed
I am sure that the particular formalisms advocated by Chomsky and by other
linguistic theorists nowadays will be diverse, and different from those of
‘Aspects’. But few theorists ever seem to have realized that there was never
any need for such formalisms. The examples quoted are odd not because they
are “poor English”, but because they are good English and say, quite
explicitly and clearly, things that no-one is likely to want to say since they
are obviously untrue. (Sincerity and injustice are abstractions, and
abstractions do not feel emotions. To disperse means for a closely-packed set
of separate units to spread apart, but a book is not a set of separate units
and hence cannot disperse.) I would be surprised to encounter an English
sentence ‘The train climbed from Johannesburg to Pretoria’, but to me it would
be absurd to postulate grammatical machinery to disallow it. It is an odd
sentence because Pretoria is about 1700 feet lower in elevation than
Johannesburg, which is not a fact about the English language or about
Universal Grammar.
To my mind the whole idea of “starred sentences” is a highly questionable one,
though much modern linguistic theorizing takes it for granted. My wife and I
recently addressed the problem of one of our cats stealing the other’s food by
buying a new type of feeding-stations with lids that open and close
automatically under the control of the individual pet’s microchip. The
makers, Sureflap, are an English firm founded recently by a Cambridge
physicist, and the manual provided is well written. So I was initially
surprised to encounter a section headed “Learning your pet into the feeder”
and beginning “When learning your pet into the feeder, make sure all other
pets are kept away”. (It explains how to get the mechanism to respond to a
particular pet.) Surely these word-sequences are not English? – ‘learn’ does
not take an animate object, or an ‘into’ phrase. But the activity described
is novel, and the writer has used English in a novel way to refer to it. I
might have preferred to write “Teaching the feeder to recognize your pet” –
but that wouldn’t be quite right, because the change to the feeding-station is
instantaneous, brought about by a single press of a button, it is the cat
which has to be gradually taught to exploit its resulting behaviour. Perhaps
there would be some other form of words which would have been faithful to that
reality and yet deviated less from established usage; but the manual writer
chose the words I quoted, and he or she is doubtless as much an English native
speaker as I am, so who am I to say the wording is not English? It did not
seem so previously, because no English-speaker had found occasion to use
‘learn’ that way. But now someone has had a reason to use ‘learn’ with that
grammar, and I and other native speakers can certainly understand what is
intended. If Sureflap prospers, in years to come probably no-one will bat an
eyelid at this way of using ‘learn’.
Many theoretical linguists have a concept of “grammaticality” according to
which, at a given time, some fixed (though infinitely numerous) class of
word-sequences are “grammatical” in a given idiolect, though from time to time
the rules of the language or idiolect change so that new word-sequences become
grammatical. They would describe the ‘learn your pet’ usage as one that is
currently ungrammatical (for most speakers) but which may be destined to
become grammatical, under the influence of things such as the Sureflap manual.
To my mind this concept of “grammaticality” is a myth. Putting words
together in novel ways in order to express novel ideas is part of competent
language behaviour. The ‘learn your pet’ example may be a rather extreme case
which, in 2015, would make many English-speakers boggle, but less extreme
cases are normal. To quote John Taylor (2012: 285):
speakers are by no means restricted by the generalizations that they
(may) have made over the data. A robust finding from our investigation
is that speakers are happy to go beyond the generalizations and the
instances that they sanction. Speakers, in other words, are prone to
_innovate_ with respect to previous usage …
Anna Babarczy and I have argued, at length and by reference to concrete
statistical evidence (Sampson and Babarczy 2014), that the distinction between
“grammatical” and “ungrammatical” in natural languages is an unreal one. So
far as we are aware, no linguists before Chomsky’s ‘Syntactic Structures’ of
1957, not even formal linguists, ever used such a concept. But giving up that
conceptual distinction undermines a great deal of what theoretical linguists
believe they are doing. There are far fewer facts standing in need of
explanation by linguistics than linguists commonly suppose.
Another recurring feature of the volume reviewed which seems questionable for
a subject that regards itself as scientific is an undue deference to
intellectual authority, evinced by many (though certainly not all)
contributors. Even some who disagree with Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language
nevertheless quote his writings as somehow licensing their own enquiries,
rather like a mediaeval proto-scientist who felt bound to cite Aristotle
before launching into an investigation which might in fact have owed little to
Aristotle’s ideas. Defending a controversial idea about the cognitive
abilities of human babies and apes, for instance, Ray Jackendoff (“The
parallel architecture and its place in cognitive science”) writes “It is
possible to read certain passages of Chomsky as endorsing such a claim”. I am
not sure that this kind of deference to an influential individual is healthy
for any modern scientific discipline (and I certainly do not believe that
linguistics is exceptional in that respect – cf. Sampson 2015).
Conversely, some contributors ignore prior work which should not be ignored –
not because it is entitled to deference, but because it is so well established
that arguments for contrary points of view are unpersuasive if they do not
give explicit reasons for rejecting the established view. This problem is
particularly noticeable in the chapters on word meaning. Meaning in natural
languages was being discussed intensively by philosophers before linguists had
much to say about it; and if there was one thing that English-speaking
philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s agreed on, it was that words do not have
fixed, definable meanings. (As philosophers commonly put it, there is no
distinction between analytic and synthetic statements.) The idea was argued
at length by writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Morton White, and Willard
Quine, and when I first encountered professional philosophy in the 1960s it
was a leitmotiv of that discipline. Many linguists today, including several
contributors to this book, believe not only that word-meanings can be defined
but that they have promising ideas about how to do it. Yet they rarely even
mention that numerous leading members of a neighbouring discipline have given
reasons to believe that it is impossible. (That could be reasonable, if
linguists had already produced convincing refutations of the philosophers’
view – there is no obligation on a book like this to rehearse past errors of
other disciplines. But the truth is that they never have.)
According to Ray Jackendoff, “nearly universal[ly]” the word ‘ghost’ can be
defined as “a mind (or soul) lacking a physical body”. Jackendoff seems to
know more about ghosts even of an English-speaking variety than I do. (If the
Christian doctrine of the Second Coming is correct, are all the departed
appropriately referred to in the interim as ghosts, as Jackendoff implies?)
As for “nearly universal”, does Jackendoff really have evidence that most
current and past human cultures have had a concept neatly equivalent to
English ‘ghost’? That would surprise me. Cliff Goddard (“The natural
semantic metalanguage approach”) apparently believes that all word-meanings in
all languages can be defined in terms of 65 semantic atoms together with
associated grammatical properties. Thus, his definition of ‘something long’
runs:
when someone sees this thing, this someone can think about it like this:
“two parts of this thing are not like any other parts,
because one of these two parts is very far from the other”
if someone’s hands touch this thing everywhere on all sides,
this someone can think about it in the same way
(‘Hands’ would be further decomposable into atoms of meaning.) Does Goddard
believe that ‘long’ said of a stick or a cucumber is a different word from
‘long’ as in ‘a long way from the Earth to the Moon’ (which cannot be “touched
on all sides”)?
I found some of the “new” chapters in this volume more interesting than the
contributions carried over from the first edition. They discuss concrete
facts that are not well-known and which seem clearly relevant to understanding
how language works, whereas most of the “old” contributions discuss material
which in itself is familiar and trivial, and their only concern is how best to
organize that material into formal models of languages. Even when the
material does require to be accounted for within linguistics, which (as we
have seen) is often not so, it is easy to feel “well, we could describe the
facts this way, or we could use that model”, and hard to see what might hang
on the choice of theory.
If an educated but sceptical non-linguist tried to take the measure of
linguistics by reading this book, it strikes me that when he put the
questionable concept of grammaticality together with the lack of convergence
among different approaches, he could well come to suspect that “theoretical
linguistics” is little more than a self-perpetuating non-subject. He might
ask himself whether practitioners are repressing awareness of the flimsiness
of its foundations, simply because their livelihoods depend on the survival of
the discipline. That suggestion may be entirely mistaken. But I am sorry to
say that, on the evidence of the book reviewed, it is not obvious to me how
the sceptic should be answered.
It may seem that this review amounts to a seriously negative evaluation of the
book, but it is not. It is a negative evaluation of the current state of the
discipline of linguistics. The book reflects this accurately, I believe.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press.
Sampson, Geoffrey. 2015. Rigid strings and flaky snowflakes. To be in
Language and Cognition. Online at < www.grsampson.net/ARsy.pdf >.
