Rules of engagement: Relationships and socialisation practices in family discourse

Abstract

This Special Issue brings together a collection of seven articles that aim to expand our understanding of relationship building and socialisation practices in family discourse with the key focus on the interactional accomplishment of “doing family.” Exploring video-recorded face-to-face, digitally-mediated and hybrid interactions, they examine a variety of family conversations – parent-child, sibling (brother-brother; sister-sister), married couples and in-laws – in different languages (Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian, Spanish), including some code-switching. The Special Issue also illustrates the use of the key discourse analytic approaches to interactional data analysis, ranging from interactional pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics to membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis.

Relationships in social interaction

The heart of our social world lies in how human relationships are created, recreated, and maintained. Not surprisingly, relationships have been the focus of various disciplines, including social psychology, linguistic anthropology, ethnography of communication, human communication, and ritual studies, all of which have engendered a wealth of theoretical approaches to the question of how human relationships are possible. Some of these approaches include rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2007), relational work and identity construction (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Locher, 2008, 2013), relationship thinking (Enfield, 2013), relational ritual (Kádár, 2013), Relational Dialectics Theory (Baxter and Montgomery, 1996), speaking relationally (Fitch, 1998), and Face Constituting Theory (Arundale, 2020). These conceptualisations range from more static role relations (exogenous to interaction) to more dynamic understandings of “relating” (as endogenous in interacting – see Arundale, 2010). They differ in how they link the individual and the social and how they define what counts as social (Arundale, 2021). While some of these theories study relationships in the “weak sense,” that is, as two or more independent identities belonging to a whole, where either the social or the individual is prioritised, others consider relationships in the “strong sense” (Arundale, 2010: 139), that is, considering the individual and the social as interdependent, yet contradictory elements that entail one another (Arundale, 2021). More importantly, what is social can be understood as the resulting additive combination of what is individual or as non-additive processes between the individuals who constrain and afford each other’s meaning through their interpretings of any given utterance (see Arundale, 2021: 278). While different conceptual frameworks enable and constrain the researchers’ observations on how human relationships emerge, most ultimately agree that relationships constitute dynamic, complex, situated, multilayered, and evolving interactional accomplishments.

The concepts of relational status (see Enfield, 2013) and relational stance play an important role in how research on relationships in social interaction can be examined. Relational status refers to the collection of knowledge about rights, responsibilities, entitlements, commitments, and enablements that people orient to at a given moment in relation to other members of a relational system, and it is akin to the notion of relationship category (Enfield, 2013; see Pomerantz and Mandelbaum, 2005). The shared sociocultural and interpersonal knowledge of the relational status that we co-construct for each other is a crucial variable in our formation, interpretation, ascription (see Maynard and Zimmerman, 1984), and (moral) evaluation of social actions. As Enfield (2013) puts it, relational “status casts our behavior in the constant light of a measure of appropriateness” (p. 61). Relational statuses are the product of repeated accomplishments of intersubjectivity across the ongoing process of using language and non-language resources with others. In other words, relational status is reflected in how close or intimate participants consider themselves to be with one another and is evidenced by the relational entitlements that their ongoing relationship affords (Obana and Haugh, 2023). Relational stance refers to the moment-by-moment construction of relationships and relating. That is how interlocutors explicitly or implicitly manage their connection with and separation from others through their verbal and embodied language use. The two concepts allow for the exploration of both stability and change, and connectedness with and separateness from others as inherent features of relating (see Arundale, 2020).

Relationships in family discourse

From the moment children start interacting with their parents and siblings, their relationships and their understanding of how relationships are accomplished through interactional patterns start to develop. The repeated achievement of intersubjective apprehension of the world with others through interaction lays the basis for preferred interactional patterns among the members of a relational system, thereby creating a pool of tacit commitments to uphold the system’s stability (see Rodriguez, this issue). Much of the research on family talk is grounded in dyadic relational statuses (e.g. mother-child, brother-sister), which are often taken for granted. However, a closer look at how relational stances are co-constructed (particularly in multiparty family interactions), demonstrate the interlocutors’ orientation to multiple layers of categorial relations (e.g. “rule enforcer–rule breaker,” “offender–victim” in Hester and Hester, 2012; see Sinkeviciute, this issue) and the relevance of, for example, deontic entitlements (Keevallik, 2017; Liu, this issue; see also Butler and Fitzgerald, 2010), epistemic authority (Bolaños et al., this issue; Endo, this issue; Takei and Burdelski, 2018), and affective stances (Goodwin, 2007; Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018; Goodwin et al., 2012).

