“Leaving the Scene”:
Embodiment and Inference in the Actions of Very Young Children
Mardi Kidwell
Department of Sociology
UCSB
How do children who are in the early stages of language development communicate to others about past events? What are the emodied resources they deploy, in conjunction with the physical and sequential resources afforded by a situation, to convey to another something about an event that has already taken place that they did not witness?
Sacks (1985) describes an “inference-making machine” whereby participants draw on their knowledge of the sequential order of events to make inferences about prior events to which they do not have access: specifically, from the production of a later event, to which they do have access, participants are able to infer what must have gone before. In this paper, I describe procedures by which children, who are between the ages of 1 and 2 ˝ years, indicate to their adult caregivers that some problematic event has transpired, which they did not see, but for which they should take action. At issue are children’s orienations to what constitutes “evidence” for another of such an event—that is, what another will infer about a current arrangement of persons and objects about what came before—and how they draw adults’ attention to selected aspects of a current situation to enable these inferences.
Drawing on 500 hours of the videotaped interactions of children in a daycare center, and using the methodology of conversation analysis, I present instances such as the following.
A single case analysis
In the following case, a child, Eathan, takes a cracker from another child, Derrick, literally behind the caregiver’s back. A third child, Krissy, sees this event and undertakes actions to draw the caregiver’s attention to the scene and get her to make an intervention.
Cracker
Children are sitting at tables eating food.
1 E: takes cracker from D
2 D: (B)ayy! turns and looks at CG who is at counter preparing children’s
meals; her back is turned
3 E: runs back to his chair with cracker
4 CG: turns around and gives milk to D, says, ( ) milk, turns back to
counter
®5 K: E:THA:N! ( . ) NO! ((yelled loudly in high pitched, crackly voice))
In line 5, Krissy, with the utterance E:THA:N! ( . ) NO!, locates Eathan as someone engaged in a prohibitable act, an act for which the prohibition NO! is relevantly made. The utterance, while itself a sanction, is designed to draw the caregiver’s attention to the scene via the loud volume she uses and high, crackly pitch, and specifically to the fact that a prohibitable event, involving a particular actor, has transpired: what may be considered the “what” and the “who” of the situation. The fact that she does this a few moments after the act, and after the caregiver has turned around to give D his milk ( line 4), shows that she has left a place for the caregiver to respond; when the caregiver doesn’t, she undertakes to retrospectively form up for her the event with the very sort of sanction the caregiver herself should have employed at that place. This, however, fails to draw the caregiver to the situation and get her to act, and a few moments later, when the caregiver sits down with the children, Krissy resumes her efforts:
9 K: Eathan said no! said to CG
10 CG: (Th--) Eathan said no?
11 K: points to D’s food He (din) Derrick’s=points to E= cwracker away ((said in a mumble))
12 ( 3.0 )
13 CG: Ohh:! Eathan too—huh ((laughs)) Eathan took Derrick’s cracker
away?
14 K: Yeah.
15 CG: Oh[h:. Yeah. I (just) didn’t even see that.
16 CG2: [ha! haha ((laughs))
Krissy’s utterance at line 9, Eathan said no!, does not accurately report the prior event, but nonetheless draws the caregiver into an exchange about Eathan and what “no” could possibly be in reference to. The caregiver’s query at line 10, Eathan said no?, provides Krissy an occasion to modify her prior utterance in light of the caregiver’s indication that she is having trouble understanding it. Now pointing at Derrick, she says, mumbled, He (din) Derrick’s cwacker away. As she speaks, she moves her point to Eathan, visually tracing for the caregiver the path previously travelled by the cracker from Derrick to Eathan. While specific words in her utterance are quite mumbled, and possibly pose difficulties in understanding for the caregiver, her clear specification of two individuals via her pointing and verbalization of their names, along with the gestural representation of the path that the candidate object “cwacker” has traveled, provide for the caregiver to piece together what had previously transpired. She says, Ohh:! Eathan too—huh ((laughs)) Eathan took Derrick’s cracker away?
In sum, we see that, in line with the “multi-modal ecology of sign systems” described by Goodwin (e.g., 2002; see also, 2000, 1995, and 1994), very young children make use of aspects of others’ conduct, along with their bodily arrangments in relation to objects and other people, to locate themselves and others in a sequential structure that makes relevant action by their adult caregivers. Moreover, children demonstrate their orientation to something like “child misconduct” on the one hand, and “caregiver intervention” on the other, as constituting a discernible orderliness in the daycare setting, one that is maintained not merely by the massive co-incidence of the two events, but by practices they may deploy to hold caregivers accountable for making the proper responses to the untoward activities of their peers.
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