Who do You Think You Are? ' : Four Children' s

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talk can be analysed in relation to three connected dimensions of identity: the ... home on a Sunday morning with Jenny, her sister (aged 7). ... door and invited her friend Gemma (aged 10) to come round to play at her house. .... sisters, but its effect is to place Emma back on a par with Jenny. .... Through all kinds of social.
‘Who do You Think You Are?’: Four Children’s Sociolinguistic Strategies in the Negotiation of Self Alison Sealey In stitu te of E d u c a tio n , Univ e rsity of W a rw ic k , Cov e n try C V 4 7A L

Introduction This paper explores some of the ways in which four children, aged 8 to 9 years, negotiated social identities through the language they used in spontaneous, casual conversation with others. The children were equipped with compact portable tape-recorders for short periods, during which they recorded themselves in conversation with a range of people, predominantly friends and family members. The paper explores how transcripts of these conversations exhibit different aspects of the children as social ‘selves’. It proposes that the children’s talk can be analysed in relation to three connected dimensions of identity: the individual self, the immediately situated social actor and the person who functions within a context of wider social relations.

Emma’s Win on the Lottery The following extract of dialogue is presented as an instance of the complex negotiations with which the paper is concerned. It involves Emma, aged 9, at home on a Sunday morning with Jenny, her sister (aged 7). Emma has called next door and invited her friend Gemma (aged 10) to come round to play at her house. The three girls have gone upstairs so that Emma can show Gemma her ‘display’ of cuddly toys, and they have been chatting about the toys laid out on Emma’s bed. Emma remembers a new toy Jenny has bought, and this apparently supplies an introduction to the topic of some money won in the national lottery. The extract is analysed to illustrate how Emma, in her talk with Gemma and Jenny, is simultaneously an individual self, a situated actor relating to those within her immediate social context, and a social being affected by structures and institutions which operate on a larger scale. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

E: G: E: G: E: J: E: G: J:

Jenny bought Oh – we won – we won the lottery yesterday Did you? A tenner Oh {laughs} And we got five pounds We get five pounds each {laughs} We’ve got five pounds [in a sing-song voice, crowing, but quietly]

1352 0520/96/01 0022-14 $10.00/0 CURRENT ISSUES IN LANGUAGE & SOCIETY

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© 1996 A. Sealey Vol. 3, No 1, 1996

‘W ho Do You Th ink You A re ? ’ 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

E: G: J: E: J: E: J: G: J: E: J: E: G: E: G: E: J:

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Because Jenny chose the numbers – a+ – and so she gets five and it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t get five so we got five each Oh. [drops something] Oop sorry ’cos I got five ’cos Dad’s spending the money on getting the lottery numbers Oh if only you had told me I’d spend the money if I knew it was going to win Yeah but erm we’re not allowed to No but they can still give us the money Who? Mm I suppose so You didn’t even do a thing {laughs} I did. I chose the numbers [emphasis on I] Gemma the lottery started on my birthday Did it Yep Oh Erm Look at this You’re a lottery girl aren’t you Emma

The extract can be analysed in various ways, of course. Generically, it is a report, introduced by Emma and extended by Jenny. Gemma provides an audience, using each of her contributions to maintain that position. Thus her ‘did you?’ functions as feedback for the story, with the minimal utterances ‘mm’, ‘oh’ and so on also providing back-channel support for the telling of the anecdote. In these terms, it has many features in common with an adult account of an incident shared among peers. In other ways, though, it is talk which is immediately recognisable as generated by children, and it provides some illustrative data about the children’s negotiation of identities and relationships. Emma the individual One of the ways in which the children, just like other speakers, define themselves is through the use of pronouns. The sisters are literally ‘positioned’ in space in their own home as members of the family which won the ten pounds. Emma’s first use of ‘we’ could be read as denoting the family as a unified group to which she and Jenny belong and Gemma does not. The ‘tenner’ which was won was the total prize, presented at the beginning of the story as a single sum acquired by the family. However, Jenny’s first contribution (L6) uses ‘we’ in a new sense: now it means only the two sisters. Jenny’s modification to the story, explaining that they got ‘five pounds’ is ambiguous, and in clarifying that they ‘each’ received five pounds, Emma simultaneously distinguishes herself from Jenny. She elaborates on this distinction in Lines 10–11, when ‘Jenny’ becomes the third party in the account of events addressed to Gemma, repeating the grounds on which she and Jenny, separately, ‘each’ received half of the total. In Jenny’s next contribution (L13), she realigns herself in stating her role alongside her father’s in the sequence of events. Emma’s response (L15) sets up a revised contrastive relationship between herself and Jenny. While the import of her claim

