A couple of posts back I talked about Bucholtz and Hall’s model of identity in discourse. I think that, while Bucholtz and Hall offer a framework for considering how identity is asserted in the language of its user, their principles do not take into account the underlying principle of reflexivity in identity construction. Indeed, in the material to be analysed in this research project, there is a network of relationships, that constitute a site of interaction.

Scollon and Wong Scollon (2004) note that social action occurs at the intersection of three factors: the interaction order, the discourses in place, and the historical bodies of the participants involved. The authors give the name “nexus analysis” to the study of discourses at this intersection.

The interaction order describes the structure of relationships between participants in the environment in which the interaction takes place. In a classroom setting, for example, interaction is structured according to the relationship between a teacher and the students in the class. Communication in a classroom is centred around the teacher, who presents teaching material to the body of students and receives questions and comments from individual students. While there is communication between students in a classroom, through conversations in whispers and notes passed between desks, these conversations are deprivileged in contrast to the "official" communication of the teacher.

The discourses in place include not just communications between people in the interaction order, but other forms of text that exist in the environment. Continuing the example of the classroom setting, these texts may range from posters in walls through the clothing of students to the arrangement of furniture and the use of communication technologies. These discourses inform the physical shape of the interaction order, and which communications are privileged over others. For example, in a classroom where all students are facing the same direction (toward the teacher), communications between students are deprivileged below communications between teacher and student. Likewise, text written behind the teacher (on a chalkboard or projected on a screen, is considered more "official" than text on posters on other walls or written on student desks.

The historical body describes the set of assumptions, skills, values, beliefs and motivations that nexus analysis each participant brings to the setting of the social interaction. An example of this would be the desire for retention or promotion within the institution that drives the teacher to deliver a quality performance in the lecture theatre, while some students’ attention is dependent on their as yet unfulfilled desire to choose an appropriate major in the degree course. The term “body” as used here may be problematic, as it connotes something physical, and in the physical world we bring our physical bodies into all our interactions. It may be helpful to consider the “historical body” as something like “the body of experience” that comprise part of the context in which interactions occur.

Scollon and Wong Scollon argue that just as each of these factors impinge of the nature and design of the discourses at their intersection, they are likewise not constant. Thus there is a cycle of change as each factor interacts, which the writers name semiotic cycles. Nexus analysis, then, is the study of how each of these cycles inform and change other cycles to aggregate change in the relationships of people in a setting of interaction, and nature of communication therein.