Making meanings, creating family : intertextuality and framing in family interactions / Cynthia Gordon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gordon, Cynthia, 1975-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communication in families--United States--Case studies.

Communication in families.

Discourse analysis--United States.

Discourse analysis.

United States.

Genre:

Case studies.

Physical Description:

ix, 233 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

Summary:

A husband echoes back words that his wife said to him hours before as a way of teasing her. A parent always uses a particular word when instructing her child not to talk during naptime. A mother and family friend repeat each other's instructions as they supervise a child at a shopping mall. Our everyday conversations necessarily are made up of "old" elements of language-words, phrases, paralinguistic features, syntactic structures, speech acts, and stories-that have been used before, and that we recontextualize and reshape in new and creative ways.

In Making Meanings, Creating Family, Cynthia Gordon integrates theories of intertextuality and framing in order to explore how and why family members repeat one another's words in everyday talk as well as the interactive effects of those repetitions. Analyzing the discourse of three dual-income American families who recorded their own conversations over the course of one week, Gordon demonstrates how repetition serves as a crucial means of creating the complex, shared meanings that give each family its distinctive identity.

Making Meanings, Creating Family takes an interactional sociolinguistic approach, drawing on theories from linguistics, communication, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Its presentation and analysis of transcribed family encounters will be of interest to scholars and students of communication studies, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and psychology. Its engagement with intertextuality as theory and methodology will appeal to researchers in media, literary, and cultural studies.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Intertextuality and Framing in Family Discourse 3

2 "All Right My Love?" "All Right My Dove": Extreme Intertextuality and "Framing Family" 26

3 "Tell Uncle Noodles What You Did Today": Intertextuality, Child-Centered Frames, and "Extending Family" 76

4 "You're the Superior Subject": Layering Meanings by Creating Overlapping and Embedded Frames 115

5 "Kelly, I Think That Hole Must Mean Tigger": Blending Frames and Reframing in Interaction 157

6 Conclusion: Intertextuality, Framing, and the Study of Family Discourse 189.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780195373820

0195373820

9780195373837

0195373839

OCLC:

261342063