Entextualization

Breakups are events that primarily take place through conversations (although sometimes dishes are thrown). Often they occur during the course of several different
conversations. That is, people may have a few conversations leading up to deciding to break up, a couple more conversations in which this decision is worked out, and several conversations after the decision in which people are disentangling from one another. As a result, the breakup stories I collected via interviews at Indiana  University in 2007-2008 were almost always compilations of other conversations. When I transcribed these
interviews, I often found myself typing narrated accounts of conversational turn-taking: “and then she said . . . .”; “and then I said. . . .” Admittedly, because I was  interviewing people on their use of new media, it would just as frequently be a story of: “and then she
texted . . .”; “and then I left a message on her voicemail. . . .” In short, people told the story of a break-up as a sequence of discrete conversations, often carried out in different media. Strung together as a story, these conversations all contributed to forming one event – the breakup.

This article maps out and reviews work on textual trajectories and related concepts from sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, discourse and literacy studies. The first part of the article argues that work on entextualisation and recontextualisation, and their incorporation in recent research on textual chains or trajectories, contributes to a new language of description which conceptualises texts in dynamic terms while still maintaining a sense of their coherence and durability. The article traces how conceptions of dialogicality and recontextualisation have been used to develop transcontextual approaches to analysis which have highlighted the ideological work of textual movement and resemiotisation. It argues that envisaging linked series of entextualisations and recontextualisations as institutionally consequential trajectories not only illuminates micro-level practices, but also indicates their dynamic interconnection with macro-level institutional processes and ideologies. In this sense, the concept of textual trajectories contributes to meso-level theorising of the interrelationship of language with social life. Examples of research from institutional contexts are reviewed to examine how textual trajectories are used to produce specialised knowledge, the instantiation of institutional procedures and the articulation of participant positionings and identities.

The ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts form the oldest sizable body of religious texts in the world. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, they had been inscribed on the interior stone walls of the pyramid tombs of third-millennium kings and queens. From their content it is clear that they were concerned with the afterlife state of the tomb owner, but the historical meaning of their emergence has been poorly understood. This book weds traditional philological approaches to linguistic anthropology in order to associate them with two spheres of human action: mortuary cult and personal preparation for the afterlife. Monumentalized as hieroglyphs in the tomb, their function was now one step removed from the human events that had motivated their original production.

The linguistic anthropology of Oceania has seen vigorous and productive analysis of language ideologies, ritual performance, personhood, and agency. This article points to three related paths of inquiry that are especially promising. First, language ideologies are analyzed for the ways they shape expectations and interpretations of effective action and social identity. Second, processes of entextualization are examined with reference to Bible translation because Christianity is a dominant social force in contemporary Oceania. Third, prominent recent work on per-sonhood and agency is reviewed, and scholars are urged to reconsider the classic Oceanic term mana in relation to changing understandings of power, including those wrought by religious transformations. These paths of inquiry are intertwined and cross-cutting and can lead to productive new understandings of ideologies and practices of stability and transformation.

The aim of this article is to show how a suspect's statement travels through two stages of the criminal law process: the police interrogation and the trial, exhibited by two modes of production: talk and writing. I first discuss how the suspect's statement is elicited and written down by the police in the police report; next I consider how the police report is made to form part of a legally adequate case-file; and finally I investigate the ways in which the judge quotes and refers to the police report in his questioning of the suspect during the trial. This step-by-step inspection of the trajectory of the suspect's statement shows processes of de-and recontextualization. The suspect's statement is written down so as to enable it to be taken out of one context (the police interrogation) and inserted into another (the trial). This means that old meanings are removed from the suspect's statement and new meanings are added. In the courtroom, however, the judge treats the suspect's written statement as his own individual production, irrespective of the interactional environment in which it was elicited. The suspect's statement is taken out of one context, inserted into another context and treated as independent of context.

This article examines how science studies in general and actor-network theory (ANT) in particular can inform scholarship on documentary. More specifically, we argue that both ANT scholars and documentary scholars are faced with the question of how a particular set of interactions are transformed into representations of reality that can travel into other contexts with their truth value intact. The ANT perspective views putative truth as circulating through a series of networks shaped through
specific interactions, and identifies the interlinking of the networks as crucial to the preservation of truth value across them. Furthermore, the ANT perspective provides
tools for understanding how representations are ransformed into facts through the labour of specific networks. We thus refuse sharp distinctions between documentary production, distribution and reception, and instead see all aspects as central to how documentaries themselves function as actants and representations.

Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widely resemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with other discourses and practices. This article examines the emergence of Integrated Reporting (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information, organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts of their activities in one single document. Specifically, this article analyses a selected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses of sustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macro discourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have played out in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large, the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses and semantically ‘bent’ to construct the organisation itself as being financially sustainable, that is, viable and profitable and for the primary benefit of shareholders. From this stance, we argue that, through the hybridity of IR, most companies have primarily colonised discourses of sustainability for the rhetorical purpose of self-legitimation.

This paper explores parallelism as a phenomenon not restricted to language and poetic expression but rather something that may be manifested through any type of signs.

The first half of the paper concentrates on the relationship of parallelism to different orders of representation - i.e. verbalization, signs communicated verbally such as images and motifs, and higher order signs e.g. communicated through images and motifs as signs. This part considers both parallelism at these different orders of representation and also interactions and relations between them.

The second half of the paper outlines an approach to parallelism across different media (channels, modes) of performance as a mode of expression. This is complementary to the discussion of parallelism at different orders of representation and considers the rhythm of the performance mode as coordinating meters of verbal, musical etc. aspects of expression.

Examples are taken from mythological epic and ritual performance. A model is also presented for considering that the 'reality orientation' (Siikala 1978) associated with certain rituals as not only subjective to a performance specialist such as a shaman, but also interfaced with the 'performance arena' (Foley 1995) of a particular traditional practice.  According to this model, the activation of the performance arena is connected to a change in reality orientation, inciting participants / audiences to attend to the unseen world engaged through performance over empirical realities of immediate experience (even if each participant's subjective engages with the performance arena may vary).

The scenario for this paper is the combined sanitary and political crisis that Brazil has been facing in these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The country is ideologically polarized and this polarization has been enhanced in the last year and a half in Bolsonaro’s government. A bleak period characterized by a way of governing that Silva (2020) names “pragmatics of chaos” due to denialism (even of the very pandemic) and to the neoliberal values cherished by a radical right-wing that supports the President and backs the discontinuation of important public policies, mainly those directed towards minoritized groups and environmental protection. Having in mind such a scenario, and amidst the societal bewilderment and inaction regarding the President’s contradictory actions towards democracy, we chose to focus on a rare event of direct resistance featured by a migrant of Haitian origin, who told in the face of the president what maybe many Brazilians had not dared to say. What is of interest here is that this performance, recorded on a mobile phone, and posted as a tweet, went viral, and gave rise to a hashtag - #acaboubolsonaro [ItsOverBolsonaro] - that is still alive seven months later. With a focus on the man’s performance of resistance and its entextualization on social media, we analyze his discourse and the impacts of his positioning. In the analysis, we try to retrace some of the threads traversed by the hashtag in two Twitter accounts and some of the reverberations on Instagram. We also discuss how the discursive thread of the postings weaves a metareflexive fabric about the man’s performance. We see this meta-reflection as an acknowledgment of another praxis that we have called ‘pragmatics of resistance’.

Intertextuality and misunderstanding This special issue investigates the interplay of intertextuality and misunderstanding in the mediation of social realities. The notion of intertextuality, that any given text is accorded meaning through its relations to other texts, draws our analytic attention to semiotic configurations (words, reported speech, sayings, stories, television shows, etc.) that extend with some attributed interpretive and formal coherence across successive contexts of use. Our concern with misunderstanding, on the other hand, brings to the foreground the heterogeneity of social identities, competencies, institutions and communities that both inform and result from acts of communication. Bringing together misunderstanding and intertextuality allows the contributors to this volume to highlight an apparent paradox concerning texts in their use as ostensibly common reference points by heterogeneous actors. On the one hand, texts are attributed with coherent and implicitly shared meaning. On the other hand, any given text is also necessarily variable through successive uses. Their paradoxical, double-faced status allows texts to play a key role in mediating divergent subject positions, social identities and communities. By considering misunderstanding in relation to textuality we draw attention to the underlying relativity of any textual meaning and the heteroglossia of successive voicings of ostensibly repeated or recirculated texts (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272). What emerges from the articles in this volume is a look at the variable and negotiated quality of textual meaning and form at the juncture of social identities, institutions and communities; and conversely, the uses made of textuality in coordinating and articulating social difference.

