James Paul Gee at Routledge

Glossary

Click on the terms to reveal their definitions.

Academic Language: Specialist styles of language associated with academic disciplines, fields, and domains, including the so–called "content areas" in school (e.g., mathematics, science, social studies, history, civics).

Big "C" Conversations (Tool of Inquiry): "Conversations" (with a capital "C") are debates in society or within specific social groups (over focused issues like smoking, abortion, or school reform) that large numbers of people recognize, both in terms of what "sides" there are to take in such debates and what sorts of people tend to be on each side.

Big "D" Discourse (Tool of Inquiry): Social languages (see below) are varieties or styles of language used to enact specific socially situated identities and activities (practices) associated with those identities. But people enact identities and activities not just through language, but also by using language together with other "stuff" that isn't language. I use the term "Discourse", with a capital "D", for ways of combining and integrating language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking, believing, valuing, and using various symbols, tools, and objects to enact a particular sort of socially recognizable identity.

Building Tasks: This book takes the view that people use language actively to build things in the world. Just as hammers and saws can be used to build buildings, so, too, grammar can be used to build things in the world or to give meaning and value to things in the world.

Clause: "In a rough and ready way we can define a "clause" as any verb and the elements that "cluster" with it. So in a sentence like "Mary left the party because she was tired", we have two clauses: "Mary left the party" and "because she was tired". The sentence "Mary left the party" contains only one clause. In a sentence like "Mary intended to leave the party", we have two clauses: "Mary intended" and "to leave the party" (where "Mary" is understood as the subject of "to leave"). Here the second clause ("to leave the party") is embedded in the first clause ("Mary intended") as the direct object of the verb "intend". These two clauses are so tightly bound together that they would most often be said as a single speech spurt. In traditional grammar, a sentence is any clause that stands complete by itself (e.g., "The boys liked the cakes"). A non–sentential clause is any string of words with a subject and predicate that does not stand complete by itself (e.g., "John thinks that the boys like the cakes", where "the boys like the cakes" is a clause, but "John thinks that the boys like the cakes" is a sentence). Since linguists do not want to keep having to say "clause or sentence", they sometimes call anything with a subject and predicate a clause, whether it is a clause or a sentence in traditional terms. "

Collocational Patterns: Any pattern of words or grammatical structures (types of words and phrases and clauses) that "hang together" to betoken a particular social language (and the identity associated with it) in the way in which sun hat, swim suit, sunscreen, a towel, and flip–flops "hang together" to betoken a "sunbather".

Connections Building Task: Using language to make things connected or relevant to each other or to make them disconnected or irrelevant to each other.

Context: Context includes the physical setting in which a communication takes place and everything in it: the bodies, eye gaze, gestures, and movements of those present; what has previously been said and done by those involved in the communication; any shared knowledge those involved have, including shared cultural knowledge. However, context is both something "already there" and created by the way we talk. What speakers say keys people to construe the context in certain ways while, at the same time, people use how they view the context to interpret what is said. We called this the "reflexive property" of language and context. Listeners use only what they deem the relevant parts of context to interpret what was said (see the Frame Problem).

Conventions: Conventions are like rules, except that they are often unconsciously followed. Conventions are agreed upon ways to act or interact, but, again, the agreement is often tacit or unconscious and has arisen because people follow or "imitate" what others have done. Conventions can be more or less rigid or flexible, that is, people following a convention can sometimes do things pretty much the same way every time or act with more flexibility and still be seen as following the convention. Language, meaning, and practices are all based on conventions. When you speak or act, if you were not, in some way, following a recognizable convention, then others would not be able to know what you were saying or doing. This does raise an interesting issue of how we ever do anything really new or how new conventions arise (both deep problems in social science), though clearly part of the answer is that we can combine conventions to make new ones or give old ones partially new meanings (sometimes based on other conventions). Since conventions are like rules and breaking them can lead to bad consequences in society (a "loss"), we can view speaking and acting in society as like engaging in games (which have rules and win and lose states).

