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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT. This article examines disagreement and aggravation in bilingual children's cross-sex, classroom interaction by bringing together research on children's language, bilingualism and gender. A conversation analytic approach is employed to answer the following questions: (1) How do the participants manage disagreement? (2) How do the participants perform stereotypical male or female talk?, and (3) What role, if any, does code-switching play in the management of the interaction? The analysis demonstrates the use by one girl of stereotypical male ways of speaking to manage the collaborative activity and orient her co-participants to the assigned task and the use of codeswitching to build opposition. *
INTRODUCTION. While a great deal of attention has been paid to the linguistic behavior of Chicano youth in terms of language maintenance and shift issues, comparatively little is known about the construction and negotiation of identity of Chicano youth in spontaneous conversation among peers. Furthermore, although stereotypical assumptions about Chicana/Latina adult and adolescent women in conversation have begun to be challenged (Galindo 1992, 1999, Mendoza-Denton 1996, Gonzales Velasquez 1999, and Galindo & Gonzales Velasquez 1992), little work has been done on describing the interaction patterns of Chicano/Latino preadolescents (cf. Goodwin 1999, a notable exception). Finally, while Goodwin (1999) has investigated the interaction patterns of Chicana/Latina pre-adolescent girls, her analysis focused primarily on same-sex interaction in play contexts and it did not consider the girls' bilingual repertoires (e.g. the use of code-switching) as a resource in the interaction. The language practices used by Chicana pre-adolescents to construct gender identities and manage cross-sex interaction remain relatively unexamined.
In this article, a conversation analysis approach is employed to examine the role of aggravation and disagreement in the management of a bilingual, cross-sex interaction among three Chicano (Mexican-American) children. The following research questions are the focus of the analysis: (1) How do the participants manage disagreement? (2) How do the participants perform stereotypical male or female talk? and (3) What role, if any, does code-switching play in the management of the interaction? In the article that follows, the research on disagreement and preference, gender, codeswitching and children's peer interaction is reviewed briefly. Then, the social context of the interaction is described, followed by a brief sociolinguistic profile of Arizona and the Phoenix metropolitan area and a description of the research site and the methodology. Finally, several examples from the interaction are presented and analyzed, and the article concludes with a discussion of the strategies used to manage disagreement and construct identities.
1. BACKGROUND. Group membership and ethnicity, while traditionally viewed as static aspects of identity, are revealed in recent research to be interactional achievements (Antaki & Widdicombe 1998, Rampton 1999). Similarly, gender, which was seen as an immutable social category, has been demonstrated to be something that speakers bring about or DO in interaction (Aronsson and Thorell 1999, Farris 2000). Disputes are a site of interaction that is organizationally complex (Grimshaw 1990:3, Cromdal 2004:34) and in which social roles and identities are constructed, negotiated, accepted and rejected (Goodwin & Goodwin 1990, Williams 2005). In a bi- or multilingual environment, this identity construction and negotiation may be carried out through choice of language variety (Yoon 1996, Bailey 2000a, Sebba and Tare 2002, Gafaranga 2001, Cashman 2005), use of codeswitching (Lo 1999, Bailey 2000b) or codeswitching style (Chen 2004), choice of repair strategy (Cashman 2002) and deployment of other resources, both linguistic and non-linguistic in nature.
In this section, the groundwork is laid for the examination of a bilingual, cross-sex, child-child interaction involving disagreement. First, the concept of preference in spontaneous conversation, or talk-in-interaction, is reviewed in the context of disagreement. Then, preference in child and adult language is contrasted, and issues in gender and bilingual conversation related to preference are discussed.
1.1. DISAGREEMENT AND PREFERENCE. The concept of preference is one of the major discoveries of the conversation analytical approach to the study of talk-in-interaction (Boyle 2000:583). As Boyle points out, preference is usually defined by the markedness of a second pair part (such as an answer to a question or the response to an invitation) in relation to the first pair part (the question or the invitation), its frequency of occurrence or its consequences for the speakers' 'face' (585). In other words, preferred conversational turns were seen as unmarked, more frequent and not threatening to the interlocutor's face. In contrast, dispreferred turns at talk have been described as marked, less frequent and threatening to the interlocutor's face (cf. Pomerantz 1984). Boyle points out that, according to his reading of Harvey Sacks' original lectures, the concept of preference so central to the orderliness of conversation has been simplified and misunderstood. First, preference is not only a feature of the second pair part, but is 'concerned as much with initial actions as with responses' (592). Second, rather than a simple dichotomy of preferred/dispreferred actions, there are two types of dispreferred actions. In distinguishing between the two types of dispreferred actions, and between preferred and dispreferred actions, Boyle argues that two concepts are key: NOTICEABLE ABSENCE and ACCOUNTABILITY. While preferred actions are unnoticed because they are contextually relevant and, therefore, expected, dispreferred actions are noticeable because they are not expected and/or seemingly not relevant. That is, Boyle defines the dispreferred action as 'an action which is noticeably absent, and which therefore has to be accounted for' (589). The two types of dispreferred actions are distinguished by the type of account offered by the interactant. Dispreferred actions that are NOT SANCTIONABLE are those that do not lead to negative inferences about the character of the interactant, while dispreferred actions that are SANCTIONABLE may lead to negative inferences about the character of the interactant. Research has demonstrated that disagreement in interaction tends to be dispreferred while agreement tends to be preferred. It is important also to note that actions are not universally preferred or dispreferred; rather, context is needed to determine preference in situ on a case-by-case basis (Pomerantz 1984, Boyle 2000). Pomerantz (1978), for example points out in her analysis of compliment responses that interactants must balance two systems of constraints--a preference for agreement with a cultural tendency to avoid self-praise.
Disagreement or opposition in interaction where agreement is preferred may be mitigated or aggravated. Mitigation is the softening of the threat to the other's face. The action carried out in the disagreement is minimized or disguised through mitigation, which Caffi (1999) divides into three strategies: bushes, hedges and shields. Bushes make the propositional content of the speech act less precise, hedges weaken the illocutionary force of the speech act, and shields displace the disagreement's origin away from the speaker (Caffi 1999). Interactants employ a variety of linguistic resources to mitigate, including turn-taking choices (e.g. delays, silence), morphological choices (e.g. diminutives, tense/mood/aspect), and lexical choices (e.g. register, specialized vs. general vocabulary). In situations where disagreement is dispreferred, mitigation may be used to mask a disagreement, making it, if not unnoticeable, less noticeable and, therefore, less accountable and sanctionable. Aggravation, in contrast, highlights rather than masks the threat to the other's face. As with mitigation, speakers carry out aggravation using a variety of linguistic resources, including volume (e.g. dramatically raised or lowered volume), intonation (e.g. heightened pitch contours, vowel lengthening), lexical choices (e.g. insult terms, opposition terms) and speech acts (e.g. threats, orders). Using these and other resources, speakers display disagreement rather than mask it. In this way, speakers may make disagreement more noticeable in situations where disagreement is preferred (such as in response to an interactant's...
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