Volume 26, Issue 4-5

Dinnertime has served as a lucrative site for the study of family discourse (e.g., Blum-Kulka 1997; Ochs and Taylor 1995). Its importance as a site of analysis is not surprising since dinner is one of the few activities that brings many families together on a daily basis and, as such, serves as an important site for the constitution and maintenance of the family and familial roles. In this study of the naturally occurring interaction of dual-income families with young children, the family members do not eat dinner at the same time. To understand family discourse at mealtime in these families, it is necessary to redefine ‘family dinner’ to include meals in which all family members are present but not everyone is eating, and to consider the wider context in which these interactions occur; that is, as part of homecoming transitions when one parent arrives home and the child and other parent are already there. I use a framing approach (Goman 1981; Tannen 1994) to consider two ‘dinnertime homecomings’ from two dual-earner families who tape-recorded themselves from morning until night for at least one week. I find four primary frames that occur during these interactions (dinner, managerial, caregiving, sociable) and focus on one footing that occurs within the sociable frame: a child-centered family footing. I describe how this footing is linguistically constituted during the interactions, how parents negotiate this footing as it competes with other footings and frames, and how one parent uses this footing as a resource to restore family harmony. Ultimately, the child-centered footing in a sociable frame is a family-centered footing that serves to create and maintain family solidarity.

Analysis focuses on how utterances opposing another position in an argument are constructed with a simultaneous orientation to (a) the detailed structure of the prior utterance being opposed and (b) the future trajectories of action projected by that utterance, which the current utterance attempts to counter and intercept. Through such practices participants treat each other as cognitively complex, reflexive actors who are reshaping a contested, consequential social landscape through the choices they make as they build each next action. Data is drawn from a dispute between a father and his son who is just entering adolescence.

This article examines how the interpenetration of the public and the private spheres is accomplished in discourse. My analysis of the interactions among family and friends that were prompted by the television program Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? shows how different voices from the public sphere are recycled and interpreted in private talk. I identify such conversations about the television show as gossip or a type of talk that Bakhtin (1975: 151) describes as ‘zhytejskaya germenevtika’ , a term which was previously translated as ‘living hermeneutics’ (Bakhtin 1981: 338), but which I suggest is more accurately translated as ‘quotidian hermeneutics’ because it better captures Bakhtin's concept of the everyday nature of meaning-making in discourse. The analysis of audiotaped conversations among family and friends suggests that the public and the private are dialogically intertwined in private interaction and that television texts serve as valuable resources in how participants discuss private issues without getting personal, reinforce their own friendships, affirm shared values, and delight and entertain one another with gossip about a sensationalistic television event. By examining dialogic repetition, constructed dialogue, rhetorical questions, and other linguistic strategies, I demonstrate how speakers engage in ‘quotidian hermeneutics’ moment-to-moment in interaction.

Drawing from a corpus of naturalistic videotaped data documenting everyday activities of 32 middle-class dual-earner families in Los Angeles, California, this article explores children's bedtime routines as an interactional matrix for carrying out culturally salient relational work, illustrating how family members co-participate in a ‘discourse of anticipation’ that prepares for—yet simultaneously forestalls—the moment of bedtime separation. Integrating research from psycho-cultural studies, language socialization, and conversation analysis, the article builds upon prior work on everyday routines as rich vehicles for cultural learning, discerning and tracing how parents and children co-constitute bedtime activities as collaboratively negotiated closing routines that foster autonomous self-initiative in tandem with a growing capacity for relational communion with others.

Making use of videotapes of family interaction, this paper investigates alternative trajectories that develop as parents and children negotiate disputes resulting from directive/response sequences. Forms of arguments constituted through recycled positions are distinguished from arguments that are buttressed by accounts or rule statements. Constellations of features including structures of control, forms of tying utterances to prior utterances, accounts, as well as facing formations are consequential. The forms of participation frameworks that are constructed afford different ways of sustaining focused interaction, gearing into what someone has said, and displaying to each other how participants are aligned within the activity frame. Alternative trajectories develop in light of the forms of joint attention that are established, as well as sustained engagement.

This analysis brings together Goffman's concept of alignment, Bakhtin's notion of dialogicality, and A. L. Becker's idea that interaction consists of ‘reshaping’ old texts into present contexts to consider how one mother reshapes her own and her child's previous discourse across three conversations to construct different alignments with her co-interlocutors and different identities for herself. The mother, Janet, who works part-time but spends most of her time caring for her three-year-old daughter, Natalie, tape-recorded nearly all of her interactions for one week. The conversations I examine involve (i) Janet ‘being Mommy’ as she deals with a misbehaving Natalie while also trying to talk on the telephone; (ii) Janet and Natalie reversing roles and playfully re-enacting this incident two days later; and (iii) Janet recounting the re-enactment to three friends the next evening during a dinner party and evaluating it in a way that distances her from the identity of a ‘full-time stay-at-home mom’. The analysis shows how specific bits of prior text are reshaped to create play, build rapport, and construct alignments that put forth particular identities at particular interactional moments. It thus illustrates how ‘the same’ prior text serves as a resource for creating multiple alignments and identities in discourse.

Drawing from a corpus of naturally occurring parent–child interactions, this paper documents a common verbal practice used by US dual-earner parents to issue an early inquiry into children's homework. This practice is analyzed as a first discursive move to get homework accomplished. The analysis of this practice shows that parents' topicalizations of homework most often occur early in the afternoon and function to gauge the amount of homework that needs to be done and then allow the parent to initiate a sequence that plans for the doing of the homework into the rest of the day's activities. This practice starts a sequence of talk that illustrates the often difficult path that parents negotiate between retaining parent control and responsibility for the completion of homework, and socializing child autonomy. I also argue that this verbal practice is an indication of the degree to which parents orient to homework as an organizer of family activity on afternoons. Finally, this practice has implications for documenting the ways in which directives are not isolated utterances, but can in parent–child interaction be situated within a larger sequence of sequences in order to initiate activity.

Building on Becker's notion of prior text and Bakhtin's of dialogicality, I explore intertextuality in family discourse by tracing how three couples' conflicts about domestic responsibilities are recycled, reframed, and rekeyed over time, both between each other and in conversation with others: in one case with a friend, and in another with the couple's child. I use the term ‘recycling’ for situations where a topic is closed then arises again later in the same or a different conversation; ‘reframing’ for a change in what the conversation is about; and ‘rekeying’ for a change in the tone or tenor of an interaction. I trace a conflict in each of three families—the first two briefly, the third at length—in order to examine how speakers negotiate conflicts about the division of household responsibilities. In the third example, analysis helps explain why the issue of household responsibilities carries so much weight. In all three examples, restoring harmony was accomplished in part by reframing in a humorous key, and in ways that reinforced the speakers' shared family identities. The paper thus demonstrates how the abstract concept, intertextuality, actually works in everyday interaction.