The present issue presents the continuation of work begun at a symposium on child discourse held at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 1974. The papers presented there were subsequently published (Mitchell-Kernan & Ervin-Tripp icy). These papers on social discourse all dealt with children's sociolinguistic skills applied to conversation. Among the topics we explored together, the sequencing and function of children's discourse was a problem of particular interest and complexity. Therefore, following the first symposium, the participants planned another for the purpose of discussing sequencing in child discourse. The papers presented at the second symposium, held at the 1975 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, are included here in revised form. These papers indicate the complexity of the issues related to the structure of children's discourse. Sequencing, for instance, appears to be more than a matter of linguistic rules, or even a matter of turn-taking between speakers. Rather, the choice of linguistic forms, of speech acts or routines, like the choice of whether to speak or to communicate in some other way, seems to be determined by interactional strategies as well as linguistic rules. Interactional strategies, in turn, reveal assumptions that speakers appear to hold about the nature of the participants and the most appropriate and effective way to use language in interactions with them. A consensus concerning the importance and implications of interactional strategies can be discerned in these papers, and this is the central theme of this volume.

Despite considerable recent research on child discourse, there has been little controlled cross-cultural work. Numerous valuable studies of children's speech events in specific societies are available, but comparisons are largely anecdotal and informal. Similarly, several analytical schemata have been developed to deal with particular types of discourse in particular societies (see, for example, Sinclair & Coulthard 1975; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974 Brenneis & Lein 1977; Watson & Boggs 1977), but their applicability in other contexts has not been tested. Comparative research is necessary both to test the generality of interpretations of child discourse based on research in one society and to explore the cross-cultural utility of analytical methods.

Children in Hawaii who have some Polynesian ancestry have been observed to engage frequently in a pattern of verbal disputing that is characterized by the forceful use of ‘Not!’ as an outright contradiction by one speaker of another. This paper describes the pattern and its development from early childhood into adolescence and the context of relationships in which it develops.

A great deal of interest has developed in the last few years in studying children's linguistic routines in interaction as a means toward understanding child cognitive development (see for example Mitchell-Kernan & Ervin-Tripp 1977). In this study we hope to extend the parameters of this line of research to include cross- cultural investigation. We also hope to shift the focus of investigation away from concentration on children's routinized usage of linguistic form to concentration on children's strategies in their total communicative behavior, both linguistic and non-linguistic.

Adaptations to a partner perceived to be conversationally incompetent can be heard in speech to children, the hard-of-hearing, foreigners, speakers with certain speech defects, the aged, and hospital patients. These adaptations may be controlled partially by the actual performance of partners in conversations, through influences on perceived ability. The first half of this paper describes specific changes in children's conversational abilities in early childhood, which in turn may serve to alter how their partners judge their abilities to understand. The second half of the paper addresses the evidence regarding the level and types of changes in adult speech to children as the child's ability changes.

This paper, like the research on which it is based, grew out of an interest in the conditions and circumstances which enable children to tell long and involved stories of their own creation. For several years we have been collecting narratives from part-Hawaiian children five to twelve years of age in a variety of circumstances. These include both individual children and self-selected peer groups talking to each other and with one of us around school or in their own neighborhoods (see Watson-Gegeo & Boggs 1977; Watson 1975; Boggs 1972). The description by Sutton-Smith and his collaborators (1975: 82), which parallels some of our experiences, provides a useful introduction to the questions addressed in this paper:

If you keep asking children to make up stories for you and show some delight at the stories they tell; and if you keep coming back and asking for more stories, then the stories get better and better.

Maintenance of dialect differences despite loss of communicative isolation points up the need to analyze the role of dialect-standard alternates in signalling social identity and in contributing to conversational inference. Such analysis should focus on conversational interaction and on the processes by which situated interpretations are arrived at and used as frames for interpreting what follows. An Afro-American sermon and a disputed speech by a Black political leader to a mixed audience are analyzed. Dialect alternants serve to signal switching between contrasting styles in both. In the sermon, the audience shares with the speaker a knowledge of the structure of the activity and of the rules for both styles. In the speech, the activity lacks a predictable structure, only the style can frame interpretation, and most of the audience do not share its rules. Conversational inference is shown to depend not only on grammar, lexical meanings and conversational principles, but also on constellations of speech variants, rhythm, and prosody. Such constellations may persist as symbols of shared cultural background. (Dialectology, conversational and discourse analysis; Afro-American speech styles; urban United States.)

As Kolers (1972) has pointed out, the study of bilingualism offers a distinctive way to study some of the mental activities underlying the way that people use language. Code-switching (the introduction into the context of one language stretches of speech which exhibit primarily the other language's phonological and morphological features) offers a unique opportunity for studying some of the more complicated aspects of bilingual speech, particularly regarding the momentary choice of language. Researchers whose work has influenced this paper include Haugen, Weinreich, Mackey, Fishman, Rayfleld, Clyne, Hasselmo, Gumperz, Diebold, Lance, Valdés-Fallis, Pfaff, and Timm. Among the list of poorly understood phenomena in code-switching are (I) seemingly unpredictable switching, and (2) the possibility of formal, complex rules underlying different code-switching patterns. It is these open questions which modelling might illuminate.