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Abstract
A close examination of peer interactions of children between the ages of 5;0 and 7;0 reveal occurrences where children composed and sequenced their communicative acts in intricate ways that were functional as solutions to a suddenly emergent social dilemma. Their acts and act sequences functioned to place constraints on what followed in the interaction, such that they opposed the other's unwanted actions by making the other's cessation of the unwanted actions relevant, and interpretable in a socially positive way. These same acts and act sequences simultaneously steered the interaction away from conflict by not making a conflictful response relevant. Besides their dual functionality, these communicative acts were so tailored to the immediate context and situational dilemma that they have an inventive aspect. These data raise the theoretical question of what basis the children had for composing and sequencing communicative acts in situ that anticipate their interactional consequences and promote desired ones. A proposal is made in the concluding discussion that the basis for this capability is acquisition of “knowledge” of a set of Principles of Relevance in interactions and discourse.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the valuable feedback and patience of Alan Sillars who has been an editor in the fullest sense, Anita Pomerantz's help as reader and sounding board, and the care and thoughtfulness of the reviewers.
Notes
1. Promoting desired consequences or wants means different things in different contexts, from obtaining material benefits, to gaining support for one's beliefs, feelings, or policies, or simply making it relevant to express what one wants to and for that to be interpretable in the intended way. In the children's interactions examined here, the consequences or wants being promoted involved attaining a task-related goal in the current interaction.
2. “Relevance” here differs from what Sperber and Wilson (Citation1986) consider. Their interest is how others’ acts are relevant to one's current beliefs (“assumptions”) about the world. The concern here is how communicative acts are relevant to each other, such that they constrain each other's inclusion and interpretation in an interaction or discourse so as to form a discursive whole.
3. By “interaction,” I refer to a sequence of communicative acts (including larger discursive constructions such as narratives) that are produced alternately by two or more individuals, dialogically, where those components are interconnected by their relevance to each other to form a socially functional whole (an interview, a debate, a negotiation, a conversation, etc.). By “discourse” I refer to multisentential, discursive constructions composed monologically by individuals, where the parts of such constructions are interconnected on the basis of relevance to each other to form a conceptual whole (a paragraph, a text, a polemic, a news story, a campaign speech, etc.). Analytically, a discourse could be a component of an interaction, or self-standing, and one could analyze as a single discourse a synthesized discursive construction that was composed collaboratively or interactively.
4. The names of the children in each dyad are pseudonyms. The pseudonyms were crafted to indicate on which side of the video picture the children appeared (children on the viewer's right side were given names beginning with R, and those on the left names beginning with L).
5. Transcript symbols are based on the system devised by Gail Jefferson. The main ones in these transcripts are: (a) aligned square brackets mark the start or end of overlapping speech; (b) text within parentheses indicates transcriber uncertainty; (c) unequal signs (>… < ) mark speeded up speech; (d) colons after syllables mark elongated phones; (e) underscoring marks vocal emphasis; (f) up/down arrows mark notable pitch changes; (g) degrees signs before and after syllables indicate notably softer speech and (h) numbers in parentheses indicate pause length in units of tenths of seconds, and a period within parentheses indicates a micro-pause.
6. Lorraine in Case 3 is the same child as Rachel in Case 1, but her two interactions were taped 5 months apart with different partners, and Lorraine's communicative acts are not the focus here.
7. To say that component acts have to be relevant to each other does not necessarily mean that every act has to be relevant to every other act in an interaction or discourse. An interaction or discourse may comprise subunits whose components are relevant to each other but not necessarily to the components of other subunits; for example side-sequences (Jefferson, Citation1972), pre-sequences (Schegloff, Citation1980, Citation1988), and context spaces (Reichman, Citation1985).
8. It is conceivable that similar principles apply to being inventive (or optionally, conventional) at macro levels of composition as well as this micro level. Sections of an interaction (e.g., phases of a negotiation) or discourse (chapters of a book) can be represented as single communicative acts, and on that basis new sections can be planned with reference to how they would be relevant to the sections that preceded them, and would constrain the sections that follow. Whole interactions or discourses could be similarly represented as single acts whose composition depends on figuring out how they would be relevant to prior interactions (e.g., committee meetings) or discourses (court rulings on a particular matter), and would constrain similar interaction or discourses to follow.