DE: Rekontextualisierung, d.h. Einbettung von Äußerungen in andere neue Kontexte, stellt, besonders in heutigen zahlreichen Online-Diskursen, ein besonders mächtiges Tool dar. Eine gewaltige Anzahl von Texten, Bildern und Videos unterliegt jeden Tag dem Prozess des Teilens, der zum einen Distribution bedeutet (vgl. semiotische Operatoren wie Hashtags oder Hyperlinks), zum anderen der Kommunikation online dient. Der Beitrag konzentriert sich auf die linguistische Analyse von ausgewählten Beispielen geteilter Inhalte (in Social Media), v.a. auf Teilen als Kommunikation in sozialer Umgebung.

EN: The entextualization, that is embedding of expressions in new contexts, is (especially in today’s discourses online) a very powerful tool. Many texts, images or videos are subject to the process of sharing. This process means both distribution (compare semiotic operators, hashtags or hyperlinks) and communication online itself. The article focuses on linguistic analysis of selected examples of shared content in the social media, first of all on sharing as communication in social environment.

Resumo: Este artigo focaliza as práticas discursivas de Luan, um jovem negro e de identificações homoeróticas, em interação na Web 2.0. Os dados foram gerados em uma investigação etnográfica, no contexto interacional da rede social Facebook. As noções de entextualização e de performances são privilegiadas para dar conta da observação dos processos de circulação e desestabilização de discursos cristalizados de raça, na construção das identificações de Luan como garoto negro e sensual. Defende-se que tais noções são a chave de leitura para a compreensão de como tais discursos são estrategicamente utilizados pelo jovem, ao construir suas performances nas interações com amigos dessa rede social. As análises apontam que identificações de raça são entremeadas por marcas de gênero/sexualidade e que estratégias de agenciamento emergem em meio a uma profusão de significados normativos. Palavras-chave: Performance identitária. Entextualização. Agenciamento.

Socialization takes place not in bounded interactional episodes, but across communicative encounters. This aspect provides the general frame of the present paper which uses the concept of "trajectory of socialization" (Wortham 2005) to explore a connected series of educational events in a school in Rio de Janeiro where a group of Brazilian 5 th graders and their History teacher engage in discussions about gender, sexuality and difference, related to the operationalization of a multiliteracies syllabus with strong queer overtones. The data, generated in a one-year ethnographic study in this urban school setting, follows the socialization journey of one student, Julio, as he gets introduced, along with his classmates, to new reflective practices concerning normativity patterns, social stereotypes and marginalized alterities. To scrutinize Julio's intersubjective journey and the local-societal dialectics implicated in it, I interface the notions of trajectory of socialization, entextualization Briggs 2009/1990;, and what I term transcontexts, i.e. interactional mobile environments comprising both perduring and shifting aspects. (Re)framing and (re)keying activities, together with repetition and topic recycling (Tannen 2006), as interrelated processes establishing a sense of coherence and continuity, constitute the analytical focus of the work which captures the group's collective positionings and the boy's shifting alignments towards more critical understandings of identity processes in general and gender and sexuality in particular. The logical articulation suggested is that the accurate observation of interpersonal actions in the classroom and discourse chains may throw light on how connectivity across events is established in discourse and identity practices, which, lying beyond emergent meaning-making processes, intersect with a larger sociohistorical scale.

In this study I examine a corpus of former refugee narratives published by the nonprofit Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) on their website in 2011. In order to investigate the relationship between the constituent parts and the narrative as a whole, I use critical discourse analysis to examine the strategic use of person, quantified temporal phrases, broader thematic elements, and the constitution of “former refugee narrative” as a genre. I conclude that the RCOA dominates temporality and maintains authority over the narratives through specifically applied quantification yet captures the necessary subjective and emotional material of the refugee experience to achieve the authenticity the co-narratives need to be well-received by the public. Thus, by manipulating hermeneutic composability, the RCOA evidences an objective, authoritative portrayal yet captures a subjective experience worth telling, and by manipulating intertextual gaps they appeal to the Australian nationalism implicit in the contemporary political climate.