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that she would have spent the money herself is ambiguous (she uses an ironic intonation, suggesting scorn for Jenny’s supposed foresight in choosing winning numbers), this statement repositions the girls in respect of their father. Emma echoes Jenny’s formulation ‘Dad’s spending the money’, but makes herself the subject in ‘I’d spend the money’ (L15). So now it is Emma who is connected to their father, until Jenny reminds her that she could not have done what he did. The ‘we’ in Line 17 may mean children in general or it may mean just the two sisters, but its effect is to place Emma back on a par with Jenny. Within the role of children, collectively, who are involved with the lottery enterprise, Jenny once more contrasts herself with Emma, distinguishing her as the ‘you’ who made no contribution (L21), and emphasising ‘I’ in Line 23. At this point (L24), Emma addresses herself to Gemma to make a point about the topic of the lottery which moves it on from the anecdote about the win. In this contribution she is again a distinctive individual, the only one who can claim a birthday on the day the lottery started. With little further encouragement from Gemma to prolong the discussion, in which she has played little substantive part, Emma seems ready now to move the topic on to something present in the room (a broken toy), but Jenny makes a final contribution to the lottery topic before there is a pause and the discussion moves on to toys and games. In Line 29, Jenny again addresses Emma as ‘you’, supporting and adding to her claim by offering her the designation of ‘lottery girl’. Emma does not respond. In this dialogue, then, Emma is often an ‘I’. Even this designation has more than one connotation, including the ‘I’ who has a particular date of birth, the ‘I’ who received five pounds, the ‘I’ of a brief fantasy where it is possible to buy one’s own lottery tickets. Emma the sister Emma is also included in more than one collective ‘we’. She is part of her family unit and also one of the members of her particular generation within it. In this extract, she chooses a designation as the former (L1, L3) and is assigned a designation as the latter by Jenny (L6, L17). Emma is also designated as belonging to the collective group of ‘children’ in general. Jenny’s reminder that there are restrictions on who can buy tickets assigns Emma to the category of those excluded from the adult world. Jenny’s use of the formulation ‘not allowed’ (L17) positions them both in the category of those who are subject to constraints on what they may do. Emma’s comment about ‘fairness’ (Lines 10–11) also has a childish ring. Parents’ and teachers’ discourse about learning to share, to take turns, to apologise for hurting or inconveniencing someone else, are aspects of the socialisation which promises to admit children, eventually, to an adult world of responsible interaction with others. However, children’s appeals to this discourse of ‘fairness’ often seem to evoke an idealised social world where natural justice prevails and all must be seen to be equitable, at the very least among the children themselves, and particularly in respect of the individual who is making the claim. Like the utterance ‘we’re not allowed’, ‘it wouldn’t be fair’ carries an elliptical reference to the rules which are sometimes supposed to govern the children’s experience.

