Comparison of Topic Organization in Finnish, Swedish-Finnish, and ...

DISCOURSE PROCESSES, 37(3), 225–248 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Comparison of Topic Organization in Finnish, Swedish–Finnish, and Swedish Family Discourse Marja-Terttu Tryggvason Södertörn University College, Sweden

The purpose of this study was to examine whether there are cultural differences in topic organization and role-related topic control in dinner conversations; such differences may function as a means for socialization into communicative styles. The research was designed as a comparative study of two geographically close but linguistically very different ethnic groups: Swedes and Finns, including Finns in Sweden as an intermediate group. Previous research has shown Swedes to generate more talk and to produce considerably shorter pauses than Finns. Furthermore, previous studies have indicated that lengthy pauses often precede topic changes. Empirical data were collected by video recording conversations in each of the three cultural groups: 11 Finnish families in Finland, 11 Finnish immigrant families in Sweden, and 11 Swedish families in Sweden. Due to the shared setting, the conversations displayed many similarities, but there were also some intercultural differences. The main result was that the Swedish family dinner discourse was significantly more encyclopedic and coherent than the Finnish and Swedish–Finnish one. The findings support the hypothesized connection between pausing and topic organization. The mothers in each group were most active in controlling topic development.

Analysis of dinner conversations in Finnish and Swedish families, including Finnish families in Sweden, has shown that Swedish families generate significantly more talk than Finnish and Swedish–Finnish families (Tryggvason, in press). On average, Swedish families produce 20 turns per minute versus 13 to 14 turns by Finnish and Swedish–Finnish families, and Swedish families produce considerably fewer and shorter pauses than Finnish and Swedish–Finnish families (pausing 9% of the time compared to 23% and 22%, respectively). Such variation in length of pauses by difCorrespondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Marja-Terttu Tryggvason, Södertörn University College, Room ME 225, 141 89 Huddinge, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]

226

TRYGGVASON

ferent ethnic groups has been ascribed to cultural differences in speech fluency or talkativeness (Scollon & Scollon, 1981). However, there are reasons to believe that pausing may be causally connected with other discourse features like topicalization (Maynard, 1980; Watts, 1997). A pause often indicates a transition relevance place (TRP; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), meaning that the speakership is transferred. If the transfer is not successful, silence can occur. It is in these situations that topic changes regularly appear, as a solution to the problem of producing continuous talk (Maynard, 1980). Maynard and Zimmerman (1984) further added that a new topic after a lengthy pause is usually unrelated to a prior topic. According to Bergmann (1990), in situations where talk becomes discontinuous and gets stuck in silence, the objects and phenomena in the situation, “local matters” as he called them, are an important resource for continuation of interaction (p. 211). Usually, these kinds of topics are not “rich topics”; that is, they are rather quickly exhausted, although they may be used to introduce other topics (Sacks et al., 1974). Thus, they tend to preserve the continuity of the conversation. Finland and Sweden are geographical neighbors that for centuries have had strong historical and cultural ties. In previous cross-cultural studies, all based on interviews or questionnaires, Finns and Swedes as communicators in public have been reported to have similar features compared with a number of other ethnic groups (Daun, 1998, 1999; Sajavaara & Lehtonen, 1997; Sallinen-Kuparinen, McCroskey, & Richmond, 1991). Thus, they share the characteristic of social reticence; for example, they are unwilling to appear in public, and they are both taciturn and accept extended silence. They are good listeners as illustrated by their respect for the right of other interlocutors to keep the floor which, in turn, results in little simultaneous and interrupted talk. However, in a mutual comparison based on interviews (Laine-Sveiby, 1991), Finns and Swedes saw different communicative characteristics in each other. The Swedes were considered to be more talkative whereas the Finns were more direct. In a recent study, by Daun, Verkasalo, and Tuomivaara (2001) on stereotypes, Finns seemed to be aware of communicative differences between them and Swedes. Thus, they assessed Swedes to be more talkative than themselves.

MEALS AS SITUATED EVENTS Meals seem to create culturally specific discourse environments, where children can both listen to adult talk and participate in collaboratively produced discourse. Thus, they serve as intergenerational shared social multiparty events, a pragmatic socialization context in which children learn how to become competent conversational partners. In several recent studies, meals have been found to expose children to a wide range of culturally molded speech genres—for example, narratives and explanations (Beals & Snow, 1994; Blum-Kulka & Snow, 1992; Grøver Aukrust & Snow, 1998; Ochs, Taylor, Rudolph, & Smith, 1992). Meals also expose children

TOPIC ORGANIZATION IN THREE CULTURAL GROUPS

227

to local cultural rules regulating discourse, for example, the participants’ rights to speak, choice of appropriate topics, and turn-taking rules (Blum-Kulka, 1997; Junefelt & Tulviste, 1997; Tulviste, 2000). Except for a few studies based on the same data as this study (De Geer, Tuviste, Mizera, & Tryggvason, 2002; Tryggvason, in press; Tryggvason & De Geer, 2002; Tulviste, Mizera, De Geer, & Tryggvason, 2002), no comparative studies on language socialization processes among Finns have been conducted. Meals are speech events that are considered to be governed by rules and norms (Hymes, 1974). In Goffman’s terms (1961), meals represent a “situated activity,” a “circuit of interdependent actions” within which the nature of the event plays a major role in shaping patterns of interaction (p. 96). From a Vygotskian (1978) interactionalistic perspective, linguistic and communicative development is socioculturally situated, meaning that the language development starts as part of a social activity system (Wertsch, 1985). The activity type involves certain constraints on the contributions, which specify which acts are required, expected, tolerated, or prohibited. The interpretation of a particular act relies on the context of goals (Mey, 1993). Mey claimed that “constraints given the actual situation in a conversation can identify the possible ways to proceed toward the goals they [interactants] want to obtain” (p. 264). These acts were called pragmatic and they are heavily marked by their context. Nevertheless, dinner conversations are less regulated multiparty activity types. This means that the activity frames are relatively flexible and may be changed and modified during the interaction. The discourse progression is not predetermined, but is usually achieved gradually by participants during the interaction. The discourse is assumed to be jointly constructed (Clark, 1996, p. 10). Thus, the participants jointly establish the relevant activity frame. In Gumperz’s (1982) terms, participants used contextualization cues to signal and to interpret acts. Conversations are based on the voluntary contribution of all participants. Thus, they have a self-organizing power, as Bergmann (1990) claimed.

