Volume 37, Issue 4 - Special Issue: The dynamics of textual trajectories in professional and workplace practice, Guest editors: Theresa Lillis and Janet Maybin

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 entextualization and recontextualization, and their incorporation in recent research on textual chains or trajectories, contributes to a new language of description which conceptualizes texts in dynamic terms while still maintaining a sense of their coherence and durability. The article traces how conceptions of dialogicality and recontextualization have been used to develop transcontextual approaches to analysis which have highlighted the ideological work of textual movement and resemiotization. It argues that envisaging linked series of entextualizations and recontextualizations 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 theorizing 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 specialized knowledge, the instantiation of institutional procedures and the articulation of participant positionings and identities.

This paper examines the complex literacy event through which police witness statements are produced in England and Wales. Witness statements are constructed through interviews which archetypally consist of a trajectory from the witness of the crime, through a police officer and onto a written page with the officer taking most control of the writing. This paper examines how this ostensibly inevitable trajectory materializes in practice. It identifies a distinctive way of traversing the trajectory through which the inner workings of the trajectory itself are put on display by the interviewing officer and through this display recursively influence the trajectory. This display of the trajectory draws on four discursive means: writing aloud, proposing wordings, reading back text just written and referring explicitly to the artifactuality of writing, which I label, collectively, “Frontstage Entextualization.” Through Frontstage Entextualization, the writing process comes to be used as a resource for both producing text and involving the witness in text production. The paper identifies three forms of activity which are accomplished through Frontstage Entextualization: First, frontstage drafting which allows words and phrases for possible inclusion to be weighed-up; secondly, frontstage scribing which foregrounds the technology of pen and paper which allows the witness to be appraised of writing processes; and finally, frontstaging the sequentiality of written-ness to textually resolve difficulties of witness memory. The paper concludes by suggesting that the analysis has shown how text trajectories can be made accessible to lay participants by institutional actors.

Drawing on a weekly news feature of recontextualized public discourse, this paper examines journalists’ uptake of political (mis)communication. We label such mediatized speech events text bites . Text bites present us with eye-catching bits of reported speech about the main characters: the politician whose words are being quoted and the journalist captioning the quote. Rather than speak for themselves, the quotes speak through recontextualization – that is, through the inflection of prior discourse with new meanings. Our data are taken from a corpus consisting of news quotes by politicians published in De Standaard , a Belgian news site. Drawing on the linguistic anthropology of intertextuality, we analyze how the journalistic responses evaluate the reported politicians, their statements and their communicative performance. Findings show how a media logic conditions what politicians can and cannot say, to whom and about whom, and how journalists portray politicians who do not comply with this logic. Evaluations of the moral and verbal merits of what politicians do with words evince an appreciation for colorful characters, self-deprecatory humor, plain language and stylistic craftsmanship. Media criticism is generally rebuffed: text bites do boundary work, demarcating the professional territory of journalists and politicians. Text bites address a highly media-literate readership of news consumers who recognize the “characters” in the plot line of political communication.

Drawing on a text-oriented action research ethnography of the writing practices of UK-based social workers, this paper focuses on a key but problematic aspect of everyday, professional textual practice – the production of “case notes.” Using data drawn from interviews, workshops, texts and observation, the paper locates case notes within social work everyday practice and explores the entextualization of three distinct case notes. The heuristic of imagined, prescribed and actual trajectories is used to track specific instances of entextualization and to illustrate why the production of case notes is a particularly complex activity. A key argument is that in the institutional imaginary, and reflected in the institutionally prescribed trajectory, case notes are construed as a comprehensive record of all actions, events and interactions, prior to and providing warrants for all other documentation. However, they are in actual practice produced as parts of clusters of a range of different text types which, together, provide accounts of, and for, actions and decisions. This finding explains why case notes are often viewed as incomplete and raises fundamental questions about how they should be evaluated. The complexity of case notes as an everyday professional practice is underscored in relation to professional voice, addressivity and textual temporality.

In this paper we develop a social semiotic account of continuity and change across texts. Our aims are to make a theoretical contribution to scholarly work on inter-textual relations by adopting a multimodal perspective; and to develop a framework for understanding how texts mediate knowing, learning and agency in education and beyond. We achieve this through a case study of surgical education. We present and analyze, first, a collection of pedagogic texts designed for surgeons learning to perform a common surgical procedure. Second, we look at a series of texts that culminated in a pedagogic text on surgery for the general public. We conclude that a multimodal, social semiotic framework provides essential means for the recognition, documentation and understanding of continuities and changes in text production and engagement.

Locating itself within Blommaert’s (2014, From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistics, Tilburg Paper in Culture Studies , Tilburg University, Paper 106) sociolinguistics of mobility and complexity, this article argues for the theoretical and methodological value of the concept of the “meaning-making trajectory” as a unit of analysis for research in sociolinguistics and literacy studies. A meaning-making trajectory gives priority to analysis of transcontextual processes, questions of agency and intentionality, and the precise ways in which semiosis materializes activity as it unfolds over time and space. Focusing on empirical data from research on a participatory house-building project in South Africa, I present a language of description for the analysis of trajectories, which links together “strips,” “nodes” and “participant frameworks.” I argue that a trajectory comprises a unit of analysis which has mobility as its premise and which reveals complexity in the transformations of meaning making across space and time. I argue for a close tracing of trajectories on the emic level and that the identification of moments or “nodes” in trajectories, where the direction of the trajectory shifts, enables researchers to undertake precise analyses of agency and contingency. Inequalities of access to and availability of semiotic and material resources at points along a trajectory reveal potential for the mediation of agency or for the enactment of symbolic violence.