1.29 Using Gee's tools and questions to analyze language

Note: If you have not sent you NIH training certificate => please do so by next week. I am required to present proof of your training to the Kean University Institutional Review Board. To do so, I need a copy of your training certificate. Once you complete your training, copy the text and paste it into an email & send it to the course email.

 

What counts as writing studies research. We spent some time at the beginning of class talking about what you might do for a research project for this course. You posted some great ideas on your blogs, and I wrote back with some suggestions for how you might turn your idea into a project. One way to narrow and focus your ideas is to develop some specific, focused questions about what particular group of people you want to work with, what specific context you want to look study, what practices (creating profiles on Facebook, what parents/children do together when young children are practicing learning to write letters, the different ways teachers talk to first graders when they introduce writing activities to that are meant to be "fun". . .). I read some titles of talked about some studies from writing research books to generate ideas. These books are available in my office - or I can recommend specific articles. We will be working on finding & narrowing down your topic for a while, so don't panic => just keep on it.

 

Reviewing Gee's tools and questions. 

We had a brief discussion of Discourse, Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality (defined on 44 => and check out how to USE them for language analysis on page 60).

 

Analyzing Shaggy Dog Stories.

We spent the rest of class asking "writing studies" kinds of quesitons about our first data set : the Shaggy Dog Stories posted to the right.

 

Our process was to read the story, to notice:

   

• What intertextual references contributed to the jokes' meaning ("getting" the reference in the closing line => Only you can prevent forest fires. I'm afraid not. Thank God it's Friday. "The check is in the mail."; or appreciating the repetition in 3's, or knowing lawyer jokes, or "a guy walked into a bar" jokes and etc )
• What Discourse you needed to belong to for thejoke to"work" (what the listener/reader needed to know to understand it = features of what Discourses the joke teller assumed the listerner/reader was familiar with).  
• The way the language worked to "build" the punchline (create words with special meanings that "make sense" in the nonsence sentence that is the "moral" of the story).

We talked about these stories one by one, and then started to ask bigger questions (where we had to look at more than one joke), questions like:

 

• "what features does a joke have to include to count as a shaggy dog story?" 
• "what makes shaggy dog stories funny?" 
• "what role does violence play in shaggy dog stories and how does it make them funny?"
• "what are the features of the punchlines in shaggy dog stories?"
• "what language moves do shaggy dog stories make to build the "tension" that results in the "surprise ending" that is the punchline?

At this point I asked you to work in groups. The groups are:

Sarah, Mike

Oriana, Rikki

Devon, Amy

Derrick, Paul

Sharyn, Chris, Alison

Allyson, Yoleiny, Deanna

 

Group assignment:

Each group was asked to decide on a question to ask about Shaggy Dog stories. You were instructed to use Gee's language tools to examine the way the language in the jokes worked and to use what you discovered from answering Gee's questions as "evidence" to answer the overall question you were asking question.

  

Each group should post their "findings" on their blog (so you will 2 or 3 of you will have the same post). You may analyze one shaggy dog story in depth, or you may analyze several of the stories to "prove" a theory about general features of shaggy dog stories

 

For next class:

We will begin next class with presentations on your "findings." Your presentation should hit each of the points listed for Blog 3. You should talk me and your classmates through your reasoning.  I am probably also going to ask you what was hard, what you didn't understand, and what you'd like to work on more to feel more comfortable with discourse analysis.

 

Write: Blog 3 should include:

1. a detailed statement of the question about shaggy dog stories that you set out to answer.
2. list of Gee's language tools/questions that are relevant to your analysis
3. answers to Gee's questions that are relevant to your anlaysis
4. quotes from the joke that serve as your evidence of what the joke does
5. discussion of the patterns and what they suggest with respect to your question

This point of this exercise is to get some practice using Gee's language tools/building task questions to develop an analysis. For this one it is more important to do some exploring than it is to be "right" or even to find an "answer".

 

 

Sample post for Blog 3:

 

1. Question: What kinds of relationships between the listener and the joke teller are built by Shaggy Dog stories? I am analyzing the Lawyer joke as an example of a shaggy dog story that expects the listener to know other lawyer jokes

 

2, 3 & 4 (grouped together)=>answers to Gee's questions that  provide evidence for my answer to the big question along with quotes from the jokes(my data).

 

=>  What sort of relationship or relationships is this piece of language seeking to enact with others (present or not).

 

In the lawyer joke, the joke teller (the person saying the language in the story) is inviting the listener to bash lawyers.

