Kinyi/He Jianyi

Email: mc14189@connect.um.edu.mo

I am currently a second-year MA student in the University of Macau. I live in Dongguan, Guangdong, China and I like to work on areas related to children’s language.

Parental directive and response sequences have been a fruitful site for research attention recently. Previous research shows that parental directives can be implemented by various means ranging from bald imperatives to interrogatives to hortative sentences while children’s responses also vary with respect to their stance displayed ranging from flat refusals to bargaining and crying and to pleading and so on (Goodwin & Cekaite 2018). Immediate compliance is rather rare and compliance is frequently negotiated over multiple turns which involve different means such as blackmail, threats, changing to fun engagement, bribe, rational explanations, and authority. The data corpus comprises video-recorded dialogues of parent-child interaction from one Chinese family and one bilingual family. This study examines how differently parents construct children’s socialization and relationships by analyzing directive-response sequences in parent-child interaction with a particular focus on non-compliant response sequences. By opting for either open-end or close-end directives, parents construct children’s social world and thinking into different shape. Both parents and children are working together to compromise and work out a solution for negotiations. Thus, reaching on an agreement over negotiations needs mutual effort depending on primary forms of directives and stances from both sides. Culture might impact trajectories of negotiation sequences but it might constitute only one among many possible causes such as social environment, community, personality, and moral values for the differences on parental directives.

Selected readings

Aronsson, & Cekaite, A. (2011). Activity contracts and directives in everyday family politics. Discourse & Society, 22(2), 137–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926510392124

Goodwin, & Cekaite, A. (2018). Embodied family choreography : practices of control, care, and mundane creativity (First edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Koniski. (2018). Please turn it off: Negotiations and morality around children’s media use at home. Discourse & Society, 29(2), 142–159. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517734349