Sampson, Geoffrey and Anna Babarczy. 2014. Grammar Without Grammaticality.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Taylor, John. 2012. The Mental Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Geoffrey Sampson studied Chinese at Cambridge University and linguistics and computer science at Yale. He taught linguistics, and later computer science, at the LSE, Lancaster, Leeds, and Sussex Universities, with sabbaticals at Swiss and South African universities and British research institutions. He has published on most areas of linguistics. Since becoming professor emeritus at Sussex he has been a research fellow at the University of South Africa.
EDITOR: Marta Dynel
EDITOR: Jan Chovanec
TITLE: Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 256
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Martine van Driel, University of Birmingham
SUMMARY
(1) Preface: Researching interactional forms and participant structures in
public and social media, by Jan Chovanec and Marta Dynel
The preface focuses on an explanation of the origin of this volume, the
theoretical frameworks it is grounded in and an overview of the articles
contained inside. Chovanec and Dynel believe that with a changing media scape,
it is important that participation frameworks are altered to fit the new media
that audiences are getting involved in. They refer to Goffman’s (1981)
initial work, which came from a more sociological perspective, as well as to a
wide variety of linguistic scholars who used the framework to adopt it to the
more current diverse range of communication (among others: Hymes 1972; Bell
1984; Clark 1996).
They go on to explain their perspective on two different forms of interaction
in the participation frameworks: public media (e.g. TV) and social media; they
have included articles in both areas in this volume. Their main aim with this
volume is to address two topics: (1) “participation frameworks and
interactional phenomena in traditional public media discourses” and (2) “the
nature of participation and interaction in novel discourses arising in
computer-mediated and technology-mediated communication” (Chovanec & Dynel
2015: 10). They explain that they have ordered the articles by the authors’
approaches to participation frameworks (though they mention the articles could
also be grouped by theme: television and film discourse, news discourse and
social media), and they provide the reader with a short overview of each
chapter.
Part 1 – Reconsidering participation frameworks
Participation frameworks and participation in televised sitcom, candid camera
and stand-up comedy, by Alexander Brock
Brock’s article is focused on re-arranging existing participation frameworks
to account for the communication between TV characters (fictitious) as well as
the communication between the collective sender and the TV audience (real). He
shows how to add to existing frameworks by focusing on televised comedy,
specifically sitcoms, candid camera shows and stand-up comedy. Brock refers to
the real communication between the collective sender and the TV audience as
Communicative Level 1 (CL1) and to the fictitious communication between the
characters as Communicative Level 2 (CL2).
Brock considers many different situations in TV comedy which alter
participation frameworks, such as hecklers during a stand-up comedy show,
different camera perspectives (such as Point of View) and studio audiences
present during sitcoms. His use of CL1 and CL2 is helpful in these situations;
yet addressing such a wide variety of participation situations results in a
lack of depth in terms of how these participation frameworks change the
dynamics of audiences and producers, as well as how these participation
frameworks assist in the production of comedic moments. Both these issues are
alluded to by Brock, and he acknowledges that there is a “complexity of things
yet to discover” (45).
(2) Participation structures in Twitter interaction: Arguing for the
broadcaster role, by Fawn Draucker
Draucker’s paper focuses on Goffman’s (1981) theory of three different
production roles: (1) the animator as the participant who “produces the talk
in its physical form” (p 50), (2) the author who wrote the words and (3) the
principal whose ideas are expressed in the words. Draucker argues that when we
analyse Twitter, we should incorporate a fourth role: the broadcaster. She
defines this role as “a ‘followable’ party that makes talk available to
recipients” (p 63).
The role of broadcaster is different from any of the three other roles
described by Goffman (1981) as it can re-distribute previously written tweets
(with its own author, animator and principal) in the form of re-tweets. In
that case, the followable party or the broadcaster, is still considered an
active participant, Draucker argues, as they can be held accountable for the
content of what they re-tweet. The role of broadcaster is also applicable in
the case of company accounts, where one person in the company might be the
animator, author and principal, while the company as a whole will be the
distributor of the tweet through their Twitter account.
Draucker has also included previous research into computer-mediated discourse,
which forms the basis of her idea that the broadcaster is an active
participant in Twitter communication.
(3) Participant roles and embedded interactions in online sports broadcasts,
by Jan Chovanec
Chovanec builds his paper around “Goffman’s (1981) observation that much of
human talk contains embedded instances of prior talk” (p 68). He has taken
this observation and applied it to online sports broadcasts. In his analysis,
he employs frames of interaction based on Fetzer (2006) which reflect the
different levels of interaction. For example in a television broadcast of an
interviewer, the first frame will include the interviewer and interviewee as
well as the studio audience. The second frame is the audience watching at home
and will envelope that first frame. Chovanec’s analysis contains four frames:
(1) the football match, (2) the television broadcast studio, (3) the audience
at home and the online studio, (4) the online recipients. His analysis focuses
on how the interactions within each frame as well as across frames are
represented in the online commentary.
Chovanec’s analysis leads to two main conclusions: (1) embedding leads to a
one-way flow of communication, meaning the final at home audience cannot
interact with the interviewee on screen, but (2) with modern technology it is
possible that final recipients can temporarily enter into a production role,
through online commentary for example. According to Chocanec this reflects the
trend of “participatory journalism” which includes audiences in the production
of media communication.
Part 2 – Participation and interpersonal pragmatics
Troubles talk, (dis) affiliation and the participation order in
Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion boards, by Michael Haugh and Wei-Lin
Melody Chang
Haugh and Chang have analysed a Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion board on
‘mom talk’. Their interest lies in how participants on these forums understand
their roles in the participation order as well as the moral order. By looking
at how participants respond to ‘troubles talk’ which they define as “the
expression of some degree of dissatisfaction or discontent with a particular
situation (…) followed by (dis) affiliation with those troubles by a recipient
(Jefferson 1988)” (p 102). Haugh and Chang lay out three types of talk found
on online discussion boards with interlinked preferred responses: (1) troubles
talk, (2) soliciting advice and (3) complaining.
They explain that participants displaying troubles talk have a preferred
response of displaying emotional reciprocity but can sometimes encounter
dispreferred responses of giving advice (preferred response to soliciting
advice) or blaming or accusing (dispreferred response to complaining).
Their analysis shows that participants show emotional reciprocity through
“mutual encouragement”, “mutual bemoaning” and “empathic suggesting”; however
a small number of responses showed accusing and advising. Whereas in English
culture this can be seen as face threatening, in Chinese culture giving advice
is seen as a supportive response. This leads Huang and Chang to suggest that
more work needs to be done in non-Western computer-mediated communication
(CMC) in order to create the metalanguage to deal with these different
cultural responses appropriately.
(2) Humour in microblogging: Exploiting linguistic humour strategies for
identity construction in two Facebook focus groups, by Miriam A. Locher and
Brook Bolander
Locher and Bolander have analysed status updates on Facebook from two groups:
10 students and young professional living in Switzerland, and 10 UK students.
Their aim was to explore how these participants use humour and how that humour
is used to create their identity. Locher and Bolander start by reviewing
previous research on identity creation on (mainly) social media as well as
briefly investigating how to define humour. Though they never clearly state
their working definition of humour, they explain in their methodology that
they decided what was humorous based on “clear evidence through linguistic
means” and “background knowledge that warranted the status update to be taken
humorously” (p 143).
Through their analysis they identify ten types of humour. The most common
types being (1) appeal to shared knowledge, (2) irony, (3) word play and (4)
self-deprecation. Not all these uses of humour were responded to and used in
co-creating a group identity, but as Locher and Bolander state, since the
statuses are published on a semi-public domain (Facebook) they are intended
for an audience and therefore some form of identity creation. They also argue
for the importance of studying the use of humour over time as one humorous
status update will not lead to the creation of a humorous identity.
The researchers also identified five categories of identity creation: (1)
personality, (2) pastime, (3) humour, (4) work and (5) relationship claims.
Within each of the two groups (Swiss and UK) the individuals used these five
identity claims differently. Locher and Bolander conclude that though
differences could be found in their data, the technological advances that
Facebook has made since their data collection in 2008 make it necessary for
more research to be done.
(3) Impoliteness in the service of verisimilitude in film interaction by Marta
Dynel
Dynel’s paper is the first paper in this collection to take a more theoretical
approach, focusing on impoliteness in film interaction. She draws on the
participation framework to separate the two communicative levels of film: (1)
the inter-character level and (2) the recipient level. The inter-character
level follows similar communicative behaviours as nonfictional situations,
meaning that face threatening acts on this level can be considered impolite by
the hearer (on the same level), whereas the recipient (the TV audience) might
consider face threatening acts on the first level not as impoliteness but as a
form of entertainment depending on the “inferential path devised by the
collective sender” (p 159).
