Discourse Analysis/ M1 2019/2020

Instructor: Mahammedi Belkis Department of English. Zian Achour

Situated Meaning and Context

In this chapter, we learn new concepts (situated meaning and cultural models), and we learn about
their relationship to context and discourse production and interpretation.

In order to understand these concepts, we need to read Chapter 3 and 4 of “Introduction to Discourse
Analysis: Theory and Method” by J.P, GEE.

Use the following quotes from the chapters to guide you through your reading. The quotes contain
some of the main points discussed in the chapters. Pay attention to keywords.

After finishing the chapters and the handouts, we will be able to answer the following questions:

1. What are the characteristics of situated meanings?

2. What is the role of cultural models?
3. What is the relationship between situated meaning, cultural models and context?
4. What is the relation between situated meaning, cultural models and discourse?

●Meaning is situated in social practices and contexts. When children learn words, they tend to associate them to
different things, situations, and a variety of different contexts, “each of which contains one or more salient
features that could trigger the use of the word” (Gee, 2001: 41).

●These features are not a random list of associated meanings, instead they hang together to form a pattern that
specific socio-cultural groups of people find significant. (ibid)

●As children grow they learn to form patterns and sub-patterns in the contexts in which the word is used. We
humans recognize certain patterns in our experience of the world. These patterns constitute the situated meanings
of the word (p 42).

●For adults, in addition to patterns, words involve “rough and ready” explanation of those same patterns
(Anglin1977; Keit 1979, 1989 in Gee 2001: 42).

●These patterns should make sense within some cause-effect model that is related to a specific social group and
specific cultural practices. Different social and cultural groups, age, genders have different explanatory theories
about the same words .These explanatory models encapsulate viewpoints on who does/ says what sort of “word” to
what specific purpose and with what status. (ibid)
●These explanatory theories are rooted in the practices of socio-culturally defined groups of people, thus theorists
and discourse analysts refer to them as “cultural models” (Gee, 2001, 2005)

●Each word is associated to situated meanings and cultural models which are two main tools for inquiry about
discourse. They help involve “ways of looking at how speakers and writers give language specific meanings within
specific situations.” (p 40)

●The situated meanings of specific word are relative to a specific discourse.

●Situated meanings are assembled out of diverse features, on the spot as we speak, listen and act (Barsaloo 1987,
1991, 1992; Clarck 1993 in Gee 2001).

● Different contexts invite different assemblies (p 47).

●As communicators (addressors and addressee) we can both recognize and assemble features or patterns of
features. The first one is static and the second one is dynamic and stresses meaning as an active process. (ibid)

●Situated meanings are neither to general, nor too specific. Instead, they are “mid-level patterns or
generalization”. (Barsaloo 1992)

●“Situated meanings are not static and they are not definitions. Rather, they are flexibly transformable patterns
that come out of experience and, in turn, construct experience as meaningful in certain ways and not others .”
( Gee 2001: 49)

●To know a situated meaning is not merely to be able to say certain words but to be able to recognize a pattern
situated meanings both contextualized and somewhat general.

●Situated meanings are, then, a product of the bottom-up action and reflection with which the learner engages
the world and the top-down guidance of the cultural models or theories the learner is developing.

●If the patterns a mind recognizes or assembles stray too far from those used by others in a given Discourse … the
social practices of the discourse will seek to “discipline” and “renorm” that mind … situated meanings and cultural
models exist out in the social practices of Discourse as much as, or more than they do inside heads” (Gee 2001: 52,
53).

●The context of an utterance is everything in the material, mental, personal, interactional, social, institutional,
cultural, and historical situation in which the utterance was made that could conceivably influence the answer to
the questions above. Context is nearly limitless. (p 54)
●Learning about what producers and interpreters think, believe, value, and share, and how they are situated
materially, interactionally, socially, institutionally, culturally, and historically will eventually cease to change the
sorts of answers to those questions all that much (although answers to those questions are tentative). (Ibid)

●Words have histories, they bring with them as potential situated meanings, all the situated meanings they have
picked up in history and in other settings and Discourses.

●Any text is infected with the meanings (at least, as potential) of all the other texts in which its words have
comported. Such potential situated meanings can have effects even when they are not fully activated by producers
and interpreters. (Check Gee’s example of the use of the words robut and atrophied) (p 55)

●The present is an artifact of a very specific past. The present is an outcome of previous situated meanings and
cultural models, meanings and models which continue to inhabit the present in more or less overt ways (p 58)

●Cultural models are images or storylines or descriptions of simplified world in which prototypical events unfold.
They are our first thoughts or taken for granted assumptions about what is typical or normal. They are sort of
movies or videotapes in the mind, tapes of experiences we have had seen, read about, or imagined. (p 60)

●They differ from one society to another, and within communities of the same society. They change with time,
social change, and experience. We are usually unaware that we are using them until we are challenged by
someone or some text where our cultural models do not fit. In fact, the situated, social, and cultural nature of
meaning often becomes visible to us only when we confront language-at -work in languages and cultures far
distant from our own (check Gee example of the Mexican family). (p 60, 61).

We have had plenty of discussions around the meanings of words and social practices in different cultures.

Based on our previous handouts and in-class discussions, try to examine the possible situated meanings of the
following words according to you and other culture: “Hijab”, “islam”, “woman”, “man”, “masculine”, “feminine”,
“motherhood”, “terrorism”, “power” …

Choose other words and try to examine their histories and their various situated meanings
Situated meanings and context
 “situated meanings” involve ways of looking at how speakers and writers give language specific meanings
within specific situations.
 I will argue in this chapter that the meanings of words are not stable and general. Rather, words have multiple
and ever changing meanings created for and adapted to specific contexts of use.
 At the same time, the meanings of words are integrally linked to social and cultural groups in ways that transcend
individual minds.
 I will consider two areas where it is clear that meaning is multiple, flexible, and tied to culture. I
 n the first case, dealt within section 3.2, we look at how children acquire the meanings of words.
 In the second case, which we turn to in section 3.5, we look at how scientists and “everyday”people use the
“same” words to mean different things.
 I close this chapter with a discussion of how meanings are situated in relationship to history and in relationship to
other texts and voices.
 This latter discussion will introduce a third tool of inquiry, namely “inter-textuality,” that is, the ways in which
different sorts of texts and styles of language intermingle to create and transform meaning.
 To make matters clearer here, I will often write stressing the ways in which language-in-use is fitted or adapted
to the contexts or situations in which it is used.
 If we turn now to another area – how scientists and “everyday” people understand the “same” words differently –
we will see again how the meaning of a word varies across different contexts,
 both within a given Discourse (e.g. that of physicists)and across different Discourses (e.g. between physicists and
“everyday” people).We will see, how the situated meanings of words are connected to different cultural models
linked to specific social groups and their characteristic Discourses.
 We will also see that these different social groups are often in competition with each other over things like
power, status, and the “right” to claim to know.
 Instantly, in context, we Situated meanings and cultural models
 situated meanings are not just in our heads. They are negotiated by people in interaction. that is accepted,
rejected, or countered in certain ways by the person with whom I am interacting.
 A situated meaning is an image or pattern that we assemble “on the spot” as we communicate in a given context,