Abstract
Dinner times provide rich opportunities for overt and covert socialization. Drawing upon a larger corpus of 35 video-recorded family meals involving the three-year-old Zoe and her parents, this conversation analytic study describes how Zoe displays such agency through the practice of “voicing control” – momentarily sounding and acting like an adult by performing a range of controlling acts such as leading, instructing, advising, assessing, and mediating. I argue that by playing with such activities bound to the category of a higher position than hers, the child manages to grow “a head taller” in the Vygotskyan sense. The findings contribute to the budding literature on documenting socialization in naturalistic settings with a specific focus on the child’s role in such socialization.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2018 Georgetown University Round Table (GURT) on Languages and Linguistics and the 2018 International Communication Association (ICA) Conference in Prague. I thank the audiences at these presentations for productive discussions on various aspects of the study and the two anonymous reviewers of ICA for thoughtful comments on the implications of the findings. Many thanks, in particular, to the anonymous reviewer of Semiotica for introducing me to the fascinating body of literature on identity experimentation and for making many other helpful suggestions and detailed edits that have strengthened this manuscript in numerous ways.
Appendix: Transcription notations
| . | (period) falling intonation. |
| ? | (question mark) rising intonation. |
| , | (comma) continuing intonation. |
| - | (hyphen) abrupt cut-off. |
| :: | (colon(s)) prolonging of sound. |
| word | (underlining) stress. |
| word | The more underlining, the greater the stress. |
| WORD | (all caps) loud speech. |
| °word° | (degree symbols) quiet speech. |
| ↑word | (upward arrow) raised pitch. |
| ↓word | (downward arrow) lowered pitch. |
| >word< | (more than and less than) quicker speech. |
| (word) | (uncertain transcription) |
| hh | (series of h’s) aspiration or laughter. |
| .hh | (h’s preceded by dot) inhalation. |
| (hh) | (h’s in parentheses) inside word boundaries. |
| [ ] | (lined-up brackets) beginning and ending of |
| [ ] | simultaneous or overlapping speech. |
| = | (equal sign) latch or contiguous utterances of the same speaker. |
| (2.4) | (number in parentheses) length of a silence in 10ths of a second. |
| (.) | (period in parentheses) micro-pause, 0.2 second or less. |
| (syl syl syl) | (syl) number of syllables in non-decipherable talk. |
| ((points)) | (italicized smaller fonts in double parentheses) nonverbal activity or transcriptionist comment. |
| {((words))-words} | dash to indicate co-occurrence of nonverbal behavior and verbal elements; curly brackets to mark the beginning and ending of such co-occurrence when necessary. |
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