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Popular Culture Review
as with other aspects of physical appearance, conveys various social aspects.
Therefore, wearing a specific type or style of clothing and the manner in which
it is worn conveys a message from wearers to readers about the wearer’s
ethnicity, income, religions affiliation, and social class. Regarding language or
discourse, it, too, takes on different social variables, and the variables are
constrained by factors such as the interlocutor’s age, ethnicity, gender, setting,
and purpose of communication. These factors must be considered for
communication to be meaningful. They are similar to Dell Hymes’ claim of
communicative competence (58). On a similar note, Schiffrin finds that writers,
in much the same manner as speakers, “design their discourse for their projected
recipients” (187).
On a related topic, Norman Fairclough, in his analysis of critical discourse,
argues that communication depends on which social conventions are assumed to
be held (3). This approach to discourse is part of the manner in which people
interpret features of text. This is certainly the case with respect to the message
documented on T-shirts in that the messenger has a specific message in mind
and uses a specific method to transmit that message. As was mentioned above,
written communication falls within the broader scope of language, and written
communication on T-shirts is relevant for such a study.
Within the context of discourse analysis, meaning is constructed in terms of
what users do with language. One area of meaning that can be deduced from this
study of meaning is that analysts are concerned with social meaning (Barker and
Galasinski 25). In the view of these researchers, “meaning is regulated by power
which governs not only what can be said under determinate social and cultural
conditions but who can speak, when, and where” (12). A key feature of this
insight to meaning is power. Power here is not a means of suppressing someone.
Rather, it is used in a sense of giving power to oneself. It is similar to Michel
Foucault’s use of the word “power” (55). This view of language and power also
relates to an issue of identity. Individuals take on themselves the power to be in
control of their lives and the way they present themselves in society. By using
certain lexical items (e.g., Fighter), composers of T-shirt messages do just that.
An additional issue in a discussion of discourse analysis that has a place in
this analysis of the language of remembrance is that of speech acts. The topic of
speech acts might have been indirectly referenced to some extent in the previous
pages when the number of words noted on T-shirts was discussed.
Speech Acts in Popular Culture
Beyond the traditional structural analysis of language (e.g., phonology,
morphology, syntax, and semantics), what individuals do with language is an
area of language study that has come to the attention of analysts Fromkin,
Rodman, and Hyams (214). The topic of speech acts began with the earlier
works of Austin and Searle. Searle, for instance, was interested in what he terms
“characterizations” of linguistic elements. That is, he was interested in such
issues as whether an expression is used to refer, to make sense, or to analyze
certain propositions (4). Although the adjective is speech, this can be extended