Using Categories to Assert Authority in Murrinhpatha-Speaking Children’s Talk

ABSTRACT

Children, like speakers more generally, often use categories of person, place, and activity (e.g., doctor, school, bedtime) to frame and monitor interactions among themselves. This article explores the use of categories by a group of Murrinhpatha-speaking Aboriginal children in Wadeye, northern Australia, when attempting to assert authority. The creation and negotiation of power asymmetries are a common feature of children’s peer talk worldwide but analyzed here for the first time among speakers of a traditional Australian language. Analysis suggests that although there are similarities with children from other sociocultural/linguistic contexts, there are differences in these children’s choice of membership categories (e.g., husband, country) and how they deploy and react to them (e.g., by ambiguity and by silence respectively). Such differences highlight the connection between language, society, and the interactional resources available to speakers as well as reinforcing the merit of studying membership categorization in children’s talk. Data in Murrinhpatha with English translation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This extends Sacks’s (1992) concept of category-bound “activities”/“features.”

² Kardu thipmam (“Aboriginal people,” literally “black humans”) is the term that Murrinhpatha speakers use to refer to themselves in relation to non-Aboriginal people.

³ “Language Acquisition in Murrinhpatha” (LAMP) was an Australian Research Council-funded project (DP110100961) based at the University of Melbourne, 2011–2015.

⁴ Although neither child produces the category term ngakumarl (“totem”) in this section of dialogue, their caregivers’ utterances in the latter part of the excerpt indicate that the children are orienting to the kardu thipmam category of totem, as opposed to claiming a miscellaneous crocodile as their own.

⁵ The different pronunciation of this term by Tabitha and by Casimira is indicative of variation in the community.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under [Grants DP110100961 and DP170101725].