Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates Japanese heritage language speaking children’s interaction and argues for the need to recognize the dialogic aspect of their speech as a component of “child agency”. The focus is on in-group communication within families and on languages as sets of communicative resources.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates Japanese heritage language (JHL) speaking children’s interaction and argues for the need to recognize the dialogic aspect of their speech as a component of “child agency” (Smith-Christmas 2020). The focus is on in-group communication within families, where languages are seen as sets of resources in the JHL speakers’ repertoires. How dialogic elements of the common repertoires are employed concretely as communicative resources in everyday JHL interaction is a topic in need of further analysis.

Social actors are typically understood to be determined socio-culturally, but also linguistically by the grammatical structures of the languages they master (Al Zidjaly 2009). Rather than discussing “agency” in relation to the structural dimension of social reality, this paper zooms on the latter, more specifically on the dialogic aspects of speech as representations of co-constructed, in-situ forms of (discoursive) agency. Our pilot analysis of discourse data shows evidence of JHL children’s agency in discourse through “parallelism”. Children, much like their parents, engage in the process of creating “family language ecology” through linguistic practices. The data come from case studies of Japanese and Finnish-Japanese families residing in Finland.

The theoretical framework of Dialogic Syntax (DS) (Du Bois 2014) is adopted to analyze the linguistic and interactional processes involved in JHL communicative dynamics. In this orientation, the structural organization of language is considered not only to communicate or reason, but also to engage. The dynamic emergence of “structural resonance” in interaction can be analyzed in functional terms as serving communicative and collaborative goals of JHL speakers. Based on the principle of DS, all participants in conversation construct discourse together by creating structural resonance. Among such communicative collaborative moves, the most effective one is “parallelism”, linguistic paring of patterns in discourse. As our analysis demonstrates, it is not only a form of repetition, but also a powerful strategy that serves the communicative and cognitive goals of its users.