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- Volume 20, Issue, 2010
Pragmatics - Volume 20, Issue 4, 2010
Volume 20, Issue 4, 2010
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Introduction
Author(s): Amy Kyratzis, Jennifer F. Reynolds and Ann-Carita Evaldssonpp.: 457–466 (10)More LessThe five articles in this issue examine how children, in naturally occurring school and neighborhood peer and sibling-kin groups across a variety of cultures and societies, socialize one another to do heteroglossia, drawing upon a diverse repertoire of linguistic and discursive forms in their everyday cultural practices. Through the use of ethnographic techniques for recording natural conversations, they demonstrate how children, in their peer play interactions, make use of and juxtapose multiple linguistic and cultural resources at their disposal in linguistically diverse and stratified settings. The analyses provide detailed insights into children’s heteroglossic verbal practices (Bakhtin 1981, 1986), that is, their use and differentiation of multiple codes and registers in the creation and negotiation of social distinctions. Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia addresses the dialogic relationship between multiple and sometimes conflicting codes or registers and the larger socio-political and socio-historical meanings that are negotiated through those linguistic forms. In particular, the concept refers to tensions between the multiplicities of language varieties within a national language, which are drawing it towards a standard central version, and those that are moving away from national standards through hybrid linguistic forms of official and unofficial languages. Research on heteroglossia entails an examination of how speakers indexically hail socio-historical tensions and contradictions in situated instances of language use that result in the regimentation of codes and associated notions of collective membership and personhood (Blommaert & Verschueren 1998; Hill & Hill 1986; Kroskrity 2000; Pujolar 2001; Schieffelin 1994; Silverstein 2003; Woolard 1998, 1999). Bailey (2007) recently remarked that much of the sociolinguistic and discourse analytic work on code-switching and other so-called syncretistic discourse practices are productively reinterpreted through the prism of heteroglossia, which attends equally to monolingual and multilingual forms. The perspective of heteroglossia allows the analyst to focus on alternations of officially authorized codes and languages, without neglecting “the diversity of socially indexical linguistic features within codes” (Bailey 2007: 268). As will be demonstrated in the articles, the concept of heteroglossia provides a conceptual framework that draws from diverse traditions that address different social and temporal scales while simultaneously attending to the indexical and meta-pragmatic properties of language.
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Enregistering the voices of discursive figures of authority in Antonero children’s socio-dramatic play
Author(s): Jennifer F. Reynoldspp.: 467–493 (27)More LessThis study examines how boys from San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala develop their own perspective about what it means to be moral human beings in the world via discursive practices that contrast enregistered voices within an emergent performance genre that simultaneously doubles as socio-dramatic play-frame. This emergent genre exhibits both mimesis and alterity; children have appropriated a popular adult genre, within which their participation, originally, was highly circumscribed. In their own productions, however, they occupy the main character roles and enact re-accented “voices” of king and kin in highly competitive, proselytizing discourse. The resulting performance is a subversion of the social order where ‘the challenge’ of good defeating evil is undone, reflecting a child-centric critical stance. To wit, the boys refuse to be convinced by the authority of an overly patriarchal-colonial moral order. I build upon Sawyers’ (1995) model of play-as-improvisation to develop a synthetic framework in analyzing indigenous children’s play and childhood(s). The approach I espouse draws upon ethnographically informed studies of peer talk-in-interaction, verbal art as performance, and semiotic functionalism to examine how children “do heteroglossia” in and out-of-play frames of interaction as they construct selves capable of confronting the social order.
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Socializing Heteroglossia among Miskitu children on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua
Author(s): Amanda Minkspp.: 495–522 (28)More LessThis article adapts Bakhtin’s term “heteroglossia” as a framework for analyzing Miskitu children’s multilingual speech on Corn Island, off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Analysis of naturally occurring speech in this context illustrates the utility of partial competencies and hybridized speech, supporting a view of language not as a bounded system, but as a diverse pool of communicative resources that socialize children into multiple modes of voicing and acting. More broadly, the article examines the relations between language ideologies and language socialization, and the ways that both are articulated within complex histories of cultural interaction and stratified social relations. The article challenges conventional dichotomies of language loss and revitalization by viewing the hybrid linguistic practices that enable children to bridge social and cultural worlds.
