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meaning taken in this book and discuss some of the implications it holds. Then, after a brief discussion of the role of “situated meaning” in discourse analysis, I close this chapter with a discussion of how meanings are situated in
relationship to history and in relationship to other texts and voices. This latter discussion will introduce a third tool of inquiry, namely “inter-textuality,” that is, the ways in which different sorts of texts and styles of language
intermingle to create and transform meaning.
To make matters clearer here, I will often write stressing the ways in which language-in-use is fitted or adapted to the contexts or situations in which it is used. However, as we saw at the outset of Chapter 2, when we use language
we both create contexts or situations make things meaningful in certain ways and not others and fit or adapt our language to these ongoing contexts or situations which, after all, often get created in relatively similar ways from
time to time and usually stay in existence, thanks to people’s interactional work, for a shorter or longer period of time. In fact, it is because children learn how to fit their language to the contexts primarily created by others in
their social and cultural groups that they learn that certain forms of language can create and transform such contexts in quite active ways.
3.2 A child acquiring the meaning of a word
Consider the case of a little girl learning the word ‘‘shoe.” At first, she uses the word only for the shoes in her mother’s closet. Eventually, however, she “overextends” the meaning of the word beyond what adults would use it
for. Now she uses it, not only in situations where shoes are involved, but also while handling her teddy bear’s shoeless feet, passing a doll’s arm to an adult to be refitted on the doll, putting a sock on a doll, and when looking at
a picture of a brown beetle Griffiths 1986: 296–7.
At this point, the little girl associates the word “shoe” with a variety of different contexts, each of which contains one or more salient “features” that could trigger the use of the word. The picture of the beetle is associated with the
word “shoe” presumably in virtue of features like “shiny” and “hard” and “oval shaped”; the doll’s arm merits the word “shoe” in virtue of features like “fittable to the body” and “associated with a limb of the body,” and so forth.
What the little girl is doing here is typical even of how adults deal with meaning. Of course, she still must learn the full range of features she ought to consult in a context in order to call something a “shoe,” but more importantly, she
must also come to realize that the features associated with different contexts which trigger the application of a word are not just a random list. Rather, they “hang together” to form a pattern that specific sociocultural groups of people
find significant.
For example, in the case of shoes, features like “hard,” “shiny,” “formal,” “rigid soles,” “solid color,” “with thin laces” tend to “hang together.” They
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form a pattern, picking out a certain set of shoes, i.e. formal shoes. On the other hand, features like “soft,” “thick laces,” “perhaps with colored trim,” “flexible soles,” ‘‘made of certain sorts of characteristic materials,” “having
certain sorts of characteristic looksdesigns,” tend to “hang together” to form another sort of pattern. This pattern picks a different set of shoes, i.e. athletic shoes. There are other patterns that pick out other sorts of shoes.
I should point out, as is clear already in any case, that it is no easy matter to put these patterns into words. As we will see below, such patterns are really a matter, in many cases, of unconscious recognition, rather than conscious
thought. Furthermore, some features in a pattern are always present, while some are present in some cases and not in others e.g. note our “perhaps with colored trim” above.
There are patterns of features like “having a shape contoured to a human foot,” “covering a significant amount of the foot,” “flexible enough to fit on foot,” but “relatively rigid” that “hang together” in such a way that they pick out
a very large class of the whole set of shoes. However, even these are not a necessary and sufficient set of conditions for shoes in general. There are still borderline cases, like moccasins not really hard enough and sandals don’t
really cover enough. When the child reaches this point, she is finding patterns and sub-patterns in the contexts in which the word “shoe” is used.
3.3 Situated meanings