This article puts forth a methodology for reading and analyzing texts that seriously considers the language-society nexus. Inscribed at once in the pragmatic and linguistic-anthropological perspectives, the article analyzes a mediated event - namely, the Profissão Reporter TV show of Aug. 30, 2011, which enacted, side by side, the beauty contests "Miss Presidiária" (Brasília), "Miss Gay Brasil" (Juiz de Fora) and "Beleza Nordestina" (Rio de Janeiro) - so as to consider the fact that the event not only entextualized (i.e., caused to travel, in terms of BAUMAN; BRIGGS, 1990) talk and images from other contexts, but also imagined the trajectories of reception of the event. We looked for ethnographic evidence of the modes of production and circulation of the text, from a participant observation with subjects who variously received such mediated event.

Theoretical and applied research in the field of institutional discourse analysis calls for an increasing awareness of the constitutive nature of discourse in the representation and the assessment of social identities (Sarangi & Roberts 1999; Blommaert 2010; Eades 2010). The staunchly textualist accounts surviving institutional practice, however, tend to obscure complex multidiscursive and language ideologically anchored processes that mold procedural outcomes. On the basis of first-hand ethnographic data collected across legal-administrative procedures in Belgium, this article aims at revealing some meaningful contexts that have been erased in the case of an asylum seeker who became a murder victim and whose asylum file was used in the assize trial as a resource to sketch his social identity. The analysis explores
the ideological functioning of textuality in the situated details of communicative practice, thereby aiming for a better understanding of the intricacies of multidiscursive identity construction in translocal procedural settings.

This book presents an innovative institutional transpositional ethnography that examines the textual trajectory of “the life of a calling script” from production by corporate management and clients to recontextualization by middle management and finally to application by agents in phone interactions. Drawing on an extensive original research it provides a behind-the-scenes view of a multilingual call center in London and critiques the archetypal modern workplace practices including extensive use of monitoring and standardization and use of low-skilled precariat labor. In doing so, it offers fresh perspectives on contemporary debates about resistance, agency, and compliance in globalized workplaces. This study will provide a valuable resource to students and scholars of management studies, communication, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology.

Situo este estudo no contexto da aprovação de um projeto de lei intitulado “Infância sem pornografia”, submetido à câmara de vereadores da cidade de Juiz de Fora – MG, o qual fora proposto com o efeito de judicialização dos/as professores/as da cidade que discutissem temas como gênero e sexualidade, sob a alcunha de “pornografia” pela autoria do projeto de lei. Uma vez proposta a lei, tal texto foi objeto de discussão em diversas sessões na câmara municipal entre janeiro de 2017 e abril de 2018.  Diferentes discursos destes eventos foram entextualizados (BAUMAN ; BRIGGS, 1990) em diferentes mídias jornalísticas. Neste artigo, coloco sob escrutínio o texto-base da lei, bem como notícias divulgadas no jornal local, em uma análise a partir dos conceitos de trajetórias textuais, entextualizações e indexicalidade (BAUMAN ; BRIGGS, 1990; BLOMMAERT, 2005). Ao analisar tal material, observo como discursos (GEE, 2005) sobre gênero e sexualidade são indexicalizados. Além de colocar em jogo disputas sobre os sentidos do que vem a ser “pornográfico”, produzindo um “pânico moral” (MISKOLCI, 2007), tais textos indicam que seus apoiadores não consideram os efeitos perlocucionários (AUSTIN, 1990) dos enunciados da lei no que tange ao trabalho dos professores da rede pública local, além de constituir-se por diferentes recursos linguísticos que lançam o tema como uma questão de partidarismo político e não de interesse público. Ao final, proponho uma reflexão sobre a educação e o papel desempenhado pela referida lei municipal nos avanços do conservadorismo.

This article explores how a certain number of concepts and practices from
the field of linguistic anthropology can clarify for literary and cultural critics the interactive nature of the production of meaning around cultural artifacts. The article uses as case studies the critical practices of Ross Chambers and Pierre Bourdieu in order to explore how cultural artifacts, in particular textual ones, are recreated, recontextualized, or reactivated differently in different sets of hands, in different places and times, and
how these differences can be taken to be a function of the indexical capacity of a work, a capacity that is revealed differently in its interaction with any given reader.