TOPICS Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin (1976) were the first to define the concept of topic. They proposed defining a discourse topic as referring to “the proposition or set of propositions about which the speaker is either providing or requesting information” (p. 338). A definition like this has a shortcoming, in that it focuses more on single utterances than on longer stretches of discourse. According to the traditional text-linguistic perspective, topics are internally coherent. It is the topical content that makes them coherent. The role of the discourse topic is to “reduce, organize and categorize semantic information of the sequences as wholes” (van Dijk, 1977, p. 132). According to this definition, the topic is seen as a product and does not consider dynamic aspects of topic progression. Many researchers (Bublitz, 1988;

228

TRYGGVASON

Linell & Korolija, 1997; Maynard, 1980; Schegloff, 1990; Svennevig, 1999) also included actions performed in a topic. This means that the perspective on topics is no longer exclusively content-based. Topics are interactionally established—they are joint projects. That is, when a topic is proposed by a participant, the way it is constructed depends on whether and how coparticipants take it up. A topic emerges in a sequence of utterances and turns that are internally bound together by local coherence (Linell & Korolija, 1997). Topics are, thus, developed by local coherence from utterance to utterance. This means that the utterances are both dependent on prior utterances and that they create conditions for possible next utterances. Heritage (1984) referred to this as the “double contextuality of dialogue contributions” (p. 12). In his terms, utterances were both context-shaped and context-renewing. Thus, through and in local coherence, interlocutors construe topics gradually. When there is a clear shift in content, a topic boundary is established and a new topic is thus introduced. However, there are no clear guidelines for evaluating when the change of content means a topic boundary and a topic shift. This study had one focus on global coherence (Linell & Korolija, 1997), that is, on various kinds of links and bridges, semantic connections that tie the subsequent topic to a previous one. A topical action was defined by Bublitz (1988) as an action used by a participant “to intervene in the development and the course of the [discourse] topic, and thus to contribute to a topical thread being initiated, maintained and completed” (p. 40). Thus, the analysis of topical actions assists in revealing discourse roles: who among the participants introduces, shifts, sustains or closes topics. As an overarching term, Linell and Korolija (1997) used “topical episodes” for units combining both content and topical actions. However, Bublitz (1988) and Svennevig (1999) merely used the term topic. Because topical episode has not gained a wider acceptance in the scientific community, I will go with Bublitz and Svennevig and use the term topic for both action patterns and content.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY This study aimed at examining topic organizational structure of dinner table conversations from three points of view and with regard to its possible significance for pausing. First, I considered the types of topics introduced and the way of introducing them—that is, how they related to prior topics. Because the participants were family members and acquainted with each other, they were expected to introduce similar kinds of topics by means of “delivering news” about themselves or other people known to the participants (Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984, p. 303). However, the higher frequency of pauses in Finnish talk might have indicated, according to Bergmann (1990), a greater tendency for the Finnish participants to turn to local matters about the setting, in contrast to the Swedish participants. Based on a previous study (Tryggvason, in press) on pauses, Finnish


229

and Swedish–Finnish family members could be expected to a greater extent to have more unrelated topic introductions than Swedish family members. Accordingly, Finnish talk is expected to be more noncoherent than Swedish talk. However, it should be kept in mind that the striving for coherence and staying on topic is balanced by the need for renewal and topic change (Bergmann, 1990; Heritage, 1984). This means that the explanation for the difference in coherence between Finns and Swedes is not so obvious. The topic types coded for this study are related to the level of conversation. Because, due to the pauses, local topics or here-and-now topic introductions are expected to occur (Bergmann, 1990), Finnish talk is hypothesized to be on a more concrete level than Swedish talk. The second aim of the study focused on topical actions, that is, which family members initiated and closed topics and to what extent. Based on previous studies using the same set of data (Tryggvason, in press; Tryggvason & De Geer, 2002), the mothers had quantitative dominance in producing talk in each group, and they also elicited the most talk. Therefore, it could be assumed that the mothers also had the dominant role in organizing topics. This assumption is not, however, so clearly supported by previous findings—for example, Erickson (1990) and Blum-Kulka (1997). In Erickson’s study of an Italian American family, the participants had the most prominent position, whereas in Israeli, Israeli American, and Jewish American families, both parents had active roles of comparable magnitude (Blum-Kulka, 1997, pp. 57–99). The third goal of the study was to examine the conversational behavior of immigrant Finns in Sweden. This group is situated at the interface of two contact cultures; it is of interest to find out whether the culture of origin or the country of residence has the greater impact on conversational style in the previous two aspects. In our previous studies (De Geer et al., 2002; Tryggvason & De Geer, 2002; Tulviste et al., 2002), the Swedish Finns showed a high congruity with native Finns. For this reason, it could be expected that the Swedish Finns would resemble Finns more than Swedes also with regard to topic organization. This expectation does not wholly agree with what Tulviste et al. (2002) and De Geer et al. (2002) found concerning Estonians in Sweden or what Blum-Kulka (1997) found concerning American Israelis, both of which groups have shown greater adaptation to the new culture than Finns.

DATA AND METHODOLOGY Participants The research participants of this study consisted of 11 Finnish families in Finland, 11 Swedish families in Sweden, and 11 Finnish immigrant families living in Sweden. The suitable families who had an elementary school age child (9 to 13 years

230

TRYGGVASON

old), termed target child, were recruited through elementary schools. This age group was selected because most of the research in adult–child verbal interaction focuses on preschool children in dyads. Previous studies that focus on older children shift the emphasis to verbal interactions of children at school (Romaine, 1984; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). However, to explore the degree of cultural variation in styles of pragmatic socialization, there is a need to study school-age children interaction at home. In addition to the target child’s age, the families were defined by the educational level of the mothers. They were urban middle-class families with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. With the exception of 1 Finnish mother, all mothers had more than secondary school education. In the samples of this study, a total of 9 Finnish, 8 Swedish–Finnish, and 7 Swedish mothers had a master’s or corresponding degree, whereas the rest had some other postsecondary-school education (e.g., as a kindergarten teacher). The number of family members was restricted to three to four participants for all participants to have equal possibilities for conversation contributions. The mean age of all children was similar in each group, as shown in Table 1. Eight families in each group had both parents present at dinner, whereas three families in each group were single parent families. Descriptive statistics of all participants are shown in Table 1. The Finnish and Swedish families were monolingual, speaking Finnish or Swedish, respectively. The home language of the Swedish–Finnish families was Finnish, Swedish, or both, depending on the family’s decision. Two Swedish–Finnish families spoke Swedish at dinner, because the mothers said they valued Swedish more when living in a Swedish-speaking environment. In two other families with a Finnish-speaking mother and a Swedish-speaking father, the children switched between Finnish and Swedish, depending on the topic. All the Swedish–Finnish children were born and had grown up in Sweden. On the average, the mothers had lived in Sweden for 21 years (range = 14 to 28 years).

TABLE 1 Number and Mean Age of the Participants and Standard Deviations FinFin

Mother Father Target child Sibling Note.

SweFin

SweSwe

N

M

SD

N

M

SD

N

M

SD

11 8 11 13

38.7 38.5 10.6 9.2

3.41 2.90 0.67 5.29

11 8 11 10

43.6 47.5 10.0 9.3

4.30 4.80 1.00 4.03

11 8 11 10

41.0 44.1 11.0 11.2

3.93 4.94 1.18 5.05

FinFin = Finns in Finland; SweFin = Finns in Sweden; SweSwe = Swedes in Sweden.


