Family interaction has been studied to understand children's language acquisition or socialization at home (Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourses. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977). However, few studies have examined family discourse in conjunction with the negotiation of power and connection and the creation of gendered identities. This volume is one of the first to fill the gap by investigating family talk at home and at work, drawing on the frameworks of hierarchy and solidarity and framing in verbal interaction.
The opening chapter provides an overview followed by a description of the participant recruitment and data collection procedures. Four dual-career, middle-class American families were recruited, and their face-to-face interactions at home and at work for a week were recorded and transcribed. The authors identify several themes in the extensive database, and divide the chapters into three parts. Chaps. 2 through 5 shows the dynamics underlying family discourse, in which women and men negotiate identities for themselves as mothers and fathers and as members of a family. The first two chapters focus on the interconnectedness of power maneuvers and connection maneuvers, in that interlocutors seek connection, desiring to reinforce their intimate involvement with each other as members of a family while struggling for the power to influence the actions of others. Chap. 3 illuminates a working mother's gendered parental identity in the interaction with her husband and brother.
Chaps. 6 through 8 address the discrepancy between the dual-income couples' ideology and their behavior in the creation of family identities. Chap. 6 demonstrates working mothers' conflicts between their parental and professional identities, such that they espouse egalitarian role sharing but linguistically position their husbands as breadwinners, but not themselves. Despite the ideology of egalitarian co-parenting, chap. 7 explores the division of the gatekeeper identity – mother in the care of their child and father in managing finances. Chap. 8 reveals a working father's talk of parenting at work with his co-worker who is also a father.
Chaps. 9 through 11 focus on the discursive means through which family members negotiate their family's beliefs and shared identities. Chap. 9 shows how family members use linguistic strategies to construct a group identity in the process of political socialization. Chap. 10 illustrates the relationship between place and language in father–son interaction. By examining family interaction during TV watching, chap. 11 demonstrates that family members negotiate and maintain their family's values, beliefs, and identities by repeating or rephrasing words from TV programs.
This volume provides insight into verbal interaction in the private world of family on the micro level by capturing naturally occurring interaction in a wide range of contexts. The multiple forms of conversational interchanges (e.g., interaction of father–mother and parent(s)–child, through a pet or TV programs) contribute to extending the research methods of discourse analysis. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and communications. It will also serve as impetus for future research on family discourse in different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic contexts and in different languages.
