Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE PARENT–CHILD NARRATIVES
- 2 Cultural Variations in Mother–Child Narrative Discourse Style
- 3 Early Sociocommunicative Narrative Patterns During Costa Rican Mother–Infant Interaction
- 4 Lessons in Mother–Child and Father–Child Personal Narratives in Latino Families
- 5 Evaluation in Spanish-Speaking Mother–Child Narratives: The Social and Sense-Making Function of Internal-State References
- 6 Love, Diminutives, and Gender Socialization in Andean Mother–Child Narrative Conversations
- PART TWO DEVELOPING INDEPENDENT NARRATION
- PART THREE NARRATIVE LINKS TO LITERACY AND OTHER SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENTS
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- References
6 - Love, Diminutives, and Gender Socialization in Andean Mother–Child Narrative Conversations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE PARENT–CHILD NARRATIVES
- 2 Cultural Variations in Mother–Child Narrative Discourse Style
- 3 Early Sociocommunicative Narrative Patterns During Costa Rican Mother–Infant Interaction
- 4 Lessons in Mother–Child and Father–Child Personal Narratives in Latino Families
- 5 Evaluation in Spanish-Speaking Mother–Child Narratives: The Social and Sense-Making Function of Internal-State References
- 6 Love, Diminutives, and Gender Socialization in Andean Mother–Child Narrative Conversations
- PART TWO DEVELOPING INDEPENDENT NARRATION
- PART THREE NARRATIVE LINKS TO LITERACY AND OTHER SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENTS
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- References
Summary
Key Words: diminutive, evaluative morphology, emotion, narrative, evaluation, Spanish, Andes, maternal speech
ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how emotional words and diminutives function as evaluative resources within mother–child narrative conversations. Participants included 32 Indigenous Spanish-speaking mother–child pairs from the southern Ecuadorian Andes. Mothers were asked to record interactions in which they participated in narrative conversations with their child. Findings suggest that diminutives played a salient part in the socialization of emotion in this Indigenous community. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicated gender differences in uses of these types of evaluation and, in particular, in how diminutives and emotional words were used together, with 5-year-old girls hearing significantly more diminutives in emotional utterances than 3-year-old girls and more than boys of both age groups. Implications for narrative evaluation and language socialization are discussed.
INTRODUCTION
Narratives are often defined as stories about actual or imaginary past events (McCabe, 1991). Early and foundational work on narrative (e.g., Labov & Waletzky, 1967) identified evaluation as a central narrative component. As Labov and Waletzky (1967) demonstrated, a narrative's referential functions might be carried out perfectly well; however, without evaluation, the narrative tends to be difficult to understand and lacks significance – in their words, “it has no point” (p. 33). Daiute and Nelson (1997) extended this work, pointing out that as children develop narrative discourse skills, evaluation helps them learn how to situate or position themselves within society.
- Type
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- Information
- Spanish-Language Narration and LiteracyCulture, Cognition, and Emotion, pp. 119 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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