Through examples from the TV-series House, Dynel shows how the impoliteness of
House (the main character) is linked to his power, both his expert power (he
is the best diagnostician) and his legitimate power (he has subordinates) and
how his impoliteness has different responses on each communicative level. She
argues that even though on the inter-character level the impoliteness is
neutralised as part of House’s personality and on the recipient level the
impoliteness is classed as entertainment (this is first-order impoliteness),
researchers can still classify his behaviour as second-order impoliteness.
House’s impoliteness acts are not unmarked, she argues therefore are similar
to how even in close relationships, candor can be viewed as impoliteness.
(4) “That’s none of your business, Sy”: The pragmatics of vocatives in film
dialogue by Raffaele Zago
Zago’s paper continues on a topic similar to Dynel’s, as it looks at the
pragmatics of vocatives both on the inter-character level and on the recipient
level. He starts by giving an overview of English vocatives as well as the
pragmatics of vocatives in film dialogue. The latter details methodologies
used in the past as well as research outcomes. Zago then goes on to
investigate different pragmatic functions and positions of vocatives in
Sliding Doors (SD), One Hour Photo (OHP) and Erin Brockovich (EB). Zago
selected these three films because they contain a variety of interactions.
On the inter-character level, Zago found that the use of vocatives mimics
natural conversation. Vocatives are mainly used as “relational, attitudinal
and expressive” rather than “in their identifying role” (p 203). He also found
the use of vocatives particularly high in confrontational situations; these he
labelled “adversarial vocatives” (p 203). Finally, they also mimic natural
conversation when they are used in the final-position, thereby increasing the
illocutionary force of the sentence.
On the recipient level, Zago found four functions of vocatives: (1) they
simulate natural spoken discourse thereby increasing the viewer’s suspension
of disbelief, (2) they increase “conversation dynamicity”, (3) they foreground
certain segments of dialogue by drawing attention to whom each character is
speaking, and (4) they foreground whole scenes in cases where they are
overused.
Part 3 – Forms of participation
A participation perspective on television evening news in the age of immediacy
by Linda Lombardo
Lombardo’s paper is the first to focus on television news media in this
volume. TV news is still “among the most influential knowledge producing
institutions of our time” (Ekstrom 2002: 274) and is developing constantly to
grow along with the trend towards “communicating effectively” and with
“improvisation and conversation as preferred mode of delivery” (p 212).
Lombardo then compiled a corpus of BBC evening news programmes and is
analysing the reporter – news presenter exchanges through a participation
framework perspective. This dialogic exchange, she says, is performed on
behalf of the audience and includes a ‘liveness’ as it takes the form of a
conversation.
This ‘liveness’ in the reporter-news presenter exchanges is decreasing though
as Lombardo’s corpus shows. The exchanges are shortening with “less discourse
in a conversational mode” (p 229). This is replaced by a quick switches
between news items and the inclusion of live links and invitations to visit
the website and participate in the news through comments. Lombardo argues that
these changes could have a negative effect on the TV audience as there is less
chance for a full understanding of the news event.
She then draws again on Goffman’s (1981) participation framework, stating that
the TV audience is positioned as a “ratified hearer/observer” in the news
presenter – reporter exchanges and, with the directions to the website, is
more and more becoming a “full recipient who can take on a (limited) role in
producing language” (p 229).
(2) What I can (re)make out of it: Incoherence, non-cohesion, and
re-interpretation in YouTube video responses by Elisabetta Adami
Adami’s paper focuses on video responses on YouTube and how cohesion and
coherence are present in them. As YouTube videos allow participants to use a
variety of multimodal resources for response which can result in only loosely
related responses, Adami argues that a framework should be developed to
“account for marginally related exchanges” (p 234). She follows Kress’s
definition that “communication is always a response by one participant to a
prompt” (2010; p 235). Therefore even responses that are not explicitly
cohesive with the initial video can still be analysed as cohesive and coherent
in some way.
Adami analysed 613 video responses to one of YouTube ‘most responded to’
videos entitled ‘best video ever’. The responses, she argues, can be tracked
along “a relatedness continuum” (p 254) which ranges from “fully cohesive and
attuned responses” through four other categories to responses that display “no
explicit or implicit clues of relatedness with the initiating video” (p 254).
With such a wide range of responses, Adami states that the success of a video
does no longer depend on the author’s intended meaning, but instead on its
“prompting potential” (p 255).
Finally she argues that sign-making through the different copy-and-paste
methods participants use in their video responses is influencing what is
accepted as explicit and implicit cohesiveness and calls for further research.
This research will also need to take into account the changing, multimodal
form of online participation, which is creating more focus on
individualisation over community. Perhaps a redefinition of community is
necessary in further research.
(3) Enhancing citizen engagement: Political weblogs and participatory
democracy by Giorgia Riboni
Riboni’s paper investigates the difference between American political weblogs
run by political parties and those run by citizens. Weblogs have been able to
fill a gap in the market by favouring participation, helping to mobilise
opinions and helping to organise citizens’ activities (p 260). Blogs run by
citizens especially are subjective and mainly represent solely the viewpoint
of the author. This is in contrast with blogs run by political parties who
tend to represent the party as a whole rather than one individual. Riboni then
adopts a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach to identify
these differences and how these different blogs represented the 2008 American
elections.
She collected data from 10 citizen political blogs selected by popularity and
from 10 party political blogs selected by their “political creed” (p 263).
With 10,000 tokens taken from each blog, Riboni’s corpus consisted of 200,000
tokens.
Riboni’s analysis focuses on the use of pronouns, both first person singular
and first person plural and finally the discursive construction of the
candidates through the blogs. She shows that citizens’ blogs use more first
person singular pronouns and represent their own ideology in their blogs.
Party blogs use some first person singular pronouns, for example when posts
are written by a member of congress who shares their experience in congress.
They mainly use first person plural pronouns though, as they are representing
the collective party and want to include the audience in that party. Riboni
concludes by showing that the citizen bloggers tended to represent Obama and
McCain (the two presidential candidates) through personal characteristics,
whereas party blogs focused on their political programmes.
EVALUATION
Dynel and Chovanec clearly set out the aims of this volume in the preface;
they are to investigate (1) “participation frameworks and interactional
phenomena in traditional public media discourses” and (2) “the nature of
participation and interaction in novel discourses arising in computer-mediated
and technology-mediated communication” (p 10). A quick answer to whether they
have achieved those aims is yes. In each of the three parts, they give an
opportunity to both scholars in traditional media and scholars in newer media
to adjust existing participation frameworks as well as to propose new ideas.
The traditional media discussed ranges from TV news to film, and while these
topics have been thoroughly discussed in other work, the papers in this volume
are able to give new insight into these media. They do this specifically by
focusing on under-explored parts of Goffman’s (1981) participation framework
(e.g. Brock in Chapter 2), or by focusing on the changes in the media due to
technological advances (e.g. Lombardo in Chapter 9).
The newer media discussed in this volume includes both commonly discussed
media such as Facebook and Twitter, and also less common media such as YouTube
video responses and political weblogs. Especially in the new media chapters,
the variety of methods is striking: corpus linguistics, critical discourse
analysis and multimodality to name a few. This use of a wide variety of
methodologies strengthens the book and its representation of current research
into new media.
Though the volume is coherent in its topic, Dynel’s own paper seems to not fit
as well as other chapters. Although all the articles are related to the topic,
Dynel’s paper is more theoretical than the others. Perhaps the addition of
another more theoretical paper would have made a difference and would at the
same time have added a new perspective on participation in both public and
social media. There is a lot of practical, analysis work in this field, and
more theoretical work like Dynel’s chapter would be a great addition.
I recommend this volume to researchers in both participation and media
research fields. Dynel and Chovanec have successfully integrated these two
research areas, including methodologies and theoretical background from both
fields. As interdisciplinary research is growing, this volume shows how well
different fields can work together.
REFERENCES
Bell, A. 1984. Language Style as Audience Design. Language in Society 13:
145-204.
Clark, H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ekstrom, M. 2002. Epistemologies of TV Journalism: A Theoretical Framework.
Journalism 3(3): 259-282.
Fetzer, A. 2006. ‘Minister, We will see How the Public Judges You’. Media
references in political interviews. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 180-195.
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia
Press.
Hymes, D. 1972. Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In
Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John
Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 35-71. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Jefferson, G. 1988. On the Sequential Organisation of Troubles Talk in
Ordinary Conversation. Social Problems 35(4): 418-441.
Kress, G. 2010. Multimodality. A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary
Communication. London: Routledge.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Martine van Driel is a PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her PhD research focuses on new forms of news media and reader response. Other research interests include: political discourse, multimodality, speech and thought presentation and gender and identity research.
