Metacommentary

Mass-media representations of the stereotypical science nerd position scientists as white, male, and largely English-speaking. Teachers and students who state a desire to work in equitable science learning communities may nonetheless reproduce inequities through their classroom practices which either embody or validate the science nerd stereotype. This study compares secondary students' metacommentary on the science nerd trope in a mass-media representation to their metacommentary on their own and their peers' classroom practices and sheds light on design elements for Critical Race Media Literacy (Yosso, 2002) tasks that may promote equity in science education spaces.

This article explores the use of "Mexicans Be Like" memes in terms of the heteroglossic tension they both employ and produce, and the ways in which meme examples creatively recontextualize ideas about immigration, the border, contested histories, models of personhood, racialization and presumptions of social value. I understand these memes as an opportunity for viewers to position themselves in political, social and cultural landscapes, and in so doing contribute to an environment where consumers are not passive but quintessentially productive, altering the meme content, and redeploying them into new social domains. In an attempt to appreciate the work "Mexicans Be Like" memes do, I consider how the "Mexicans Be Like" meme produces and contests certain models of personhood and the social values associated with them. This piece explores how the producer/consumers of this meme are necessarily bricoleurs, constructing meaning via their thoughtful deployment of cultural, at times stereotypic, referents. This article points to ways in which people produce meaning through their engagement with the meme form, using it to challenge dominant narratives in the context of a collaboratively produced Web 2.0 environment.

А н н о т а ц и я. Статья посвящена рассмотрению культурных стереотипов, отраженных в классических сказках, и выявлению способов их представления во вторичных текстах. Осознание давления «социальных мифов» в значимых для социума текстах привело к тому, что в конце ХХ века они стали объектом пристального внимания женщин-писателей. В сборнике рассказов «Кровавая комната» Анжела Картер переписывает сюжеты сказок Шарля Перро, называя это «работой по демифологизации». В статье выявляются «социальные мифы» в отношении женщин в двух авторских версиях исходной истории о Красавице и Чудовище. Анализ художественной системы вторичных текстов показывает, что критический взгляд на культурные конструкты определяет выбор способа репрезентации истории-текст о тексте и изложение через восприятие женского персонажа. Это позволяет ввести в реинтерпретацию метакомментарий, объектом которого становятся имеющиеся в обществе экономические практики касательно молодых женщин; они, наряду со страхами, присущими героиням, тематизируются посредством выдвижения сквозных мотивов и правовой лексики. Поступки главной героини приобретают психологическую мотивировку, которой ее плоский прототип лишен, а использование индивидуальной (женской) точки зрения, отсутствующей в тексте-источнике, позволяет автору артикулировать критическую позицию к социальным конструктам женщины, внушаемым сказками, причем от лица главной героини и с современных для читателя позиций. Возможность переосмысления главной героиней своей внутренней сущности и появления для нее новых жизненных сценариев по сравнению с тем, что жестко предписан классической сказкой, задана автором посредством ввода в повествование фонового персонажа и множественным пересказом исходной истории, который расшатывает ее непреложный ход. К л ю ч е в ы е с л о в а : реинтерпретация; вторичный текст; волшебные сказки; рассказы; английская литература; английские писательницы; литературные жанры; метакомментарий; культурные конструкты; феминистская критика; женские персонажи.

This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and -sharing functions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, making an analogy between these two conceptualizations of the Internet and Jerome Bruner’s two different modes of knowing in his (1986) bookActual minds, possible worlds: logico-scientific and narrative. Just as analyses of Web 2.0 discourse highlight collaborative construction, dissemination, and uptake of information, analysis of narrative illuminates the accrual of sociocultural meaning in collaboratively constructed stories. We use discourse and narrative analytic methods to investigate the social indexicality of “accent” in a corpus of Philadelphia Accent Challenge YouTube videos (and the associated comment sections), and we illustrate how indexical value accrues via the snowballing of reflexive metacommentary in the form of narratives ...

This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and -sharing functions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, making an analogy between these two conceptualizations of the Internet and Jerome Bruner’s two different modes of knowing in his (1986) bookActual minds, possible worlds: logico-scientific and narrative. Just as analyses of Web 2.0 discourse highlight collaborative construction, dissemination, and uptake of information, analysis of narrative illuminates the accrual of sociocultural meaning in collaboratively constructed stories. We use discourse and narrative analytic methods to investigate the social indexicality of “accent” in a corpus of Philadelphia Accent Challenge YouTube videos (and the associated comment sections), and we illustrate how indexical value accrues via the snowballing of reflexive metacommentary in the form of narratives ...

ii DECLARATION By submitting this dissertation electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights, and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification.