231

Procedure When suitable families had been identified, letters briefly describing the study were sent to the families, asking them to return the letter and indicate their willingness to participate. Data on Swedish (SweSwe) and Swedish–Finnish (SweFin) families were collected in Stockholm area, and those on Finnish ones (FinFin) were collected in Oulu, Finland. The study material was collected by video recording during one meal, usually a dinner, in the family homes. The Finnish recordings were performed by the Finnish author, and the Swedish recordings by a Swedish researcher. Because it was not a normal and natural situation for the families to be recorded, they were instructed to “act as normally as they could and ignore the camera.” Regardless, consistency was maintained because they all shared the same situation. There was no interaction between the researcher and the family members during the recordings. The whole mealtime was recorded. The mean duration of a meal was 19.38 min in the Finnish families, 18.56 min in the Swedish–Finnish families, and 22.22 min in the Swedish families. There was no significant difference in time, F(2, 30) = 1.11, p = .344. All video recordings were transcribed using the CHAT transcription system (MacWhinney, 1991), and the CLAN computer program was used for counting turns and utterances. According to the CHAT system (MacWhinney, 1991), each line in a transcript starts with an asterisk that is followed by a three letter ID. Each main line can contain only one utterance. When a speaker produces several utterances in a row, each utterance is coded with a new main line. A turn consists of a line with the same speaker ID in a row.1 The Corpus The Finnish material consisted of 4,049 utterances, the Swedish–Finnish material, 4,050 utterances and the Swedish material, 6,288 utterances—different by an analysis of variance test, F(2, 30) = 5.47, p = .009. Swedish families produced more utterances than Finnish and Swedish–Finnish families (by a least significant difference [LSD] test, p = .008, df = 30). The Swedes also produced significantly more utterances per second than the other groups, different at p = .007, df = 30 from Finnish families and p = .023, df = 30 from Swedish–Finnish families. The Finnish and Swedish–Finnish materials were collected and transcribed by the Finnish author and the Swedish material was transcribed by a Swedish researcher who also collected the recordings. The author checked all the Swedish recordings and the Swedish researcher checked the Swedish-speaking Finnish transcripts. 1The following abbreviations have been used in the transcripts: MOT = mother; FAT = father; CHI = target child; SIB = sibling; M = men; W = women; %com = an explaining comment; +/. = the speaker was interrupted; # = a short pause; #27 = a pause, the number shows how long in seconds it is; xxx = unintelligible speech.

232

TRYGGVASON

Categories In this study, a topic was defined as consisting of at least three turns. Both of them had to be substantial turns (minimal responses were counted as such) by different speakers. Thus, a topic could not consist of one turn only, and topic proposals or topical bids (Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984), which were not taken up by coparticipants were excluded from the analysis. An instrumental topic (such as asking for something on the dinner table) that consisted of one or two turns was omitted if the ongoing conversation was not interrupted by it. For example, a turn Anna mulle lisää vettä ‘Give me some more water’was omitted if it did not generate a topic of at least three turns. Topics were approached empirically in two ways: topic types and topic shifts. Topic types are macrothemes that summarize the content of a talk segment in terms of a global theme (Brown & Yule, 1983). The topic types attempted to capture a continuum of conversational focus from the immediate here-and-now context to a wider sociocultural context. The topic types thus ranged from a concrete, physical level to a deeper, more general level. The topic types, adopted from Blum-Kulka (1997, p. 38f) and Svennevig (1999, p. 218f), were as follows.

Topic types. Setting topics (Blum-Kulka’s, 1997, situational concerns) were spatiotemporal talk about the dinner table and its immediate environment within sight and hearing. They included routines of the dinner concerning serving, offering, and finishing, like Haluatko mehua? ‘Do you want to have juice?’ or Mamma ge mig mjölk ‘Mom, give me some milk’. Other themes could be triggered by the situation, such as telephone calls or the weather outside the kitchen window. Setting topics were generally introduced disjunctively and as noncoherent with previous discourse. Immediate family concern topics (Blum-Kulka, 1997) were person-oriented topics that focused primarily on the participants. According to Blum-Kulka (1997) “matters talked about within this frame happened or were noticed in the very recent past of the last day and are being recounted or discussed for the first time and may require further action” (p. 45). Thus, they were talk about the day’s happenings, concrete past events, future plans, somebody’s likes and dislikes, feelings, and so on. However, topics evoked situationally were counted as setting topics. Immediate topics were subdivided into self-, other-, we-, and they-oriented introductions according to whom the topic focused on. Self-oriented topics included initiatives when the speaker started talking about himself or herself. In the following example, the daughter started telling about her plans some days ahead: På måndag ska jag åka in till stan till träningen ‘On Monday, I will go to the city to practice’. In other-oriented topics the addressee was the main character of the topic. A large number of the other-oriented topic introductions were questions that elicited a new, often noncoherent topic. This, however, presupposed that the interlocutors


233

had “shared history of interaction” and could rely on “mutually assumed knowledge of one another’s biography” (Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984, p. 303). In the following example, the mother addressed an explicit question to her daughter: Har du gjort läxan Karin? ‘Have you done your homework Karin?’ We-topics included the speaker and one or more persons sitting at the table; for example, a son asked the mother for two brothers of them: Voidaanko me mennä vielä ulos? ‘Can we still [tonight] go outside?’ They-oriented introductions included topics about friends and relatives who were not present at the table and the participants talked about those people excluding themselves. The next example was contextualized by a conversation in which the family first discussed how one daughter was going to stay overnight at a friend’s house. The question about the persons not present brought a new aspect to the conversation: Hur är det? Är mamma och pappa hemma hos Sandra? ‘How is it? Are mother and father at Sandra’s house?’ Encyclopedic topics (Blum-Kulka’s, 1997, nonimmediate concerns) were, like setting topics, impersonal in the way that they introduced matters that were not directly related to the individual daily lives of the participants. They were not bound by considerations of either time and space, but were statements of a general character. Encyclopedic topics did not usually appear as totally new, but emerged from the ongoing discourse. Thus, the prior topic was recontextualized. This category could include, for example, themes about politics, literature, music, people at a general level, and also metalinguistic matters.

Topic shifts. The topic shifts and changes of content were measured by using the following classification of coherence, partially based on Linell and Gustavsson (1987, p. 42f) and Linell and Korolija (1997, p. 176f). Coherence measured what kind of relation the new topic had to a prior one. The categories form a scale from coherence to noncoherence. Recontextualized topic initiations were related to the immediately preceding discourse, but the coherence was only partial. They could be associations to a fact, a concept or a referent in the prior topic or recontextualizations as defined by Linell and Korolija (1997). The same matter was partly maintained from one topic to the next, but because the focus on it shifted, a new topic was initiated. A recontextualized topic boundary meant, at least to some extent, a new referent in a new situation and coparticipants accepted the closing of a previous topic and engaged jointly in a new one. Reinitiated topics were triggered by the content of a more remotely preceding discourse. The speaker usually went abruptly back to a topic that was activated earlier in the discourse. Situation-triggered topic initiations were triggered spatiotemporally by the here-and-now situation: the dinner table and immediate surroundings. Situation-triggered topics were not coherent with the previous topic.

