Entextualization

As described in Chapter 1, we adopt a “consequentialist” view of meaning in discourse. Some elements oflinguistic meaning are decontextualizable, with words and expressions having, in some respects, the same meaning in whatever setting (Putnam, 1975). Grammatical categories capture some such elements—“boy,” for example, is a count noun, and it can be the subject of mental state verbs, among other enduring properties. Thus, we know that in whatever context we utter the word “boy,” the entity thus denoted is expected to be physically discrete and capable of human mental activities. But in most respects, meaning is context dependent or indexical. The meaning of an utterance depends in significant part on how it is taken up by subsequent utterances. The concept of uptake is central to a consequentialist view of meaning (Garfinkel, 1967). Rather than meaning being understood as fully locatable in preexisting definitions or speaker intentions, the meaning of a sign depends in substantial part on how it is taken up by subsequent speakers and utterances—on how it is metapragmatically construed, explicitly or implicitly, in subsequent discourse. This brings us to “entextualization,” as described in the last chapter, the process through which signs are recontextualized such that an account of social action emerges to organize the discursive interaction.

Most discursive interactions could be interpreted in more than one way. What sounds like a compliment can turn out to be an insult (“Wow, you’re on time today!”). What seems to be lunch with a friend can become a therapy session. What starts as routine classroom management can end as racist discourse. Entextualization is the process through which an interaction with indeterminate meaning comes to be recognizable as one type of event or another, as having been a recognizable type of social action (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Silverstein, 1976; Silverstein & Urban, 1996). Without entextualization, there could not be recognizable discursive events. Entextualization establishes an event, its boundaries, and its meaning. Entextualization is somewhat like the gelling of Jello as it transitions from a liquid to a solid state. When Tyisha was talking about playing Nintendo, sleeping, and eating, it was still not clear what implications this might have for her position in the narrating classroom interaction. But around the moment when the teacher said, “you are like an animal,” her position as a disruptive outcast, as someone less worthy than the other students and teachers, became more solid and presupposable.

We can recast our question about Mr. Bader’s class in these terms. The utterance “racist” at line 020 is a sign that needs interpretation. It is not explicitly metapragmatically framed, so we need to identify the implicit metapragmatic construal that indicates what sort of social action it helps to signal. This construal would normally occur over time as other signs come to presuppose a convergent interpretation. The back-and-forth, part-and-whole circle of interpretation, from indexical signs to metapragmatic construals and back, comes to a provisional end when a set of indexical signs locks together in what Silverstein (1993) calls a poetic structure. Poetics, in this sense, involves the recurrent patterning of indexicals. This “text-metricality,” as Jakobson (1960) calls it, emerges from textual parallelisms in which similar linguistic forms recur. In our terms, speakers create configurations of mutually presupposing indexicals.

When analyzing the discourse immediately preceding Pete’s utterance, we asked whether Hyo was reporting the speech of Mr. Bader in line 004 when he says “send you to the office” and in line 006 when he says “I will bring the hammer down.” By looking at an emerging configuration of indexical signs, we can begin to answer this question:

“I definitely want to send somebody to the office” (Mr. Bader in line 001) “I will ... send you to the office” (Mr. Bader and Hyo in lines 003—004) “I will ... take you to the office personally” (Mr. Bader in lines 003, 005) “I will bring the hammer down” (Hyo in line 006)

There are two overlapping poetic patternings across these text segments. One is “send [pronoun] to the office,” and the other is “I will [verb phrase].” After Mr. Bader says: “send somebody to the office,” Hyo repeats this phrase—changing only one word, “somebody” to “you.” Mr. Bader also uses an “I will” sentence structure, and Hyo echoes with threats that adopt this structure. These two parallelisms, in which Mr. Bader leads and Hyo follows, provide more evidence that Hyo is, in fact, speaking as if he were Mr. Bader in lines 004 and 006. Hyo may be reporting the anticipated speech of Mr. Bader or reformulating and suggesting new threats for Mr. Bader to use.

The progression of reference and predication about hammers and swords, described earlier, also involves poetic parallelism, a configuration of mutually presupposing indexical signs:

“the hammer” (line 006)

“the hammer of Thor” (line 009)

“the sword of light” (line 010)

“the sword of darkness” (line 012)

“the sword is dark” (line 015)

“the blade is black” (line 018)

“this is black” (line 019)

Several parallelisms occur in these segments. There are repetitions of the head of the noun phrase, “the [hammer/sword/blade],” and the two characterizations of this noun, “of [Thor/light/darkness]” and “is [dark/black].” The poetic progression involves shifts in both slots. In the head of the noun phrase, the weapon becomes increasingly dangerous, changing from “hammer” to “sword” to “blade.” In the characterizations of this object, the weapon becomes increasingly dark: from “light” to “dark” to “black.” These configurations will help us interpret the social action occurring in Mr. Bader’s classroom.

Let us return to Pete’s puzzling utterance about racism. This utterance takes up the emergent configurations just described. That is, as the unfolding discourse links increasing forms of violence (from “hammer” to “sword” to “blade”) to the darkening of those forms (from “light” to “dark” to “black”), Pete seems to presuppose wider U.S. racial ideologies that link blackness—as an emblem of a racialized identity—to negative qualities like danger and brutality. Pete construes the configuration of implicit indexical links between “black” and violence and characterizes the preceding discussion as racist. His crying “racist” entextu-alizes the preceding discourse as racist, presupposing an ideology that associates violence with blackness.

Our analysis so far has focused on the discourse in Mr. Bader’s classroom, using it as an example to illustrate the various components of our approach to discourse analysis within the speech event. Table 2.2 summarizes the steps in our approach.

The final step is to identify the positioning and social action occurring in the narrating event. We have argued that Pete is probably crying “racist,” that is.

TABLE 2.2 The components of our approach to within-event discourse analysis

	Describe the characters, actions, and events in the various narrated events, perhaps representing them visually
	Attend initially to deictics, reported speech, and evaluative indexicals
	Identify configurations of indexicals that emerge and collectively presuppose relevant context and support a model of the social action occurring
	Through an iterative process, infer construals of social action that could explain the salient indexicals; then reconsider which indexicals might be salient; then infer a revised account
	Draw conclusions about the social action occurring in the narrating event

making a joke by accusing Mr. Bader of using the word “black” inappropriately. In order to understand this construal of the narrating event more fully, however, we need to examine other speech events in the branching pathway across which people cry “racist.”