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Part of
Language and Social Interaction at Home and School
Edited by Letizia Caronia
[Dialogue Studies 32] 2021
► pp. 87–120

Chapter 2
Making unquestionable worlds

Morality building practices in family dinner dialogues

| University of Bologna
| University of Bologna
| University of Bologna

Drawing on extant studies and research on language socialization and dinner talk, this chapter focuses on ordinary family interactions as socializing experiences and – at the same time – as culture-building activities. Adopting a conversation analytic approach, examples of video-recorded family dinner interactions are discussed to illustrate how cultural ideas and moral horizons are presupposed and (re)constructed in the micro-order of everyday family life. Specifically, the analysis shows how parents talk into being the cultural certainty that food is a “good that must be preserved” by treating it as an “ought to be shared” resource or as a valuable good per se. We contend that, by taking part in such ordinary dialogues, children are socialized to these cultural beliefs as if they were taken for granted, obvious and uncontestable facts of life. At the same time, it is through such unplanned dialogues that members enact the silent and almost invisible process through which individuals create – day by day – their cultural world as a quasi-natural one.

Keywords: conversation analysis, socio-cultural perspective, language socialization, family dinner interaction, practices of control, mundane morality, food as a common good, food and water as intrinsically valuable goods
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mundane morality and everyday practices
    • 2.1Morality in everyday family life: Children's socialization and culture construction
    • 2.2Mealtime morality
  • 3.Data corpus and procedures
  • 4.The construction of food as a common good
  • 5.Food and water as valuable goods per se
    • 5.1Wasting water as a reprimandable activity: The use of elliptical directives as a resource
    • 5.2Water as a morally laden object: The use of impersonal negative deontic declaratives
    • 5.3“Do we throw everything away every time?”: Rhetorical questions as indirect statements of the rule
    • 5.4Leftover food as a morally loaded object: Asking for an account and “disguised directives” as resources
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Building unquestionable worlds: Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.32.02car
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