Conversational Analysis: A detailed form of discourse analysis that sees conversation as the basic human communicational form and seeks to explicate how people produce and reproduce social order through talk and orientation to talk and each other in social interaction. The approach is almost always just spelled as "CA" and is a branch of sociology (one that gives up building grand sociological theories in favor of describing the order people actually create and how they create and sustain that order). Manny Schegloff at the University of California at Los Angeles is the best living practitioner of CA.

Critical Discourse Analysis: Any form of discourse analysis that seeks to engage with politics (see the glossary entry for "Politics"). Critical discourse analysis deals with whose "interests" are represented, helped, or harmed as people speak and write. When "critical discourse analysis" is spelled as "CDA" it often refers to the work of Norman Fairclough and his associates.

Dialect: A style of speaking and/or writing a language (and spoken and written language are usually different) associated with a given region, ethnic group, social class, or other social division. Dialects can vary by pronunciation ("accent"), grammar, or discourse (communication) features or all of these.

Discourse (Little "d" discourse): With a little "d" ("discourse"), this word in this book means any instance of language in use or any stretch of spoken or written language (often called a "text" in the expanded sense where texts can be oral or written).

Discourse Analysis: The analysis of language in use whether spoken or written. Linguistic forms of discourse analysis pay attention to the details of grammar and how they function in communication. Other forms of discourse analysis pay attention only to themes and messages (sometimes this is called "content analysis").

Figured World (Tool of Inquiry): A figured world is a theory, story, model, or image of a simplified world that captures what is taken to be typical or normal about people, practices (activities), things, or interactions. What is taken to be typical or normal, of course, varies by context and by people's social and cultural group. A figured world is a socially and culturally constructed way of recognizing particular characters and actors and actions and assigning them significance and value. Thus, we all have ways to construe what is a typical or "appropriate" bedroom, house, spouse, marriage, way of raising children, educated person, alcoholic, romance, student, and so on through an endless list. Figured worlds have also been called "folk theories" and "cultural models". When people simulate in their minds what counts as a typical or "appropriate" marriage or married couple (to take one example) they are creating or calling on their figured world of marriage or married couples. However, figured worlds are not just in people's heads, since they are often reflected in texts and media of various sorts as well.

Final Intonation Contour: An utterance said with a noticeable rise or fall (or rise–fall or fall–rise) of the voice on the information focus in the intonation contour. This sounds "final", as if a piece of information is "closed off" and "finished". In this book I have used a double slash ("//") to represent the end of final intonation contour.

Form—Function Correlations (Tool of Inquiry): Any correlation in terms of which a given word or type of word, phrase, or clause is associated with a given communication function. For example, subjects of sentences (as in "Mary" in "Mary got into Stanford") are correlated with or associated with the communicational function of being the "topic" of a sentence (the "topic" is what is being talked about or the thing that the speaker or writer is making a claim or assertion about or asking a question about).

Frame Problem: "People interpret what they hear or read by considering both what was said or written and the context in which it was said or written. Speakers and writers can never put everything into words explicitly, so they must rely on listeners and readers drawing inferences about their meaning based not just on what they have said or written, but also on the context in which they have said or written it. But context (see "context" in the glossary) is indefinitely large and so listeners and readers must make judgments about how much of the context and what parts of it are relevant in interpreting what a speaker or writer means. It is always possible that considering more of the context would change what the listener or reader takes the speaker or writer to mean. So the question arises as to how we know when to quit and how we make judgments about what in the context is relevant to interpretation and when and how we choose to widen what we consider relevant in the context. This is called the "Frame Problem" (and it is something that computers are very bad at when they try to match human beings in making judgments about relevance). Writing raises an interesting problem with context, since we can consider the context in which a text was written or the context (which may be hundreds or thousands of years later—witness the Bible or the Koran) in which the text is read, or both. People debate which context gives rise to the "right" meaning. But there is no answer to this question. It is a choice of what practices we want to engage in. "

Functional Grammar: An overt description of grammar (the conventions people follow in speaking or writing a language) that pairs different types of grammatical structures (e.g., different sorts of subjects and objects, nouns and verbs, noun phrases and verb phrases, and clauses—e.g., relative clauses) with the one or more functions they typically serve or can serve in communication.

