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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.
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Making Meanings, Creating Family This page intentionally left blank MAKING MEANINGS, CREATING FAMILY Intertextuality and Framing in Family Interaction Cynthia Gordon 1 2009 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright # 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gordon, Cynthia, 1975– Making meanings, creating family : intertextuality and framing in family interactions / Cynthia Gordon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-537382-0; 978-0-19-537383-7 (pbk.) 1. Communication in the family—United States—Case studies. 2. Discourse analysis—United States. I. Title. HQ536.G667 2009 306.87010 4—dc22 2008042017 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For my parents Karen Gordon and Greg Gordon This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments T he research project on which this book is based was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (grant no. 99010-7 to Deborah Tannen and Shari Kendall and grant no. B2004-20 to Deborah Tannen, Shari Kendall, and Cynthia Gordon). I thank project officer Kathleen Christensen and the Sloan Foundation for their support of this project. I also thank fellow researchers Deborah Tannen and Shari Kenda