Drawing from this line of research, we can identify five key features that characterise familial relationships in family talk research:

• The negotiation of (a)symmetric moral entitlements, rights, responsibilities, and expectations of the family members;

• The affective dimension of actions in accomplishing familial practices;

• The extensive quality of shared common ground alongside its affordances and constraints in relation to what is (not) said;

• The long-standing commitment to upholding relational expectations at the level of dyadic relational systems (e.g. responsibilities siblings assume toward each other) and the whole family relational system (e.g. maintaining a shared moral familial stance); and

• The competing commitments tied to different dyadic relational systems where members are incumbents (e.g. a parent’s relational commitment to their child and their spouse) and to family as a group in opposition to other groups (e.g. extended family and in-laws).

These features not only account for the complexity of the study of family talk but also shed light on the underexplored areas that are examined in this Special Issue as we aim to understand how family relationships are interactionally accomplished.

Socialisation practices in family discourse

Language socialisation research explores how children, through the process of language acquisition and the use of language in their cultural contexts, become recognised members of society (see Ochs and Schieffelin, 2011). In other words, through various socialisation practices at home and educational contexts, children are developing not only their linguistic, pragmatic, and social competences, but also are emerging as competent members of “culture-in-action” that encompasses their ability to interact, accomplish actions and interactional projects, and build and maintain relationships. While language socialisation research has examined many topics in different contexts, in relation to the family discourse, we can particularly highlight children’s socialisation into interactional and pragmatic competences and practices, and moral norms.

Starting at a very young age, children already demonstrate their emerging understanding of turn-taking, primarily through embodied action such as gaze. For instance, by monitoring the parents’ gaze, toddlers also engage in the management of their own behaviour (Kidwell, 2005) as well as use such monitoring to avoid or elicit the parents’ responses (Kidwell and Zimmerman, 2006). In their turn, through pursuits, repair and immediate responses, parents of young children at the prelinguistic and limited-language-production stages socialise them into the conditionally relevant responses to questions and summons, and the acceptable length of silence between the first-pair part and second-pair part in adjacency pairs (see Filipi, 2009). Similarly, the use and appropriateness of interruptions is another aspect of interactional competence of which children in different cultural contexts become aware through their everyday communication with their parents (see Blum-Kulka, 1997).

Socialisation into interactional and pragmatic practices also includes providing children with the resources to construct social actions and relevant responses to them in a given situation. For instance, teaching children how to participate in and co-create storytelling can be seen as one of the core practices that socialise children into participation roles and turn-taking (Blum-Kulka, 1993, 1997; Georgakopoulou, 2002; Kim and Carlin, 2022, 2023; Kim and Crepaldi, 2021). Preference organisation such as preference for agreement is also a fundamental aspect of interaction and can be observed in parents’ sanctioning of older siblings’ disagreement with prior assessments (Keel, 2016). Children’s socialisation into the construction of social actions (e.g. requests) is related to politeness socialisation, where children are taught the appropriate ways to use language depending on interpersonal and situated contexts. Not only do parents construct their talk orienting to children’s face needs (Snow et al., 1990; see also Gordon and Lance, this issue), but they also achieve socialisation through the use of politeness formulas (e.g. “please”), honorifics, pragmatic markers, indirect forms to teach implicit ways in social interaction, as well as metapragmatic comments explicitly reminding children to use the appropriate forms (Burdelski, 2011, 2013; Cook, 1992; Field, 2001; Gleason et al., 1984; Park, 2006; see Sinkeviciute, this issue). Interestingly, children can also show their understanding of appropriate behaviours and rules (see Kim and Fitzgerald, this issue) by commenting on their parents’ conduct through metapragmatic comments (see De Geer, 2004).

Furthermore, through everyday routines and interactions such as getting ready for bed, cleaning a room, agreeing to future compliance, children at different ages are socialised into becoming “moral agents,” that is, responsible for their actions and accountable for inappropriate sanctionable behaviours (e.g. Aronsson and Cekaite, 2011; Fasulo et al., 2007; Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, 2007; Sterponi, 2003; see Rodriguez, this issue). Such moral guidance can also be accomplished through shaming sequences in which parents provide negative assessments of children’s inappropriate behaviours (Potter and Hepburn, 2020) that have largely been examined in the cultural contexts linked to Confucian ideology (e.g. Chiu, 2022; Lo and Fung, 2011). Socialising children into socially acceptable behaviours can also be done through the use of humour, particularly teasing, which contributes to children’s understanding of the moral order as well as indirectness in interaction (e.g. Eisenberg, 1986; Schieffelin, 1986; see also Brumark, 2006).

Importantly, parents should not be viewed as the sole agents providing socialisation. Research has also shown that children can socialise each other as well as contribute to the family socialisation practices (see Liu, this issue). Sibling talk, whether dyadic or multi-party, provides such contexts, where the asymmetrical power relations are less pronounced than in parent-child interactions. Nevertheless, children are drawing on their familial and social norms in their socialisation efforts (e.g. Declercq, 2021), including in bilingual and multilingual families (see Cho, 2018; Johnsen, 2020).

