Teasing a child is a behavior that seems specifically designed to create uncertainty in the recipient of the tease. Although the teaser does not actually intend the literal content of his or her utterance to be accepted as true, teasing creates the possibility that the child will believe the utterance to be true. According to Grice's (1975) maxim of quality, speakers should not say anything they believe to be untrue; yet in teasing children, adults intentionally violate this maxim. The question to be addressed in this chapter is why adults choose to tease children and thereby create this type of uncertainty in them.

Although descriptions of teasing are rare in the literature on interactions involving young children, there are enough data to indicate that explanations of teasing must focus on a particular cultural or subcultural group (Coles 1977; Heath 1981; Miller this volume; Schieffelin this volume; Simmons 1942). Teasing has been shown to vary across groups in its structural characteristics, assignment of roles permissible for children, and association with other speech forms, such as criticism, joking, and assertion. Thus, the specific focus of this chapter will be the teasing that occurred in the interactions of two Mexican immigrant families living in northern California.

The suggestion to be made is that while there are common characteristics shared by all teasing sequences, at any particular time the specific goal of the teaser may vary.

In the preface to Introduction to S/Z, Roland Barthes's work on ways in which readers read, Richard Howard writes: “We require an education in literature … in order to discover that what we have assumed – with the complicity of our teachers – was nature is in fact culture, that what was given is no more than a way of taking” (emphasis not in the original; Howard 1974:ix). This statement reminds us that the culture children learn as they grow up is, in fact, “ways of taking” meaning from the environment around them. The means of making sense from books and relating their contents to knowledge about the real world is but one “way of taking” that is often interpreted as “natural” rather than learned. The quote also reminds us that teachers (and researchers alike) have not recognized that ways of taking from books are as much a part of learned behavior as are ways of eating, sitting, playing games, and building houses.

As school-oriented parents and their children interact in the preschool years, adults give their children, through modeling and specific instruction, ways of taking from books that seem natural in school and in numerous institutional settings such as banks, post offices, businesses, and government offices. These mainstream ways exist in societies around the world that rely on formal educational systems to prepare children for participation in settings involving literacy.

We turn now to the application to sociological (including anthropological) concerns of the apparatus we have developed. In section 7.1 we consider the relevance of our theory to the traditional concerns of social anthropology; in 7.2 we turn to the analysis of significant patterns of interaction in particular social systems.

Social theory and the study of interaction

We have explored some systematic and universal properties of language use addressed to face redress. But what bearing has all this on sociological or anthropological theory or research? What is universal and pan-cultural cannot, at first glance, be of cultural significance. That which organizes such low-level orders of events can hardly, it might seem, have any bearing on the mainstream sociological concern with social structure. Indeed the study of interactional systematics has been impugned by Giddens (1973:15) on charges of being ‘a resurgence of crude voluntarism, linked to what I would call a retreat from institutional analysis’. Moreover, he continues, the views ‘that the most vital aspects of social existence are those relating to the triviata of “everyday life” … easily rationalise a withdrawal from basic issues involved in the study of macro-structural social forms and social processes’ (ibid.).

One suspects that many social theorists, including some anthropologists, share these views. Nevertheless, in actual fact in social anthropology there has been a persistent if rather thin strand of interest in the way in which social relations of various kinds are realized in interaction. And this interest follows from the sorts of theoretical orientation that have been most influential.

The learning of socially appropriate norms of behavior is a complex and multifaceted process. Prompting for the use of appropriate verbal behavior plays an active role in the social development of children in Basotho society. This chapter examines the prominent use of ere … ‘say …’ and other prompts by Sesotho-speaking caregivers during interaction with children. It identifies the forms these linguistic routines take and the functional contexts in which they occur. Finally, it examines how these prompts are used in the socialization of young children, providing them with a framework from which to recognize social situations and respond accordingly.

Background

Lesotho is a small, dry, mountainous country completely surrounded by the Republic of South Africa. Sesotho, or Southern Sotho, is a southern Bantu language used by approximately three million speakers, half of whom reside in Lesotho, the other half resident in South Africa. The people who live in Lesotho and speak Sesotho call themselves Basotho. Many Basotho men have been employed in the mines in South Africa since the mid 1800s. Fosterage, whereby children are sent to live with grandparents, aunts, or uncles, has long been practiced and is still common in both rural and urban areas. Rural women have traditionally worked in the fields, leaving children to entertain themselves, or, in the case of infants, leaving them with grandmother or neighbors.