She is a member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and has recently presented reader response data of readers of news live blogs at the annual PALA conference at the University of Kent (UK).
Aside her PhD, she is working on articles on multimodality, political tweets and radio interviews.
EDITOR: Rodney H. Jones
EDITOR: Alice Chik
EDITOR: Christoph Hafner
TITLE: Discourse and Digital Practices
SUBTITLE: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Mariza Georgalou, Lancaster University
SUMMARY
Digital technologies afford miscellaneous ways for people to engage in new
discourse activities and practices, ones which they have not engaged in before
and which have not been possible before (Barton and Lee 2013). In this light,
a volume that addresses discourse and digital practices is a highly welcome
addition towards enhancing our knowledge of what people do with/through
digital discourse and how discourse analysts approach digital texts.
“Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age”
is a collection of 14 studies, first presented at “The Fifth International
Roundtable on Discourse Analysis: Discourse and Digital Practices” (23-25 May
2013, Hong Kong), with a two-pronged aim: i) to explore how discourse analysis
enables us to understand contemporary digital practices, and ii) to determine
how these practices challenge researchers to adjust traditional discourse
analytic tools and advance new theories. Zeroing in on different types of
digital media, examining different kinds of practices and integrating a wide
array of frameworks and approaches, this volume presents a nice panorama of
the current state of research.
In their introduction, which can function as an ideal point of departure for
courses on digital discourse, Rodney H. Jones, Alice Chik and Christoph A.
Hafner detail certain particularities of digitally mediated texts including
texture, intertextuality, dialogicity, multimodality, contexts, affordances,
interactional character, and the conveyance of ideologies.
The first study of the volume, “Discourse analysis of games”, by James Paul
Gee, considers how games can have syntax, semantics and situated meanings
determined by context and socio-cultural knowledge paving the way for the
creation of a field of discourse analysis applied to video games. Taking the
2D indie puzzle platformer video game “Thomas was Alone” as a case in point,
Gee evinces that when we play a video game, we are having interactive,
responsive, turn-based conversations on the basis of the affordances at our
disposal.
The next contribution, Rodney H. Jones’s “Discourse, cybernetics, and the
entextualisation of the self”, analyses 25 of the most highly rated
self-tracking apps available on Apple’s App Store, relying upon his own
experience with these apps as well as those of other users’ as described in
online reviews, blog posts and two focus group interviews. Through a
combination of multimodal and mediated discourse analysis with insights from
cybernetics, media theory, and autoethnography, Jones shows that the texts
produced by self-tracking apps (in the form of analyses, exhortations,
reminders and narratives) “process” their writers and readers in terms of
resemiotisation, retemporalisation, and recontextualisation.
David Barton’s study, “Tagging on Flickr as a social practice”, sheds light on
people’s purposes when tagging on Flickr within the framework of a social
approach to language online, developed from literacy studies. Based on
observations of 30 Flickr users’ photo pages along with online interviews with
some of these users, Barton asserts that tags are not sheer metadata but can
play an instrumental role in meaning-making, enabling users to express
existing and/or new information, convey affective stances towards images, make
“asides”, narrate stories, invent new concepts, and exhibit linguistic
creativity.
In “Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in online reviews”, Camilla Vásquez
focuses on data from user-generated online consumer reviews with particular
reference to the websites TripAdvisor (hotels), Amazon (common consumer
goods), Yelp (restaurants and services), Netflix (films) and Epicurious
(recipes). Her analysis reveals that reviewers adopt a range of diverse forms
of intertextuality and interdiscursivity to ground their opinions, align or
disalign with the evaluations of other reviewers, lend authority to their
claims, educate readers, express tastes and preferences, and forge a sense of
virtual co-membership.
Phil Benson, in his study “YouTube as text: Spoken interaction analysis and
digital discourse”, treats the uploading of a video on YouTube as an
interactional turn, which starts a process of multimodal social interaction in
which users “respond” to the “initiation” of the video via a variety of
semiotic modes. His analysis of a series of YouTube videos entitled “Cantonese
Word of the Week” provides compelling evidence for the usability and
usefulness of the frameworks for analysing spoken interaction (Sinclair and
Coulthard 1975; Stenström and Stenström 1994) in the context of multimedia
digital discourse.
The next contribution, “Co-constructing identity in virtual worlds for
children”, comes from Christoph A. Hafner, who employs positioning theory
(Davies and Harré 1990) to investigate the virtual world of Moshi Monsters.
His discussion is informed by observations of his two children while they were
participating in Moshi Monsters as well as by stimulated recall sessions,
where the children viewed videos of their online activity and then provided a
guided account of it. Hafner concludes that identity in virtual worlds
constitutes a jointly negotiated, interactive process between designer and
user.
Commencing from the same theoretical premises with Hafner, Alice Chik, in her
paper “Recreational language learning and digital practices: Positioning and
repositioning”, takes a 4-week autoethnographic approach to examine the
positioning of language learners in the language learning social network sites
(LLSNSs) of Duolingo and Busuu. What she observes is that learners are
positioned, both textually and multimodally, by the websites to accept certain
conceptualisations of foreign language learning. She also points to the fact
that LLSNSs adopt discursive practices of infantilising learners (e.g. via
cartoonish background colours and figures) as a display of power relations.
In “Investigating digital sex-talk practices: A reflection on corpus-assisted
discourse analysis”, Brian King deals with the practice of “sex talk” in gay
chat rooms synthesising tools from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis
with insights from researcher observation. After working with data from 1,332
participants, emanating from the Queer Chatroom Corpus that he has compiled,
King finds that these chat rooms are mainly places to socialise rather than
places to participate in cyber-sex.
The paper “Apps, adults and young children: Researching digital literacy
practices in context” by Guy Merchant reports on the use of iPad apps to
access interactive stories in early education centres in England, anchoring
his research in the literature on gesture, touch and pointing, and haptics.
The main thrust of Merchant’s argument is that portable screens and apps
contribute significantly to the everyday experience and popular culture of
toddlers and young children, to the same degree as book sharing, television
and related media play. Hence, they should be seen as key ingredients of
educational provision both at home and in early year settings.
In a similar vein, Victoria Carrington, in “‘It’s changed my life’: iPhone as
technological artifact”, is interested in the interaction of a female
adolescent with her iPhone in the construction of everyday life. According to
Carrington’s sociomaterial analysis, an interesting synergy between new
literacy studies, the philosophy of technology, and object ethnography, the
iPhone (by means of its apps, the texts produced within it, and the ways in
which it comes through in the owner’s discourse) facilitates various forms of
communication, displays of identity, information gathering and sharing, and
socialising.
In “Digital discourse@public space: Flows of language online and offline”,
Carmen Lee is concerned with how “internet-specific” language is reconstructed
and recontextualised in offline physical spaces. Her dataset consists of
photographs of public spaces in Hong Kong where internet-specific language is
evident, field notes about the location of the text, and interviews with
passers-by. Situating her discussion within the paradigms of linguistic
landscape research, geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon 2003), literacy studies
and ethnography, Lee cogently argues that the presence of internet language in
offline spaces not only indicates public awareness of netspeak features but
also contributes to the enregisterment of internet language.
Jackie Marsh, in “The discourse of celebrity in the fanvid ecology of Club
Penguin machinima”, explores the social practices embedded in the production
and consumption of machinima (a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema” which
refers to films made by fans in virtual worlds and computer games using screen
capture and editing software), which are created by children and young people
who participate in the virtual world Club Penguin. To do so, she coalesces
Foucaultian discourse analysis with an ethnographic approach that involved
interviews with two key participants and observation of their YouTube channels
and Twitter streams. As she demonstrates, in these online worlds, discourses
of recognition, status and competition create celebrity-fan relationships that
replicate those met outside the peer-to-peer network.
The volume ends with two penetrating critiques on discourses about digital
practices where both authors engage with the theoretical concerns and
empirical calls voiced within critical discourse analysis. Ilana Snyder, in
her contribution “Discourse of ‘curation’ in digital times”, examines the
discourses and practices associated with curation in texts gleaned from the
realms of digital marketing, online communication, education online, and
digital literacy studies. In the context of digital technologies, Snyder
notices that curation comprises the processes of creating, editing,
aggregating, organising, culling, interpreting, producing, testing new
attitudes, rethinking and pushing boundaries. As she aptly points out,
curation is a social practice and as such “it is always ideological, always
rhetorical and often political” (p. 209).
