As children are learning to become competent members of their society, so also are they learning to become competent speakers of their language. In other words socialisation and language acquisition take place at the same time in a child's experience. In this book, Elinor Ochs explores the complex interaction of these two processes. Focusing in particular on the experiences of children in Samoa, Ochs examines both the cognitive and socio-cultural dimensions of children's language development. She shows that language competence includes not only knowledge of grammatical principles and sentence construction but also knowledge of the norms that link language to social and cognitive context; and that local social and cultural systems as well as children's individual psychological and biological capacities, organise their understanding and production of particular language constructions. This innovative study will appeal widely to anthropologists, developmental psychologists, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, communication specialists and educationists interested in child development and caregiver-child communication.

Culture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan Village (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, Series Number 6)

Reference

Ochs, Elinor

Language Study & Reference

Cambridge University Press

Parenting & Relationships

This pathbreaking book looks at everyday storytelling as a twofold phenomenon--a response to our desire for coherence, but also to our need to probe and acknowledge the enigmatic aspects of experience. Letting us listen in on dinner-table conversation, prayer, and gossip, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps develop a way of understanding the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday narrative--as a genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities. 
 Focusing on the ways in which narrative is co-constructed, and on the variety of moral stances embodied in conversation, the authors draw out the instructive inconsistencies of these collaborative narratives, whose contents and ordering are subject to dispute, flux, and discovery. In an eloquent last chapter, written as Capps was waging her final battle with cancer, they turn to "unfinished narratives," those stories that will never have a comprehensible end. With a hybrid perspective--part humanities, part social science--their book captures these complexities and fathoms the intricate and potent narratives that live within and among us.

Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Capps, Lisa

Psychology & Counseling

Harvard University Press

This pathbreaking book looks at everyday storytelling as a twofold phenomenon--a response to our desire for coherence, but also to our need to probe and acknowledge the enigmatic aspects of experience. Letting us listen in on dinner-table conversation, prayer, and gossip, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps develop a way of understanding the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday narrative--as a genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities.
Focusing on the ways in which narrative is co-constructed, and on the variety of moral stances embodied in conversation, the authors draw out the instructive inconsistencies of these collaborative narratives, whose contents and ordering are subject to dispute, flux, and discovery. In an eloquent last chapter, written as Capps was waging her final battle with cancer, they turn to "unfinished narratives," those stories that will never have a comprehensible end. With a hybrid perspective--part humanities, part social science--their book captures these complexities and fathoms the intricate and potent narratives that live within and among us.

Literature & Fiction

Meg Logan has not been farther than two miles from home in six years. She has agoraphobia, a debilitating anxiety disorder that entraps its sufferers in the fear of leaving safe havens such as home. Paradoxically, while at this safe haven, agoraphobics spend much of their time ruminating over past panic experiences and imagining similar hypothetical situations. In doing so, they create a narrative that both describes their experience and locks them into it. 
 Constructing Panic offers an unprecedented analysis of one patient's experience of agoraphobia. In this novel interdisciplinary collaboration between a clinical psychologist and a linguist, the authors probe Meg's stories for constructions of emotions, actions, and events. They illustrate how Meg uses grammar and narrative structure to create and recreate emotional experiences that maintain her agoraphobic identity. 
 In this work Capps and Ochs propose a startling new view of agoraphobia as a communicative disorder. Constructing Panic opens up the largely overlooked potential for linguistic and narrative analysis by revealing the roots of panic and by offering a unique framework for therapeutic intervention. Readers will find in these pages hope for managing panic through careful attention to how we tell the story of our lives.

Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia

Religion & Spirituality

Examines how children and adults use language to perform a variety of informational, social and poetic functions - to introduce, sustain and elaborate topics, to provide relevant responses and to play.

Acquiring Conversational Competence (International Library of Psychology)

Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd

Acquiring conversational competence (RLE: Discourse Analysis)

First published in 1983, this book represents a substantial body of detailed research on children’s language and communication, and more generally on the nature of interactive spoken discourse. It looks at areas of competence often examined in young children’s speech have that have not been described for adults ― leading to insights not only in the character of adult conversation but also the process of acquiring this competence. The authors set forward strategies for conversing at different stage of life, while also relating these strategies to, and formulating hypotheses concerning, the dynamics of language variation and change.

Schieffelin, Bambi B.

Routledge

Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award 
Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize
Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home.
Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.

Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors

Arts & Photography

Arnold, Jeanne E.

Graesch, Anthony P.

Ragazzini, Enzo

Photography & Video

The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ochs, Elinor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ochs, Elinor