Making Meanings, Creating Family: Intertextuality and Framing in Family Interaction

by Cynthia Gordon

Overview

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, which 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-especially those interested in family discourse. Its engagement with intertextuality as theory and methodology will appeal to researchers in media, literary, and cultural studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195373837
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/12/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Cynthia Gordon is Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University. She is the co-editor of Family Talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families.

Table of Contents

1.. Introduction: Intertextuality and Framing in Family Discourse2.. "All right my love?" "All right my dove": Extreme Intextuality and "Framing Family"3.. "Tell Uncle Noodles what you did today": Intertextuality, Child-centered Frames, and "Extending Family"4.. "You're the superior subject": Layering Meanings by Creating Overlapping and Embedded Frame5.. "Kelly, I think that hole must mean Tigger": Blending Frames and Reframing in Interaction6.. Conclusion: Intetextuality, Framing, and the Study of Family DiscoursePostscript: "Old habits never die, they just mutate"Appendix: Transcription ConventionsNotesReferencesIndex

Editorial Reviews

"Cynthia Gordons meticulous and stunningly insightful analysis of a unique data set demonstrates how family members make use of, and create, frames by repeating and transforming earlier utterances in their daily conversations. A truly groundbreaking book that enriches our understanding of framing, intertextuality, family interaction, and the interrelationship among them." —Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University

From the Publisher