"Dinner Talk" draws upon the recorded dinner conversations of, and
extensive interviews with, native Israeli, American Israeli, and
Jewish American middle-class families to explore the cultural
styles of sociability and socialization in family discourse. The
thesis developed is that family dinners in Western middle-class
homes fulfill important functions of sociability for all
participants and, at the same time, serve as crucial sites of
socialization for children through language and for language use.
The book demonstrates the way talk at dinner constructs, reflects,
and invokes familial, social, and cultural identities and provides
social support for easing the passage of children into adult
discourse worlds.
Family discourse at dinner emerges as a particularly rich site for
discursive socialization and a highly meaningful enactment of
sociable behavior in culturally patterned ways. Although all the
families studied have a commom Eastern European background, Israeli
and Jewish American families are shown to differ extensively in
their interactional styles, in ways that enact historically
different, community-related interpretations of the dialectics of
continuity and change. Native Israeli, American Israeli, and Jewish
American families differ culturally in the ways they negotiate
issues of power, independence, and involvement through various
speech activities such as the choice and initiation of topics,
conversational story-telling, naming practices, metapragmatic
discourse, politeness strategies, and in immigrant, bilingual
families, language choice and code switching. "Dinner Talk"
demonstrates the unique interactional style of each of the groups,
linking the observed communication patterns to the ideological,
sociocultural, and historical contexts of their respective
communities.
This innovative study of family discourse from a cross-cultural
perspective will appeal to students and specialists in
sociolinguistics, communication, anthropology, child language, and
family and Jewish studies, as well as to all interested in patterns
of communication within families.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
