Discourse & Identity - Discourse & Performance - Intertextuality in Discourse - Discourse Analysis

Discourse & Identity - Discourse & Performance - Intertextuality in Discourse - Discourse Analysis When we speak or write we use more than just language to display who we are, and how we want people to see us. The way we dress, the gestures we use and the way/s we act and interact also influence how we display social identity. Other factors which influence this include the ways we think, the attitudes we display, and the things we value, feel, and believe. As Gee ( 2011 ) argues, the ways we make visible and recognizable who we are and what we are doing always involves more than just language. The Princess of Wales, for example, knows in the Panorama interview not only how she is expected to speak in the specific place and at the particular time but also how she should dress, how she can use body language to achieve the effect that she wants as well as the values, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions it is appropriate for her to express (as well as those it is not appropriate for her to express) in this situation. That is, she knows how to enact the discourse of a Princess being interviewed about her private life in the open and public medium of Television. As Gee explains: a Discourse is a ‘dance’ that exists in the abstract as a coordinated pattern of words, deeds, values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects, times, and places in the here and now as a performance that is recognizable as just such a coordination. Like a dance, the performance here and now is never exactly the same. It all comes down, often, to what the ‘masters of the dance’ will allow being recognized or will be forced to recognize as a possible instantiation of the dance. Performative acts are types of authoritative speech. This can only happen and be enforced through the law or norms of society. These statements, just by speaking them, carry out a certain action and exhibit a certain level of power. Examples of these types of statements are declarations of ownership, baptisms, inaugurations, and legal sentences. Something that is key to performativity is repetition.[7] The statements are not singular in nature or use and must be used consistently in order to exert power (Hall 2000). All texts, whether they are spoken or written, make their meanings against the background of other texts and things that have been said on other occasions (Lemke 1992 ). Texts may more or less implicitly or explicitly cite other texts; they may refer to other texts, or they may allude to other past, or future, texts. We thus ‘make sense of every word, every utterance, or act against the background of (some) other words, utterances, acts of a similar kind’ (Lemke 1995: 23). All texts are, thus, in an intertextual relationship with other texts. As Bazerman ( 2004: 83) argues: We create our texts out of the sea of former texts that surround us, the sea of language we live in. And we understand the texts of others within that same sea.