Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 34, Issues 10–11, October–November 2002, Pages 1621-1649
Journal of Pragmatics

Multi-modality in girls’ game disputes

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00078-4Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper examines embodied procedures for producing disagreement turns in the midst of the children's game of hopscotch. Turn shape, intonation, and body positioning are all critical to the construction of stance towards a player's move in the game. In particular, in formulating a player's move as “out” foul calls can state unambiguously, without doubt or delay that a violation has occurred. Turn initial tokens in disagreement turns include cries of “OUT!”, negatives (“No!”), or response cries (nonlexicalized, discrete interjections such as “Ay!” or “Eh!”). Players make use of pitch leaps, vowel lengthening, and dramatic contours (for example, LHL contours) to vocally highlight opposition in the turn preface. Whereas the normal pitch range of a speaker's talk in ordinary conversation can be between 250 and 350 Hz, in opposition moves the pitch may be considerably higher, around 600 Hz. Affective stance is also displayed through gestures such as extended points towards the person who has committed the foul or the space where the foul occurred. Explanations or demonstrations (frequently embodied re-enactments of the player's past move) constitute additional critical components of disagreement moves as they provide the grounds for the opposition. Disagreement moves and trajectories within children's games provide demonstrations of the practices through which girls build and display themselves as agents in the constitution of their social order. Data for this study consists of videotaped interaction of working class fifth grade girls on the playground: second generation Mexican and Central Americans in Los Angeles, and African American Southern migrant children. Ethnic differences in the display of opposition are observable within the groups studied.

Section snippets

Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, 1978. Her research interests include how children construct their social organization in the midst of play and in particular how stories, dispute, gossip, and directives are employed strategically. Her recent work deals with how children use language practices to circumscribe the boundaries of their groups and how participants make use of intonation, gesture,

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  • Cited by (0)

    Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, 1978. Her research interests include how children construct their social organization in the midst of play and in particular how stories, dispute, gossip, and directives are employed strategically. Her recent work deals with how children use language practices to circumscribe the boundaries of their groups and how participants make use of intonation, gesture, and a range of semiotic resources in the construction of their action in interaction.

    Charles Goodwin is Professor of Applied Linguistics at UCLA. He received his PhD from the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania, 1977. He spent two years analyzing discourse and cognition in the workplace at Xerox PARC. Interests and teaching include video analysis of talk-in-interaction, grammar in context, gesture, gaze and embodiment as interactively organized social practices, aphasia in discourse, language in the professions and the ethnography of science.

    Malcah Yaeger-Dror (www.u.arizona.edu/∼malcah) is a research scientist in the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1979. She has done research on Canadian French, American English and Israeli Hebrew dialects, as well as on discourse factors related to social situation and language (or dialect) variation in these languages. Currently she is comparing the relative importance of cognitive and conversational 'imperatives’ in a variety of interactive situations.

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