Lastly, Neil Selwyn’s study, “The discursive construction of education in the
digital age”, clusters discourses of digital education into two categories: 1)
discourses of digital re-schooling (according to which digital technology
breaks down barriers between and within institutions, facilitates new ways of
participating and interacting, and allows participants to “bring in” their new
vernacular practices); and 2) discourses of digital de-schooling (according to
which digital technology completely usurps the educational institution placing
emphasis on the idea of “do-it-ourselves”). He concludes that both these sets
of discourses dictate the necessity for educational change.
EVALUATION
This is an intellectually fascinating volume essential for advanced students
and researchers within the areas of discourse analysis, literacy and
multimodality studies. It will also be of interest to those working with
digital media in the fields of education, media and communication studies, and
cultural studies. Previous training in discourse studies and familiarity with
the mechanics of digital communication are seen as a prerequisite for readers.
All contributions confirm the significance, robustness, plasticity and
malleability of the discourse analysis paradigm with reference to contemporary
digital environments. Following very different strands within the paradigm,
the authors succeed brilliantly in analysing a broad spectrum of interesting
topics and multimodal examples tackling at the same time useful concepts such
as “packaging” and “flow” (Gee), “servomechanism” (Jones), “deepened
subjectivity” (Ramsay 2003 in King), “polymedia” (Madianou and Miller 2013 in
Carrington), and “enregisterment” (Agha 2003 in Lee). What is more, nearly
every author provides their own conceptualisation of the term “affordance”
hinging on the enabling/constraining configurations of the digital media under
discussion.
One major strength of this volume is the practical advice given to discourse
analysts who (wish to) conduct research on digital media. Barton underscores
that online life is essentially social; hence the role of other people, both
online and offline, has major implications for the analysis. Vásquez proposes
a sustained period of participant observation of the site/community together
with interviews with contributors and readers so as to acquire additional
insider information and approach the given topic more holistically without
overlooking vital details. Hafner, on the other hand, gives handy tips on how
to prompt participants for comments without embedding assumptions about their
activity. In addition, King, Lee and Merchant touch on the role of digital
technology not just as an object of research but also as a research tool. King
provides a lucid account of ethics and digital research emphasising that “[t]o
treat digital data as inherently public and freely available, and to gather
data with impunity, is to risk ‘poisoning the well’ for future researchers”
(p. 134).
Another laudable feature of the book is its orientation towards taking a
critical approach to digital discourse. Jones cautions researchers that they
should not hallow digital services and apps as these are mainly driven by the
commercial and ideological agendas of internet companies and advertisers. On
the same wavelength, Hafner calls for the critical evaluation of consumerism
discourses represented in some texts within virtual worlds. From an
educational perspective, Selwyn suggests moving “beyond the celebratory nature
of much scholarly work on digital media” (p. 239) and endeavouring to
demonstrate the connection between different types of dominance and inequality
inherent in digital education. The authors also recommend circumspection in
claiming generalisability or representativeness of any findings. The global
potential of digital media and mobile devices does not necessarily entail that
they have global reach. Merchant sees iPads as “placed resources” (Prinsloo
2005) with their use always being infused with “the local as instantiated in
routines, relationships and day-to-day operations, as well as by the beliefs,
understandings and experiences of participants” (p. 147). Carrington, on the
other hand, reminds us that the social advantages accruing from technology are
distributed unevenly given that not all (young) people around the world are
iPhone/smartphone owners.
With the exception of Barton and Lee, the discussions included in this volume
revolve around Anglophone case studies. It would be nice to see examples from
more languages as this would considerably increase the potency of discourse
analysis tools in understanding digital practices. Moreover, the inclusion of
(auto)ethnographies on devices that run operating systems other than iOS would
constitute a valuable asset.
The volume displays a couple of bugs related to typos: “herteroglossic”
(bottom of p. 6) instead of “heteroglossic” and an inconsistency between
“complementarity” and “complimentarity” (top of p. 11).
In sum, the volume at hand is a substantial contribution to the burgeoning
field of digital discourse analysis, which can intrigue and inspire further
fruitful research.
REFERENCES
Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication
23(3–4): 231–273.
Barton, D. and Lee, C. (2013). Language online: Investigating digital texts
and practices. London: Routledge.
Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of
selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20(1): 43–63.
Madianou, M. and Miller, D. (2013). Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital
media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural
Studies 16(2): 169–187.
Prinsloo, M. (2005). The new literacies as placed resources. Perspectives in
education 23(4): 87–98.
Ramsay, S. (2003). Toward an algorithmic criticism. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 18(2): 167–174.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place: Language in the
material world. London: Routledge.
Sinclair, J. M. and Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stenström, A. and Stenström, B. (1994). An introduction to spoken interaction.
London: Longman.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Mariza Georgalou has recently been awarded a PhD from Lancaster University’s Department of Linguistics and English Language, UK. Her research focuses on social media discourse analysis. She has forthcoming research articles in the journals Discourse & Communication, Discourse, Context & Media, and Social Media & Society. See also www.marizageorgalou.com.
AUTHOR: Thomas Hestbaek Andersen
AUTHOR: Morten Boeriis
AUTHOR: Eva Maagerø
AUTHOR: Elise Seip Tonnessen
TITLE: Social Semiotics
SUBTITLE: Key Figures, New Directions
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Weimin Toh, National University of Singapore
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
This book is a collection of interviews conducted with five key figures in the
field of social semiotics. The five scholars interviewed are Christian M.I.M.
Matthiessen, Jim R. Martin, Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen and Jay Lemke.
These scholars have taken Halliday’s concept of social semiotics and developed
it further in various directions. Based on their background, research purpose
and research areas, they have created their own original contributions to
theory and practice. The book consolidates the thoughts of the five scholars
through their interviews and highlights the similarities and differences
between their perspectives and M.A.K. Halliday’s original concept of social
semiotics. The book is well structured into three main components. The first
component, which includes the introduction, serves as a framing chapter for
the book. The second component includes the interviews with the five scholars.
And the final component consists of the concluding chapter, which serves as a
cohesive link for the interviews through the discussion of the central themes
common to each of the interviews.
The book focuses on the qualitative instead of quantitative analysis of the
lived experiences of the interviewees and how their background informs their
various perspectives in social semiotics. Each chapter focuses on in-depth
interviews of one scholar. The chapters are presented using main headings such
as “background” and “language teaching” with specific interview questions
under each of the main headings. There are both common and distinctive
interview questions for the scholars. Common interview questions include, for
instance, asking the scholars for their definitions of key terms such as
“mode”, “meaning”, “context”, “multimodality” and so on. These interview
questions serve as a cohesive thread to not only bind the different interviews
together but also highlight the different perspectives that the scholars take
in social semiotics. There are also distinctive questions asked for each of
the scholars which highlight their unique contributions. For instance, some of
the interview questions for Jim R. Martin focus on appraisal whereas some
unique questions for Jay Lemke focus on the concept of “meta-redundancy” which
he brings from his science background.
In Chapter 1, “Introduction” provides the theoretical context for the
interviews conducted in the later chapters. The authors provide a concise
introduction to M.A.K. Halliday’s social semiotics. As the main aim of the
book is to present and discuss how the five scholars redefined and reshaped
several of Halliday’s original ideas, the theoretical introduction is no more
than a brief outline of the fundamentals of Halliday’s social semiotics. The
introduction also provides some biographical information for the scholars and
a brief outline of their contributions to social semiotics. The chapter ends
by providing an outline of the methodology, i.e. how the interviews were
conducted, gathered and edited.
In Chapter 2, “Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen”, the interview starts by asking
for the scholar’s background. The background of the scholar highlights how he
was introduced to systemics or social semiotics. The chapter then moves to
theoretical discussion with the scholar by asking for his views regarding the
difference between the terms social semiotics and systemic functional
linguistics (SFL). In the first main heading under “SFL and social semiotics”,
the scholar was also asked about the cognitive component in the theory; and
the first section concludes by highlighting the scholar’s emphasis on the
social component of the cognitive component in the theory. The second section
touches on a number of basic concepts such as communication, text and code.
The scholar was asked to define “text”, and indicate the place of the concept
of “code” in systemic functional linguistics. The third section proceeds to
discuss the scholar’s main areas of interest, which is language description.