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Serious games
Author(s): Inmaculada M. García-Sánchezpp.: 523–555 (33)More LessThis paper examines the situated ways in which Moroccan immigrant children in Spain create imagined, alternative life worlds and explore possible forms of identification through an investigation of these children’s hybrid linguistic practices in the midst of play. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) notions of heteroglossia and hybridity, the analysis focuses on the meanings of codeswitching practices that a group of Moroccan immigrant girls deploy in pretend-play sequences involving dolls to construct female identities; identities that they treat as desirable in the context of Spanish idealizations of femininity, but that are considered transgressional by adults in Moroccan diaspora communities in Spain. Neighborhood peer group play affords Moroccan immigrant girls’ transformations and engagement in subversive tactics, in that these activities take place outside the scrutiny of parents and other adults. The rich verbal and sociocultural environment of Moroccan immigrant children’s peer groups provide us with an excellent window to investigate peer language socialization processes in relation to how immigrant children negotiate, transform, and subvert in the midst of play the different, and often incongruous, socio-cultural and linguistic expectations and constraints that they encounter on a daily basis. Use of Moroccan Arabic and Spanish in this pretend play, in particular, results in a heteroglossic polyphony of voices imbued with moral tensions (Bahktin 1981, 1986). This analysis highlights the importance of these hybrid linguistic practices in immigrant girls’ explorations of alternative processes of gendered identification in multilingual, culturally-syncretic environments. Through surreptitious pretend-play, Moroccan immigrant girls explore imagined transgressional possible identities and moral worlds. In this sense, this research also underscores the implications of children’s language use and language choice in pretend-play for larger processes of cultural continuity and transformation in transnational, diasporic communities undergoing rapid change.
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Latina girls’ peer play interactions in a bilingual Spanish-English U.S. preschool
Author(s): Amy Kyratzispp.: 557–586 (30)More LessThe current English-only educational climate in California presents children with polarizing discourses about national belonging (Bailey 2007). This study uses language socialization theory (e.g., Garret and Baquedano-López 2002) and Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of “heteroglossia” to examine how members of a peer group of linguistic minority children attending a bilingual Spanish-English preschool in California used bilingual practices among themselves to respond to such polarizing discourses and organize their local peer group social order. The peer group was followed over several months during free play in their preschool classroom using methods of ethnography and talk-in-interaction. An extended episode of birthday play was examined. The children use code-switching as a resource to negotiate locally shifting “frames” (Goffman 1974) and participation frameworks (C. Goodwin 2007; M.H. Goodwin 1990a; 2006) during their play interaction. Through their language practices, group members reflexively portray the tension between their languages (Bakhtin 1981), and inscribe some domain associations (Garrett 2005; Paugh 2005; Schiefflin 2003) for English and Spanish (e.g., using English for references to aspects of birthday parties relevant to U.S. consumer culture; Spanish for topics of food and family). These practices reproduce hierarchical and gendered rankings of the languages inscribed in monolingual discourses of the dominant U.S. society. However, the children also challenge regimented patterns, through using, at moments, unmarked forms of code-switching, often within single utterances. These hybrid utterances blur boundaries across frames and groups of players, affirming “linguistic and cultural hybridity” (Haney 2003: 164) within the peer group.
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“ ‘Schwedis’ he can’t even say Swedish” - subverting and reproducing institutionalized norms for language use in multilingual peer groups
Author(s): Ann-Carita Evaldsson and Asta Cekaitepp.: 587–604 (18)More LessThe present study explores how minority schoolchildren in multilingual peer group interactions act upon dominant educational and linguistic ideologies as they organize their everyday emerging peer culture. The data draw from ethnographies combined with detailed analysis (CA) of video recordings in two primary monolingual school settings in Sweden. Bakhtin’s processual view of how linguistic norms are used for overcoming the heteroglossia of language is used as a framework for understanding how monolingualism is talked-into-being in multilingual peer groups. As will be demonstrated, the children recurrently participate in corrective practices in which they playfully exploit multiple linguistic resources (syntactic, lexical and phonetic features) and the turn structure of varied activities (conflicts, accusations, insults, classroom discourse) to play with and consolidate a collective critical view of not-knowing correct Swedish. Moreover, they transform faulty talk (repeating structural elements, recycling arguments, using parodic imitations, joint laughter, code-switching) to display their language competence, assert powerful positions and strengthen alliances in the peer group. It is argued that such forms of playful heteroglossic peer group practices are highly ambiguous and paradoxically tend to enforce power hierarchies and values associated with different social languages and codes, thus co-constructing the monolingual ideology.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 35 (2025)
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Volume 34 (2024)
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Volume 33 (2023)
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Volume 32 (2022)
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Volume 31 (2021)
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Volume 30 (2020)
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Volume 29 (2019)
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Volume 28 (2018)
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Volume 27 (2017)
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Volume 26 (2016)
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Volume 25 (2015)
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Volume 24 (2014)
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Volume 23 (2013)
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Volume 22 (2012)
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Volume 21 (2011)
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Volume 20 (2010)
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Volume 19 (2009)
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Volume 18 (2008)
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Volume 17 (2007)
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Volume 16 (2006)
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Volume 15 (2005)
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Volume 14 (2004)
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Volume 13 (2003)
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Volume 12 (2002)
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Volume 11 (2001)
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Volume 10 (2000)
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Volume 9 (1999)
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Volume 8 (1998)
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Volume 7 (1997)
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Volume 6 (1996)
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Volume 5 (1995)
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Volume 4 (1994)
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Volume 3 (1993)
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Volume 2 (1992)
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Volume 1 (1991)
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