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Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 26:1 (2003) ► pp.38–54

Alliance building in girls’ talk

A conversational accomplishment of playful negotiation

| University of Western Sydney

This paper focuses on those speech activities which foreground the conversational accomplishment of alliance building in pre-adolescent girls’ talk. The methodology and analysis of alliance building is synthesised from the theoretical frameworks of interactional sociolinguistics and Conversation Analysis. Delicate microanalysis reveals how playfully negotiated behaviours are interwoven into interactions by participants during the course of their talk in a range of interactional tasks. Findings demonstrate that alliance building is accomplished in a diversity of forms that contribute to the overall gamelike key of pre-adolescent girls’ talk. Some of the selected resources foreshadow documented interactional practices associated with women, realised in turn taking procedures and features such as close monitoring of talk complimenting actions and statements of self deprecation (Coates, 1991; Holmes, 1993; Tannen, 1993). Findings also reveal that alliance building is not confined to overtly positive affect practices and supportive behaviours reported in the widely embraced cooperative model. Results are discussed in terms of their contribution to the literature on older children’s language use.

Published online: 1 January 2003
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.26.1.04ard
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[no author supplied]
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