Grammar: The conventions having to do with word use and the construction of phrases and sentences that one follows in speaking and writing a given dialect, social language, or language. These conventions are often called "rules", but they are tacit and unconscious. People also write grammars, that is, they explicitly describe the rule system of a language. Such grammars can be purely descriptive in the sense that the grammar describes what speakers actually do. They can also be prescriptive in the sense that the grammar describes what the author takes to be "correct" or the way people "should" speak and write.

Hybridity: Hybridity refers to people, uses of spoken or written language, practices, Discourses, or cultures that combine or mix two or more different identities. Sometimes hybridity is hidden or denied (or its origins are forgotten) and people see what is really hybrid as uniform, single, or "pure". Very little in the way of people, language, practices, Discourses, or cultures is in reality "pure". At least historically almost everything is a mixture. (For example, English is a mixture of German, Latin, and early French, not a "pure" Germanic language.)

Identity: " A word used for lots of different things. What I mean by it in this book is this: Different ways of being in the world at different times and places for different purposes, for example, ways of being a "good student", an "avid bird watcher", a "mainstream politician", a "tough cop", a video game "gamer", a "Native American", and so on and so forth through a nearly endless list. I do not mean your core sense of self, who you take yourself "essentially" to be, though that is an important notion as well. I often use the term "socially situated identity" or "social identity" instead of just the word "identity" to make clear I am talking about how we recognize and act out different social roles or different social positions in society. "

Identities Building Task: Using language to enact specific socially situated identities or to project such identities onto others, or to privilege or disprivilege such identities.

Intertextuality (Tool of Inquiry): When we speak or write, our words often allude to or relate to, in some fashion, other "texts" or certain types of "texts", where by "texts" I mean words other people have said or written. For example, Wired magazine once printed a story with this title: "The New Face of the Silicon Age: Tech jobs are fleeing to India faster than ever. You got a problem with that?" (February 2004). The sentence "You got a problem with that?" reminds us of "tough guy" talk we have heard in many movies or read in books. It intrigues us that such talk occurs written in a magazine devoted to technology. This sort of cross–reference to another text or type of text I refer to as "intertextuality". In instances of intertextuality, one spoken or written text alludes to, quotes, or otherwise relates to another one.

Intonation Contour: The pattern of length, loudness, and pitch changes across an utterance (see stress). The intonation contour is "how we say" what we say in terms of the way we lengthen words, use various degrees of loudness on different words, and the ways in which we change the pitch of our voice on different words and across a string of words. In English, the intonation contour signals attitude, emotional meanings, emphasis, and various nuances of meaning. It is hard to describe such meanings, but they are crucial to communication and whether a communication goes smoothly or offends people.

Lifeworld: A term used in different ways in different scholarly sources and not used at all by "everyday people". Your "lifeworld" (sometime spelled as "life world") is composed of those places or spaces where you communicate as an "everyday person" and make claims based on "common sense" and "everyday knowledge" and not specialist or expert knowledge. People use their vernacular when they are communicating in their life world. The concept is useful because it allows us to reflect on the fact that in our modern high–tech, science–driven global world, the lifeworld (the space where people can comfortably claim to know things based on non–expert knowledge) is shrinking.

Line: A line is what I, in this book, call an idea unit or a tone unit (see speech spurts)

Macro–lines: It is often said that, in speech, there are no such things as "sentences", that the sentence as a linguistic unit is a creature of writing only. I do not believe this is true. What is true is that sentences in speech are much more loosely constructed, much less tightly packaged or integrated, than in writing. Nonetheless, people often use the syntactic resources of English to tie together two or more lines into something akin to a sentence. I will call these "sentences" of speech, macro–lines, referring to what we have so far called "lines" (i.e., intonational units, idea units, tone groups) as "micro–lines" when I need to distinguish the two. So by "macro–line" I mean "what counts as a sentence in speech".

