Introduction

Extract

The present issue presents the continuation of work begun at a symposium on child discourse held at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 1974. The papers presented there were subsequently published (Mitchell-Kernan & Ervin-Tripp icy). These papers on social discourse all dealt with children's sociolinguistic skills applied to conversation. Among the topics we explored together, the sequencing and function of children's discourse was a problem of particular interest and complexity. Therefore, following the first symposium, the participants planned another for the purpose of discussing sequencing in child discourse. The papers presented at the second symposium, held at the 1975 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, are included here in revised form. These papers indicate the complexity of the issues related to the structure of children's discourse. Sequencing, for instance, appears to be more than a matter of linguistic rules, or even a matter of turn-taking between speakers. Rather, the choice of linguistic forms, of speech acts or routines, like the choice of whether to speak or to communicate in some other way, seems to be determined by interactional strategies as well as linguistic rules. Interactional strategies, in turn, reveal assumptions that speakers appear to hold about the nature of the participants and the most appropriate and effective way to use language in interactions with them. A consensus concerning the importance and implications of interactional strategies can be discerned in these papers, and this is the central theme of this volume.