Introduction

We have claimed that a face-bearing rational agent will tend to utilize the FTA-minimizing strategies according to a rational assessment of the face risk to participants. He would behave thus by virtue of practical reasoning, the inference of the best means to satisfy stated ends.

We now claim that what links these strategies to their verbal expressions is exactly the same kind of means-ends reasoning. For example, suppose our Model Person has chosen the strategy of negative politeness: recall that negative politeness consists in doing the FTA on record, with redressive action directed to the addressee's perennial want to not be imposed upon. Then our MP must unambiguously express the FTA, and choose between a set of appropriate ways that would partially satisfy that negative-face want of the addressee's; that is, he must do so if he intends to rationally satisfy his desire to achieve the end we have labelled negative politeness. He may choose more than one such means of redressive action, as long as those chosen are consistent, and the effort expended not out of proportion to the face risk attending the FTA.

Such redressive action need not of course be verbal. In order to partially satisfy your want to have your wants desired, I may indicate my understanding of them by bringing you a gift appropriate to them.

Introduction

We wrote this paper as an introduction to the symposium in which a number of the papers herein were presented. In it we intended to propose three hypotheses. The first is that children learn language in the process of interacting with others in patterned ways. We believe that the papers in this volume provide abundant evidence for the plausibility of this hypothesis. Secondly, we wanted to go further by suggesting that interactional routines facilitate the child's perception, analysis, and practice of utterances. Here we have offered examples in order to illustrate how such linkage may occur. Finally, we suggest that culturally formulated ways of communicating motivate both linguistic and social development: that in learning how to speak appropriately a child learns both language and social rules.

This paper is motivated by the belief that we need an account of language acquisition that does not avoid the question of learning. In particular, we want to be able to portray the processes of language learning so as to show how the learner's systems evolve rather than just to describe static stages. We also want to account, if possible, for the motivation that produces language development. We believe that cross-disciplinary research is needed in order to provide such an account. This is because socialization and language learning are closely intertwined. Socializing situations occur fairly predictably as to time, place, participants, and desired outcomes, all of which greatly facilitate language learning.

Introduction

In 1822, after traveling throughout the Pacific, the Reverends Tyerman and Bennett reported a certain problem that many Christian families were experiencing. Writing to London, they referred to the head of one such family:

Without the particular moral interpretation of the good Reverends Tyerman and Bennett, emotional intensity among Pacific peoples, particularly among Polynesians, has been noted and expressed in art, literature, and numerous ethnographic descriptions.

Empirical research may have ramifications in multiple directions. Here we bring together those that we foresee and make some assessment of their relative importance.

Let us first summarize what we set out to do in this paper. We wished in the first place to account for the pan-cultural interpretability of politeness phenomena, broadly defined. We argued that this interpretability derives from the universal mutual-knowledge assumptions of interacting individuals: that humans are ‘rational’ and that they have ‘face’. On these lines we constructed an overall theory of politeness, integrating notions of polite friendliness and polite formality in a single scheme. From abstract ends, our two ‘face wants’, repeated application of rational means-ends reasoning will bring us down to the choice of linguistic and kinesic detail, to the minutiae of message construction. Only at the most abstract level, then, do we need to resort to concepts like ‘ethological primitives’, ‘innate dispositions’, and so on — concepts that notoriously block inquiry. Nor, interestingly, do norms play a central role in the analysis.

This is the core of the investigation, which is to be read against a set of sociological goals. The essential idea is this: interactional systematics are based largely on universal principles. But the application of the principles differs systematically across cultures, and within cultures across subcultures, categories and groups. Moreover, categories of egos distribute these universally based strategies across different categories of alters. From an interactional point of view, then, principles like those here described are some of the dimensions, the building blocks, out of which diverse and distinct social relations are constructed.