234

TRYGGVASON

Unanchored initiations had not occurred earlier in the conversation. Thus, they were also fully noncoherent. Because both situation-triggered and unanchored topic initiations were noncoherent topical shifts, they were not mutually exclusive. When a new topic was situationally triggered it was coded as a situation triggered topic rather than as unanchored. The following example is a situation-triggered introduction that occurred when the wind blew heavily outside: Olipa hyvä ettei lähdetty kesämökille ‘It’s good that we didn’t go to the summer cottage’. Topics about serving and taking food could occur several times in one conversation, but despite reoccurrence they were coded as a situation and not as reinitiated. At a topic transition place, the introductory utterance was evaluated according to its type and coherence with the preceding discourse. The topics were defined relative to the formulation by which they were introduced in the conversation. Although the focus might be altered when the talk proceeded, the topic was defined by its introduction. Following are some excerpts as examples of the analysis. In addition to representing typical family dinner conversation, they were chosen because they include different kinds of introductions. Excerpt 1: FinFin, CHI (12M); SIB (17M) 1 MOT:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

SIB: MOT: SIB: MOT: MOT: FAT: FAT:

9 MOT: %com: 10 MOT:

%com:

#7Milloin muuten teillä Olli alkaa tuo koeviikko? ‘#7 By the way Olli when does your exam week start?’ Other-oriented, unanchored Yksi koeviikko on ihan ennen joulua. ‘One exam week is right before Christmas.’ Onko teillä yksi vaan? ‘Do you only have one?’ On. ‘Yes.’ Oho. ‘Oh I see.’ En ole koulua käynyt niin olen vähän+/. ‘I have not been in school so I am a bit+/.’ Tietämätön. ‘Ignorant.’ On hyvä kala. ‘This fish is good.’ Setting, situation Liian suolaista. ‘Too salty.’ The conversation goes on and has two other topics when MOT comes back to a remote topic #7Miten teillä ei ole tenttejä sitten kuin vasta ennen joulua? ‘#7How come that you don’t have any exams until just before Christmas?’ Other-oriented, re-initiated The topic continues

In line 1, the mother addresses her unanchored question to the sibling. The mother herself marks it as locally untriggered by the use of “by the way,” a misplacement marker (see Schegloff & Sacks, 1974). The topic goes on for some turns until it is interrupted by the father, who starts talking about the food in line 8. The father was coded as the closer of the first topic, because he performs the last utterance. The new topic is a setting and situation introduction. After two other topics, omitted in the excerpt, the mother, perhaps due to a silence of 7 sec, takes up her discussion about the exams. The topic is thus reinitiated.


235

Excerpt 2: SweFin, CHI (11M) 1 MOT:

2 CHI: 3 MOT: 4 CHI: %com: 5 FAT:

6 CHI: 7 FAT:

8 9

CHI:

FAT: 10 CHI: 11 FAT:

12 CHI: 13 CHI: 14 MOT: %com:

Mitä teillä oli tänään koulussa # syömistä? ‘What did you have for lunch today at school?’ Other-oriented, unanchored Minä olen jo sanonut sinulle. ‘I have already told you.’ Ai niin olitkin. ‘Oh yes you did.’ Pyttipanna. ‘Pyttipanna [a dish]’ The topic continues Sitä on paljon ollutkin nyt kun vaalikeskustelut on puhunut aika paljon just tuosta koululaisten ruuasta ja vertailevat vanhusten ja sotilaiden ruokaan. ‘Because of the election the pupils’ food has been discussed a lot and it has been compared to that of old people and soldiers.’ Encyclopedic, recontextualized xxx Miten hyvät ruuat niillä on. ‘What good food they have.’ Kenellä? ‘Who?’ Armeijassa ja vankilassa. ‘In the army and in prison.’ 0 [=! nods]. Koulussa missä lasten pitäisi opiskella hirveän paljon ja olla tehokkaita niin hirveän paljon säästetään ruoassa. ‘At school, where children should study hard and be effective, too much [money] is saved in food costs.’ Hm. Semmosta huonoa ruo+/. ‘Such bad food+/.’ Mihin sinä menet huomenna uimaan? ‘Where do you go for swimming tomorrow?’ Other-oriented, unanchored The topic continues

The encyclopedic type is exemplified in Excerpt 2. It is as usually recontextualized from a previous topic. First, the mother addresses a nonconnected question to the son about lunch. In line 5, the topic reaches the encyclopedic, general level where the interlocutors themselves are not the explicit focus of talk anymore, but they discuss the quality of school food. The topic is not closed off, but the mother interrupts and raises another completely new topic in line 14. Interrater Reliability The author coded the entire corpus. With an additional Swedish blind coder examining a representative subset of 834 utterances in the original Swedish discourses that comprised 55 topics from two Swedish-speaking conversations, interrater reliability amounted to 74% concerning topic types and topic shifts. In this analysis, topic types and topic shifts were counted separately; that is, in a conversation with 27 topics, 54 different units had thus to be defined. The agreement for coding topic boundaries was somewhat higher, 76% (the author coded 3 more topic boundaries than the blind coder). The disparities concerning topic types and topic shifts related to cases in which both the topic type and topic shift deviated between the cod-

236

TRYGGVASON

ers. Disagreements were solved by going through the written definitions and by discussing the possible reasons for coding differences. Because topic maintenance is in itself a dynamic process containing progression (Bergmann, 1990; Foppa, 1990), it was most problematic to distinguish recontextualization from topic maintenance—that is, to define a topic boundary from gradual topic transition. In Excerpt 3 in line 12, the coders disagreed after the first analysis whether the turn was a contribution to the current topic or to a new topic introduction. Excerpt 3: SweSwe, CHI (12F); SIB (10M) 1 CHI: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

MOT: CHI: CHI: MOT: FAT: CHI: MOT: CHI: CHI: MOT: CHI: FAT:

14 CHI: 15 FAT: 16 SIB: %com:

Jag var ute med Kristinas hund. ‘I was outside with Kristina’s dog.’ Self-oriented, unanchored Va? ‘What?’ Kristinas hund. ‘Kristina’s dog.’ Du vet vem Kristina e. ‘You know who Kristina is.’ Ja ja jag vet vem Kristina e. ‘Yes, yes I know who Kristina is.’ Var du ute med hennes hund? ‘Were you out with her dog?’ Ja. ‘Yes.’ Ensam? ‘Alone?’ Ja. ‘Yes.’ Det var jag igår också. ‘I also did it yesterday.’ Inte på kvällen efter maten? ‘You weren’t in at night after dinner.’ Näe vi spelade fotboll. ‘No we played football.’ Va e det för sort? ‘What breed is it?’ They-oriented, recontextualized Tax. ‘A dachshund.’ Jag tycker om små taxar ja. ‘I like small dachshunds yeh.’ Jag har klappat den. ‘I have petted it.’ The topic continues for 41 more turns

In Excerpt 3, the child starts telling what she has done today after school. She makes a self-oriented, but completely unanchored introduction as the mother’s reaction in line 2 also reveals. As for the father’s turn in line 13, it was difficult to determine whether a new topic was introduced or the previous one was continued. After the discussion with the blind coder, the turn was segmented from the previous topic based on the fact that a new referent (a dog), in contrast to the child, is now the main focus of talk. Although the turn gives a new direction to the conversation, the dog as a cohesive link made the boundary questionable. Because the proposal is taken up by the family—the family is engaged in it for 45 turns—provides another reason to assign the topic boundary. If the family had exchanged only a few turns about the dog and returned to the target child’s after-school-activities, line 13 would not have created a new topic. In this context, the topic is they-oriented, but it could have been an encyclopedic topic if the family had discussed dachshunds or dogs at a general level.


