Social interaction, Social Context, and Language

Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-tripp

Dan Isaac Slobin, Julie Gerhardt, Amy Kyratzis, Jiansheng Guo

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317780793
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

This collection of essays is a representative sample of the current research and researchers in the fields of language and social interactions and social context. The opening chapter, entitled "Context in Language," is written by Susan Ervin-Tripp, whose diverse and innovative research inspired the editors to dedicate this book to her honor. Ervin-Tripp is known for her work in the fields of linguistics, psychology, child development, sociology, anthropology, rhetoric, and women's studies. She has played a central role in the definition and establishment of psycholinguistics, child language development, and sociolinguistics, and has been an innovator in terms of approaches and methods of study.

This book covers a wide range of research interests in the field, from linguistically oriented approaches to social and ethnography oriented approaches. The issue of the relationships between forms and structures of language and social interactions is examined in studies of both adult and child speech. It is a useful anthology for graduate students studying language and social interaction, as well as for researchers in this field.

Part One: Susan Ervin-Tripp

Susan Ervin-Tripp: A Mind in the World

Susan Ervin-Tripp has shown us the possibility of redefining the life of the intellectual. Rather than allowing her problem domains to be shaped by traditional task definitions, she has — again and again — gone to "the world" to find problems worthy of study, and has repeatedly returned to the world to share her gained insights. That is, hers is truly "a mind in the world" — in two senses: a mind that takes inspiration from real-world, consequential human situations and that directs its intellectual activity towards changing those situations. In this brief introduction, we wish to illuminate the striking personal characteristics that reflect this theme.

Commitment to Diversity

Although born and raised far from both coasts — in Minneapolis — it is hard to think of Sue's life and work without thinking of such places as France, Japan, the Indian reservations of the American Southwest, and, of course, the two coasts of this country. She has enthusiastically explored and studied diverse peoples, languages, social, and cultural settings. In her research methods, too, one thinks of a diversity of approaches: experiments, naturalistic and controlled observations, interviews — using audio recordings of speech, written texts, video recordings of interaction patterns, and a range of stimulus materials over the years. Similarly, looking at the populations Sue has studied, one finds children and adults, natives and immigrants, monolinguals and bilinguals, individuals and groups.

In the academic setting, she has held positions in departments of psychology, rhetoric, and women's studies. Within her home department of psychology she is rare in being an active member of three divisions — developmental, cognitive, and social. And at Berkeley she has placed her research projects in the Institute of Cognitive Studies (formerly the Institute of Human Learning), the Institute of Human Development, and the Language-Behavior Research Laboratory of the Institute of International Studies. This diversity is also reflected in the range of disciplines that Sue has been affiliated with, as committee member and colleague: psychology, linguistics, anthropology, education, sociology, rhetoric, and women's studies.

Innovative

More than once, Sue has played a central role in the definition and establishment of a new area of study: psycholinguistics in the fifties, and in the sixties, the modern study of child language development as well as sociolinguistics. And in all three, she has always directed the attention of Americans to the importance of linguistic and cultural variation.

Equally striking is Sue's repeated innovation in the realms of technology and methodology. She was the first person to realize that computers could be useful in storing and analyzing child language data — and that in the days of punch cards and mountains of printout. And, furthermore, the data that she entered on those punchcards came from tape recordings of child speech in an era that had only known written transcripts taken on the fly. (And, as an interesting reflection of the Zeitgeist, while Sue and Wick Miller were carting "portable" taperecorders to children's homes in California, Roger Brown and Martin Braine were doing the same thing on the East Coast — though they didn't use the computer to help them.) When Sue discovered wireless microphones, she ingeniously sewed them into children's vests, so as to be able to gather natural conversation without the intrusion of cumbersome equipment and observers. Thus, when "portable" video recording equipment came on the market, Sue was ready to study children's behavior in context — the context of interaction between family members in their homes.