Preface

The reissue of ‘Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena’ over a decade after it was written, perhaps calls for some explanation, especially as, for economy of production, we have have had to minimize revisions to a new introduction and bibliography. One reason is that we believe the issues addressed there (and originally, or at least most influentially, by Goff man 1967, 1971) have a perennial importance, for they raise questions about the foundations of human social life and interaction. For example, in the original introduction to this work, Goody (1978a: 12) notes how the phenomena we review below seem to require an enormously complex kind of reflexive reasoning about other agents' desires, and she suggests that this reasoning, with its roots in interpersonal ritual, ‘may be fundamental in an evolutionary sense to social life and human intelligence’. She goes on to suggest (1978a: 15), in the context of a discussion of ‘joking relations’, that it is the essence of these that they carry the ‘presumption of non-threatening intention’. From a gross ethological perspective, perhaps we can generalize somewhat: the problem for any social group is to control its internal aggression while retaining the potential for aggression both in internal social control and, especially, in external competitive relations with other groups (Maynard-Smith, in press).

In the following narrative a young mother from the working-class community of South Baltimore recalls an incident that occurred when she was in junior high school:

Nora tells this tale with pride and pleasure. Her proficiency in the art of teasing enabled her to outwit her peers and to transform a potentially painful experience into an occasion for self-display.

Firth noted many years ago that “Every human being is a bundle of institutionalized roles. He has to play many parts, and unless he knows his lines as well as his role he is no use in the play” (quoted in Verma 1969:293). The research described in this paper was designed to examine how and when preschoolers in middle-class Anglo-American cultures learn their “lines,” i.e., how they acquire full communicative competence (Hymes 1972). As children become active members of any language community, they must learn to speak not only grammatically but also appropriately. Children in all societies must, at some time during acquisition, learn a variety of sociolinguistic and social-interactional rules that govern appropriate language use. Even where the language addressed to 2-year-olds may be of highly specialized nature, by the time these children reach age 4 or 5, they have experienced diverse speech settings: They go to the doctor, to preschool, to birthday parties, to the grocery store. They participate in a variety of speech situations, with people who differ in age, sex, status, and familiarity, and whose speech will therefore vary in a number of systematic ways. This type of language variation has been described for a number of situations in American English under the rubric of register variation (see Andersen 1977, in press or Ferguson 1977 for more detailed summaries of work on registers). The range of registers examined in the study described below included “babytalk,” “foreigner talk,” “teacher talk,” and “doctor talk.”

Remarks on alternative models

One way of thinking about our enterprise is this: we are attempting a description, in a very limited area, of the principles that lie behind the construction of social behaviour. There can be no doubt that one reason that social theory has never come to ground level is the notable lack of a satisfactory theory of action. The major social theorists (for instance Durkheim, Parsons, Weber), and indeed analytical philosophers, have only made crude attempts at the analysis of the single act. Only cognitive anthropologists (inspired initially by Miller, Galanter and Pribram 1960), cognitive psychologists, and workers in artificial intelligence (e.g. in Schank and Colby 1973) have looked at actions in the context of hierarchical plans which may specify sequences of actions. But how does one generate plans? How does one mentally check their validity? What kinds of reasoning lie behind them? These are questions which, compared to the study devoted to deductive reasoning, have received scant attention since Aristotle (but see for instance Körner 1974). Above all, a satisfactory account of action in an interactional setting has been grossly neglected, despite evidence that very special properties of coordination arise in such settings (Grice 1971, 1975; Lewis 1969; Schelling 1960). Indeed, here our own analysis must be found wanting, dominated às it is by the act-by-act analysis of contemporary philosophy and linguistics; we try to make amends in section 6.3.

One of the most striking meeting places of language and culture can be found in communicative style. The notion of communicative style has been defined by Barnlund (1975) to include the topics people discuss, their favorite forms of interaction, the depth of involvement sought, the extent to which they rely upon the same channels for conveying information, and the extent to which they are tuned to the same level of meaning, such as factual versus emotional content. Obviously, communicative style is one aspect of “communicative competence,” relating, in particular, to the “rules for use” that govern speakers' production and interpretation of language appropriately in context (Hymes 1972). Communicative style, which I will define loosely here as the way language is used and understood in a particular culture, both reflects and reinforces fundamental cultural beliefs about the way people are and the nature of interpersonal communication. As Scollon (1982) has argued, children's acquisition of culture-specific patterns of communication is an extremely important part of their socialization, since such patterns serve as one of the primary sources of information on cultural values concerning social relationships and interaction. Thus acquisition of communicative style plays a part in the development of children's social cognition, thereby helping to shape their world view (Whorf 1956) or “reality set” (Scollon & Scollon 1981).

Japanese communicative style

It is widely recognized that the communicative style of the Japanese is intuitive and indirect, especially compared with that of Americans.