237

RESULTS Because Swedish families had longer dinners and produced more speech than Swedish–Finnish and Finnish families, the analyses that follow were done on percentages. Table 2 shows the topic shifts of the dinner conversations in the three different groups. By definition, neither unanchored topic introductions nor situation-triggered topic introductions were related to the prior topic. The proportion of these unrelated topic transitions differed across the samples of 11 families F(2, 30) = 2.90, p = .071, being higher in Finnish (62.3% of all introductions) and marginally higher in Swedish–Finnish talk (60%) than in Swedish talk (51.5%; LSD tests, p = .030, df = 30 and p = .079, df = 30, respectively). There were also differences in percentages of recontextualized topic introductions, F(2, 30) = 4.08, p = .027. The LSD test revealed a difference between the Swedish (38.8%) and the Finnish (26.3%) families (p = .010, df = 30) and marginally so between the Swedish and the Swedish–Finnish (29.2%) families (p = .054, df = 30). To establish that the number of parents present during the conversation did not have any effect, the LSD was also performed for the 8 two-parent families in each group: The difference was 26% to 37% for Finnish versus Swedish families (p = .039, df = 21) but 29% to 37%, for Swedish–Finnish versus Swedish families, not significantly different (p = .191, df = 21). Other results concerning topic shifts did not show any other significant differences. A purpose of a family dinner is to build a kind of a news-telling frame where the family members have the right to ask and tell about his or her news. They introduce topics to deliver news and rely on mutual knowledge of one another’s history. This spontaneously leads to many topic shifts. Each group scored a similar number of topic shifts (Swedish Finns 15, Finns 16, and Swedes 17 topics on average per family). However, the Swedes deployed previous discourse in topic shifts to a higher degree than both Finnish groups, as presented in the previous paragraph (38.8% of TABLE 2 Topic Shifts and Three Cultural Family Groups FinFin Topic Shift Recontextualized Re-initiated Situation Unanchored Total

SweFin

SweSwe

N

%

N

%

N

%

83(61) 36(27) 114(85) 82(62) 315(235)

26.3(26.0) 11.4(11.5) 36.2(36.1) 26.1(26.4)

84(56) 31(18) 110(73) 63(45) 288(192)

29.2(29.2) 10.8(9.4) 38.2(38.0) 21.8(23.4)

148(104) 37(34) 115(83) 81(60) 381(281)

38.8(37.0) 9.7(12.1) 30.2(29.5) 21.3(21.4)

Note. FinFin = Finns in Finland; SweFin = Finns in Sweden; SweSwe = Swedes in Sweden. Raw numbers and percentage of topic shifts with all 11 families (including 3 in which father was absent) in each cultural group and with 8 families (both mother and father present) as indicated in parentheses.

238

TRYGGVASON

all Swedish initiations were recontextualized against 26.3% in Finnish families, p = .010, and 29.2%, p = .054, in Swedish–Finnish families in 11 families). Perhaps pausing in Finnish discourse might explain this. A pause marked that a topic had faded out and it also indicated, as Maynard (1980) claimed, that the floor was vacant for initiating a new and also an unrelated topic (Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984). Table 3 presents the raw numbers and percentages of topic types. Culture also influenced the percentages of encyclopedic topic introductions, F(2, 30) = 3.39, p = .047. LSD tests revealed that Swedish families produced a significantly higher percentage of encyclopedic topic introductions (7.9%) than Finnish families (4.1%, p = .014, df = 30). The corresponding difference was not significant between Swedish and Swedish–Finnish families (5.2%, p = .163, df = 30). A similar pattern was observed in the subsets of families with two adults present; the difference was significant between Finnish (3.8%) and Swedish families (7.8%, p = .023, df = 21), but not between Swedish–Finnish (5.2%) and Swedish families (p = .254, df = 21). Children across the groups also generated encyclopedic talk, in contrast to findings in Blum-Kulkas’s (1997) study on Israeli, American Israeli, and Jewish American families that had children of similar age, but one more adult present as an observer. She found that children listened to rather than participated actively in encyclopedic talk. The proportion of encyclopedic talk was much higher (45%) in Blum-Kulka’s study than in this one. The difference can be due to several factors. Blum-Kulka defined the term somewhat more broadly to include narratives about families’ past events and history in the category. Perhaps due to a strange observer at the dinner table, the Israeli families repeatedly told stories, as Blum-Kulka put it. This kind of storytelling about the past hardly existed in this material. The difference might also be cultural. It is possible that the dinner has more of the function of TABLE 3 Topic Types and Three Cultural Family Groups FinFin Topic Type Setting Self-oriented Other-oriented We-oriented They-oriented Encyclopedic Total

SweFin

SweSwe

N

%

N

%

N

%

73(56) 63(40) 107(91) 13(8) 46(31) 13(9) 315(235)

23.2(23.8) 20.0(17.0) 34.0(38.8) 4.1(3.4) 14.6(13.2) 4.1(3.8)

67(45) 59(36) 87(59) 10(8) 50(34) 15(10) 288(192)

23.3(23.4) 20.4(18.8) 30.2(30.7) 3.5(4.2) 17.4(17.7) 5.2(5.2)

66(45) 84(64) 124(93) 16(13) 61(44) 30(22) 381(281)

17.3(16.0) 22.0(22.8) 32.5(33.1) 4.3(4.6) 16.0(15.7) 7.9(7.8)

Note. FinFin = Finns in Finland; SweFin = Finns in Sweden; SweSwe = Swedes in Sweden. Raw numbers and percentage of topic types with 11 families in each cultural group or with 8 families as indicated in parentheses.


239

being a forum for sociability in Israeli families, whereas the dinner in Nordic countries is still considered to be a physical activity. This might be concluded from the difference in duration. The Israeli dinners lasted on average for 60 to 90 min, whereas the dinners in my study were about 20 min long. The results also revealed, as predicted, that both Finnish groups used local phenomena such dinner, stormy weather, the family’s cat, or the researcher’s camera as topicalizers to a larger extent than the Swedish families (23.2% to 17.3%). The LSD showed a difference between Finnish and Swedish families (p = .032, df = 30), but not between Swedish–Finnish and Swedish families (p = .123, df = 30). The results were similar in two-parent families, with a difference between Finnish and Swedish families (p = .025, df = 21), but no difference between Swedish–Finnish and Swedish families, (p = .103, df = 21). Otherwise, the relatively similar topic type introductions may be explained by the shared intergenerational news-telling activity-type, which allows all participants, also children, to jointly construct dinner talk. Table 4 shows the distribution of which family members initiated topics in each group. In the groups of 8 two-parent families, Swedish target children initiated significantly more topics than the Finnish and Swedish–Finnish target children, F(2, 21) = 3.69, p = .042. In the Swedish families, 23.1% of all initiatives were made by the target children against 11.4% (p = .026, df = 21) in the Swedish–Finnish families and 11.5% (p = .031, df = 21) in Finnish ones. When all the families were included, the target children did not show any overall differences in topic initiation F(2, 30) = 1.61, ns. Neither target children nor siblings differed from each other across the groups. Table 5 shows the distribution of the topic closers in each group. Blum-Kulka (1997) concluded that explicitly marked closings were relatively infrequent in dinner table conversations. Because most topics also suspended by themselves in this study, topic closers were less interesting. TABLE 4 The Distribution of Topic Initiators FinFin Member Mother Father Target child Sibling Total

SweFin

SweSwe

N

%

N

%

N

%

149(117) 53(53) 53(27) 60(38) 315(235)

47.3(49.8) 16.8(22.6) 16.8(11.5) 19.1(16.1)

135(85) 57(57) 41(22) 55(28) 288(192)

46.9(44.3) 19.8(29.7) 14.2(11.4) 19.1(14.6)

180(121) 71(71) 86(65) 44(24) 381(281)

47.2(43.1) 18.6(25.3) 22.6(23.1) 11.6(8.5)

Note. FinFin = Finns in Finland; SweFin = Finns in Sweden; SweSwe = Swedes in Sweden. Raw numbers and percentages of the distribution of topic initiators in 11 families in each cultural group or with 8 families as indicated in parentheses.