In order to deal with such large and complex bodies of data, Sue innovated methods of coding and sorting utterances according to both linguistic and behavioral dimensions. Her procedure was always to begin with naturalistic data, work with teams of students (both undergraduate and graduate) to devise and refine coding schemes, and then move on to more focused studies.

Engagement with People

It is noteworthy that these beginning phases of opening up a new territory always involved students at all levels. (In fact, when Sue was offered an attractive early retirement option recently, she declined it, preferring to stay engaged with students, in both research and teaching.) Sue's way of working with students has always been to treat them as co-investigators in a collaborative quest. Another facet of her involvement with students has been an active concern with their professional development — from their first days at Berkeley on through their individual careers.

Perhaps the "mind in the world" has been most evident with regard to her involvement with problems facing women and ethnic minorities — in the state and nation as well as on the campus. We cannot list the many committees, lobbying efforts, and contributions to public education (and educating the public) that fill every year of Sue's biography. But as an indication of this dedication, this is how she summarized her experience as Ombudsman for the University of California at Berkeley in 1987-89:

The job of ombudsman is highly rewarding, in particular when we receive gratitude for helping to solve a problem that has put someone in jeopardy (e.g., the student who didn't get assurance she was admitted until exam week, the student whose graduation was blocked in error), or when by proposing a slight change in procedure or the wording of a regulation or instructions we could remedy a chronic problem. We have set aside special time to investigate issues that appear to reveal structural problems. To faculty members, the unseen crises in the lives of the students we teach are especially poignant. We find that the clients who discover us reveal just the tip of profound problems on the campus, such as the burn-out of bureaucrats who then start making rigid automatic decisions, the conflict many students experience between the time demands of jobs and classes, and the heavy financial burdens borne by many students, especially single parents. The Office of the Academic Ombudsmen is both a safety valve and a valuable sensor for campus problems.

In a way, Susan Ervin-Tripp has been an ombudsperson in the intellectual world as well — attempting to reconcile theories, listening to neglected viewpoints, alerting us to structural problems, and seeking solutions. The leitmotif in Sue's opening chapter is CONTEXT. There she talks about the influences of context on the structure and use of language. Here we underline the context of Sue's involvement with the world as determining the directions and impact of her work.

—The Editors

A Brief Biography of Susan Ervin-Tripp

Susan Moore Ervin was born in Minneapolis on June 27, 1927. She attended an all-women's high school, then an all-women's college, Vassar College, where she took courses in 11 subjects, among them courses in art history (her major), the social sciences, and several languages. Her undergraduate experiences had already impressed upon her a concern with women's issues, as she noted her good fortune in having had many excellent women professors at a liberal arts college — while those women were not allowed entry at the time to the larger research universities.

After Vassar, Susan Ervin attended the University of Michigan. Her concern with social issues was foreshadowed in her choice of Michigan, where she wanted to work with disciples of Kurt Lewin to use social psychology to try to understand and solve important social problems that were in the forefront of concern in the early postwar years. Disappointed in this quest, but retaining her keen interest in social psychology, she became drawn to the problem of bilingualism by the dramatic personal experience of her bilingual friends, who reported a sense of double identity and dual personality. The issue of the psychological role of bilingualism for individuals became her dissertation topic (Ervin, 1955, Ervin-Tripp, 1964).¹

Her application to the Social Science Research Council to fund this research brought her to the attention of John Carroll, who in 1951 initiated a move to bring linguistics and psychology together. This connection resulted in two important influences on Ervin's life. First, she was privileged to play a role in the founding of psycholinguistics, taking part (as one of six graduate students) in a workshop sponsored by the SSRC in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America at Indiana University in the summer of 1953. Ervin made contributions on language learning and bilingualism to the classic report that came out of that summer: Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems (Osgood & Sebeok, 1954).

The second important result was that John Carroll invited Ervin to work on the Southwest Project on Comparative Psycholinguistics, a wide-ranging attempt to test the Whorf hypothesis by means of comparative research in six language communities: Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, Hopi-Tewa, Spanish, and English. At the outset, then, her formation was cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic (Ervin, Landar, & Horowitz, 1960; Ervin & Landar, 1963). In working with American Indian communities in the Southwest, Ervin was impressed with the coherence that culture confers upon language and its use — a lesson no doubt incorporated into her later influential work on the situated nature of children's as well as adults' language.

