150 Douglas J. Glick
system that links (and strengthens) causal attributions about the problem of school
violence in Israel to a (relative) speaker's/writer's conservative vs. liberal political
identity. The study then closes with a discussion of some of the general methodological
and theoretical implications drawn from this semiotic case study.INTRODUCTION
In an area of the world known for and perhaps for some even defined by its explicit
violence, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that the secular school system in the State of
Israel has the highest rate of youth violence in the world.^2 This problem was recently deemed
so troubling in fact that the Israeli government launched a nation-wide media campaign in an
attempt to alleviate it. This paper focuses on this ̳problem of school violence‘ as it is
discursively constructed in Israel‘s newspapers on a daily basis.^3
Verbal practices, like all other cultural practices, display different kinds and degrees of
regularity. More specifically, there are relatively shared ways in which verbal practices refer
to objects, index into existence contextually-defined social interactional ̳realities‘ and denote
ideas in both conceptual and propositional form. It is known that these linguistic functions
overlap in a myriad of ways in any particular instance or type of language use (Jakobson
1960, Silverstein 1993). Here however, at least at first, the focus will be on the denotational
contribution to a Hebrew language practice found in Israel today: ̳talk about the problem of
school violence in Israel‘.^4 That is, the analytical focus will be on one aspect of what has been
called a ̳discursive construction‘ (Foucault 1980, Woolard 1991). What, however, are the
component parts of a discursive construction?
A discursive construction is in part composed of the relatively shared set of propositions
uttered when engaged in a verbal practice of talking about an abstract concept or idea, such as
the ̳the problem of school violence in Israel‘. In studying a discursive construction from this
perspective, the search is thus for the relatively regular component propositions that constitute
it. These include not only the regularly repeating propositional statements that enact the
practice, but also any regularly repeating models, analogies, theories and/or ideologies that
are either explicitly stated or implicitly present within its enactment (cf. the discussion and
approaches found in Gal 1992; Schaffner and Kelly-Holmes 1996; Schieffelin and Woolard
1998; Silverstein 1992; Woolard 1991; Woolard and Schiffelin1994). Moreover, as we will
see, though all such constituent parts of the practice from this denotational perspective are
propositions, some of these regularly repeating components are propositions with more local
relevance to the particular topic (i.e. in this case, something like, ̳The schools are at fault‘).
(^2) This was reported as a cover story in Israel‘s most popular daily newspaper, Yedioth Achronot, on December 28,
3 2001.
It should be pointed out that there are distinct educational systems in Israel for religious Jews as well as for the
various religious groupings of so-called ̳Israeli Arabs‘. Arguments here about the discursive construction of
4 the problem of school violence relate only to the secular educational system for Jewish students.
As mentioned above, denotational function overlaps with all others in linguistic practices. ̳I liked your article‘ is
among many other things, however, interpretable as a denotational proposition – that is, as a statement of fact.
Its regular (indexical) function as a compliment, however, would in most contexts make its denotational
function a highly presupposed part of the interpretive background at best (i.e. one wouldn‘t respond to it by
saying, ̳Yes, you did‘). What distinguishes the practice being studied here, and in part motivates the opening
theoretical approach to it, is that instances of it are often interpreted as factual, denotational propositions given
the framing of the practice itself as typically argumentative (cf. Jakobson 1960, Silverstein 1985).