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Cynthia Gordon Project title: The Linguistic Construction of Family Rituals I am interested in the linguistic construction of family rituals, both language- and task-based, and in the role of a family’s private language or “familylect” in structuring them. More broadly, I am interested in how routine ways of speaking, acting, and interacting work together towards (re)creating a family’s unique identity and family culture. To explore these topics, I analyze data drawn from a Sloan-funded family discourse study at Georgetown University for which I served as a research team member. As part of their participation in this study, four dual-income couples with at least one child carried digital audiotape recorders with them for one week, recording throughout the day. Following taping, each participant was observed at work and at home for at least one day. The resulting database consists of 460 hours of recording and over one million words transcribed. The research I am conducting as a MARIAL fellow uses theories and methods from interactional sociolinguistics to examine these data, in particular to investigate the following research questions: · What are the linguistic features that comprise each of the familylects? · What kind of talk-based rituals exist in these families (e.g. narrative practices, verbal play)? How are these rituals structured? How does the familylect surface as part of talk-based rituals? · What kind of activity- or task-based rituals exist in these families (e.g. related to children’s bedtime or naptime)? What role does language play in family rituals that are task- or activity-based? · How can the interrelationships between familylects and family rituals be characterized? How do both familylects and family rituals work towards constructing each family’s distinctive culture?
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