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(5.2 TC)
Are
you
goin w‟
daddy
?
Yeah.
Who‟s funeral's on now mammy?
Eat the breakfast so and
we
go.
<$O> <$G?> <\$O>
<$O> <$G?> <\$O>.
Are
you
goin w‟
daddy
in the motor car?
Oh sorry. I‟m goin daddy.
In this extract, the father clearly aligns his own identity with that of his baby and this
is achieved in a number of ways (marked in bold in the extract). Firstly, his utterance
Are you goin w’daddy?
, repeated twice, connects
you
with
daddy
thus establishing a
shift from a lexical realisation of self for the father to the perspective of his child.
The everyday identity the father carries with him is the
I
, however, to his son he is
daddy
and his awareness of this is evident. Secondly, in the utterance
Eat the
breakfast so and we go
, the father combines his and his son‟s perspective into one
and the same using an inclusive
we
. Thus, his utterances reflect a close connection
with his son constituted by his use of indexicals (see also Tannen, 2007). Wales
(1996) offers a number of possible reasons for parents‟ use of kin titles like
daddy
in
talking to infants. She suggests that parents use them because they „implicitly
recognise the problematic „shifting‟ nature of speaker/addressee roles, of
I
and
you
reference‟ (p. 56). She also claims that the use of kin titles „actually promote the
addressee‟s/child‟s perspective or world view‟ (p.57). This emphasis on the child‟s
world view would be further strengthened by the parents switching the origo from
themselves to their children through their use of YOU. Wells (1977: 275) maintains
that:
…for the ordinarily most intricately organised and sensitive category Sender to be
surpassed in intricacy and sensitivity by the normally unelaborated category Receiver,
is a remarkable departure which forces a pragmatic interpretation of the subordination
of Sender to Receiver in adult-child interaction.
128
While agreeing with Wells that the Receiver category is more elaborately developed
and that the child is the centre of attention for both the families in TravCorp and
SettCorp, it is argued here that Sender is not subordinate to Receiver, rather the
Receiver category is more frequent due to the role played by indexicals such as
YOU in establishing a child-centred deixis and also, as seen from further analysis of
the occurrences of YOU in TravCorp and SettCorp below, in the construction and
transmission of a parental identity.
In relation to the linguistic creation of identity, Tannen (2001; 2007) examines the
discourse of American families using an interactional sociolinguistic approach.
Much of Tannen‟s work (1994; 2001; 2007) builds on Bateson‟s (1972) and
Goffman‟s (1981) concept of a linguistic
frame
as a way of understanding
participants‟ interpretation of ongoing interaction. Tannen (2001; 2007) claims the
unique situational characteristics of family discourse result in two parental frames,
those of
caretaking
(instructing and taking care of children) and
socialising
(enjoying children‟s company), and these are critical to the understanding of family
discourse (see also Marinova, 2007). Similarly, Blum-Kulka (1997a), working from
a cross-cultural perspective, acknowledges that parents have to try to be sociable
with children, while at the same time socialising them. This, according to Tannen
(2007), results in parents performing subtle combinations of power (caretaking) and
connection (socialising) manoeuvres. Therefore, parents are faced with a dual
identity when it comes to dealing with their children; on the one hand, they want to
be their friend, while on the other they need to be a parent and evidence of this can
be seen in the use of YOU in both TravCorp and SettCorp. This, again, seems to
result in the family deictic centre being constructed around the children in these
families.
The role of YOU in establishing the dual identity of a parent is evident in extract
(5.3) from TravCorp. In this extract, the father is in the family home with four of his
children. The children want to go out and play but it is raining outside:
129
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