Dinner Talk - Softcover

Blum-Kulka, Shoshana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080581776X ISBN 13: 9780805817768

Publisher: Routledge, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

...it is a rewarding [book] both in what it tells us about the families we have had the privilege to hear indirectly and for what it shows about the ability of fine analysis to illuminate the culture of speakers.
—Journal of Sociolinguistics

Blum-Kulka's book is a valuable resource for both sociolinguists and sociologists of language who are interested in pragmatic socialization and cross-cultural analysis. The work will be of interest to those who explore the construction of cultural identity in talk, as well as those more specifically concerned with cultureal divergence among American and Israeli Jewish communities. The study also serves as an excellent example of the micro-analytic approach to questions about the relationship between language and culture.
—Language in Society

A child's illness and death is a family tragedy, terrifying and ultimately devastating for every member of the family. Too often we give little attention tothe child's siblings. Fanos brings home to us with insight and compassion the siblings' reactions: their resentments, their guilts, their fears, and their deep and persisting sense of loss. This book should be consulted regularly by all parents of seriously ill children, and it should be on the desk of all professionals who would provide parents of seriously ill children with support and counsel or provide siblings of seriously ill children with understanding.
—Robert S. Weiss
University of Massachusetts, Boston

You will never sit down at dinner with your family again, without thinking of this book. It shows how the simple act of sharing a meal can be a mechanism for teaching children, for expressing one's identity, and for transmitting one's culture.
—Catherine Snow
Harvard University

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 080581776X
• ISBN 13: 9780805817768
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 326