240

TRYGGVASON

TABLE 5 The Distribution of Topic Closers FinFin Member Mother Father Target child Sibling Total

SweFin

SweSwe

N

%

N

%

N

%

149(109) 49(49) 75(53) 42(24) 315(235)

47.3(46.3) 15.6(20.9) 23.8(22.6) 13.3(10.2)

139(76) 64(64) 52(35) 33(17) 288(192)

48.3(39.6) 22.2(33.3) 18.1(18.2) 11.4(8.9)

154(114) 70(70) 91(59) 66(38) 381(281)

40.4(40.6) 18.4(24.9) 23.9(21.0) 17.3(13.5)

Note. FinFin = Finns in Finland; SweFin = Finns in Sweden; SweSwe = Swedes in Sweden. Raw numbers and percentages of the distribution of topic initiators in 11 families in each cultural group or with 8 families as indicated in parentheses.

The analysis of the degree of topical activity by each speaker revealed that the role of age (child vs. adult) and gender (mother vs. father) had an effect on the levels of topical contribution. To varying degrees, the adults dominated the talk agenda, performing the majority of topical actions, both as initiators and as closers, in all groups (62% in Swedish families, 64% in Finnish families, and 69% in Swedish–Finnish families). The analysis in Blum-Kulka’s (1997) study showed very similar proportions, from 64% to 68%. As expected, mothers in each group performed most topical actions. The fathers acted quite similarly in the different groups, being more passive than the mothers. The reverse pattern emerged in the Jewish American families Blum-Kulka studied. According to Blum-Kulka, Jewish American dinners are more formal and ritualized than Israeli ones. Therefore, the fathers are assigned a more public role, meaning that they tend to dominate the talk. In addition, perhaps the presence of a strange observer led the Jewish American fathers to behave more formally than usual. The Nordic fathers seemed to consider the family dinners to be private occasions. The dominance of the adults allows us to conclude that the adults, especially the mothers, in this study, were largely responsible for controlling topic organization, as in the studies of Blum-Kulka (1997) and Ochs and Taylor (1995). This was also suggested by Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin (1976), who claimed that “children often collaborate on a discourse topic proposed by an adult” (p. 380). In addition to imbalance in action roles, there was also asymmetry with regard to who was exposed to conversation within the cultures. Children had a protagonist’s role as Ochs and Taylor (1995) named it; that is, in each group, they were subjects of the talk. The findings did not reflect any cultural variations in the sense that over half of the topics raised were child-focused in each group. They were either initiated by the children or addressed to them. Other-oriented topic introductions were the most common kinds of topic introductions in each group (see Table 3). The popularity of other-oriented introductions testified to the news-delivery


241

character and shared history of family conversations. Because they were often made by adults addressing a child, Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin’s (1976) conclusion, “asking questions is a speech behavior more characteristic of adults speaking to children than children speaking to adults, or to each other” (p. 380), was also relevant for the this study. Excerpt 4 is an example of a self-oriented introduction. The target child brings up a new topic about her bicycle ride just before dinner. Although the first word niin ‘well’ in line one serves as a tying word to previous discourse, the rest of the family is not familiar with it from prior conversation, which makes the introduction unanchored. The topic seems to have connection to something in the child’s mind. In line 4, the target child raises the topic from the personal level to a general one, as she wonders why insects do not die when hitting the face as they do when hitting the front of a car. Excerpt 4: FinFin, CHI (10F); SIB (11F) 1 CHI:

2 MOT: 3 CHI: 4 CHI:

5 CHI: %com:

Niin koko ajan kun mina pyöräilin niin tuntui koko ajan ötököitä osui naamaan. ‘Well all the time when I cycled I felt insects hitting my face all the time.’ Self-oriented, unanchored Hm. Niin sitten semmonen kamala ötökkä kävi tuossa. ‘Then such a disgusting insect hit me there [on my face]. ’ Miten ne voi kimmota aina naamasta jonnekin? ‘How can they bounce back from the face to somewhere?’ Encyclopedic, recontextualized Miksi ne ei lätsähä siihen niinkuin aina auton siihen? ‘Why don’t they crush like on a car?’ The topic continues

There were no differences in participation by children across the three groups in relation to other family members, even though the existing literature indicates different notions about Finnish and Swedish child-raising. According a Swedish researcher (Welles-Nyström, 1996), a part of socialization is that children can feel free and equal to participate. As late as in 1999, Daun, Mattlar, and Alanen argued when comparing cultural values by adopting Schwartz’s (1992) universal value list that the Finnish communication pattern is more hierarchical and less democratic than the Swedish one. In addition, they claimed that Finns are not so much concerned about equality as the Swedes. This may be true concerning public communicative behavior, as exemplified by the finding that Finns did not actively take initiatives when communicating with foreigners in multinational working places (Rusanen, 1993). Discursive roles in terms of contributions to topical actions in an informal setting did not manifest any difference between Finnish and Swedish children. Furthermore, children in the three groups practiced conversational norms in a similar way by producing self-initiated topics and responding to other-oriented elicitations by adults to the same extent. The

242

TRYGGVASON

results may provide evidence that, as in Sweden (Ekstrand & Ekstrand, 1985), child-raising attitudes in Finland are changing from parental obedience toward independence and self-direction and a more democratic socialization style (Kiviniemi, 2000). The change in Finland can perhaps also be ascribed to the school where productive skills (such as oral performance and pupil-centered didactic approaches) are nowadays much more emphasized than when the adults of this study went to school (Peruskoulun opetussuunnitelman perusteet, 1994).

DISCUSSION This study of dinner conversations in Finnish, Swedish–Finnish, and Swedish families has identified similarities as well as differences in the ways topics are organized in the three groups. In terms of recontextualized topic introductions and encyclopedic topic introductions, both evoked by a previous topic, Swedes differed significantly from both Finnish groups. Recontextualized Topic Introductions The Swedes performed significantly more recontextualized topic introductions than the Finns. Based on previous research showing that other-regulation is a source of self-regulation (Wertsch, 1979), it is likely that cultural variations in conversational skills are consequences of primary socialization. Children at family dinners also learn about and gain access to the world of cultural discourse through listening to adults and participating in talk. As was shown in a comparative study on 2-year-old Estonian, American, and Swedish children (Junefelt & Tulviste, 1997), Swedish children are encouraged from an early age to participate in family conversation. Swedish mothers regulated verbal behavior in a manner similar to that of American ones. They paid great attention to socializing their children in becoming good conversational partners, whereas Estonian mothers put more value on physical behavior. In addition, Swedish mothers were significantly more talkative than Finnish mothers (Tryggvason, in press; Tulviste, Mizera, De Geer, & Tryggvason, 2003), as shown by the same data set as this study. Our previous study (Tryggvason & De Geer, 2002) also showed that despite talking less, Finns elicited more talk than Swedes. Finnish parents used explicit questions to a higher degree than Swedish ones, whose elicitors could also be indirect like declaratives. That a topic created a new topic without explicitly eliciting it and Swedes stayed longer on a topic (on average 17 utterances per topic in Swedish families against 13 utterances in both Finnish groups) made Swedish talk more progressive and continuous. The previously mentioned factors help us understand why Swedish interlocutors had more flow and progressivity as well as more coherent topic introductions than Finns.


