Meaning discourse analysis by james paul gee

Page 40 3 Situated meanings and cultural models

3.1 Meaning

The primary tools of inquiry we will discuss in this chapter are “situated meanings” and “cultural models.” Both of these involve ways of looking at how speakers and writers give language specific meanings within specific situations. I will argue in this chapter that the meanings of words are not stable and general. Rather, words have multiple and ever changing meanings created for and adapted to specific contexts of use. At the same time, the meanings of words are integrally linked to social and cultural groups in ways that transcend individual minds. This chapter will also discuss a perspective on the human mind at work in the social world. Traditional views of the mind in cognitive science have tended to view the human mind as a “rule following’’ device that very often works in quite abstract and general ways. The perspective taken here views the human mind as a “pattern recognizing” device that works primarily by storing experiences and finding patterns in those experiences, patterns that often stay fairly close to the experiences from which they were extracted i.e. they are not always all that abstract or general and that shape how we engage with and store in our minds our subsequent experiences. To begin to develop a “situated” viewpoint on meaning “situated” means “local, grounded in actual practices and experiences”, I will consider two areas where it is clear that meaning is multiple, flexible, and tied to culture. In the first case, dealt with in section 3.2, we look at how children acquire the meanings of words. In the second case, which we turn to in section 3.5, we look at how scientists and “everyday” people use the “same” words to mean different things. In sections 3.3 and 3.4, I introduce the two tools of inquiry ways of looking at language-in-action in the world focused on in this chapter. These two tools will play a major role throughout the rest of this book: “situated meanings” and “cultural models.” In subsequent sections, I extend the discussion of situated meanings in several directions. I first develop the particular perspective on the human mind that underlies the approach to Page 41 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