One of the contributions language description made is the ability to do
text/discourse analysis in more communities operating with different
languages. The fourth section touches on the dialects of SFL, where the
scholar discusses the benefits of the Sydney grammar over the Cardiff grammar
and Chomsky’s generative linguistics. For instance, he indicates the great
value of the holistic thinking of Halliday’s SFL. He also mentions that a key
difference between the Cardiff grammar and the Sydney grammar is that the
Cardiff grammar is modular oriented, whereas Halliday’s grammar is
relational-dimensional. The fifth section discusses context and genre where
the scholar discusses the main difference between Martin and
Matthiessen/Halliday’s approach. For instance, he highlights that Martin was
exploring context and genre in terms of one dimension: the hierarchy of
stratification. In contrast, Matthiessen approaches context and genre in a
two-dimensional way where context was extended from the context of culture at
the potential pole of the cline to contexts of situation at the instance pole.
The remaining sections of the chapter involve the scholar’s discussion of
“meaning”, his definition of “mode” and his multi-semiotic work, SFL and
language teaching, and looking towards the future of SFL.
In Chapter 3, “Jim R. Martin”, the interview starts by discussion of the
scholar’s background to understand how he was introduced to social semiotics
and his inspiration and motivation from practice. The second section discusses
the basic theoretical concepts. It aims to understand how the scholar consider
the relation between SFL and other social semiotic directions, his views on
having a cognitive component in social semiotics and his definition of
“communication”. The third section highlights the scholar’s distinctive
concept, such as “stratification” and discusses his understanding of the
concept. This section also draws links to other scholars such as Jay Lemke in
relation to his concept of meta-redundancy and how the concept is a useful way
to interpret further what stratification really means when there is a
hierarchy of abstractions rising from the phonology. Martin next discusses his
context model, where he highlights the differences between Halliday’s model
and his. For instance, he mentions that his model has two strata which he
terms “genre” and “register” whereas Halliday has one strata which he calls
“context”. Martin also explains why he stratified context whereas Halliday did
not. He was influenced by Mitchell’s (1957) and Hasan’s (1979) work on buying
and selling encounters and he took the idea of staging (text structure) and
reconceived it in terms of a system/structure cycle, so that he had an axial
perspective on genre. He referred to text structure as schematic structure and
attempted to make connection to van Dijk and Walter Kintsch’s work on schema
or script theory. In the section on “semantics”, Martin highlights his
emphasis on the text as the unit of analysis and not the clause. The following
section “appraisal” discusses how Martin came to that concept, and also
multimodal appraisal. The remaining sections discuss Martin’s definition of
“mode”, his view on the differences between SFL dialects, SFL and education
and the future of systemic functional linguistics (SFL).
Chapter 4, “Gunther Kress”, discusses his background and how he first came to
engage in social semiotics. Next, he discusses how his form of semiotics
relates to other forms of semiotics, such as that of Ferdinand de Saussure,
Charles Sanders Pierce or Roland Barthes. He also discusses his view of the
relation between sign, semiotic resource and semiotic system and his emphasis
on the functional more than the systemic in SFL. In the next section, he
defines mode as a social category. In his discussion of “medium”, he indicates
the importance of distinguishing between mode as a representational resource
and medium as disseminated technology. Next, he explains the origin of the
concept of “affordances” and how he uses it. Under the section on “literacy”,
he indicates his avoidance of the term “literacy” because the term indicates
that they have obtained an answer which they have not. Under “text and
communication”, he uses the term text for any semiotic entity which is
internally coherent and framed so that he sees it as distinct from other
entities. Text is a material thing produced via communication which is
semiotic work. He relates “design” to resources that young people need in
order to function in relation to their own wishes in society. In
“applications”, he explains how concepts were applied in learning and
institutional contexts. In the final section “the future”, he highlights the
expansion of SFL as tools to allow social semioticians to do descriptions of
the semiotic beyond language.
Chapter 5, “Theo van Leeuwen”, starts by discussing how Leeuwen’s career
began. The second section discusses his view in relation to the differences
and connections he see between SFL and social semiotics and multimodality. It
also discusses his background as a film semiotician and how it influenced his
theory. This section concludes with van Leeuwen explaining his views on the
difference between his and Kress’s work compared to O’Toole’s work. For
instance, he mentions that O’Toole takes a slightly different approach,
foregrounding the idea of rank, and linking the ranks to specific systems but
without working on the systems in detail. In the next section, he mentions his
view on social semiotics in relation to other semiotic traditions such as
Roland Barthes’ (1973) Mythologies which is part of his overall framework. The
major strengths and weaknesses of the social semiotics approach are also
discussed where he indicates that the social in social semiotics is not always
sufficiently kept in focus. He also mentions his stance on maintaining the
“critical approach” to SFL in contrast to Gunther Kress who has moved in a
direction with less emphasis on a critical approach, and maybe more on a
strategic approach. In the section on “sign making”, he explains his view of
the concept of “sign” and “ motivated sign”. He defines “communication” as a
term for semiotic practices.” He also restricts “text” to actual “textual
artefacts”. More theoretical discussion continues where he explains the
difficulty in defining “multimodality” and “mode”. Then he provides the
definition of “mode” as essentially an immaterial semiotic resource which is
abstract enough to be applicable across different means of expression or
medium. Next, he defines “grammar” as a system that prescribes how language is
used and explains the relation of his notion of stratification to Halliday’s.
The remaining sections of the chapter discuss technology and meaning making,
theory building, linguistics in a multimodal world, his impact, and the future
of SFL.
Chapter 6, “Jay Lemke”, starts with discussion of Lemke’s background by
outlining how he started his academic life in the sciences and later moved to
social semiotics. In the section on “the sign”, Lemke explains his acceptance
of the Peircian concept of icon, index and symbol in contrast to Gunther
Kress. Next, he explains his distinctive concept of “meta-redundancy” drawn
from his science background. Under “metafunctions, communication, text and
genre, Lemke explains how he modified Halliday’s three metafunctions and gave
them new names: presentation, orientation and organisation. Under
“stratification and text”, he explains his introduction of the concept of text
scale, activity scale, and time scale where the fundamental model for his work
came indirectly from developmental biology. More conceptual discussion follows
in which he outlines his major theoretical contributions to the field of
multimodality, gives a brief definition of the term mode, describes how he
distinguishes between modes, and discusses affordances, literacy and
multimodal literacy and the development of a general social semiotics of all
modes. The latter half of this chapter discusses his SFL’s contribution to
science, the relationship between cognition, emotions and aesthetics, his
study of digital media such as computer games and social semiotics and SFL in
the United States. The chapter concludes with his views on SFL today and in
the future.
Chapter 7, “Central Themes”, starts off by providing an overview of the five
scholars interviewed in the book, highlighting their similarities and
differences from Halliday’s social semiotic. The remaining sections focus on
theoretical discussion of systems and concepts. Common threads in the previous
interview chapters are discussed using central themes such as “meaning”,
“sign”, “semiotic system”, “text”, “text analysis”, “context”,
“communication”, “Sydney grammar versus the Cardiff grammar”, “multimodality”,
“mode”, “social critique and design”, “analysis in relation to design”,
“functions and applications”, “education”, and “academia”. The final sections
of the chapter touch on future challenges, hopes and aspirations in relation
to refining theories and concepts and the idea of social semiotics as a grand
theory.
EVALUATION
An important merit of this book is that it enables the reader to see the
multiple perspectives of social semiotics. Through the interviews, the book
achieves its aim in showing how different scholars with different backgrounds
build on or change Halliday’s SFL for their own research purposes and research
areas. This consolidation of various scholar’s interviews is rare. In
consolidating the five scholar’s views, the book enables the reader to
understand their similarities and differences in approaching a theoretical
field. It also allows readers or scholars to understand how a framework is
modified, elaborated or expanded based on different understanding of an
original framework, which in this case is Halliday’s SFL. The authors open the
book with the chapter by providing the theoretical outline of SFL. This brief
outline of SFL is sufficient for linguistic students but non-linguistic
students may have to do more readings on their own to better understand the
other theoretical concepts discussed during the interviews. The brief
biographical background provided for the five scholars interviewed is useful
as it consolidates the key scholars’ background in social semiotics.
In Chapter 2, there is a section which discusses the relationship between
social semiotics and neuroscience. The interview highlights that Halliday and
Matthiessen attempt to explain the functioning of the brain through language
and they also tried to make contact with neuroscientists. Perhaps this part
can be elaborated with more information provided about the outcome of the
contact with the neuroscientists if it has been made. It would be interesting
to have more interdisciplinary insights about how language is related to
cognition.
In Chapter 3, Martin provides a brief overview of appraisal theory and how it
came about. There was the use of terminologies such as “feelings”, “AFFECT”,
“emotions”, “JUDGEMENT”, “ENGAGEMENT” and “APPRECIATION”. Perhaps the authors
could indicate the difference between “feelings” and “emotions” as the
distinction was not highlighted through the interview. Is “feeling” correlated
to “AFFECT” and “emotions” correlated to “JUDGEMENT” since these terms are
used in the same sentence? Or is “emotions” an overarching category that
applies to all the appraisal categories? The interview could also have
included discussion of the relationship between “aesthetic”, “evaluation” and
“emotions”. “Aesthetic” is a term or concept that is frequently seen to occur
with “evaluation” and including the term in the interview would have provided
more insights into Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework.