243

Encyclopedic Topic Introductions The Swedes had a significantly higher frequency of encyclopedic topic introductions than the Finns and thus, they reached a more general level of discussion more often than the Finns. In an examination of regulatory comments among Finns, Swedes, and Estonians (Tulviste et al., 2002), it was found that Swedes commented on moral issues significantly more than other groups, whereas Finns (both immigrants in Sweden and Finns in Finland) stressed the importance of obeying table manners. Thus, they gave more attention to behavior in the here and now. Also in this study, Finns tended to use contextual resources like the dinner situation and family members for conversational themes. Like Swedes, the Finns were sociable, and talked and asked about everyday matters, but at a concrete level. They mainly conveyed information about daily life. These findings give support to previous claims mainly based on intuitive perceptions. It has been claimed to be typical of Finns to respect the opinion of other persons, because an opinion is considered to constitute a part of a person’s private self (Sajavaara & Lehtonen, 1997). Foreign interlocutors in Salo-Lee’s (1993) study experienced Finns as communicators who preferred to communicate briefly and present facts, and they avoided revealing their opinions. Finnish avoidance of discussing or arguing was also suggested in a quantitative study on regulatory comments (Tulviste et al., 2002) where regulatory comments were more often negotiated or discussed by Swedes than by Finns, who rather obeyed such comments.

Cross-Cultural Comparison On the whole, the Swedish–Finnish way of organizing topics more resembled the Finnish than the Swedish one, as expected. It is an interesting question how Finnish immigrants have held on to their communicative style in the face of external influences. In the 1960s and 1970s, the immigrant Finns were mainly blue-collar workers of low social class and even the Finnish language had a low status in Sweden. Gradually their social status, and even that of the language has been rising (Finnish, along with four other languages, obtained a minority language status in Sweden in 2000). Some identity researchers (Liebkind, 1989; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994; Virta, 1994) claimed that many Finns in Sweden have developed a functional double identity based on a positive self-concept. On the one hand, Finns seem to be well integrated into the Swedish society, but on the other hand they have signaled strong awareness of their Finnish origin and willingness to preserve this awareness by establishing a broad social network consisting of their own institutions, organizations, weekly magazines, and leisure time activities. The majority of immigrant Finns in Sweden are currently bilingual. On several occasions, Finnish parents have shown their strength in fighting for the rights to bilingual education for their children, due to their belief in bilingualism. Thus, Finnish pupils have

244

TRYGGVASON

had the opportunity to attend bilingual classes in public Swedish schools or they have received mother tongue instruction in Finnish when attending a Swedish class. Because the number of Finnish classes drastically decreased in the late 1980s and private schools were made legally possible in 1990, bilingual language or ethnic schools were established on private Finnish initiatives in the 1990s (eight are now in operation). Other factors, like closeness to the home country and frequent and intimate contacts with fellow countrymen both in Finland and within Sweden, where Finns are the biggest ethnolinguistic minority, have certainly facilitated the maintenance of identity. The similarity of the Swedish–Finnish conversational style to the Finnish one indicates that style does not depend on the immediate context. On the contrary, because Swedish was spoken in 4 of the 11 Swedish–Finnish families, the congruity between the Finnish styles questioned the connection between language and discourse patterns and supported the findings by Clyne (1994), Halle and Shatz (1994) and Blum-Kulka (1997), who stressed the role of culture and socialization over language.

SUMMARY The purpose of this study was to examine topic types, topic shifts, and topical actions in family dinner conversation, interculturally. It was found that “news delivery” topics had a similar frequency: Other-oriented and self-oriented topics occurred to a similar degree in each cultural group. However, the higher frequency of here-and-now-anchored setting topics in Finnish families living in either Finland or in Sweden, and the significantly more frequent encyclopedic introductions in Swedish families raised Swedish talk occasionally to a more general level. Because the latter were usually connected to the preceding topic, they made Swedish talk more coherent on average. Significantly more recontextualized topic shifts in Swedish talk also bolstered coherence. The analysis suggested that pauses and topicalization may be causally connected. In these conversations, discontinuous talk was characterized by topics related to the immediate context. Topics triggered by the situation seemed to be more difficult to expand to a coherent discourse. Regardless of the cultural context, the discourse roles were unequally distributed. Adults, particularly mothers, took the responsibility for leading and constructing the organizational structure of the conversations. In terms of topical actions, children behaved similarly across the groups. These findings were derived from a monocultural natural speech event, but they suggest that Finns and Swedes may use different pragmatic skills when meeting each other in an intercultural context. The Swedish school system is an example of such a context. Because school is a marked encyclopedic context, Finnish immigrant children might experience an asymmetrical relationship to their Swedish


245

schoolmates as to the use of context-independent topics. Finnish children might have difficulties taking turns in the classroom dialogue because of the faster speech rate and shorter interturn pauses common among Swedes. For this reason, it would be of considerable interest to follow up this investigation of dinner conversations with studies on classrooms with both Finnish and Swedish students because understanding cultural differences in communication style may be helpful in mixed classrooms.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research for this article was supported by Grants 3101A and 31103 from the Baltic Foundation in Sweden. I thank Dr. Boel De Geer who collected and transcribed the Swedish material, Professor Lennart Hellspong at Södertörn University College for his excellent comments, and Per Näsman at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm for statistical analyses.

REFERENCES Beals, D., & Snow, C. E. (1994). “Thunder is when the angels are upstairs bowling”: Narratives and explanation at the dinner table. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 4, 331–352. Bergmann, J. R. (1990). On the local sensitivity of conversation. In I. Markova & K. Foppa (Eds.), The dynamics of dialogue (pp. 201–226). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Blum-Kulka, S. (1997). Dinner talk. Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Blum-Kulka, S., & Snow, C. E. (1992). Developing autonomy for tellers, tales, and telling in family narrative events. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 2, 187–217. Brown, G., & Yule, G. (1983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Bublitz, W. (1988). Supportive fellow-speakers and cooperative conversations: Discourse topics and topical actions, participant roles and ‘recipient action’in a particular type of everyday conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Clyne, M. (1994). Inter-cultural communication at work: Cultural values in discourse. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Daun, A. (1998). Svensk mentalitet: ett jämförande perspektiv [Swedish mentality: A comparative perspective]. Stockholm: Rabén Prisma. Daun, A. (1999). It’s rude to interrupt! Swedish communication style. In A. Daun & S. Jansson (Eds.), Europeans. Essays on culture and identity (pp. 15–24). Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press. Daun, A., Mattlar, C. -E., & Alanen, E. (1999). What about the Finns? Personality and national culture. In A. Daun & S. Jansson (Eds.), Europeans. Essays on culture and identity (pp. 193–203). Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press. Daun, A., Verkasalo, M., & Tuomivaara, P. (2001). Stereotypes among Finns in Sweden. Ethnologia Europaea, 31, 55–62.

