Breaking in and spinning out: Repetition and decalibration in Thai children’s play genres

Abstract

ABSTRACTChildren’s humorous play is a cultural activity with its own particular aesthetic – an aesthetic in which highly creative, incongruent, and unexpected speech and action are valorized, appreciated, and rewarded. Drawing on Bauman’s concept of calibration, the adjustments by which speakers align their intertextual utterances to new contexts and purposes, this paper argues that an aesthetic of decalibration is at work in children’s metalinguistic and metapragmatic language play. Children capitalize upon linguistic and pragmatic ambiguity to breach expectations, drawing on complex linguistic, contextual and pragmatic knowledge to create maximally humorous language play performances. Through close analysis of videotaped interactions from a larger ethnographic, discourse analytic study of northern Thai children’s everyday lives, this article examines how younger children are socialized into these practices of language play through peripheral participation in multi-age play groups, showing that the repetitive poetic structure and predictability of the play genres constitute jumping-off and breaking-in points for language play. (Calibration, repetition, children’s language, play, language socialization, Thai, humor)1