Another limitation of the study is related to the selection of the
participants for the interview. Five scholars were selected for the interview
and they are assumed to be the key figures in the field of social semiotics.
Perhaps more scholars, such as Peter White, could be included for the
interview to diversify the insights provided even more. Since Kress and van
Leeuwen were both included for the interview, it would be interesting to
include the pairing of Martin and White (2005) to compare their views in
social semiotics.
This book is generally an excellent piece of academic writing and suffers only
from very infrequent spelling and formatting errors. For instance, I have only
spotted one grammatical error (on page 168, “interviewed to this book” should
be “interviewed in this book”). Each chapter links to the next chapter
cohesively and complements each other very well. The framing introduction and
concluding central themes also serve as cohesive links for the interview
chapters. This book is meant for more advanced students and scholars of
linguistics, specifically social semioticians, discourse analysts, and
multimodal discourse analysts and presumes a certain level of familiarity with
social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis concepts. Overall, “Social
Semiotics – Key Figures, New Directions” provides insightful and detailed
interviews of key figures in social semiotic. The interviews are firmly
grounded in the methodology set out in the introduction chapter. Additionally,
Chapter 6 provides a good summary of the interviews conducted in the previous
chapters by structuring the insights into central themes. This systematic
structuring of the interview findings makes it a good and accessible source of
information and inspiration for future work to be conducted by scholars in
social semiotics.
REFERENCES
Barthes, R. 1973. Mythologies. St albans: Paladin.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1979. On the notion of text. In: Sandor J. Petofi (ed.), Text
vs Sentence: basic questions of textlinguistics (Papers in Textlinguistics
20.2) Hamburg: Helmet Buske, pp. 369 – 90.
Martin, Jim R. & Peter R.R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: appraisal
in English. London: Palgrave.
Mitchell, T.F. 1957. The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica: a
situational statement. Hespéris, Archives Berbères et Bulletin de l’Institut
des Hautes-Études Marocaines. Pp. 31 – 71.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Toh Weimin is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature in the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests include social semiotics, multimodality and the study of new technologies like offline and online gaming worlds. Besides his interest in researching gaming worlds, he is also interested in anime and film analysis using a multimodal discourse analysis approach. His current PhD research work involves the creation of a ludonarrative model for video games to understand the different relationships between narrative and gameplay in video games. This theoretical model is supported by the empirical study of players.
AUTHOR: Stephen Pihlaja
TITLE: Antagonism on Youtube
SUBTITLE: Metaphor in Online Discourse
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Lori Gilbert, University of East Anglia
SUMMARY
“Antagonism on YouTube: Metaphor in Online Discourse”, by Stephen Pihlaja, is
a monograph focussing on metaphors within an instance of religious-based
‘drama’, or antagonistic debate, on YouTube. The book is an addition to the
Bloomsbury Discourse Series edited by Ken Hyland, and joins other notable
recent works in the series, which consider online discourse such as online
consumer reviews (Vásquez, 2014), text messaging (Tagg, 2012), and Twitter
(Zappavigna, 2012). Pihlaja’s book complements these works through a
metaphor-focussed discourse analytic investigation of YouTube, which takes a
micro focus on one particular drama ‘event’. Where many studies consider only
comment responses to various online communication genres, this book considers
both comments and videos, thus covering relatively new ground in discourse
analysis of YouTube.
The book is comprised of 6 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction, and
contains a contextualization of the study as a contribution to ‘web 2.0’
research. Chapter 2 provides a narrative account of the data analysed within
the book, followed by an overview of data collection methods and a
methodological introduction to the approach used in this study, as well as an
introduction to ethical considerations. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 each present a
framework and application of different layers of analysis (metaphor analysis,
categorization analysis, and positioning analysis, respectively). Chapter 6
is a summary, and brings together the empirical findings in relation to the
theoretical issues raised throughout the book.
Chapter 1 considers the notion of communities in YouTube, in relation to
previous research on computer-moderated communication (CMC). The study is
framed with a focus on impoliteness, online community theory (Herring, 2004),
and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998).
Chapter 2 begins with a reflexive account of the author’s developing interest
in atheist and Christian YouTube communities between the period of 2006 and
2010. Pihlaja continues with a background of events leading to the particular
drama ‘event’ analysed within the book, referred to by the author as the
‘human garbage’ drama. In brief, this drama was instigated by Yokeup, a
Christian ‘vlogger’ (video blogger) who uploaded a series of videos on YouTube
referring to specific people and groups of people as ‘human garbage’, a
metaphor he defends as an interpretation of a biblical passage. The drama
unfolds as comment responders and other vloggers respond to Yokeup either in
support or criticism of the use of this term.
Following this contextual background, Pihlaja details his data collection
methods and a general procedural account of the identification,
categorization, and description of instances of impoliteness. The author’s
initial analysis consists of a ‘macro-level’ analysis of 20 videos and
responses, which is then narrowed down to 3 ‘exchanges’ (videos plus comment
responses) for micro-level discourse analysis. These three exchanges
represent different configurations of interaction, between Christians and
atheists; atheists and atheists; and Christians and Christians.
Finally, the chapter concludes with an introduction of the three discourse
analytic frameworks used within the study, which are discussed at length and
applied in the following chapters.
In Chapter 3, the author applies the first of three layers of analysis,
metaphor-led discourse analysis, in his investigation of drama in YouTube.
The chapter sections include a theoretical literature review, methodology,
analysis, discussion, and conclusion. The chapter can thus be read as a
stand-alone study focussing specifically on the metaphor discourse analysis of
YouTube discourse.
Pihlaja employs a discourse dynamics approach (Cameron and Maslen, 2010;
Cameron et al., 2009), in order to focus on the development of drama through
the interactive development of metaphors over time.
Through application of this framework, the author shows how the drama in the
dataset develops from a Bible parable (the vine and the branches, John 15) to
the metaphor of ‘human garbage’, as introduced by Yokeup, the drama’s central
figure. This drama continues as the primary instigator subverts negative
responses from Christians by claiming that the term was not his own creation
or interpretation, meanwhile subverting negative responses from non-Christians
by adopting a role of piety as the willing target of non-Christian ‘hate’.
Further interaction between members of the community results in the
interpretation and development of this metaphor via the Christian belief in
‘literal’ readings of the Bible, which results in drama surrounding the
concept of ‘burning’ as a ‘divine’ punishment for non-believers. Meanwhile,
non-Christian participants in the drama, who do not tend to recognise
‘burning’ as a punishment inflicted by God, develop alternative metaphorical
stories of the ‘human garbage’ metaphor as a reference to Holocaust imagery,
and subsequently consider whether Yokeup is a ‘psychopath’ who would not
deserve to be saved in a hypothetical Titanic situation.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the empirical findings support
a dynamic description of metaphor use, in that within actual discourse it is
difficult to differentiate between various descriptions of metaphor (e.g.,
‘systematic metaphor’, ‘parables’). Finally, Pihlaja relates the metaphor
development to Foucault’s notion of control (1981), positive and negative face
(Brown and Levinson, 1987), and evaluative language.
Chapter 4 comprises an application of membership categorization analysis
(Sacks, 1995; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002, 2009) to the dataset. As with
Chapters 3 and 5, this chapter can be read as a stand-alone study. This layer
of analysis focuses on the local use of categories within interactive
discourse.
The chapter begins with a literature review of relevant approaches to
membership categorization analysis. The study is located amongst studies
considering categorization within context. The literature review is followed
by a brief methodology section, while the bulk of the chapter is concerned
with membership categories arising from the dataset.
The first instance of categorization involves the instigator of the drama
being categorized by other users as a ‘psychopath’, or otherwise mentally
unwell, due to his perceived lack of empathy, which escalates into some users
suggesting he is capable of violence. The analysis moves on to focus on how
both Christian and atheist interactants categorize individuals as ‘types of
Christians’ that are, in almost all cases, separate from Christian
denominational categories such as Evangelical, Baptist, etc. Instead, users
are deemed by others to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Christians, depending on how the
‘Christian duties’ were performed. In this case, being a ‘good Christian’
entails the spreading of messages that result in being ‘hated by the world’
(Pihlaja, 2014: 102). Similarly, the category of ‘fluffy Christians’ is used
as a negative evaluation by Christians who criticise other Christians for not
following the Bible’s ‘instructions’ to not associate with non-Christians.
