Language socialization across cultures / edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Schieffelin, Bambi B.

Ochs, Elinor.

Series:

Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language ; no. 3.

Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language ; no. 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language acquisition.

Socialization.

Physical Description:

vii, 274 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Summary:

Children's acquisition of language and their acquisition of culture are processes that have usually been studied separately. In exploring cross-culturally the connections between the two, this volume provides a new, alternative, integrated approach to the developmental study of language and culture.

The volume focuses on the ways in which children are both socialized through language and socialized to use language in culturally specific ways. The contributors examine the verbal interactions of small children with their caregivers and peers in several different societies around the world, showing that these interactions are socially and culturally organized, and that it is by participating in them that children come to understand sociocultural orientations. They emphasize the salient language behaviors of children and others, and show how these are embedded in broader patterns of social behavior and cultural knowledge. They reveal that various features of discourse -- phonological, morpho-syntactic, lexical, pragmatic, and conversational -- carry sociocultural information, and that language in use is a major resource for conveying and displaying sociocultural knowledge. As children acquire language, so they are also acquiring a world view.

This innovative approach to the study of language acquisition and socialization will appeal widely to anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, specialists in communication studies, and educationists.

Contents:

Introduction / Elinor Ochs

Calling-out and repeating routines in Kwara'ae children's language socialization / Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo and David W. Gegeo

Prompting routines in the language socialization of Basotho children / Katherine Demuth

Interactional routines as cultural influences upon language acquisition / Ann M. Peters and Stephen T. Boggs

What no bedtime story means / Shirley Brice Heath

Social norms and lexical acquisition / Martha Platt

The acquisition of register variation by Anglo-American children / Elaine S. Andersen

Teasing and shaming in Kauli children's interactions / Bambi B. Schieffelin

Teasing / Ann R. Eisenberg

Teasing as language socialization and verbal play in a white working-class community / Peggy Miller

The acquisition of communicative style in Japanese / Particia M. Clancy

From feelings to grammar / Elinor Ochs.

Notes:

Includes bibliographies and index.

ISBN:

0521326214

0521339197

OCLC:

13823512