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relationship to, and fears about, achievement and success, and sometimes “cloak” or “defer” their “material interests’’ with abstract argumentative talk in which they fail to directly mention their own personal interests and
concerns.
7.5 Connection building
When we look at how our teenagers use language to build connections across their sentences, stanzas, and larger portions of their texts, we discover linguistic details that further reflect the different social language they are using.
For example, consider how the two groups use the word “because” or “‘cause”.
“Because” in all genres of talk can be used to connect two clauses and name a causal relationship. For example, consider two examples from Brian’s interview, one from a narrative and one from an argument: “I was like the most
hated kid in the grade, because I was such a spaz” or “We were actually the bad guys in that situation, because we made treaties with them and we broke the treaties.” I will call this the “causal use” of “because.” “Because” also has
a more discourse-based use to introduce a new stanza, event, or episode. For example, consider an example from Kevin’s interview: “And we go play that, like, it’s like an army game, it’s almost like Jailbreak. Cause there’s this
place we call Indian caves . . .”.
Table 7.3 below shows the distribution of the “causal use” of “because” across the seven teenagers in Table 7.1 on p. 125:
Table 7.3 Percentage of “causal uses” of “because” out of all uses of “because”
We see a very similar thing if we consider the connecting word “so,” a word that has as one of its uses connecting one clause as the “result” of the state of affairs named in another clause e.g. from Brian’s interview: “I owed BMG
like sixty dollars so I just paid them off,” where paying is the result of owing. If we compare Brian upper middle class and Kevin working class, we find that Brian uses a “so” in this sort of use once per 109 words in his
interview. Kevin uses “so” this way only once per 545 words and, ironically, the interviewer uses many more “so’s” to Kevin than a different interviewer does to Brian.
These differences suggest that whether or not the upper-middle-class teens are talking “viewpoint and argument talk,” narrativizing, or engaging in some other sort of talk, they take a more syntactic and less discourse-based view
of information, stressing “logical” relations over more thematic, Sandra
Kevin Maria
Brian Emily
Ted Karin
49 44
39 89
76 84
89
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discourse-level connections. These differences represent linguistic aspects of the different social languages the teens are using and the different ways in which they are building connections among the situated meanings they are
building.
I do not, however, want to suggest that connection building only involves linguistic items like “because” and “so.” When we talk, we build connections at all levels of our language. We connect clauses and sentences in certain ways;
we connect stanzas, episodes, and arguments in certain ways; and we connect larger themes in certain ways. Furthermore, what doesn’t get connected is just as important as what does. To make this clear, let me give an
example of a disconnection at a thematic level.
Consider our interview with Emily, an upper-middle-class girl. In her interview, Emily several times tells of correcting people for racist and homophobic remarks. Furthermore, she condemns the students in her school for
ignoring the small number of African-Americans who are bussed in. However, much later in her interview, when Emily is asked directly about racism in the “society part’’ of the interview, she says: “I think like I mean I think it
is a problem, but I don’t think it’s, that big of a problem, like,” and gives no indication she has seen any instances of racism, though she could readily have appealed to her earlier remarks.
What this indicates, I would argue, is that earlier in her interview, when Emily is discussing racist remarks, she is really speaking, not to the theme of racism, but to a different theme. The theme in the earlier part of her interview
seems to be that she herself is less “sheltered” and more worldly-wise than the other kids in her current town, kids many of whom, she very well knows, count as having more “potential” and being more “successful” than those who
lived in her previous town. The actual fact of racism enters in only as fodder for her assessment of her fellow upper- middle-class peers. In the “society part” of her interview one of her themes is the unfairness of, and lack of a real
need for, affirmative action. Emily fails we might say “actively fails” to connect her two themes. Failing to connect things is as much a meaningful device as is connecting them.
Here we see that sense making is “local” and in the service of “themes,” not necessarily globally consistent across large stretches of discourse. This is often true of human sense making and academic Discourses are, by no means,
exempt, Selzer 1993. Meanings are situated in the specific contexts we are building here and now in our interactions with others.
7.6 Building meaning in narrative