Another criticism of Christians by Christians is made through the use of the
category of ‘fake Christians’, where one interactant implies that others might
not actually be ‘saved’ and thus only ‘claim’ to be Christian. The category
of ‘perfect Christian’ is actually used pejoratively by an atheist commenter,
who describes the actions of certain Christians as being so hateful that they
perfectly demonstrate the dangers of religion.
This analysis highlights the complexity of this community, where users
“interact with others who may regularly employ different categories or the
same categories in different ways” (Pihlaja, 2014: 125), and these categories
are given meaning depending on their context. The drama is developed through
use of categories, which act as topics enabling users to disagree.
In Chapter 5, Pihlaja employs a positioning analysis in order to look beyond
the relatively static understanding of social identity through ‘ingroups’ and
‘outgroups’. Rather, the author uses positioning theory (Harré et al., 2009;
Jones, 2006) to investigate the emergent, dynamic, and context-dependent
nature of social positioning.
As with Chapters 3 and 4, this chapter can be read as a stand-alone study.
However, this third layer of analysis also, in effect, brings together
findings from the previous two chapters focussing on metaphor, categorization,
and impoliteness, as it deals with disagreement as well as how user
positioning changes over time. While Chapter 4 deals with the ways that users
categorize others, Chapter 5 complements this approach by considering how
users position themselves.
Pihlaja’s analysis identifies users who position themselves in various ways.
Some of the drama participants align themselves with God and the Bible in
particular ways in order to position themselves as being more pious than
others with different (or ‘incorrect’) interpretations of the Bible. In the
case of the main instigator of the drama, Yokeup, he positions himself
simultaneously as being at ‘war’ with unbelievers by calling them ‘human
garbage’, but also attempts to position himself as a ‘loving preacher’ through
a friendly, non-aggressive demeanor. He presents this condemnation as concern
rather than disdain with framing statements such as “God bless you guys… enjoy
your day… Jesus loves you… He has a great plan for your life” (Pihlaja, 2014:
141). The chapter also focuses on how community members position others as
‘bullies’, thus attempting to align atheist and Christian users against the
individual who posted the ‘human garbage’ video.
In summary, the positioning analysis identifies dynamic and contextual
positioning of members, who tend not to identify as members of a particular
group, but to take particular positions toward conflict depending on the
context (Pihlaja, 2014: 150).
Chapter 6 is a summary, and unifies findings in the previous chapters in order
to argue that (at least in the case of this dataset) YouTube drama is complex,
and it is not possible to identify a single cause or reason for the
development of argument. This is in part due to users having different
interpretations and levels of knowledge about each other and the history of
the argument (Pihlaja, 2014: 153). Metaphor sharing and shifting is
instrumental for users who position themselves in relation to others, and
particularly for antagonising other users. By way of demonstrating this
complexity, Pihlaja introduces a new aspect of YouTube drama – temporary
harmony – by describing a number of instances where vloggers who had
previously disagreed produce collaborative videos in order to, for example,
help raise funds for a Hurricane Katrina charity.
Pihlaja’s conclusion applies the empirical findings of his study to engage
with and support the conceptualisation of metaphor using discourse dynamics,
arguing that “although different kinds of systematicity in metaphor use may be
theoretically distinguishable, in real discourse, the distinctions are
blurred” (2014: 154).
The author finds that one key feature of YouTube drama is that it often
develops not only through reference to historical events within the drama, but
also through the memory and reformulation of events that have occurred in
videos and comments that were deleted by authors for various reasons. In this
way, Pihlaja argues that YouTube drama is very similar to ‘offline’ drama, and
that YouTube simply offers new technological affordances for drama.
Pihlaja engages with the notions of ‘face’ and ‘impoliteness’, but argues that
the definitions of these concepts are insufficient when analysing complex
drama. He thus finds Culpeper’s (2011) definition of ‘impoliteness’ to be
more adequate as its focus is not so much on strategic face attacks as it is
on the individual experiences of situated interaction. Pihlaja finds, for
example, that when users attract negative comments from others, this could
constitute ‘positive face’.
The summary also engages with inter-faith scholarship, consolidating the
findings of the analytical layers to argue that the interactants’ use of the
Bible to claim moral authority includes not only citations of the ‘word of
God’, but also heavy use of metaphorical extensions of such, which effectively
“attempted to effect change by representing their own desires as those of God
– the ultimate authority” (Pihlaja, 2014: 154).
EVALUATION
This book develops a cohesive argument for the description of the dataset as
‘drama’; the theme of metaphor development, over time and within context, is
adhered to throughout the study. Each of the three layers of analysis
complements and builds upon the others to contribute to a central argument
about how metaphor is used to develop drama in YouTube. Meanwhile, each of
the three chapters focussing on a specific analytical framework (Chapters 3,
4, and 5) can be read as a stand-alone study, which makes this book useful for
scholars interested in metaphor in general as well as those interested in one
of the specific frameworks used within the study.
Pihlaja’s research is innovative in that, while previous studies on YouTube
discourse have focussed on interaction, Pihlaja argues that it is difficult to
elicit and identify ‘typical behaviour’ and has thus taken a novel approach in
analysing a group of YouTube participants over time, through a variety of
interactions.
Pihlaja’s engaging writing style is characterised by clear and concise
descriptions of both the discourse he analyses and the theoretical frameworks
he uses and develops within his research. As such, this book is a valuable
introduction to the discourse analysis of online data, as well as a useful
tool for experienced discourse analysts who are keen to discover how
communication continues to evolve within the ever-changing landscape of online
environments.
Furthermore, this book would be especially useful for interfaith religious
scholars focusing on atheist-Christian and Christian-Christian interaction.
Pihlaja’s study makes an important contribution to the debate and conflict
between atheist and Christian groups, convincingly arguing that “disagreement
stemming from conflicting beliefs and expectations need not be limited to
theological or philosophical arguments, but can also include disagreements
about social interaction in particular communities” (Pihlaja, 2014: 148).
Pihlaja’s empirical approach also enables a convincing argument that while
theological disagreements between religious (and non-religious) groups
identified within the dataset are not new, their contextualization and
production through such social media as YouTube have resulted in new
mechanisms for disagreement.
In terms of the presentation of the analysis, there are a couple of issues.
At times, the narrative ‘drama’ can be difficult to track, but this is perhaps
unavoidable given the complexity of the dataset, which includes a large number
of discourse participants and non-synchronous timelines. Nevertheless, it
would have been useful if the author had developed a concise overview of the
drama in another mode – perhaps within a table or timeline – to complement the
extensive narrative description of events.
Additionally, the methodology sections of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 would perhaps
be more useful to non-specialist scholars if they included specific examples
of how the analytical framework was applied to the data.
There are also some notable limitations in terms of theoretical and
methodological focus. For example, although the study is foregrounded in
Chapter 1 by a potential consideration of the group of interactants as a
‘community’, or a ‘community of practice’, this research thread appears
briefly and sporadically throughout the book in relation to other research
focus points, and is never fully developed as a salient aspect of the
discourse in its own right.
Furthermore, despite the author’s focus on YouTube as an online platform
heavily featuring both plain-text comments and videos, this analysis includes
relatively little multimodal focus. Chapters 3 and 4 only consider the
transcription of video speech. The positioning analysis in Chapter 5 does
consider images, but only briefly and without reference to an established
framework for multimodal discourse analysis. The book itself is also
mono-modal, as there are no images or screenshots included. While the author
does concede that the multimodal aspects of the discourse are potentially rich
sources of information about these interactions, he does not engage with them
in his analysis because of time constraints. As such, there is scope for
further development of this study, but the book in its current form is likely
to be less relevant to multimodal scholars than to text-based discourse
analysts.
In summary, the book is an engaging and well-executed qualitative study that
advances the fields of CMC discourse analysis, metaphor analysis, and
inter-faith scholarship. It introduces a number of convincing arguments
regarding theoretical limitations of community, metaphor, and impoliteness
theories, which are thus adapted by the author in this novel analysis of
YouTube discourse.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Lori Gilbert is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia, UK. The title
of her thesis is “‘Friends’, ‘fans’, and foes: Identity performances through
responses to Facebook brand marketing”. It is a discourse analytical study,
employing genre analysis, Appraisal analysis, and negotiation analysis in its
focus on identity within the advertising-infiltrated social context of the
Facebook newsfeed. She is interested in discourse analysis, Appraisal theory,
Systemic Functional Linguistics, genre analysis, identity, CMC, and new media.
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