Language choices that characterize this perspecitve includes:

 

• lawyer was quite wealthy = establishes that this is a "rich lawyer" joke (not about public defenders or lawyers who take on social justice issues) and that he lives the "good life" (invites friends to his country house)
• The friend is "eager to get a freebie off a lawyer" = shows that the character in the story sees the lawyer as rich and is glad to have a chance to have fun at the lawyer's expense. Also - this implies that the friend may not really like the lawyer much - but rather just wants to spend a week in the country. The choice of "freebie" and "getting a freebie off" suggests freeloading - rather than friendship.
• The lawyer, seeing the two bears, immediately dashed for cover = lawyer thinks of himself first
• The lawyer ran back to his Mercedes = rich, could have said "car" => Mercedes implies wealth
• "visions of lawsuits from his friend's family danced in his head" = his friend may be dying and he is worrying about lawsuits = characterizes lawyer as primarily concerned with money
• "Would you believe a lawyer who told you the Czech was in the male?"= lawyers as liars.

A listener will not like this joke if they feel lawyers are being unfairly represented.

 

The teller is enlisting the listener in shaming, making fun of, belittling lawyers for being too concerned with their money and for being more concerned with money than with people. It is aggressive - in that it actively portrays the lawyer as overly concerned with money and percieved as a liar.

 

 

=>What perspective on social goods is this piece of language communicating (what is "normal" "right" "good = etc)?

The story communicates (assumes) that it is normal to think of lawyers as liars, that lawyers are usually rich, and self interested. It also suggests that it is normal not to believe lawyers, and that in particular it is normal not to believe what lawyers tell other people about money.

It also assumes that most people will think it is funny to see a lawyer get "what he deserves"

 

Because the lawyer was a habitual liar, the sheriff did not believe him, and now the lawyer will probably have a lawsuit (since we assume the male bear is long gone). This is comic because the lawyer is worried about the lawsuit and not the death of his friend, and because he gets what he deserves = a lawsuit that is indirectly the consequence of the fact that he routinely cheats others.

 

The social goods conveyed by this story are the feeling of superiority/satisfaction the listener/teller share at lawyer's expense.

 

 

=>How does this piece of language connect or disconnect things: how does it make one thing relevant or irrelevant to another?

1. The story makes the fact that the visiting friend is a Czech both apparent = and it holds back the particular naming of that friend as a Czech until the punch line. It calls him "Czechoslovakian" to preserve the surprise at the end.

 

2. The order of the story goes through an escalating list of unsavory characteristics associated with lawyers. The allusions to money and self interest are lower stakes (less damning) that being a liar, and they come first in the joke. So the joke moves from the mildly unattractive characters (selfishly rich, and self interested) to being perceived as a liar = which is the worst. So this language builds up its case, by getting the listener to "agree" with or go along with less obnoxious characteristics before the "big" one at the end.

 

=>What does this story contribute to/say about larger Conversations about lawyers?

It speaks to stereotypes about lawyers that are made clear in "lawyer jokes" = Americans generally resent that lawyers. They generally see lawyers as making money for interpreting laws - mostly made by other lawyers - that ordinary people cannot understand=> and that ordinary people then have to pay lawyers to interpret. It is pretty putting out standard negative stereotypes against lawyers.

 

It adds the idea that lawyers dishonesty can come back to bite them. And that in the end, they are going to face consequences for their bad behavior. This is a common moral belief - that "good will out" and "no ill deed goes unpunished". So this joke draws from those to Conversations.

 

 

=>Intertextuality: This particular joke is like a Lawyer (Blonde, Polish, etc) joke in that it allows people from one perspective or group to poke fun at or say something critical about another group.

 

It is like a Shaggy dog story, in that it makes its criticism through a ridiculous play on words, where the re-defined meanings have been developed word by word in the telling of the joke, and it offers its condemnation or criticism through a pattern where the stakes start out low and get bigger until their is a ridiculous example of what is wrong with the group at the end.

 

5. Relating my discussion back to my overall question. If I were doing a really good job,  of this I would sum up how my answers to Gee's questions work together to answer the main question (stated for point 1). This was meant primarily to show you how to use the Gee questions as part of your analysis, so I didn't do that part.

 

You do not have to do your post in this form. You may list codes, categories, patterns and theories = like the analytic process outlined for the last blog. Or you may answer other questions and present the "quotes" from the stories in other ways. You may also analyze more than one joke and offer a comparison.  Or something else?  The point is to develop an anlaysis.

 

Good luck!