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Emma the lottery girl Finally, the talk links Emma with the wider social world symbolised by the lottery: in reporting the win itself, in speculating about buying her own ticket and in making the link with her birthday. However, she appears as simultaneously inside this cultural club and excluded from it. She herself cannot participate, because of gambling laws, and the tenuous link with her birthday is not one which an adult would need to make. Jenny’s final statement (L29) can also be read as including her in the adult world of the lottery, its use of ‘lottery’ as a premodifier for the ‘girl’ Emma is. However, the phrase may also be read as exclusionary. It is true that ‘girl’ is related to chronological age in ambiguous ways, but even when it is applied to adult women, as it may be in a phrase such as this, its connotations are often infantilising. This analysis of a brief conversation between Emma; her sister, Jenny; and friend, Gemma has illustrated the three dimensions of identity proposed at the outset: the specific, individual ‘I’; the situated self who negotiates relationships which are sometimes more and sometimes less aligned with various others in her immediate circle; and the child member of wider social institutions and networks. The next section of the paper sketches out the idea of these dimensions of identity-through-language in a little more detail, although space does not allow a thorough exploration of the many ways in which this issue has been addressed in various disciplines. It is important to note that the three ‘dimensions’ proposed are not mutually exclusive, and indeed this first extract has illustrated that the perspectives identified are co-present in the dialogue and even within a single utterance.

Dimensions of Identity in the Negotiation of Self Accounts of the self which are influenced by psychology have traditionally stressed the individual as an isolated unit, presenting a version of childhood ‘development’ in which the human organism unfolds almost like a plant which contains within itself the blue-print for its maturation. In contrast to such accounts, the discursive turn in explanations of human subjectivity emphasises the emergent possibilities, for each individual, of the interactions with others which contribute to our sense of who we are. Through all kinds of social interactions, ‘¼ most of us will fashion a complex subjectivity from participation in many different discourses that tend mutually to illuminate one another’ (Harré & Gillett, 1994: 25). The children as ‘selves’ were first presented to me in the context of this particular study through language, as a list of names supplied by their respective head teachers as possible informants for the research. At various times throughout the research, each child was spoken of (by themselves and others) in terms appropriate for a distinct individual. Only this individual child has this name and this specific life experience, unique to themselves. At the initial meeting with each family, for example, my questions about possible contexts in which recordings might be made inevitably led to an outline by the child, often with supporting additions from the parent(s), about the child’s lifestyle and routines, and these accounts contributed to a discursive construction of an individuated self in respect of each of them.

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Speakers claim an individual identity for themselves through dialogue from early childhood onwards. Halliday (1982: 43) remarks on this in relation to the formation of the child self through the initial development of language competence: the shaping of the self through interaction with others is very much a language-mediated process. The child is enabled to offer to someone else that which is unique to himself, to make public his own individuality: and this in turn reinforces and creates this individuality. The role of discourse in the constitution of the self is acknowledged by Harré & Gillett (1994), who characterise discursive practice — engaging in verbal interaction with other human beings — as the use of a sign-system with rules. They point to the use of pronouns as a basic example of speakers’ collaborative participation in this sign-rule-system, where the use of the ‘I’, is the means by which I constitute myself as a self, take responsibility for my utterances, separate my self from the selves of others. Simultaneously, though, ‘I’ am defined in relation to ‘you’ and to numerous other categories to which I may or may not belong. Immediately, then, an exploration of identity through a focus on the individual demands a broadening of perspective to include those with whom he or she is interacting. The ‘emergent properties’ of the relationship impact on the people involved in it. Many of the factors which play an important part in our sense of ourselves are contingent and arbitrary, and emerge only through our interactions with others. The children in the study were engaged in the symbolic construction of identities for themselves through the emergent properties of their linguistic interactions. Emma the lottery girl, Emma the daughter, Emma the older sister — these are not fixed, essential identities, but they are ways of being Emma which emerge, and indeed can only emerge, as she interacts with those around her. Furthermore, the possibilities for individuals — who we are and what we can do — operate in the context of various ‘macro’ social structures. These structures include the economic, political, legal and cultural ‘technologies’ which construct our everyday existence, in ways which are more or less negotiable depending on our positions within differentiated social hierarchies (see Mouzelis, 1995). Discourse itself contributes to the construction of identity at the ‘macro’ levels, because: the ways in which societies categorise and build identities for their members is {sic} a fundamental aspect of how they work, how power relations are imposed and exercised, how societies are reproduced and changed. (Fairclough, 1993: 168) The fact that I had sought out these particular informants for this study (three boys and three girls) arose from an implicit assumption that ‘eight and nine year old children’ form a social category of sufficient homogeneity to warrant their selection as members of a meaningful group. This view is hardly idiosyncratic: to choose ‘children’ as a category of social actors is unremarkable. However, it is itself an example of one of the ways in which ‘societies categorise and build identities for their members’. Children are structurally excluded from certain