Macrostructure: Larger pieces of information, like a story about my summer vacation, an argument for higher taxes, or a description of a plan for redistributing wealth, have their own characteristic, higher–level organizations. That is, such large bodies of information have characteristic parts much like the body has parts (the face, trunk, hands, legs, etc.). These parts are the largest parts out of which the body or the information is composed. They each have their own smaller parts (ultimately body parts are composed of skin, bones and muscles, and the parts out of which a body of information is composed are ultimately composed themselves of stanzas and lines). The setting to a story is a piece of the larger organization of a story. It is a "body part" of the story. Stories are often composed of the following parts: Setting, Catalyst, Crisis, Evaluation, Resolution, and Coda. Other sorts of language are composed of different parts. The larger "body parts" of a story or other language genres as a whole can be called their "macrostructure", as opposed to their lines and stanzas which constitute their "microstructure".

Meaning: Meaning arises when any symbol (which can be a word, image, or thing) "stands for" (is associated with) something other than itself. So the word "tree" stands for trees in the world. A picture of a tree could be treated in the same way. So could a line drawing of a tree. What a symbol stands for is called its "denotation" or "reference". People use certain information or conventions to identify what a symbol stands for. This information or these conventions, which are often talked about in terms of a concept or idea in the head, are called the symbol's "connotation" or "sense". (We can see that the connotation or sense is not really just in people's heads as a concept. Since the connotation or sense is based on conventions people follow, connotation or sense is also in people's social practices, since conventions are social practices.) So the word "unicorn" is associated with the connotation or sense of "horse–like animal with a horn" (and other things, as well) and this concept and/or set of conventions allows us to understand that the word stands for (refers) to unicorns (which happen not to exist in the real world, but do "exist" in people's stories, fantasies, and images). People can treat an object—say a baby—as symbols so long as they agree on the concept (idea, interpretation, conventions) that ties them to what they stand for (designate, denote, refer to), say "innocence" in the case of babies.

Non–final Intonation Contour: An utterance said with only a small rise or fall (or rise–fall or fall–rise) or a level pitch of the voice on the information focus in the intonation contour. This sounds "non–final", as if more connected information is to come. In this book I have used a single slash ("/") to represent the end of a non–final intonation contour.

Politics: The word is used in many different ways. In this book, it means any situation where social goods or the distribution of social goods are at stake. Any case where we talk, write, or act in ways that give or withhold social goods or say or imply how social goods are or should be distributed is political in my sense. This often involves speaking, writing, or acting in ways that say or imply what is "appropriate", "normal", "natural", "good", or "acceptable" (or their opposites) in regard to certain people, things, or activities. All of these are almost always associated with social goods (e.g., many people do not want to be seen as "unacceptable" or "incorrect" English speakers, not least if they are, in fact, native speakers of English who speak a different dialect of English than "Standard English").

Politics Building Task: Using language to give or take away social goods or projecting how social goods are or ought to be distributed.

Position Design: How we design what we say or write in an attempt to entice our listeners or readers to take on certain identities and engage in certain activities we want them to (for good or ill). This book deals with this Position design in terms of how we build identities, relationships, connections, significance, and other things via social languages and Discourses.

Practice: A word used in many different ways. In this book, "practice" means a socially recognized and institutionally or culturally supported endeavor that usually involves sequencing or combining actions in certain specified ways. Encouraging a student is an action; mentoring the student as his or her advisor in a graduate program is a practice. Telling someone something about linguistics is an action (informing); lecturing on linguistics in a course is a practice. Sometimes the term "activity" is used for what I am calling a practice.

Practices (Activities) Building Task: Using language to enact specific practices (activities) alone or with others.

Recipient Design: How we design what we say or write with due regard for the identities of our listeners and readers. In this book we deal with Recipient design through the Identities Building Task and the ways in which identities are enacted and recognized in social languages and Discourses.