246

TRYGGVASON

De Geer, B., Tulviste, T., Mizera, L., & Tryggvason, M. -T. (2002). Socialization in communication: Pragmatic socialization during dinnertime in Estonian, Finnish and Swedish families. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1757–1786. Ekstrand, G., & Ekstrand, L. H. (1985). Patterns of socialization in different cultures: The cases of Sweden and India. In R. Diaz-Guerrero (Ed.), Cross-cultural and national studies in social psychology. Selected papers from the 23rd International Congress of Psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 225–244). Amsterdam: North-Holland. Erickson, F. (1990). The social construction of discourse coherence in a family dinner table conversation. In B. Dorval (Ed.), Conversation organization and its development (pp. 207–239). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Foppa, K. (1990). Topic progression and intention. In I. Markova & K. Foppa (Eds.), The dynamics of dialogue (pp. 225–244). Hemel Hempstead, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters. Two studies in the sociology of interaction. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill. Grøver Aukrust, V., & Snow, C. E. (1998). Narratives and explanations during mealtime conversations in Norway and the U.S. Language in Society, 27, 221–246. Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Halle, T., & Shatz, M. (1994). Mothers’ social regulatory language to young children in family settings. First Language, 14, 83–104. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations of sociolinguistics. An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Junefelt, K., & Tulviste, T. (1997). Regulation and praise in American, Estonian, and Swedish mother–child interaction. Mind, Culture and Activity, 4, 24–33. Kiviniemi, K. (2000). Opettajan työtodellisuus haasteena opettajankoulutukselle [The teacher’s work reality as a challenge to teacher education]. Opetushallitus. Helsinki, Finland: Hakapaino Oy. Laine-Sveiby, K. (1991). Företag i kulturmöten. Tre finländska företag och deras svenska dotterbolag. En etnologisk studie [Companies in intercultural meetings. Three Finnish companies and their affiliated Swedidh companies]. Edsbruk, Sweden: Akademitryck AB. Liebkind, K. (1989). Patterns of identification amongst Finns in Sweden. In K. Liebkind (Ed.), New identities in Europe. Immigrant ancestry and the ethnic identity of youth (pp. 116–139). Aldershot, England: Billing & Sons Ltd. Worcester. Linell, P., & Gustavsson, L. (1987). Initiativ och respons. Om dialogens dynamik, dominans och koherens [Initiative and response. On dynamics, dominance and coherence of the dialogue]. SIC 15. Linköping, Sweden: University of Linköping. Linell, P., & Korolija, N. (1997). Coherence in multi-party conversation: Episodes and contexts in interaction. In T. Givón (Ed.), Conversation, cognitive, communicative and social perspectives (pp. 167–206). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. MacWhinney, B. (1991). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Maynard, D. (1980). Placement of topic changes in conversation. Semiotica, 30, 263–290. Maynard, D., & Zimmerman, D. (1984). Topical talk, ritual and the social organization of relationships. Social Psychology Quarterly, 47, 301–316. Mey, J. L. (1993). Pragmatics. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Ochs, E., & Taylor, C. (1995). The “father knows best” dynamic in dinnertime narratives. In K. Hall & M. Bucholtz (Eds.), Gender articulated language and the socially constructed self (pp. 97–120). New York: Routledge. Ochs, E., Taylor, C., Rudolph, D., & Smith, R. (1992). Storytelling as a theory-building activity. Discourse Processes, 15, 37–72.


247

Ochs Keenan, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1976). Topic as a discourse notion: A study of topic in the conversation of children and adults. In C. Li & S. Thompson (Eds.), Subject and topic (pp. 336–384). New York: Academic Press. Peruskoulun opetussuunnitelman perusteet [Framework curriculum for the comprehensive school, Finland]. (1994). Helsinki, Finland: Painatuskeskus. Romaine, R. (1984). The language of children and adolescents: The acquisition of communicative competence. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Rusanen, S. (1993). Suomalainen kansainvälisessä viestintätilanteessa [A Finn as a member of an international workplace]. In J. Lehtonen (Ed.), Kulttuurien kohtaaminen [Meeting of cultures] (pp. 31–76). Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskyla, Publications of the Department of Communication 9. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 695–737. Sajavaara, K., & Lehtonen, J. (1997). The silent Finn revisited. In A. Jaworski (Ed.), Silence. Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 263–283). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sallinen-Kuparinen, A., McCroskey, J. C., & Richmond, V. P. (1991). Willingness to communicate, communication apprehension, introversion, and self-reported communication competence: Finnish and American comparisons. Communication Research Reports, 8, 55–64. Salo-Lee, L. (1993). “Teillä on kaunis nappi”—Small talk: tyhjänpuhumista vai mielekästä viestintää? [“You have a nice button”—Small talk: Talk without content or meaningful communication]. In J. Lehtonen (Ed.), Kulttuurien kohtaaminen [Meeting of cultures] (pp. 77–90). Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä, Publications of the Department of Communication 9. Schegloff, E. A. (1990). On the organization of sequences as a source of “coherence” in talk-in-interaction. In B. Dorval (Ed.), Conversational organization and its development (pp. 51–77). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1974). Opening up closings. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology: Selected readings. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Schwartz, S. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 25). New York: Academic Press. Scollon, R., & Scollon S. W. (1981). Narrative, literacy and face in interethnic communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Sinclair, J., & Coulthard, R. M. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse: The English used by teachers and pupils. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1994). Sverigefinnar förhandlar om etnisk identitet [ Finns living in Sweden negotiate ethnic identity]. In M. Peura & T. Skutnabb-Kangas (Eds.), Man kan väl vara tvåländare också [One can also be bicitizen] (pp. 98–128). Stockholm: Sverigefinländarnas arkiv. Svennevig, J. (1999). Getting acquainted in conversation. A study of initial interactions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tryggvason, M. -T. (in press). Communicative behavior in family conversation. Comparison of amount of talk in Finnish, SwedishFinnish and Swedish families. Journal of Pragmatics. Tryggvason, M. -T., & De Geer, B. (2002). Eliciting talk as language socialization in Finnish, SwedishFinnish and Swedish families: A look at syntactic structures. Multilingua, 21, 345–369. Tulviste, T. (2000). Socialization at meals. A comparison of American and Estonian mother-adolescent interaction. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 31, 537–556. Tulviste, T., Mizera, L., De Geer, B., & Tryggvason, M. -T. (2002). Regulatory comments as tools of family socialization: A comparison of Estonian, Swedish and Finnish mealtime interaction. Language in Society, 31, 655–677. Tulviste, T., Mizera, L., De Geer, B., & Tryggvason, M. -T. (2003). A silent Finn, a silent Finno-Ugric, or a silent Nordic? A comparative study of Estonian, Finnish and Swedish mother-adolescent Interactions. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(2), 249–265.

248

TRYGGVASON

Watts, R. J. (1997). Silence and the acquisition of status in verbal interaction. In A. Jaworski (Ed.), Silence. Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 87–116). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Welles-Nyström, B. (1996). Scenes from a marriage: Equality ideology in Swedish family policy, maternal ethnotheories, and practice. In S. Harkness & C. M. Super (Eds.), Parents’ cultural belief systems: Their origins, expressions, and consequences (pp. 192–214). New York: Guilford. Wertsch, J. (1979). From social interaction to higher psychological processes: A clarification and application of Vygotsky’s theory. Human Development, 22, 1–22. Wertsch, J. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. van Dijk, T. (1977). Text and context: Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. London: Longman. Virta, E. (1994). Tvåspråkighet, tÄnkande och identitet. Studier av finska barn i Sverige och i Finland [Bilingualism, thinking and identity. Studies on Finnish children in Sweden and Finland]. Stockholm: Stockholm University, the Department of Psychology. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.