How Israelis Represent the Problem of Violence in Their Schools 153assumption, however, that there is a normatively established verbal practice here, how then,
in the face of this abundance of propositional classes, is one to uncover those propositions
that play a regular role in it? What, that is to say, do people know they can say about this
issue and still feel that they are talking about it in conventional ways?
The argument about how to narrow down this prohibitively long list of propositions was
guided by two facts that characterized the data itself. Both return us to the notion that we are
in search of regularly repeating, or common, propositions in the data. First, emanating from at
least the world of newspapers, it was very common to find propositions that either explicitly
stated or unproblematically presupposed (based on their contextual framing) the idea that
school violence was a social problem. This fact not only defines the verbal practice in part,
but it in large part accounts for why they were relevant items for newspapers in the first place.
Second, being a social problem, causal explanations for school violence were a very
commonly found type of proposition in the data. This is an empirically based assumption
upon which the rest of this study relies. Though of course such propositions had many
overlapping indexical functions in the written contexts that framed them, the propositions
defined as focal in this study were isolated out as such because their causal framing was either
explicitly stated in the proposition itself or implicitly found in its framing. So given
propositions found within a report of a violent school incident, an explanation or account for
such troubling stories, or an op-ed piece debating solutions to the problem of school violence
- to name but a few of the many types of framings – every causal proposition about the
problem of school violence in Israel was located in the data and recorded. Thus, at this first
level of analysis, the linguistic data on which this study was based were the written causal
accounts for the problem of school violence that were found in all genres of newspaper
articles across four different Israeli newspapers over a two year period. At this ground level of
the argument, the methods of this study produced a list of nearly 5000 propositions. These
written propositions were thus understood to form the ground level data that constituted this
particular discursive construction. For the reasons detailed below, however, they were not the
primary focus of the analysis carried out.
What was analytically done with the long list of propositions about causes for the
problem of school violence in Israel that emerged from the methods of this study? As noted
above, causal propositions about school violence were sometimes explicit and sometimes
implicit.
Explicit framings, such as ̳School violence is caused by a violent youth culture‘, were of
course easiest to categorize. Implicitly framed cases, however, were no less clear in context
given a focus on the denotational elements in causal propositions. The job of discovering
classes of causal propositions only required attention to the semantic elements named in the
propositions themselves. Justified by the data itself, their function as causal explanations
could be held constant and they could be grouped together into classes as near equivalents
from the propositional, or denotational, perspective. In other words, given these
methodological assumptions, the common, regularly repeating classes of causal propositions
that will be presented below from the list of nearly 5000 propositions show little to no
significant variation.
While certain common formulations were borrowed in to represent a whole class in the
discussions that follow, the distinct members of the class all included the same named
elements and causal directionality. Whatever the context framing the causal propositions,