Recognition Work: The work we humans do through talk and interaction to seek to get recognized as having a specific socially situated identity. The factors that go into getting so recognized or failing to. All the contestation, negotiation, and ambiguities around such identities and the ways in which we humans "bid" for them (try to get them recognized and accepted) and relate to and contest with each other over them.

Relationships Building Task: Using language to create or sustain social relationships or to end or harm them.

Response Design: The work that listeners and readers do to prepare their response, whether in language, action, or thought, to what they are hearing or reading. Part of the job of discourse analysis is to study how people in the course of interaction over time respond to each other and co–construct sense making as they respond to and adapt to each other.

Semiotics: A term for the study of sign systems.

Sign: Any word or symbol (which could be an image or object) that has meaning (stands for something else thanks to a given concept, interpretation, and convention which relates the sign and the thing it stands for).

Sign System (or Semiotic System): Any system of signs that are related to each other to allow communication (meaning giving) in a given domain or area. Language (a system of words and their various possibilities for combination) is the most important sign system, but there are many others (e.g., mathematics, road signs, or insignia in the military). One could, for example, treat a system of buildings—as in Washington D.C.—as a sign system in the sense that they communicate messages about power and status, for example. The "author" of this communication is of course not the buildings by themselves but their designer and the people who sustain them in part because they communicate such messages.

Sign Systems and Ways of Knowing Building Task: Using language to create, sustain, revise, change, privilege, or disprivilege any language or sign system or characteristic way of knowing the world or making knowledge claims about the world.

Significance Build Task: Using language to make thinks significant or important in various ways or to lower their significance or importance.

Situated Meanings (Tool of Inquiry): The specific meanings words and phrases take on in actual contexts of use. Speakers and writers construct their utterances or sentences to guide listeners and readers in constructing these specific meanings based on what was said and the context in which it was said. Of course, speakers and writers can never be sure listeners and readers have constructed the specific situated meanings they intended and, too, listeners and readers can choose to be uncooperative (or "resistant") and construct specific situated meanings without full (or any) regard for the intentions of speakers and writers.

Social Goods: Anything a person or group in society wants and values. Some things (like status, money, love, respect, and friendship) are taken by nearly everyone in society as social goods. Other things are social goods only to small groups (e.g., having seen a rare bird and having it on one's life list—though this is, of course, a source of status among a relatively small group of people—i.e., birders—a sought–after social good for some people).

Social Language (Tool of Inquiry): Any variety or style of speaking or writing associated with a socially situated identity of any sort (this identity may be associated with a social group, profession, culture, practice, social role, or interest–driven activity like video gaming). The term "register" is sometimes used in the same or a similar way. Social languages include dialects and all other styles or varieties of language associated with distinctive social identities and their concomitant practices (activities).

Specialist Language: Any style of language (which may involve special words, special uses grammar, or special discourse features, or special pronunciations, or all of these) used when one is speaking or writing (and these might well be different) as a specialist or expert of a certain sort. People who share a specialty or expertise often develop their own "ways with words". These people might be doctors, carpenters, criminals, anime fans, video gamers, soldiers, biologists, bird watchers, and so on through a very large and ever–growing list.

Speech Spurts: Thanks to the way the human brain and vocal system is built, speech, in all languages, is produced in small spurts. Unless we pay close attention, we don't usually hear these little spurts, because the ear puts them together and gives us the illusion of speech being an unbroken and continuous stream. In English, these spurts are often, though not always, one clause long. These spurts contain one piece of information (and, thus, are often called "idea units") and contain one intonational focus (one major pitch change), creating either a final or non–final intonation contour (and, thus, are called "tone units").

Standard English: A word with lots of different meanings or at least nuances. By "Standard English", in this book, I mean the way English is typically spoken and written (and these are different) when it is used for public sphere purposes (e.g., job interviews, mainstream media, political speeches) and does not display regional, ethnic, class, or other social variation. This really is a fiction, since variation is always present in some form in language use. But it is an important fiction nonetheless, since there can be negative consequences for being perceived as not using Standard English in some circumstances. Standard English is taken by many in society to be the way educated people speak and write (keep in mind, though, that spoken and written forms of Standard English are different), though when such educated people are speaking informally to friends they often use forms that would not be used in more formal settings.

