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Language, power and gender: A tribute to Susan Ervin-Tripp (1927–2018)

▪ Abstract  According to recent interpretive approaches to the study of children's socialization, meaning creation is an active process by which children playfully transform and actively resist cultural categories, and where language is viewed as social action that helps shape reality ( Gaskins et al. 1992 ). Four ways in which children's peer talk establishes and maintains peer culture are considered: (a) how children elaborate games and codes (and ritualize the basis of inclusion in the peer group) through peer talk, (b) how conflict talk functions to elaborate peer culture, (c) how identities as peer group phenomena are talked into being through peer talk, and (d) how adult culture is resisted through peer talk. Agentive goals of children's peer culture, and the role of language in achieving them, are discussed in each section. I conclude that sociolinguistics gives researchers a way to think about social competence as sets of linguistic practices (e.g., positionings, voicings, participation framework manipulations) that children enact.

Recently, researchers have been interested in narrative as a conversational point-making activity. Some of the features of narrative (e.g., its "objectivity", Benveniste, 1971) render it ideally suited for self-exploration and positioning of the self with respect to societal institutions (Polanyi, 1989), especially in the context of conversations within friendship groups (Coates, 1996). While past research has often focused on self-constructing and political uses of narratives of personal experience, the present study examines such uses with respect to narratives produced during preschoolers' dramatic play in friendship groups. An ethnographic-sociolinguistic study that followed friendship groups in two preschool classrooms of a California university children's center was conducted. Children were videotaped in their two most representative friendship groups each academic quarter. Narrative was coded when children used explicit proposals of irrealis in one of three forms: the marked subjunctive (past tense irrealis marking in English, e.g., "they were hiding"); the paraphrastic subjunctive (unmarked irrealis proposals such as "and I'm shy"); and pretend directives such as "pretend" ("pretend we're Shy Wizards"). Also, instances of character speech were counted as narrative. Children used con-trastive forms (subjunctive, coherence markers vs. absence of subjunctive; pitch variation) to mark different phases within narrative. Collaborative self-construction was seen in the linguistic forms they used (pretend statements; tag questions; "and-elaborations") and in the identities the children constructed for their protagonists. Girls' protagonists suggested they valued qualities of lovingness, graciousness, and attractiveness. The protagonists the boys constructed suggested they valued physical power. Girls had a greater reliance on story for self-construction than boys did. It is notable that the dramatic play narratives produced during children's play in friendship groups serve some of the same functions in positioning participants with respect to one another and exploring possible selves collaboratively with one another that personal experience narratives serve in adult intimate social groups.

The making of assessment descriptions can be key processes in children's negotiations of the social and moral orders of their peer groups. This paper examines how a friendship group of preschool boys followed through a year-long video-ethnography construct their local social and moral order, through use of a particular interactional resource, membership categorizations. A collection of clips of the boys' use of membership categorizations was created and analysed. Overall, the boys frequently described their own (or pretend play characters') behaviours as 'fixing' and 'helping', and reacted positively to these descriptions, by agreeing to do the actions, carrying out the actions and including group members so described in play. Likewise, if one of the peers' behaviours was described as 'destroying', 'smashing' or a similarly aggressive action, the boys oriented to these named qualities as negative, through changing the play topic, moving away or sanctioning the person so described. We argue that the ways in which the boys use and respond to the referenced activities and index them as 'positively' or 'negatively' bound to the relationship category of being a good friend or peer group member determine what counts to the participants themselves as acceptable moral behaviour.

This collection of essays is a representative sample of the current research and researchers in the fields of language and social interactions and social context. The opening chapter, entitled ""Context in Language,"" is written by Susan Ervin-Tripp, whose diverse and innovative research inspired the editors to dedicate this book to her honor. Ervin-Tripp is known for her work in the fields of linguistics, psychology, child development, sociology, anthropology, rhetoric, and women's studies. She has played a central role in the definition and establishment of psycholinguistics, child language