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activities and discursively constructed as different from adults: many prescriptions and proscriptions about children’s behaviour and experience are taken for granted because they apply to people within the social — and linguistic — category of ‘children’. Children, then, like other social actors, are neither free to negotiate from an infinite range of possible selves, nor yet so determined by a ‘given’ psychological identity or by their position in constrained social contexts that there is no room for negotiation. Some of the properties of the social interactions which form the data for this study are more negotiable than others. The further the children move from the immediate relationships in which they participate, the less malleable social relations prove to be: you can accept, reject or ignore your sister’s designation of you as ‘Emma the lottery girl’, but you cannot, except in fantasy, have the identity of a nine year old child and actually buy a ticket. Thus, within each of the proposed dimensions of identity managed by the children in their talk, there are both inclusionary and exclusionary influences. There are aspects of the discourses in which they participate which are common to anyone who finds themselves in these social, historical and cultural contexts; but there are other features of the discourses which mark these subjects as children: as individuals, as participants in relationships, and as members of society, with the specific identity of ‘child’. In the next section of the paper, further examples of these discursively managed dimensions of identity will be explored, drawing on the data from informal talk generated by Emma and three of the other children in the study, Leanne, Simon and Chris.

The Individual Selves The topics of the conversations recorded by the children are wide-ranging. Some of the talk relates to the activities in hand (for example, a skipping game, peeling potatoes, playing football, travelling in the car), and some of it is less context-dependent, exploring relationships, ideas, planning for events in the future and so on. There are obviously numerous occasions where each of the children selects pronouns which identify themselves as an ‘I’, as one of ‘us’, or as not ‘you’ or ‘them’. In addition to these as indicators of individual selfhood, there are also instances where the children make explicit some of their perceptions about who they are and what they are like. These utterances fall into different categories, one of which points to the changing nature of selfhood from the child’s point of view. All of the children refer at some point on the tapes to their age, often in the context of a comparison with people of other ages, or with themselves at previous or future periods in their lives. The following are some examples. Emma, as she walks to school one morning with her friend Gemma, discusses the preparations her class have been making for Easter: E: G: E:

And an Easter Hat Parade. We all had to make an Easter hat. We made them in reception and we’re too old for it {laughs} {laughs} But she still made us wear make one

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Chris, at the dining table with his parents and younger sister, turns the conversation to preparations for his ninth birthday and recalls previous parties. His father reminds him about the time a ‘bouncy castle’ was arranged for his party as a surprise: C:

Mm. That’s what I think that’s what I’d been asking for earlier on– in the – in the year hadn’t I when you were five wasn’t it. I can’t remember whether you wanted it but you didn’t I’m five now know I was six

CM: V: CM: C:

Simon engages a member of his church congregation, 17-year-old Luke, in conversation after the service, and tells him an anecdote about when he used to attend a mothers’ and toddlers’ group. Then he observes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

S: L: S: L: S: L: S: L: S: L: S: L: S: L: S: L: S: L: S:

I don’t think many people remember that far. {laughs} No. It takes a good bit of memory to do that. Mind you Mm you haven’t got to think as far back as many people have you Pardon? You haven’t got to think as far back as m+ some people have you {laughs} Yeah Only six years {laughs} S+ It seems longer but erm mm the time seems to go really fast Sure does. I remember when you were down there not down there {laughs} {laughs} You weren’t that far down but Mm. I remember when I was about down to my waist Someone could have given you a fishing rod and little hat and they could have put you in the garden by the er {laughs} pond you know just like a gnome {laughs} {laughs} Just give me some quick freeze. Or perhaps a coat of cement {laughs} Yeah. That’s it And a fishing rod like that