Stanza: A stanza is a group of lines about one important event, happening, or state of affairs at one time and place, or it focuses on a specific character, theme, image, topic, or perspective. When time, place, character, event, or perspective changes, we get a new stanza. I use this term ("stanza") because these units are somewhat like stanzas in poetry.

Stress: Stress is a psychological concept, not a physical one. English speakers can (unconsciously) use and hear several different degrees of stress in a word, but this is not physically marked in any uniform and consistent way. Stress is physically marked by a combination of increased loudness, increased length, and by changing the pitch of one's voice (raising or lowering the pitch, or gliding up or down in pitch) on a word's primary ("accented") syllable. Any one or two of these can be used to trade off for the others in a quite complicated way. Thus, in the word "wonderful" people hear the first syllable (the accented syllable) as having more stress than the next two and they hear the third as having more stress than the second: WONderfull. In an utterance composed of several words (say a clause like "I think you are wonderful") each word will carry a different degree of stress in comparison to each other depending on what the speaker wants to mark as new and/or important and as old or less important. This pattern of stress on different words is called the intonation contour of the utterance. The word with the most stress in the intonation contour of an utterance is marked by a noticeable movement in the pitch of the voice (a rise, fall, rise–fall, or fall–rise) and is said to be the "information focus" or just the "focus" of the intonation contour. Thus, if I say "I think YOU are wonderful" I make "you" the new or important information, while if I say "I think you are WONderful", I make either "wonderful" or the "you are wonderful" or "I think you are wonderful" the new or important information (when the focus is on the last word, then the new or important information can be that word or any phrase or clause it is part of). When one word in an utterance is given extra stress this is called "emphatic stress" and gives extra emphasis to this word, as in "MY daughter is a real STAR" (where I have used bolded print for the emphatic stress and regular bold print for the focus). Often emphatic stress is taken to imply a contrast—as here, a possible contrast between, say, my daughter and yours.

Theory: A theory is a set of claims about what exists in a given sphere of reality (e.g., language, cells, evolution, the environment, society), how these things should be described, and how these things are related to and interact with each other and with what results (outcomes). The claims in a theory are hypotheses (guesses) until substantive evidence is collected for them. When such evidence is collected the theory is held to be "true" (a representation of reality), though open to revision by the normal processes of scientific or empirical investigation. (Even though empirical theories are always open to revision, ignoring well–supported theories is usually dangerous and stupid and can cause much harm.)

Tools of inquiry: This book introduces form—function correlations, situated meanings, social languages, Discourses, Conversations, and intertextuality as "tools of inquiry" (see the glossary for each of these). They are tools of inquiry in the sense that they lead us as discourse analysts to ask specific sorts of questions about our data.

Utterance–Token Meaning: Another term for what I have called "situated meaning" in this book.

Utterance–Type Meaning: The general meaning or range of meanings, or meaning potential, of a word or phrase considered outside of actual contexts of use.

Vernacular: The word has different meanings and if you look it up in a dictionary it will be given meanings irrelevant to how I use it in this book. Here, "vernacular" means the style of language people use when they are seeking to communicate as "everyday people" and not as experts or specialists of any sort (though they may speak as such specialists and experts in other settings). It is the form of language they have learned in their early socialization into language within their homes or communities. A person's vernacular will vary with his or her social and cultural background, though as people engage with each other in a cosmopolitan society they will often converge on styles of the vernacular that are more similar to each other. People will vary in how they use their vernacular style depending on how informal or formal they want to be in given contexts (that is, people do not speak to their spouses in bed the same way they do to a stranger in a bar), but in both cases they are probably using their vernacular (non–specialist) style of language.

Webs of Association: The ways in which we associate ideas and themes (based on prior experience) in our heads as language unfolds in contexts. This book spells out this process partly through the notion of figured worlds, but there is much more to be said about such webs in current work in cognitive science and brain science. See references in the last chapter of An Introduction to Discourse Analysis 4th edition.