Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 178, June 2021, Pages 175-191
Journal of Pragmatics

Children seeking the driver's attention in cars: Position and composition of children's summons turns and children's rights to engage

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.03.005Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • This paper studies children's summonses to their parents or caretakers in cars.

  • The position and composition of the summons contribute to response-pressure.

  • With their ways of summoning, children exert interactional agency.

  • Children's rights to engage are contingent and accomplished in situ.

  • Adults' responses socialize children into the systematics of social interaction.

Abstract

This paper explores the topic of children having restricted rights to engage in conversation with adults in multiparty interactions. Drawing on the principles of conversation analysis, and 7 h of video-recorded Finnish and English naturally occurring in-car family interactions, our focus is on moments when a child summons the driver while the driver is driving and having a conversation with another passenger. We suggest that the composition and position of the child's summons relative to other ongoing conversations play a crucial role in whether the child receives a response, or whether the summons will be ignored or suspended by the driver. Positioning and designing summonses in different ways is a resource for the child to exert agency and mobilize a response from the driver to different degrees, which affects the child's likelihood of entering in interaction with the driver at that moment. The analysis suggests that children cannot be a priori determined to have (or not to have) certain kinds of speaking rights; instead, the “right” to engage in a conversation is contingent and situated, (re)negotiated and accomplished in situ. Finally, summons-answer sequences provide adults a resource for socializing children into the regularities of turn allocation and turn distribution.

Keywords

Summons
Adult-child interaction
In-car interaction
Turn-taking
Conversational rights
Agency

Cited by (0)

Tiina Eilittä is a doctoral researcher, working at the Research Unit for Languages and Literature (English) at the University of Oulu, Finland. She uses conversation analysis to study interaction between adults and children at busy moments of everyday life where multiple activities take place simultaneously. In her doctoral dissertation, she focuses on the practices that children use for summoning adults, and the adults' responses to them. Her research data consists of Finnish and English video recordings of interaction in families and early childhood education. Currently, she is co-editing two books and working as an editor in Finnish Journal of Linguistics.

Pentti Haddington is Professor of English language and interaction at the University of Oulu, Finland. He uses video-based methods and conversation analysis to study social interaction in complex settings. He is interested in how participants talk, use their bodies and other multimodal resources as part of their everyday social activities. He is currently studying multiactivity in various settings and interaction in multinational crisis management training. Haddington's research has been published for example in Research on Language and Social Interaction, Journal of Pragmatics and Text & Talk. He has also co-edited several books, for example for Benjamins and de Gruyter.

Anna Vatanen, PhD, works currently as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Unit for Languages and Literature at the University of Oulu, Finland. She has also worked at the Centre of Excellence on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the University of Helsinki. Vatanen is an interactional linguist and conversation analyst who works on video-recorded Finnish and Estonian conversational data. Her research has been published for instance in Research on Language and Social Interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, and several edited volumes. The phenomena she has studied include silent moments in interaction, units of language, various social actions, turn-taking organization, and multiactivity.