Some of the references to the children’s former selves, in extracts like these, are very like the observations one would make about a third party. Emma’s ‘we made them in Reception and we’re too old for it’ contains a suggestion that the referents for each of the two ‘we’s are not identical. Chris’s seeking of confirmation about what he had asked for and when would not be out of place in a question about what his younger sister, or some other third person, had said and done. This phenomenon is perhaps most noticeable in Simon’s good-humoured collaborative fantasy about how, when he was younger and smaller, he could have been used as a garden gnome. Note particularly the construction in

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Line 14: if each ‘I’ and ‘my’ have the same referent, the utterance cannot make literal sense. Like the children themselves, however, we accept that the individual self is a changing entity, especially in childhood. In addition to these most obvious and explicit references to the self as classified by age, the children sometimes comment, in various kinds of conversation, on other aspects of their personalities, skills and abilities. Chris, in a telephone conversation with his friend Ryan, remarks on his ability with hand-held computer games: C: R: C: R: C:

Erm {sighs} {....} when I went to my friend’s house erm Dylan he gave me this little game. You know that dinosaur game I had Yeah erm well he gave me one of them except it’s smaller and it’s a different game Oh Mm. And erm it’s good. I’m good at it now. Gave it me last Monday

This example also includes an implication of change: one learns to be good at a practical skill and expects to improve over time. At other times, however, the children’s descriptions of themselves suggest a more fixed notion of identity. In the following group of extracts, Leanne is at her grandmother’s house. She has negotiated with her ‘Nan’ that she will stay there for tea, as will her cousin Angela (aged 12), and they begin to help to prepare some potatoes. Her grandmother (LGM) is working out how many are needed. LGM: L:

How many do you want Leanne? I’ll er I’ll eat as much – as – as much – as you give me Nan. I don’t really care. I just eat – what – what’s put in front of me. I’m not fussy

In Leanne’s indications about the ways she sees herself, her discursive style is often markedly more adult-sounding than that of other children in the study, and one reason for this is that she sometimes appears to be quoting an adult utterance — perhaps about herself, or perhaps newly applying to herself a description she has heard adults use about other people. In this respect, Leanne’s style exemplifies the phenomenon described by Maybin (1994: 148), where, ‘one of the ways in which children construct personhood ¼ is through the reporting and taking on of other people’s voices’. One dimension of the un-childlike ‘feel’ of statements of Leanne’s such as ‘I’m not fussy’ is that they suggest a continuing state of being, an ability to describe what one is like with some certainty. This effect is created in part through the use of verbs in the simple present tense. In the following extract (which begins with the clarification of a misheard remark), this is exemplified as, on a more prosaic level, Leanne discusses peeling potatoes with her cousin: L: A: L: A: L:

¼ You said just you get what? No I said I can’t peel with Oh. No I can’t peel with knives either. I take chunks out So do I I take really big chunks out of the potatoes I do. That’s why Nan brought this so I could use it when I peel the potatoes for her and so she could use it to find it easier

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The Situated Social Actors As I have said, the discursive self even at the individual level may emerge from the interactions with others in which the children are involved. There are sometimes contrasts between the children’s reflections as presented above, on themselves as distinct from others, and the examples in the transcripts of their negotiations of their place in relation to others. In other cases, the ‘individual’ level and the ‘situated’ level are so interlinked as to be indistinguishable. The following exchange between Leanne and her cousin Angela is a good example. Their conversation has turned to a discussion of the research in which Leanne is involved, with me, and Angela wants to know if she could perhaps make some recordings too. Leanne says that Angela would have to ask me, and Angela asks about me: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

A: L: A: L:

A: L:

A: L:

Al+ er Is Alison nice? Alison Sealey. She’s okay Eh? But I don’t really know her that much do I. I mean I’ve o– I’ve only met her about three times. Summat like that anyway. Probably about five times . And A few times maybe about five {laughs} Well you don’t really judge a person do you li– when you– you need I think with me I need to get to know people before I can like judge Mm on them a bit more. Like see her every day. Like now I know that you’re a snotty cow because I see you every day

Here, again, Leanne offers a description of an aspect of what she is like. She gives Angela a partial answer to her question about me (conscious, no doubt, that I will hear the recording), but passes on to a generalisation about assessing people’s characters. In doing so, she simultaneously makes a statement about what other people can be like, about her own stance — again presented as relatively fixed — and about where her way of making such judgements fits into a more general norm. In Lines 8–9, there are several false starts as her choice of pronoun changes. The first ‘you’ is apparently used in the sense of the generic ‘one’, positioning Leanne well inside the group of people-at-large who know to be cautious before forming opinions about others. Midway through the utterance she changes stance, and specifies how she, as an individual, prefers to reserve judgement. Finally, in Lines 12–13, she playfully returns the discussion to the relationship between herself and her cousin and interlocutor, and they subsequently exchange further insults. While each of these extracts depicts Leanne as a unique ‘I’, with identifiable characteristics, they also situate her in relation to others. In describing herself in explicit ways, she suggests that some of her characteristics confer membership of social groups, such as people who are not fussy about food, people who reserve judgement on the characters of others and so on. Such mobility across the dimensions of identity in the negotiations is characteristic of many of the exchanges which the children manage in the recordings. Grouping and regroup-

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ing of the selves involved in interactions, such as those illustrated in the account of the lottery win at the beginning of this paper, occur repeatedly in various social contexts. Another characteristic of some parts of the tapes is the kind of collaborative talk identified by Coates (1989) and Maybin (1994: 147), where ‘meanings do not seem to be generated within one mind and then communicated to another through talk; rather, they are collaboratively and interactionally constructed between people’. Both these writers have commented specifically on the collaborative construction of meaning. In relation to examples of speakers — particularly women — completing each other’s utterances, Coates (1989: 119–120) observes: ‘this seems to be a clear example of the primacy of text rather than speaker’, when ‘the joint working out of a group point of view takes precedence over individual assertions’. However, in my own study, even where the function of some of the informal talk is apparently primarily phatic, rather than meaning-seeking, as it were, there are examples of ‘duetting’, such as repetitions and completions of an interlocutor’s contributions. An inference which could be drawn from this is that the children are sometimes using their informal talk to construct themselves as components of a collective ‘we’. Instead of a ‘primacy of text rather than speaker’, this may illustrate a (temporary) primacy of collective rather than individual identity. The following extract, which illustrates this kind of duetting, is from Chris’s dinner-table talk with his younger sister. She has been promised strawberries for dessert and announces that she is looking for them in the kitchen. Their mother mishears her and asks what she means by ‘strawberries on the choo choo train’. This nonsense idea is taken up and developed by both children over several utterances: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V:

You can laugh but you can’t do that {laughs} But – y+ – you can do the strawberries on the choo choo train Strawberries on the choo choo train {laughs} {laughs} {laughs} It’s not getting s+ Eyeballs on the choo choo train. {laughs} {laughs} Eyeballs on the choo choo train {laughs} Why don’t you say something like {....} Mummy on the choo choo train {laughs} {laughs} – Why don’t you say – why don’t you say something like Tom’s on the Inter-City or something Mummy on the choo choo train {laughs} Tom’s on the Inter-City Tom’s on the Inter-City

Here, Chris almost seems to be speaking ‘through’ his sister, encouraging her to repeat what has made them both laugh, suggesting what she ‘can’ say, suggesting

