Endearment and address terms in family life: Children's and parents’ requests in Italian and Swedish dinnertime interaction

Abstract

The focus of this study is on the use of endearment terms and affective markers (including other address terms, as well as nonverbal calibration) in requests sequences in inter-generational interaction, expanding prior work on requests as social action. This study documents verbal and embodied practices in dinnertime talk (30 h of video) deployed by both parents and children in order to get things done. The analyses show ways in which endearment terms were recurrently deployed in request sequences, marking both trouble and social intimacy. Moreover, the data show that endearment terms were exclusively deployed by the parents, but not by their children. The adults and children drew on different repertoires of affective resources: the children deployed an array of nonverbal and nonvocal means to display their affective stances. In addition, the parents resorted to endearment terms, nicknames and diminutives, as lexical devices invoking intimate bonds in a context where social solidarity might be at stake. Finally, while children's requests target an immediate action concerning food and food-related activities rooted in the here and now of the interaction, parental requests can be often analyzed as redressive actions, prompted by the child's (troublesome) behavior.