Situated Meaning: Social Languages and Cultural Models.

Confronting VJ9 with the James Gee phd-workshop.

Introduction

From November 23rd to November 25th a workshop on Discourse Analysis took place at the
Centre for Discourse Studies in Aalborg (Denmark). The workshop was led by James Paul
Gee, founding member of the so called New London Groupi. James Gee is Professor in the
Department of Educational Psychology at University of Madison-Wisconsin (USA). Gees
recent work has extended his ideas on language, literacy and society to deal with the so-called
new capitalism and its cognitive, social and political implications for literacy and schooling.
More recently his work started to focus on digital literacies and publications on the theories of
learning embedded in video and computer games. He has published extensively in journals in
linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.ii

The course was concerned with a family of approaches to discourse analysis that seek to
illuminate the significance and implications of social, cultural and political practices based on
a close examination of language in use (McIIveny 2005). An important part of VJ9 actually
focused on these social, cultural and political implications of language in use. During the
festival I reported the workshop on the VJ9 blog, here I want to bring some of the issues that
where tackled during the workshop together in an overview of Gees theory starting from
three concepts that are central in his work: situated meaning, social languages and cultural
models.

Discourse Analysis (DA) is an interdisciplinary field of research that was founded at the end
of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s out of disciplines such as linguistics, literature,
anthropology, semiotics, sociology, psychology, communication and others (Van Dijk
1988:17). There are many different advocates and personalities in DA and twice as many
different concepts (often meaning the same thing). The theory and concepts that I will be
presenting here are those used and developed by Gee, other DA theorists might use different
concepts or have different foci. But there is one guiding idea that would be recognized by
(almost) all DA researchers, the fact that all language-in-us is context related. And this is what
Gee calls the magical property of language.

Language in context

At the beginning of the workshop Gee asked two questions based on the premises that DA
comes down to the analysis of language in context: What is context? and Why bother?
If we want to understand a particular use of language then we have to find out what social
identity the speaker or writer is adopting and what social activity the speaker (or writer) thinks
he or she is accomplishing (Gee ).

To illustrate that the same words uttered by the same person mean different things in different
contexts Gee uses the expression getting down to business. This expression will mean a
very different thing when uttered by a professor in a formal advising session or when the
same person is being in the role of an informal chat session. So, what is context and why
bother?
 "Who" we are and "what" we are doing, where we are doing it, what has already been
said and done, as well as the knowledge and assumptions that we assume we share
with those with whom we are communicating, are all part of "context".(Gee )

This is why language in context has a magical property according to Gee. The words we
utter (or write) simultaneously reflect (are shaped by, are determined by) the context within
which we utter them and create (shape, determine) the context. (Gee) Or, as Edley and
Wetherell would have it: people are simultaneously the products and the producers of
discourse (Edley and Wetherell, 1997, p. 206). A lot of Gees work is concerned with what
this idea means for education and teaching:

elementary school teachers talk (and act) the way they do because they are in
classrooms and they are teaching, but their classrooms count as classrooms and they
as teachers teaching because they talk (and act) that way. The "world" both pre-exists
and shapes how we talk about it (and act in it) and it means what it means and has the
shape it does because we talk about it (and act in an on it) as we do. (Gee )

Situated Meaning

In education Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has often been limited to anecdotal reflection.
Gees work however is very much of use for thinking about language as an educational
scientist, a teacher, a social worker because Gee pays attention to education through not
always in schools (Gee 1992, Gee 1996) and the relevance of Discourse Analysis and
Critical Discourse Analysis to controversial issues in education (Gee 1999, 2005).

For Gee there are two tasks a (critical) Discourse analysis can undertake. The first task is what
he calls the utterance-type question. It studies the correlations between form and function in
language at the level of utterance-type meanings. (Gee) Form is understood as things like
morphemes, words, phrases or other syntactic structures. Function is understood as meaning
or the communicative purpose a form carries out. The other task is referred to as the utterance
token meaning (or situated meaning) task. It studies the correlations between form and
function on language at the level of utterance-token meanings. It is aimed discovering the
situation-specific or situated meanings of forms used in specific contexts of use (Gee).

