Transcript Section the first: Some intro stuff

Section the first (4/2)
Some intro stuff
QUESTIONS?
TYLER SCHNOEBELEN
TYLERS AT STANFORD DOT EDU
Agenda
 Howdy’s and how aaaaare you’s
 Your thoughts and questions
 Some key terms in E&Mc-G
 Some metaphors, too
 Generic he (Gaskill 1990)
 Consumerism (Talbot 1992)
Detour: setting goals
 Specific
 Measurable
 Actionable
 Realistic
 Time-bound
Some basic things to get
 Competence
 Speech community
 Community of practice
 Lexicon
 Subdisciplines in linguistics
 Phonology
 Morphology
 Syntax
 Discourse
 Semantics
 Pragmatics
Lots of movement
 Social moves
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Every contribution you make to an interaction carries out your
intentions with respect to the others. We have goals.
 “Discourse turn”
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Language is interactive, dynamic
It changes over time (and over the course of a conversation)
 “Performance turn”
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Categories are socially constructed
You “do” gender”
“Continually produced, reproduced, and indeed changed through
people’s performance of gendered acts, ast they project their own
claimed gendered identities, ratify or challenge others’ identities, and
in various ways support or challenge systems of gender relations and
privilege” (E&Mc-G: 4).
Market
 How does the linguistic market metaphor work?
Gaskill (1990)
Twitter break
 “After a patient eats, he needs to rest.”
 “A person is only as old as he feels.”
He/she/they
 Why do we care?
Talbot (1992)
Talbot’s goals
 “A linguistic model of discourse
 that integrates linguistic and social theoretical
perspectives
 so that discourse can be analyzed both as
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interaction between individuals
and as socially reproductive and constitutive of subjectivity”
Deconstruction
 The author is dead
 Or rather, the author is legion
 Multiple
 Fragmented
Ideal subject
 Sort of like the representation we saw in generic he
 Mass-media producers get to imagine the addressee
 They control “commonsense”
 Conclusion:
 “The audience is being offered sisterhood in consumption.
Synthetic personalization and the need for adult
femininity catch readers up in a bogus community in which the
subject position of consumer is presented as an integral part
of being feminine” (Talbot 1992: 579)
 Cosmetics and naturalness
Appendix
Style
 My use of language tells you something about me
 I can also use language consciously to try to tell you
something about me
 We’ll look more at “style” later on in the course, but
keep in mind that we’ve got to account for conscious
and unconscious attitudes/behaviors
It adds up
 To build a model of what’s happening in this course,
consider:
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Small verbal acts accumulate to have a large effect
 So how do individual situations produce and
reproduce abstract social structures?
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More on this as the course continues