Overview of the special issue

This Special Issue entitled Rules of engagement: Relationships and socialisation practices in family discourse brings together a collection of seven articles that aim to expand our understanding of relationship building and socialisation practices in family discourse with the key focus on the interactional accomplishment of “doing family.” Exploring video-recorded face-to-face, digitally-mediated and hybrid interactions, they examine a variety of family conversations – parent-child, sibling (brother-brother; sister-sister), married couples and in-laws – in different languages (Chinese [Liu], English [Kim and Fitzgerald; Gordon and Lance; Bolaños-Carpio et al.], Japanese [Endo], Russian [Sinkeviciute], Spanish [Rodriguez; Bolaños-Carpio et al.]), including some code-switching. The Special Issue also illustrates the use of the key discourse analytic approaches to interactional data analysis, ranging from interactional pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics to membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis.

The collection starts with a paper by Younhee Kim and Richard Fitzgerald that explores a fundamental aspect of a child’s socialisation into becoming a member of a society – learning the rules and their application. Analysing parent-young child (2;7-4;11) interactions, the authors examine instances of normative rules invoked by parents and how those can be negotiated by children who learn about the rules in situ. The detailed analysis illustrates instances where rules apply to everyone and must be followed, rules can be arbitrary, contingent and open for negotiation and the rules of rules can be won as a result of children understanding the situated hierarchy of the rule application.

Contributing to the under-explored area of sibling interactions and sibling relationships, in her article, Valeria Sinkeviciute examines a sibling dispute between two brothers (2;10 and 5;7) over sharing and how the “parent” category is used as an interactional resource by parents and children during this type of oppositional talk. The analysis of an extended sequence shows a shift across the three stages of the dispute from the children’s own negotiation of the desired object, when parents position themselves as third-party participants to the children’s socialisation into sharing and pragmatic practices and, finally, to the older brother’s blocking of the activity that presupposes sharing and a threat invoked by the mother that brings the dispute to an end.

Cynthia Gordon and Kylie Lance analyse the parents’ facework in a YouTube video showing a family mealtime conversation, in which the parents are dealing with the children’s (1;5 and 4) inappropriate behaviour during the English lesson recording. Exploring face-saving as an interactive and multimodal practice, the paper demonstrates how, in a context of a child’s problematic behaviour, facework in relation to being “good parents” and “a good language instructor” for the mother, is collaboratively achieved by the two parents through accounting, repetitions, laughter, gaze, gestures, eyebrow raising as well as on-screen text.

Zhiyi Liu explores how care is interactionally accomplished in sequences where sisters (20 and 10) constrain each other’s behaviour by problematising it, directing the target to correct the inappropriate behaviour, and accounting for the expectation of compliance. Analysing guan sequences, the paper focuses on how the sisters negotiate disalignment and legitimise their actions by formulating undesirable consequences or invoking a third party with higher authority, such as the mother. In so doing, the paper discusses the link between the deontic dimension of relationships and caring.

Andrea Rodriguez examines how relational accounting practices serve as reflexive devices through which implicit relational expectations are surfaced by family members engaged in maintaining intimate relationships at a distance. In analysing multiparty, video-mediated interactions between adult migrant children, their spouses, and close relatives (i.e. parents, siblings) located in different countries, the paper offers empirical evidence of how accounting allows family members to surface tacit relational expectations interactionally tied to “doing transnational family” (e.g. visiting children overseas) differently from relational expectations tied to “doing family transnationally” (e.g. maintaining shared stances), including with in-laws.

Tomoko Endo’s article explores the negotiation of membership, family intra- and intergenerational relations and epistemic status in (multi-party) in-laws’ conversations about young and pre-teen children. Analysing face-to-face interactions from three extended families, the paper demonstrates how in-laws manage the delicacy of epistemic statuses through complimenting each other’s children and using grammatical resources (e.g. the use of sentence-final particles), complaining and providing advice, wherein explicitly invoking a membership category plays a crucial role, and shifting the participation framework in order to avoid face threat.

Finally, Alexa Bolaños-Carpio, Darcey K. deSouza, and Ronald B. Cox examine the interactional practice of code-switching in conversations between first-generation immigrant Latina mothers living in the United States whose dominant language is Spanish and their second-generation children whose dominant language is English. They demonstrate how participants code-switch to claim lack of knowledge or to negotiate their interlocutor’s epistemic rights and status. The paper indicates that, for the participating family members, the act of switching, regardless of the language, shows an orientation to epistemics.