“Propping up” the “I,” or the discursive constitution of subjectivity: a multimodal discourse analysis of informal talk in a kindergarten classroom

Abstract

This article presents a multimodal discourse analysis of a discursive event involving three kindergarten children engaged in informal talk while writing and drawing in a classroom setting. My focus was to identify semiotic elements that indicated the children’s subjectivity as constituted in discourse. I thus characterize the focal students’ subjectivity not as an internal, pre-existing phenomenon that is brought to discourse, but, rather, as manifest in and realized as a discursive entity. From this perspective, subjectivity is thus understood as the possibility of becoming a subject of discourse: as a process of coming to create, participate in, and become affected by the unfolding discourse. Drawing upon theories of discourse developed by Émile Benveniste and Jacques Lacan, I mapped uses of the pronouns “I” and “you” as spoken signifiers that came into relation with discursive objects in the process of the multimodal constitution of subjectivity in discourse. This analysis adds to the conceptual development of the processes and significance of subjectivity in children’s multimodal discourse, as well as methodological approaches that suggest how multimodal discourse analysis can more explicitly incorporate subjectivity.