Combining digital discourse analysis and Citizen Sociolinguistics, methodological frames that contend with the effects of evolving digital practices, I present an approach to studying sociolinguistic trends by investigating how social media users talk about what language is doing. This approach is applicable to research on a wide range of linguistic and cultural contexts. The particular focus in this paper, however, is on U.S.-based social issues and linguistic features of American English as they appear in pieces of digital discourse from the micro-blogging platforms Twitter and Tumblr. Situated within the highly fractured sociopolitical climate of the pandemic-afflicted United States, the language under discussion provides a glimpse of some historically relevant sociocultural beliefs and attitudes towards the role of gender and racial identity in sociopolitical discourse. Focusing on uses of -splain, a metapragmatic bound morpheme, the paper demonstrates how social media users ass...

Combining digital discourse analysis and Citizen Sociolinguistics, methodological frames that contend with the effects of evolving digital practices, I present an approach to studying sociolinguistic trends by investigating how social media users talk about what language is doing.
This approach is applicable to research on a wide range of linguistic and cultural contexts. The particular focus in this paper, however, is on U.S.-based social issues and linguistic features of American English as they appear in pieces of digital discourse from the micro-blogging platforms Twitter and Tumblr. Situated within the highly fractured sociopolitical climate of the pandemic-afflicted United States, the language under discussion provides a glimpse of some historically relevant sociocultural beliefs and attitudes towards the role of gender and racial identity in sociopolitical discourse. Focusing on uses of-splain, a metapragmatic bound morpheme, the paper demonstrates how social media users assemble lexical, discursive, and other semiotic resources as means for negotiating sociopragmatic appropriateness. The analysis shows how the usage of words like mansplain encompass the sociolinguistic process of enregisterment through practices of linguistic reflexivity, creativity, and regimentationpractices that are essential aspects of interaction and participation in social media. Using these enregistered metapragmatic words problematizes imbalances in users' sociopragmatic ideologies, namely who can or cannot say what, to whom, and in what manner. I show how creative metapragmatic language is deployed to discuss issues of entitlement and epistemic authority in communicative dynamics. I draw on theoretical frames that reveal how the recontextualization and resemiotization of-splain words and other metapragmatic neologisms are performances of identity. I also show how splain-mediated communication facilitates users in achieving their own discursive intentions to point out language in judgmental and/or lighthearted manners. I assert that attention to metapragmatic neologisms in the perspective of Citizen Sociolinguistics enhances the analytical repertoire of digital discourse analysis.

Based on the premise that human experience is storied, the researcher engaged in the writing of critical autoethnographic narratives to examine ideological contention in language learning, language use, and language teaching. Using raciolinguistic ideologies as theoretical framework, he shows the ways ideological orientations embedded in circulating metacommentary push individuals to engage in aesthetic labor around the ways they employ their linguistic resources. Findings suggest that language educators and learners should engage in critical examination of seemingly innocent metalinguistic commentary, as these contain contradictory and multiple ideological orientations that largely shape the perception and employment of speakers' linguistic repertoires.

The article focuses generally on the functioning of commentary or metacommentary within postmodern narrative texts. Two Czech authors from the second half of the 20th century have been chosen to illustrate the theory outlined in the introductory part of the article: Ludvík Vaculík and Jiří Kratochvil. From the point of view of interpretation the structure that is being opened by commentary inside some narratives is called posthermeneutic. The article argues that posthermeneutic situation can be found in the perverse situation of samizdat publishing in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s (as depicted by Vaculíkʼs Český snář) and in the role played by women in Kratochvilʼs short story Příběh krále Kandaula. The article concludes that the postmodern might stand the reader in front of an ethical choice as far as the function of literature and art is concerned.

Consumer-grade game engines such as Multimedia Fusion and RPG Maker have dramatically extended the reach of digital games as a medium. They have also spawned online communities, where conventions and canons of using these tools have evolved. These partly stem from the functional constraints of the game engines themselves and are institutionalized through manuals, examples, tutorials, and games made with them. However, some members of game engine communities actively seek to challenge these conventions by experimenting with the engines and finding ingenious ways to put them to unexpected uses. Such experiments can be regarded as a form of metacommentary on the engines’ capabilities and limitations. While arguably impractical and inefficient, they enrich the scope of what can be done with the engine and can contribute to its further development.

