Cover not available
Part of
Constructing Collectivity: 'We' across languages and contexts
Edited by Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 239] 2014
► pp. 227–244

Children’s use of English we in a primary school in Wales

| The University of Waikato, New Zealand

Children have their own culture (Corsaro 1985; Corsaro and Eder 1990) where they initiate rules and make these rules legal in the co-construction of their everyday lives (Bateman 2011; Cobb-Moore, Danby and Farrel 2008; Tholander and Cromdal 2011). Recent research demonstrates that children use the term we in their play in order to establish friendships (Bateman 2012). The children’s use of the term we is now further explored to reveal its referential flexibility and how young children gain intersubjectivity regarding who the collection of people are when we is asserted. This is accomplished through an investigation into the positioning of the collective proterm we and the tied action of an assertion of we with a category bound activity.

Published online: 27 February 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.239.15bat
References
Antaki, Charles and Widdicombe, Susan
(eds). 1998. Identities in Talk . London: Sage.Google Scholar
Bateman, Amanda
. 2010. Children’s Co-construction of Context: Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviour Revisited . Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wales Swansea, Swansea, Wales.Google Scholar
. 2011. “Huts and heartache: The affordance of playground huts for legal debate.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 3111–3121. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2012. “Forging friendships: The use of collective pro-terms by pre-school children.” Discourse and Society 14(1): 165–180. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Butler, Carly W. and Weatherall, Ann.
2006. “ ‘No we’re not playing families’: Membership categorization in children’s play.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 39(4): 441–470. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Butler, Carly W.
2008. Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground . Hampshire: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Church, Amelia
. 2009. Preference Organisation and Peer Disputes: How Young Children Resolve Conflict . Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Cobb, Charlotte, Danby, Susan, and Farrell, Ann.
2006. “Young children enacting governance: Child’s play?” Australian Association for Research in Education 28: 1–11.Google Scholar
Cobb-Moore, Charlotte, Danby, Susan, and Farrell, Ann.
2008. “Young children as rule makers.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1477–1492. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corsaro, William. A.
1985. Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years . Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.Google Scholar
Corsaro, William A. and Eder, Donna.
1990. “Children’s peer cultures.” Annual Review of Sociology 16: 197–220. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cromdal, Jacob
. 2001. “ Can I be with?: Negotiating play entry in a bilingual school.” Journal of Pragmatics 33: 515–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. “Childhood and social interaction in everyday life: Introduction to the special issue.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1473–1476. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Filipi, Anna
. 2009. Toddler and Parent Interaction . Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Francis, David and Hester, Stephen.
2004. An Invitation to Ethnomethodology . London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold
. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology . Oxford: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working out Durkheim’s Aphorism . Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving
. 1981. Forms of Talk . Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles
. 1981. Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers . New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie H.
1998. “Games of stance: Conflict and footing in hopscotch.” In Kids’ Talk: Strategic Language Use in Later Childhood , Susan Hoyle and Carolyn T. Adger(eds), 23–46. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie. H.
2006. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion [Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture]. London: Wiley Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, Charles and Duranti, Alessandro.
1992. “Rethinking Context: An Introduction.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon , Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin(eds), 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles and Heritage, John.
1990. “Conversation Analysis.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 283–307. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grad, H?ctor and Rojo Luisa, Martin.
2008. “Identities in discourse: An integrative view.” In Analyzing Identities in Discourse , Rosana Dolan and Julia Todoli(eds), 3–28. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Have, Paul ten.
2000. Doing Conversation Analysis: A Practical Guide . London: Sage.Google Scholar
Helmbrecht, Johannes
. 2002. “Grammar and function of we.” In Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses and Cultures , Anna Duszak(ed.), 31–49. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John and Raymond, Geoffrey.
