Abstract
Making use of videotapes of family interaction, this paper investigates alternative trajectories that develop as parents and children negotiate disputes resulting from directive/response sequences. Forms of arguments constituted through recycled positions are distinguished from arguments that are buttressed by accounts or rule statements. Constellations of features including structures of control, forms of tying utterances to prior utterances, accounts, as well as facing formations are consequential. The forms of participation frameworks that are constructed afford different ways of sustaining focused interaction, gearing into what someone has said, and displaying to each other how participants are aligned within the activity frame. Alternative trajectories develop in light of the forms of joint attention that are established, as well as sustained engagement.
About the author
Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. A long-standing concern has been how children (and other humans) constitute their social organization through conversational practices. Research at Xerox PARC examined moment-to-moment negotiation of meaning across multiple modalities among workers at a large metropolitan airport. Her book He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children provides an ethnography of children's gendered language practices. Her book The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion documents language use in a girls' peer group.
© Walter de Gruyter