In continuing a line of flight opened up earlier in discussing the zombie as a symbolic device1, a metaphor that frames our relation, not to human labour in it's vitalistic and artistic affectivity, but to the congealment of it's creditory mediation as Capital which grows only as it feeds of living labor, it is worth considering how this symbol's deployment and becoming into a generic staple has presented us with a vision of what in it's immediacy appears to be a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Within the genre of zombie cinema, the horde of zombies themselves feature as the background of antagonisms, dangers and mutating threats which foregrounds human ingenuity and the drama of survival. The stage however is set almost always in a post-apocalyptic period which has already witnessed the fears we know of yet keep at a distance today. Questions such as a real post-scarcity economy, problems regarding the regulations and control mechanisms of biogenetic experimentation and the climatic consequences of our actions are what is retroactively posited to as signs from a future that we fear, but do not believe will really happen. The most recent rendition of such a horizon drenched in the symptoms of our pathologies today is enfleshed by the popular television series, 'The Walking Dead'. What dawns on us as spectators is not merely the horror and carnage that the undead in their lifeless hunger seek to inflict on the living. Actual conflict, unlike other Hollywood productions takes up considerably less reel time than the organizational formations of the pack of survivors and the arguments regarding the decisions they are to take. Whether to stay close to the forrest, which provides resources and is away from the confines and traps of the city, yet risk an ambush by night from the trees? Questions such as these arise in the immediacy of the threat they pose, and while our batch of survivors act also as farmers and scavengers in the meantime, the real anxiety and struggle that unfolds in a world without a demarcated organizational structure and division of labour takes it's toll on them. Friends, and even family turn against one another and this churning of the human will in it's struggle against the hunger that haunts it, among themselves-AND from of the remains of their brethren, animates the real drama of the series. Yet, and here I believe that it is important to insist on the historical genesis of such a metaphor-Frankenstein's creature, the original 'undead' figure, from Mary Shelley's novel, assembled in a laboratory and brought to life, expressed, from within the finitude of his being, an experience of tragedy that to the reader appears more 'human' than the actions of his persecutors who are merely stunned into aggression by such a being's appearance. Tortured thus, and abandoned by his creator we cannot help but ....

This citizen sociolinguistic case study of Roman dialect analyzes the ways in which the Roman variety of Italian is differentially conceptualized by social media users, and the ways that these conceptualizations are linked, implicitly or explicitly, to popular ideas of personhood.

The genre of the five paragraph essay (5PE) is familiar to many US high school and middle school students because it is often included in the teaching of literary analysis and general argumentation. Learners of the 5PE participate in its social life consisting of its learning, change, and spread. In this paper, I present a description of some of the online social life of the 5PE. Examining online metapragmatic commentary under theoretical frames of speech genres (Bakhtin, 1986), enregisterment (Agha, 2007), and language governmentality (Flores 2014; Pennycook 2002, 2006), and with the new methodology of citizen sociolinguistics (Rymes & Leone, this volume), I show how numerous instances of metapragmatic commentary on the 5PE, regardless of their positioning, reinforce a governmentality that constructs the 5PE as a practice totally dependent on authoritarian specifications.

Increasingly, everyday people are compiling detailed illustrations of and commentaries on language via social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Collectively, these postings function as a participatory version of more formal linguistic atlases compiled by professional sociolinguists. While they do not have professional training or credentials, these citizen sociolinguists have become collectors of sociolinguistically meaningful distinctions--meaningful because these are the distinctions that have stood out to everyday language users. Internet circulated citizen sociolinguistic portraits illustrate not only regional speech samples and their phonological and lexical variation, but also, via self-interruptive side-commentary and comments of netizens, the relative social salience of certain emblematic speech features. Citizen sociolinguistic methodology thus 1) draws on self-conscious portraits generated by language users themselves; and 2) assesses the validity of those portraits by examining the commentary on them posted by Internet peers. Findings have implications for sociolinguistic research on the Internet or In Real Life.

The status and role of Italy’s dialetti (dialects) in contemporary Italian society are contested among both citizens and sociolinguists, and their nuanced uses have begun to circulate (with commentary) around social media. This report adopts a citizen sociolinguistic approach (Rymes & Leone, this volume) to analyze a single controversial case about the Roman dialect via YouTube and Facebook, drawing on social media users’ metacommentary and recontextualizations (Rymes, 2012) of an interview with two young women at the beach. Rather than attempting to identify static and isolated characteristics of the Roman dialect based on this interview, this report analyzes the social values and linguistic characteristics that citizen sociolinguists attribute to these young women’s particular ways of speaking, acting, and being.

In this chapter, I illustrate that people accumulate idiosyncratic experiences as a repertoire of communicative resources and, in many everyday interactions, use those elements to strike out in new, more loosely encoded, de-enregistered ways.  In the face of this kind of everyday creativity, however, a question arises: How do people make sense of each other?  Without adhering to the normative expectations of language, dialect and register, how do people interacting know what counts as a communicatively relevant repertoire element? This chapter answers that question by using the concept of metacommentary--or comments about language--as a new ordering principal for understanding heteroglossic communication.

Foucault’s work has provided critical applied linguists many tools for deconstructing dominant understandings of language. However, his work has not been significantly engaged with by scholars who have attempted to develop alternative pedagogical approaches outside of these dominant understandings of language. Specifically, these alternative pedagogical approaches continue to be embedded within a discourse of truth that is antithetical to Foucault’s project. This recovering the linguistic truth paradigm of applied linguistics may be inadvertently complicit in the development of new regimes of truth aligned with newly emerging relations of power. A more thorough engagement with Foucault’s work related to developing an aesthetics of existence offers insights into developing a paradigm of linguistic aesthetics that is more aligned with Foucault’s conceptualization of truth and that is resistant to these newly emerging relations of power. A fictional classroom is described to demonstrate the characteristics of this paradigm of linguistic aesthetics.