Schmidt2021a

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Schmidt2021a
BibType ARTICLE
Key Schmidt2021a
Author(s) Axel Schmidt, Jörg Zinken
Title Directing, negotiating and planning: "Aus Spiel" ("for play") in children's pretend joint play
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Instructions, Children, Pretend play frame, Negotiation, Planning, Proposing, Rules
Publisher
Year 2021
Language English
City
Month
Journal Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion
Volume 2021
Number 22
Pages 151-178
URL Link
DOI
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
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Howpublished
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Abstract

We are interested in how children organize joint pretend play. In this kind of play, children create an invented world by transforming matters of the real world into matters of a fictional world (e.g., pretending to be a 'giant' or treating a particular spatial area as a 'witch's kitchen'). Since there are no rules and no script, every next step in the game is an improvisation designed here and now. Children engaged in free play have equal rights to determine what should happen next. For that reason, they have to negotiate next steps. We are interested in a particular expression that children often use in joint play: aus Spaß/Spiel ('for fun' or 'for play', similar to 'let's pretend'). Based on a corpus of five hours of video recordings of two pairs of twins (the younger children are between 3 and 5 years old, the older ones are 8 years old), we show that children regularly use aus Spiel while playing as a method for shaping the activity. Inventing new events, children try to get their co-players to accept them and act accordingly. In that context, issues of (dis-)alignment and deontic rights become relevant. Here, we are interested in the interactional work that aus Spiel- ('let's pretend')-turns do and how co-players respond.

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