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knowledge, and ways of knowing, are here and now relevant and activated. 2.
World building, that is, using cues or clues to assemble situated meanings about what is here and now taken as “reality,” what is here and now taken as present and absent, concrete and abstract, “real” and “unreal,”
probable, possible, and impossible. 3.
Activity building, that is, using cues or clues to assemble situated meanings about what activity or activities are going on, composed of what specific actions.
4. Socioculturally-situated identity and relationship building, that is, using cues or clues to assemble situated
meanings about what identities and relationships are relevant to the interaction, with their concomitant attitudes, values, ways of feeling, ways of knowing and believing, as well as ways of acting and interacting.
5. Political building, that is, using cues or clues to construct the nature and relevance of various “social
goods,’’ such as status and power, and anything else taken as a “social good” here and now e.g. beauty, humor, verbalness, specialist knowledge, a fancy car, etc..
6. Connection building, that is, using cues or clues to make assumptions about how the past and future of an
interaction, verbally and non-verbally, are connected to the present moment and to each other – after all, interactions always have some degree of continuous coherence.
Different grammatical devices contribute differently to these six tasks and many devices contribute to more than one at the same time. All together these six building tasks spell out the work of the semiotic aspect of the situation
network, with special reference here to language. That is, they are the work that we do with language and other semiotic systems, such as gestures or images to construct or construe a situation in certain ways and not others.
Cues or clues in the language we use different sorts of cues and clues in different social languages help assemble or trigger specific situated meanings through which the six building tasks are accomplished. In turn, these situated
meanings activate certain cultural models, and not other ones. Finally, the social languages, situated meanings, and cultural models at play allow people to enact and recognize different Discourses at work i.e. to see each other and
various things in the world as certain “kinds of people” and certain “kinds of things” engaged in certain “kinds of activities”.
5.5 Social languages revisited
What is important to discourse analysis are not languages at the level of English and Navaho. All languages, whether English or Navaho, are, as we argued in Chapter 2, composed of many different social languages
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Bakhtin 1981, 1986. Physicists engaged in experiments don’t speak and write like street-gang members engaged in initiating a new member, and neither of these speak or write like “new capitalist” entrepreneurs engaged in
“empowering front-line workers.” Each social language uses somewhat different and characteristic grammatical resources to carry out our six building tasks.
All of us control many different social languages and switch among them in different contexts. In that sense, no one is monolingual. But, also, all of us fail to have mastery of some social languages that use the grammatical resources
of our “native language,” and, thus, in that sense, we are not any of us “native speakers’’ of the full gamut of social languages which compose “our” language.
It is important, as well, to note that very often social languages are not “pure,” but, rather, people mix “hybridize” them in complex ways for specific purposes. It is sometimes quite hard to know whether it is best to say whether
someone is switching from one social language to another “code switching” or actually mixing two of them to assemble, for a given context, a transformed even novel social language which may, of course, eventually come to
be seen as a “pure” and different social language in its own right, when people forget that it arose as a mixture. It is, of course, more important, in a discourse analysis, to recognize this matter than to settle it. People can even mix
or switch between different social languages that are drawn from different languages at the level of things like English and Navaho. In Chapter 2 I gave a variety of examples of different social languages at work building and
being built through actual situations.
It is social languages which contain the cues or clues that guide the six building tasks listed earlier. Different social languages contain different sorts of cues or clues, that is, they use grammar in different ways as a resource for the
six building tasks. For example, consider again the young woman above who said to her parents, “Well, when I thought about it, I don’t know, it seemed to me that Gregory should be the most offensive,” and to her boyfriend,
“What an ass that guy was, you know, her boyfriend,” when she was talking about the same character in the same story. These utterances are in two different social languages.
In the first case, when the young woman is speaking to her parents, the following sort of pattern of grammatical features is indicative of a particular social language: preliminary clause about having been reflective “when I
thought about it”; mitigators “I don’t know,” “seemed to me”; complex subordinating syntax when-clause, it- seems-that construction; repeated references to self “I,” “me” as careful claimerknower; Latinate vocabulary
“offensive”; complex modality “should be”. This social language contains cues and clues for deference, respect, school-based learning, reflection, attention to knowledge and claims, and so forth.
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In the second case, when the young woman is speaking to her boyfriend, the following sort of pattern of grammatical features is indicative of another sort of social language: Exclamation “What an ass ”; informal
vocabulary “ass,” ‘‘guy”; right dislocation “her boyfriend”; attention to hearer “you know”; directly making claims with no mitigators or attention to self as claimer. This social language contains cues or clues for solidarity,
informality, participatory communication, attention to shared values, and a focus on the social world and not the self.
Such patterns are part and parcel of what we called “grammar two” in Chapter 2 p. 29. Interpreters listeners or readers who are members of the Discourses whose social languages these are recognize however unconsciously
the patterns in the same rapid and intuitive way they recognize the situated meanings of words.
5.6 Units and transcription
