“I’m going home,” she said: Moral socialization in Japanese parent-child interaction

Matthew Burdelski

University of California, Los Angeles

 

 

Abstract

 

Through the lens of language socialization (Ochs 1988, Ochs & Schieffelin 1984, 1995), this presentation will examine socialization of morality, by analyzing how Japanese caregivers socialize children to other-orientation through indirect language. In particular, it will show that the communicative practice of caregivers’ reporting an immediately prior utterance from someone else instructs children to take into account the words and actions of others in terms of an incumbent action. ‘Reported speech’ is a relatively commonplace feature of adult-adult interaction (Besnier, 1993; M.H. Goodwin, 1990; C. Goodwin, 1984; Hayashi, 1997; Hill & Zepeda, 1993; Holt, 1996; Koven, 2001; Tannen, 1986, 1989), as well as parent-child interaction (DeLeón, 2000; Ely et al., 1996, 2001; Schieffelin, 1990). This paper will discuss how Japanese caregivers’ reporting an immediately prior utterance from someone else morally socializes children to other-orientation. The paper will first elaborate the functions of this type of (third-person) reported speech, namely, directive, topic-initiation, and comment. Then, it will analyze the co-occurrence of reported speech with other vocal resources (reformulation, the attention-getting device hora, and repetition) as well as non-vocal resources (body orientation and body contact). Integral to the analysis are children’s responses to various kinds of reported speech.

In concluding, the presentation will interpret the present findings in terms of the general question of how children learn to analyze utterances in relation to the child’s own action, and relate the findings to psychological and interactional studies of morality.