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what she might say (‘why don’t you say ¼’), and they both repeat, modify and complete each other’s utterances. Another example, where it is hard to say who ‘owns’ the utterance, is from Emma’s discussion with Gemma, as they walk to school, about Emma having had to make an Easter hat, even though she is really too old now for this to be an appropriate task: G: E: G: E: G: E:

Well you’ve got a straw hat I get a posh straw hat with a with yellow ribbon on it. Yeah. And little posh chickens

Later in the same recording, the two girls proclaim themselves members of ‘the nutters club’, alluding to the ‘nutter calling card’ and singing a nonsense song in unison: ‘We’re nutters and violets are red and as long as polka-dotted rabbits have bad breath we’ll be nutters to the end of a giraffe’s neck’. These are only a few examples of the various ways in which the children negotiate, through their informal talk, a collective identity which situates them in relation to those present. There are also, inevitably, instances of disassociation from those around them, and of renegotiations where conflict threatens. Here, Emma and Jenny are playing in the garden where their grandmother (EG) is sitting. Jenny proposes what Emma might say, and Emma, although she responds to the prompt, claims a separate interpretation for herself: J: E: J: E: EG: E: EG:

Emma What? Are you going to tell Grandma about {....} The what? What? – Ho+ {....} – hopscotch. What about it? I just drew a hopscotch on the floor with chalk Oh. Yeah. I don’t think you should have done it {....} there and up there though do you E: Yeah. Well EG: It makes the place look very er E: Jenny did it up there. – I – I measured this one out here Leanne, playing a skipping game with two of her cousins, begins by mocking Marcie’s nil score, but when a dispute escalates she assumes a peace-making role: L: M: A: L: M: A: M: A: M:

Marcie got none. {laughs} None Please No No Angela had another go I never had a go You had another go I never. I didn’t You two had chances

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No I never. I Yes you did I couldn’t get my foot right Yous two stop arguing man

In many ways, the individual self and the situated self merge and re-emerge throughout the dialogues. The final dimension of identity proposed in the paper is the person who is contextualised in the networks and institutions of wider social relations, and this is the topic of the next section.

The Person in the Wider Social World In the analysis of the extract at the beginning of this paper, it was suggested that one of the identities claimed by Emma was as a national lottery winner. As a child of her times, she is affected by this national institution (‘we won the lottery’), associated with it (‘you’re a lottery girl aren’t you Emma’) and excluded from it (‘we’re not allowed’). Distributed throughout the dialogues recorded by all the children are direct references to various pieces of apparatus which belong to the wider social world: money, football, films, television programmes and so on. Such phenomena are created and maintained primarily by adults for adults, but the children’s worlds are not separate from them. Sometimes, the spoken references to these things serve to transform them into components of a distinctly childish discourse, although the reverse may happen too. One example of this is Chris’s substitution of ‘inter-city’ for ‘choo-choo train’ in the extract quoted above. At other times, the children‘s references to them, and incorporation of them into their conversations, suggest a potential access to the adult worlds from which they originate. The most direct versions of this temporary crossing over into adult scenarios are the role playing dialogues generated by the children. Both Chris and Emma, for example, pretended to be footballers at points in their tapes. On one occasion, Chris organises his young friends, ascribing to them the identity of whole teams: ‘Thomas you’re Liverpool, Tom you’re Man United’. As their game progresses, Chris comments on the play, chanting ‘nil-nil’ and ‘two-one’ with the intonation of spectating crowds. Emma plays with a large ball in the garden and provides a running commentary in which she explicitly names herself as playing various roles: E: J: E: J: E:

J:

And Emma has the ball Oh and it’s hand ball. The game’s changed And the game’s changed to basketball Mum Emma gets the ball she’s bouncing it and she hits the barbecue. Oh. And it went into the swimming pool which is full of dirt And then she kicks it from behind – and and – and she missed. And she gets it and she throws it up throws it up and {....} she missed. Never mind. And {....} {makes high-pitched engine noise} It turned into car racing. And Emma Mansell is in the car and she’s going to get into second place. Yes. And she they’re neck and neck. {gasps} Er what’s that other one called. Never mind. And Emma’s in the front. {makes Formula One noises}

