Parallelism, Metalinguistic Play, and the Interactive Emergence of Zinacantec Mayan Siblings' Culture

Abstract

In this article, I investigate how 2 young Tzotzil Mayan siblings playfully manipulate the sequential structure of adjacency pairs to align, to confront each other, and to challenge family roles and hierarchies. The young learners' intentional disruption reveals the early control of dialogic repetition typical of Mayan languages. More important, it illustrates the children's development of communicative competence as they reorganize greeting structures or reauthorize messages through frame shifts.

In the case of a greeting game, the siblings disrupt its inherent sequential structure using semantic counterpointing with different address terms. When conveying a question sent by an adult, the 4-year old playfully repeats it and recycles it across several turns in alignment with his younger brother and his grandfather. The subversion of the social organization of talk shows how the children interactively construct an emergent sibling culture that contests the social organization of the age-graded structure of the extended family.

The study contributes to the understanding of peer socialization in a small-scale society. One finds here how siblings' language play organizes and contests the social and moral order amidst everyday family life.

I dedicate this article to my beloved compadre Mol Petul Vaskis who passed away on December 20, 2005. His beautiful and eloquent Tzotzil will be deeply missed by his family and community. May his grandchildren remember the rhymes, stories, and advice he sweetly gave them and teach them to their children. I thank the Vaskis family of Nabenchauk, Zinacantan, Chiapas, México for their warmth and their unconditional support. I also acknowledge George Collier, Candy Goodwin and Amy Kyratzis's thoughtful comments and suggestions to a previous version of the manuscript. Research was funded by CONACYT Research Grant # 42585.

Notes

I dedicate this article to my beloved compadre Mol Petul Vaskis who passed away on December 20, 2005. His beautiful and eloquent Tzotzil will be deeply missed by his family and community. May his grandchildren remember the rhymes, stories, and advice he sweetly gave them and teach them to their children. I thank the Vaskis family of Nabenchauk, Zinacantan, Chiapas, México for their warmth and their unconditional support. I also acknowledge George Collier, Candy Goodwin and Amy Kyratzis's thoughtful comments and suggestions to a previous version of the manuscript. Research was funded by CONACYT Research Grant # 42585.

1 Age is given in years and months (years; months). Children's names are changed to respect the privacy of my collaborators.

2 “[R]itual language consists of couplets (occasionally triplets) of syntactically parallel lines which normally differ by a single word or phrase” (Haviland, 1989, pp. 31). Parallel speech is a pervasive feature in Mesoamerican languages. For Mayan languages, see Bricker, 1974, and Gossen, 1974a, 1974b. For cross-cultural studies of parallel ritual speech, see Fox (1974).

3 M. H. Goodwin (1990) also discusses parallelism in terms of “format tying” in children's arguments. See DuBois (in press) for parallel dialogic structures in what he calls “dialogic syntax.”

4 To quote some relevant studies, see Aissen, 1987; Brazelton, Robey, & Collier, 1969; Bricker, 1973, 1974; Cancian, 1964; G. Collier, 1975; de León, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2005; Devereaux, 1987; Greenfield, 1997, 2004; Greenfield, 2000, 2004; Brazelton, & Childs, 1989; Greenfield & Childs, 1977; Haviland, 1977, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2005; Maynard, 2002; Rus & Collier, 2003; Vogt, 1970.

5 See de León (1999) for the early use of CVC roots in Tzotzil early lexical acquisition.

6 See Brody (1994) for dialogical repetition in Tojolabal Mayan.

7 For the conversational status of adjacency pairs, see C. Goodwin and Heritage (1990, p. 288), and Schegloff and Sacks (1973). For an overview of adjacency pairs, see Duranti (1997a, pp. 250–259).

8 Examples are presented in Tzotzil orthographic conventions. Glosses: INT = interrogative; DEM = demonstrative; A = absolutive; 1 = first person; 2 = second person; CL = clitic.

9 The data were collected on May 25, 2004, in Nabenchauk, Zinacantan.

10 The extraction of the CVC verb root is normally done by young Tzotzil children at the onset of their first words. In fact, their early vocabularies are composed of mostly CVC roots (de León, 1998, 1999). The same process has been documented in Tzeltal acquisition (Brown, 1998).

11 In de León (1998), I showed how Grandfather uses a register with parallel structure and alternating syntactic frames in his speech to young children.

12 Rindstedt and Aronsson (2002) showed that sibling play among Quichua children can be related to language shift.

13 See Cekaite and Aronsson (2004) for a similar analysis in children playful recyclings in a language class.