This chapter illuminates how accountability is a core aspect of the intergenerational argumentation by family members during social interaction at dinnertime. First, an introduction to the concepts of social accountability and language socialization will be provided. Some prior work has focused on mutual apprenticeship (Pontecorvo, Fasulo & Sterponi, 2001), but not much work has problematized how children deploy what we will call proto-accounts (laments, multiple repeats, want-statements) on the one hand, and varied verbal accounts, on the other, in relation to age class or prior language socialization experiences. Second, we will present our study on argumentation, exploring how children’s accounts work during family dinner conversations. Argumentative resources used by parents and children will be discussed in the final part of the chapter in terms of social accountability and the relevance that these strategies have as truly interactional accomplishments.

The focus of this study is on the use of endearment terms and affective resources (including other address terms, as well as nonverbal calibration) in requests sequences in inter-generational interaction, expanding prior work on requests as social action. This study documents verbal and embodied practices in dinnertime talk (30 hours of video) deployed by both parents and children in order to get things done. The analyses show ways in which endearment terms were recurrently deployed in request sequences, marking both trouble and social intimacy. Moreover, the data show that endearment terms were exclusively deployed by the parents, but not by their children. The adults and children drew on different repertoires of affective resources: the children deployed an array of nonverbal and nonvocal means to display their affective stances. In addition, the parents resorted to endearment terms, nicknames, and diminutives, as lexical devices invoking intimate bonds in a context where social solidarity might be at stake. Finally, while children’s requests target an immediate action concerning food and food-related activities rooted in the here and now of the interaction, parental requests can be often analyzed as redressive actions, prompted by the child’s (troublesome) behavior.

The Italian discursive signal dai (Eng: come on) in family conversations, between saying and requesting

This paper analyzes the use of the Italian discourse marker ‘dai’ (English idiomatic translation : “come on”) in directive sequences between parents and children collected during family mealtime interactions. The work shows how this pragmatic device inhabits sequential contexts in which the recipient is not oriented toward the course of action to which the request refers, that is, when participants do not share the participatory framework and when resistance can be anticipated from the recipient. The paper shows the extent to which the ‘dai’ marker works as a modulator of affect (from encouragement to critique) and, at the same time, how it can open a negotiation space between parents and children as regards the management of individual responsibilities. The paper finally considers the findings in light of practices of socialization, and proposes that the marker supports a cultural preference, common in middle-class families in Western contexts, toward acknowledging the child as an agent and willful individual even in contexts in which he/she is asked to comply.