After receiving her doctorate in social psychology from Michigan, Ervin was brought into the Harvard School of Education by John Whiting, and one of the courses she taught there was child language. She reports that this experience is what prepared her to be duly impressed by Chomsky's work, Syntactic Structures, when it came out in 1957. In the fifties, language was treated as part of social psychology, and linguistics was often housed in departments of anthropology. Added to this, now, was a concern for the structure of language — an issue which Ervin realized had obvious consequences for child language development.

Ervin moved to Berkeley in 1958, where she taught English as a Second Language in the Department of Speech. One of the first things she did after arriving in Califo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Part One Susan Ervin-Tripp
• Susan Ervin-Tripp: A Mind in the World
• A Brief Biography of Susan Ervin-Tripp
• Bibliography of Publications by Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp
• 1 Context in Language1
• Part Two Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics
• 2 The Language of Social Relationship1
• 3 The Pragmatics of Constructions1
• 4 Shifting Frame1
• 5 Code-Switching or Code-Mixing: Apparent Anomalies in Semi-Formal Registers1
• 6 Oral Patterns as a Resource in Children's Writing: an Ethnopoetic Note1
• 7 Language Socialization and Language Differentiation in Small Scale Societies: The Shoshoni and Guarijío1
• Part Three Social and Interactive Processes in Language Acquisition
• 8 A Cross-Cultural Study of Children's Register Knowledge
• 9 What Influences Children's Patterning of Forms and Functions in Early Child Language?
• 10 Format Tying in Discussion and Argumentation Among Italian and American Children
• 11 Use and Acquisition of Genitive Constructions in Samoan
• 12 Arguing with Siblings, Friends, and Mothers: Developments in Relationships and Understanding1
• 13 Patterns of Prohibition in Parent-Child Discourse
• 14 Regulating Household Talk1
• 15 The Use of Polite Language By Japanese Preschool Children1
• 16 The Microgenesis of Competence: Methodology in Language Socialization
• 17 Listening To a Turkish Mother: Some Puzzles for Acquisition1
• 18 Little Words, Big Deal: the Development of Discourse and Syntax in Child Language
• Part Four Narrative
• 19 Frames of Mind Through Narrative Discourse
• 20 Emotion, Narrative, and Affect: How Children Discover the Relationship Between what to Say and How to Say it1
• 21 Form and Function in Developing Narrative Abilities1
• 22 Narrative Development in Social Context1
• 23 The Development of Collaborative Story Retelling By a Two-Year-Old Blind Child and His Father1
• Part Five Bilingualism
• 24 Bilingualism: Some Personality and Cultural Issues
• 25 What Happens when Languages are Lost? An Essay on Language Assimilation and Cultural Identity1
• Part Six Discourse in Institutional Settings
• 26 The Therapeutic Encounter: Neutral Context or Social Construction?1
• 27 On Teaching Language in its Sociocultural Context
• 28 True Confessions? Pragmatic Competence and Criminal Confession
• 29 Managing the Intermental: Classroom Group Discussion and the Social Context of Learning1
• Part Seven Gender Difference in Language Acquisition and Use
• 30 Girls, Boys and Just People: The Interactional Accomplishment of Gender in the Discourse of the Nursery School
• 31 The New Old Ladies' Songs: Functional Adaptation of Hualapai Music to Modern Contexts
• 32 Women's Collaborative Interactions
• 33 "Separate Worlds for Girls and Boys"? Views from U.S. and Chinese Mixed-Sex Friendship Groups1
• 34 Studying Gender Differences in the Conversational Humor of Adults and Children
• 35 Gender Differences in Interruptions1
• 36 Sharing the Same World, Telling Different Stories: Gender Differences in Co-Constructed Pretend Narratives1
• Author Index
• Subject Index