Showing papers by "Elinor Ochs published in 1989"

Language has a heart

Abstract: In the past several years, the social sciences have been articulating how emotion impacts cognition and social action. Linguists have underestimated the extent to which grammatical and discourse structures serve affective ends. A cross-linguistic analysis indicates that languages dedicate phonological, morpho-syntactic and discourse features to intensify and specify attitudes, moods, feelings and dispositions. These features provide an affective frame for propositions encoded. Suchframes can be consideredas pari of the Information expressed, äs affective comments on the expressed propositions they address. These comments Interface with gestural cues to provide interlocutors with critical Information on which to base subsequent social actions.

Detective Stories At Dinnertime: Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration:

Abstract: For over a year, our research groupl has been going into homes in the early evening for several hours, videoand audiorecording families eating dinner, relaxing, and putting children to bed. We are analyzing ways in which white, English-speaking American families varying in social class solve problems through talk. The present analysis is based on over a hundred hours of recorded interactions, approximately eight hours for each of 14 families (8 high SES and 6 low SES) from our initial corpus. In this paper, our focus is on narrative as a problem-solving discourse activity. Our concern is the interface of cognitive and social activity, as outlined in Vygotskian theory (Vygotsky 1978, 1981, Wertsch 1985, Rogoff & Lave 1984). Our data indicate how problem-solving through story-telling is