When we use language we have certain expectations, language always has a certain meaning
potential. A meaning potential is a range of possible meanings that the word or structure can
take on in different contexts of use. Gee uses the word Cat as an example. When we just
mean the animal that is known as a cat then we can speak of an utterance type meaning.
Utterance type meanings are general meanings, not situation-specific meanings (though we
could say that they are, in reality, connected to the prototypical situations in which a word or
structure is usually used. In the actual language use words or structures get more specific
meanings within the reach of their meaning potentials. This can be described as utterance-
token meaning or situated meaning. Using the same example of Cat then we could say the
worlds big cats are all endangerd. Here cat refers to Lions and Tigers. We could say; The
cat was a sacred symbol to the ancient Egyptians. Cat here refers to real cats and pictures of
cats. We could say: the cat broke. Here cat refers to the image of a cat.

Social Languages
When we use language we have some specific expectations. How language normally is
being used and how language has a certain meaning potential. Meaning potential: a range of
possible meanings that the word or structure can take on in different contexts of use.

The second distinction is between vernacular styles of language and non-vernacular styles.
Most linguists believe that this process of native language acquisition is partly biological.
People use their native language initially and throughout their lives to speak in the vernacular
style of language, that is, the style of language they use when they are speaking as everyday
people and not as specialists of various sorts (e.g., biologists, street-gang members, lawyers,
video-game adepts, postmodern feminists). Everyones vernacular style is as good as anyone
elses.

This claim bears important issues for education. From a linguistic point of view no child
comes to school with a worse or better language than any other childs. A childs language is
not lesser because that child speaks a so-called non-standard dialect. These claims are not
politically contentious in modern linguistics, they are simply empirical.

Nearly everyone comes to acquire non-vernacular styles of languages later in life, styles used
for special purposes, such as religion, work, government, or academic specialties. We can call
these social languages. People usually go on to acquire different non-vernacular social
languages connected to different social groups.

Cultural Model

So, in addition to situated meanings, each word is also associated with a cultural model. A
cultural model is a usually totally or partially unconscious explanatory theory or storyline
connected to a word or concept bits and pieces of which are distributed across different
people in a social group that helps to explain why the word has the different situated
meanings and possibilities for more that it does have for specific social and cultural groups of
people. For example, many people in the USA accept what has been called the success
model (DAndrade 1984). This cultural model (theory, storyline) runs something like this:
Anyone can make it in America if they work hard enough and helps make sense of things
like success and failure to many people. Of course, this model backgrounds elements like
poverty and can lead to blaming poor people when they fail to make a success of
themselves, even leading to claims that they are lazy.

Discourse models are theories (storylines, images, explanatory frameworks) that people
hold, often unconsciously, and use to make sense of the world and their experiences in it.
They are always oversimplified, an attempt to capture some main elements and background
subtleties, in order to allow us to act in the world without having to think overtly about
everything all at once.

Discourse models are simplified, often unconscious and taken-for-granted, theories about
how the world works that we use to get on efficiently with our daily lives. We learn them from
experiences we have had, but, crucially, as these experiences are shaped and normed by the
social and cultural groups to which we belong. From such experiences we infer what is
normal or typical (e.g., what a normal man or child or policeman looks and acts like)
and tend to act on these assumptions unless something clearly tells us that we are facing an
exception.
It is difficult to appreciate the importance and pervasiveness of Discourse models, or to
understand how they work, if we stick only to examples from cultures close to our own. So let
me give an example of Discourse models at work adapted from William Hanks excellent
book Language and Communicative Practices (1996). This example will also let us see that
Discourse models are at work in even the simplest cases of communication and in regard to
even the simplest words. When we watch language-in-action in a culture quite different from
our own, even simple interactions can be inexplicable, thanks to the fact that we do not know
many of the Discourse models at play. This means that even if we can figure out the situated
meanings of some words, we cannot see any sense to why these situated meanings have arisen
(why they were assembled here and how).

Example1:
In the first case below a young woman was telling her parents about how she had ranked some
characters in a story she had heard in a class she was taking at a university. She is telling her
boyfriend the same thing in the second case :

Well, when I thought about it, I don't know, it seemed to me that Gregory should be the most
offensive. He showed no understanding for Abigail, when she told him what she was forced to
do. He was callous. He was hypocritical, in the sense that he professed to love her, then acted
like that.

What an ass that guy was, you know, her boy friend. I should hope, if I ever did that to see
you, you would shoot the guy. He uses her and he says he loves her. Roger never lies, you
know what I mean?

These two texts are both in versions of the vernacular, in neither case is the young woman
trying to speak like a specialist in some specialized social language.

