Fantasy and double-play among Huli children of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This paper explores the nature of conversational exchange in sociodramatic play amongst Huli (Papua New Guinea) children. When engaged in such verbal fantasy play children frequently pattern or overlay their talk with a storytelling genre (bi te) ordinarily employed in the recounting of myths, folktales and legends. Because children in fantasy play are invoking such genre conventions outside of their normal context they indulge in what we refer to as 'double-play'. They create make-believe interaction and then 'play' again with their artefact by collaboratively constituting it as a simulated 'mythological narrative'. To understand such play processes our analysis develops a typology of utterance moves for such interaction and considers the incidence and implications of associated grammatical forms. It is further argued that important insights into the cognitive models children have of pretend playing can be gained through comparison of transcript data of both elicited - as when actors pretend to pretend - and naturally occurring symbolic play.