This case study explored the English Language related ideologies of different management groups and student representatives at a business school of Karachi, Pakistan. The study tried to bring an insider's perspective to the causes of certain language ideologies prevalent in the business school's social structure, and the role language played in power relations between the main actors of the community. For this purpose a sample of four research participants from each of the focused management cadres was selected for study. Analysis of semi-structured interviews, administered on the participants, was done using Fairclough's (2009) dialectical-relational approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The study suggested the prevalence of certain language ideologies that were manifested and latent in the
discourses of the participants. These deeply rooted
beliefs were predominantly patterned by centering
authorities: language became a means for those in
power to sustain their hegemony and maintain social
stratification in society. Functionally, English played
a stratifying role, and also was found to be extensively perceived as a commodity, a product that is to be
acquired or attained. The study realized this social
wrong of inequity and divide in a particular community,
and on the basis of the findings, recommends a reorganizing
of social structures into those of more
inclusive and democratic ones for the operationalizing
of equality and fairness in social practices.

"This article examines contrasting entextualizations of the Bible across conflicting Traditionalist and Evangelical Christian identities on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona. On the one hand, each makes use of Apache language idioms and genre precedents to underwrite their respective claims to authentic Apache identities. On the other hand, each selects different components of that loosely shared repertoire of discursive precedents in their entextualizations of the Bible in order to articulate contrasting transformative projects for their community as well as to assert the contemporary relevance of their voices within differently imagined global orders. This analysis constitutes the local speech community as a locus of ethnolinguistic inquiry in which relations to encompassing social orders are mediated in part by the circulation of texts. In this process conventions and precedents serve as a reservoir of resources mobilized for use in competing strategies advanced by differently affiliated actors in dialogue with one another. In this way multiplicity and dynamism as a characteristic of local communities is defined as a crucial dimension of local–global discursive processes.
"

This article is meant to initiate a dialogue with Judith Bridges about the performativity of language. By analyzing how social media users talk about what language is doing, especially when these users accuse someone of whitesplaining, mansplaining, or other forms of [X]-splaining, I show that they implicitly acknowledge what has been called elsewhere the ventriloquial dimension of communication. By ventriloquation, I mean that whenever we speak, write or, more generally, communicate, an act of delegation always takes place, which means that what is said, written or communicated can be presented by others as making us say things that we had not necessarily anticipated. This form of delegation, which is typical of the episodes analyzed by Bridges and that I identify as a form of downstream ventriloquation, is contrasted with upstream forms of ventriloquation, that is ventriloquations by which other actors are deemed as expressing themselves through what is being said or, more generally, communicated. I believe that the identification of these two forms of ventriloquation can help us analyze the performativity of language that interests Bridges.

Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widely resemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with other discourses and practices. This article examines the emergence of Integrated Reporting (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information, organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts of their activities in one single document. Specifically, this article analyses a selected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses of sustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macro discourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have played out in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large, the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses and semantically ‘bent’ to construct the organisation itself as being financially sustainable, that is, viable and profitable and for the primary ...

Theoretical and applied research in the field of institutional discourse analysis calls for an increasing awareness of the constitutive nature of discourse in the representation and the assessment of social identities (Sarangi & Roberts 1999; Blommaert 2010; Eades 2010). The staunchly textualist accounts surviving institutional practice, however, tend to obscure complex multidiscursive and language ideologically anchored processes that mold procedural outcomes. On the basis of first-hand ethnographic data collected across legal-administrative procedures in Belgium, this article aims at revealing some meaningful contexts that have been erased in the case of an asylum seeker who became a murder victim and whose asylum file was used in the assize trial as a resource to sketch his social identity. The analysis explores the ideological functioning of textuality in the situated details of communicative practice, thereby aiming for a better understanding of the intricacies of multidiscursi...

Resumo Este artigo focaliza as práticas discursivas de Luan, um jovem negro e de identificações homoeróticas, em interação na Web 2.0. Os dados foram gerados em uma investigação etnográfica, no contexto interacional da rede social Facebook. As noções de entextualização e de performances são privilegiadas para dar conta da observação dos processos de circulação e desestabilização de discursos cristalizados de raça, na construção das identificações de Luan como garoto negro e sensual. Defende-se que tais noções são a chave de leitura para a compreensão de como tais discursos são estrategicamente utilizados pelo jovem, ao construir suas performances nas interações com amigos dessa rede social. As análises apontam que identificações de raça são entremeadas por marcas de gênero/sexualidade e que estratégias de agenciamento emergem em meio a uma profusão de significados normativos.