However, the first text is more formal and creates a certain sense of deference in talking to her
parents, while the second text is more informal and creates a certain sense of solidarity with
her boyfriend.

Some of the grammatical markers that create these distinctions in these two texts are: To her
parents, the young woman carefully hedges her claims:
"I don't know"
"it seemed to me"
To her boy friend, she makes her claims straight out.

To her parents she uses formal terms like

"offensive", "understanding", "hypocritical" and "professed"
to her boy friend, she uses informal terms like "ass" and "guy".

She also uses more formal sentence structure to her parents ("it seemed to me that ...") than
she does to her boy friend ("...that guy, you know, her boy friend").

The young woman repeatedly addresses her boyfriend as "you", thereby noting his social
involvement as a listener, but does not directly address her parents in this way. In talking to
her boy friend, she leaves several points to be inferred, points that she spells out more
explicitly to her parents.

While different dialects would mark such distinctions in formality and deference differently,
all people have vernacular forms of language in which they can and do do such things.

Important educational issue arises here. Formal forms of the vernacular in the style of above,
more formal forms of "standard English", are often well utilized and privileged in school as a
bridge to academic social languages. Formal forms of the vernacular in other dialects are
usually poorly utilized and unprivileged, if not even demonized.

Example 2:
It is not just the vernacular that marks out these sorts of distinctions around
formality/informality and deference/solidarity. Specialist social languages do so, as well.
Indeed, any use of language must mark where it is in terms of these sorts of distinctions.
Thus, consider the two excerpts from written texts below, both written by the same biologist.
The first appeared in a professional biological journal, the second in a popular science
magazine:

Experiments show that Heliconius butterflies are less likely to oviposit on host plants that
possess eggs or egg-like structures. These egg-mimics are an unambiguous example of a plant
trait evolved in response to a host-restricted group of insect herbivores.

Heliconius butterflies lay their eggs on Passiflora vines. In defense the vines seem to have
evolved fake eggs that make it look to the butterflies as if eggs have already been laid on
them.

It does not matter whether we say that these two excerpts are from different, but related, social
languages (professional biology and popular biology), or are stylistic variants of the same
social language (a certain type of biology).

The first excerpt is more technical and formal in a way that creates solidarity with other
professional biologists, but separation from non-professionals. more formality here, unlike
in the case of the vernacular, creates more solidarity because it creates separation of
specialists from non-specialists. The second excerpt, while still formal when compared to the
vernacular variant in above, is less formal than the excerpt in and creates much less of a
separation from the non-professional audience, though it is still not as bonding as the
vernacular form in.

The first extract, from the professional scientific journal, is about the conceptual structure of
a specific theory within the scientific discipline of biology. The subject of the initial
sentence is "experiments", a methodological tool in natural science. The subject of the next
sentence is "these egg mimics": plant-parts are named, not in terms of the plant itself, but in
terms of the role they play in a particular theory of natural selection and evolution, namely
"coevolution".
In the second sentence, the butterflies are referred to as "a host-restricted group of insect
herbivores" which points simultaneously to an aspect of scientific methodology (like
"experiments" did) and to the logic of a theory (like "egg mimics" did). "Host restricted group
of insect herbivores", then, refers to both the relationship between plant and insect that is at
the heart of the theory of coevolution and to the methodological technique of picking plants
and insects that are restricted to each other so as to "control" for other sorts of interactions.

The first passage is concerned with scientific methodology and a particular theoretical
perspective on evolution. On the other hand, the second extract, from a popular science
magazine, is not about methodology and theory, but about animals in nature. The butterflies
are the subject of the first sentence and the vine is the subject of the second. Further, the
butterflies and the vine are labeled as such, not in terms of their role in a particular theory.

These two examples show in the present an historical difference. In the history of biology, the
scientist's relationship with nature changed from telling stories about direct observations of
nature to carrying out complex experiments to test complex theories using a form of language
removed from the vernacular.
Science is now concerned with the expert "management of uncertainty and complexity" and
popular science with the general assurance that the world is knowable by and directly
accessible to experts. This change in science also coincided with the growth of the sharp
separation between amateurs and professionals doing science, a separation which previously
was not that strong.
i
The New London Group launched the concept of Multiliteracies with their ground braking article A pedagogy of
multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures, first published in the Harvard Educational Review in 1996.
ii
For an extended biography: http://diskurs.hum.aau.dk/english/Seminars/GeeSeminar.htm