2005. “The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in assessment sequences.” Social Psychology Quarterly 68: 15–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hester, Stephen
. 1998. “Describing ‘deviance’ in school: Recognizably educational psychological problems.” In Identities in Talk , Charles Antaki and Susan Widdicombe(eds), 133–150. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Hester, Stephen and Eglin, Peter.
1997. “Membership categorization analysis: An introduction.” In Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis , Stephen Hester and Peter Eglin(eds), 1–23. Washington, DC: University Press of America and International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.Google Scholar
Housley, William
. 1999.“Role as an interactional device and resource in multidisciplinary team meetings.” Sociology Research Online , 4(3) [URL] DOI logo
Kitzinger, Celia
. 2007. “Is ‘woman’ always relevantly gendered?” Gender and Language , 1(1): 39–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lepper, Gorgia
. 2000. Categories in Text and Talk . London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lerner, Gene. H. and Kitzinger, Celia.
2007. “Extraction and aggregation in the repair of individual and collective self-reference.” Discourse Studies 9(4): 526–557. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Markman, Ellen. M.
1989. Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction . London: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
McHoul, Alec, Rapley, Mark and Antaki, Charles.
2008. “You gotta light? On the luxury of context for understanding talk in interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics , 40: 827–839. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula
. 2012. “Collective aspects of subjectivity: The subject pronoun εμε?ς (‘we’) in Modern Greek.” In Subjectivity in Language and in Discourse , Nicole Baumgarten, Inke Du Bois and Juliane House(eds), 33–65. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pomerantz, Anita
. (1984). “Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes.” InMaxwell J. Atkinson and John Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Psathas, George
. 1999. “Studying the organization in action: Membership categorization and interaction analysis.” Human Studies 22: 139–162. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pyykkö, Raija.
2002. “Who is ‘we’ in Russian political discourse.” In Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses and Cultures , Anna Duszak(ed.), 233–248. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey
. 1992a. Lectures on Conversation (Vol. I) . Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
. 1992b. Lectures on Conversation (Vol. II) . Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emmanuel A. and Jefferson, Gail.
1974. “A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation.” Language 50: 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emmanuel A.
1968. “Sequencing in conversational openings.” American Anthropologist, New Series 70(6): 1075–1095. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1992. “Repair after next turn: The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation.” The American Journal of Sociology 97(5): 1295–1345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000. “Getting serious: Joke-serious ‘no’.” Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1947–1955. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversational Analysis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stokoe, Elizabeth
. 2006. “On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorical reference to gender in talk-in-interaction.” The Sociological Review 54(3): 467–494.Tholander, Michael and Cromdal, Jacob.2011. “Morality in practice: An introduction.” In Morality in Practice: Exploring Childhood, Parenthood and Schooling in Everyday Life , Jacob Cromdal and Michael Theolander(eds), 1–13. London: Equinox. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wootton, Anthony
. J. 1981. “Children's use of address terms.” In Adult-child Conversation , Peter French and Margaret Maclure(eds), 142–158. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Bateman, Amanda
2022. Children’s co-construction of gender segregated spaces. Research on Children and Social Interaction 6:1 DOI logo
Bateman, Amanda & Asta Cekaite
2022. Language as context: A case of early literacy practices in New Zealand and Sweden. International Journal of Early Years Education 30:1 ► pp. 55 ff. DOI logo
Davidson, Lucinda
2022. Using Categories to Assert Authority in Murrinhpatha-Speaking Children’s Talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction 55:1 ► pp. 18 ff. DOI logo
McLay, Katherine Frances & Peter David Renshaw
2020. Making ‘us’ visible: Using membership categorisation analysis to explore young people's accomplishment of collective identity‐in‐interaction in relation to digital technology. British Educational Research Journal 46:1 ► pp. 44 ff. DOI logo
Simões Marques, Isabelle & Michèle Koven
2017. “We are going to our Portuguese homeland!”. Narrative Inquiry 27:2 ► pp. 286 ff. DOI logo
Simões Marques, Isabelle & Michèle Koven
2019. “We are going to our Portuguese homeland!”. In Storytelling in the Digital World [Benjamins Current Topics, 104], ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.