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E:

And she’s coming close to the finish line and {....} {claps} she won. Yes. And Emma Mansell wins another erm gold medal No I did And now back to the match c+ Oh not the match the car commentators No. No. What Brilliant match. Brilliant match. That’s it from us. Bye

J: E: J: E:

Here, features of the real environment (the ball, the barbecue) are incorporated into the fantasy world where the child is various adults, speaking in their style, sometimes almost literally with their ‘voice’. Leanne, Chris and Emma all adopted assumed accents at various points in the talk they recorded. (Simon did not do so on tape, although this does not mean that it did not happen.) Sometimes, the model for these voices is an identifiable adult — Chris is sometimes the television wrestler Hulk Hogan, for example, and Emma, in rejecting the suggestion that she and her friends might play blind man’s buff, mimics the way her mother would ‘tell us off’, saying ‘it’s far too dangerous’, with exaggerated intonation. In other instances, the assumed voice is unspecific, an imitated accent, often American. Leanne, for example, discusses films and pop music with Angela and sings in an American style, both to accompany records and also by herself. These allusions to other (adult) people who inhabit the wider culture, through the adoption of their ‘voices’, is not quite the same as the sustained role play which the children sometimes enacted, but there is no clear demarcation between role play, the direct quotation of specific others’ speech, the loose assumption of another’s ‘voice’, and the use of the words of others, where: the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s concrete contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. (Bakhtin, 1981: 293–4) The children in the study ‘took’ (in Bakhtin’s sense) the words of many others, including other children, but there were also many traces and echoes in what they said of distinctly adult discourses. Many of the children’s individual utterances, if taken out of context, would be indistinguishable from those of adults. This in itself illustrates the fluidity of the discourse styles and negotiation of selves which the children manage constantly as they interact with others.

Conclusion This paper has explored examples of children engaging in the linguistic interactions through which they negotiate social identities. The linguistic ‘tacking’ by means of which they navigate their interactions (albeit not at a conscious level) is impressive in its sophistication. It provides an indication of the sociolinguistic competence which the children display as they negotiate identities for themselves as individuals, as siblings, sons and daughters, friends and as generic children. Even the meanings implied by these categories are not static, as the past and the future echo through interactions involving each child.

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The fact that they are children locates them within hierarchically structured social relations. As social actors, they are not as favourably placed as adults in relation to the social technologies which provide the contexts for everyday interactions, and this too is a dimension of who they are. Acknowledgements The research described in this paper, ‘The role of spontaneous spoken language in the social relationships of six 8 and 9-year-old children’ was funded by the Nuffield Foundation under the Social Science Small Grants Scheme (SOC/100/903). Transcription of the tapes was financed by COBUILD. I am very grateful to the children and their families for their participation; all names have been changed. I should like to thank Bob Carter for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of the paper which helped to clarify several of the ideas explored, and I am also grateful to Ron Carter, Fred Inglis, Hilary Minns, Sylvia Winchester and the participants at the CILS seminar held at the University of Durham (March, 1996) for their helpful comments and questions. References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. M. Holquist (ed.) C. Emerson and M. Holquist (trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Coates, J. (1989) Gossip revisited. In J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds) Women in their Speech Communities. London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (1993 edn) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell. Halliday, M.A.K. (1982) Relevant models of language. In B. Wade (ed.) Language Perspectives. London: Heinemann. Harré, R. and Gillett, G. (1994) The Discursive Mind. London: Sage. Maybin, J. (1994) Children’s voices: Talk, knowledge and identity. In D. Graddol, J. Maybin and B. Stierer (eds) Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mouzelis, N. (1995) Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? Diagnosis and Remedies. London: Routledge.

Appendix Transcription conventions guess at unclear word or utterance [text] additional information wholly unrecoverable section text overlapping parts of utterances {text} non verbal contribution + word begun but not completed {....} unexpected pause