Reported Voices and Evaluation

Abstract

One of the things that first struck me when I listened to the tapes I collected was how frequently children quoted and reported other people’s voices. In the course of relating an experience, arguing a point or giving an explanation they frequently reproduced the words of parents, teachers, friends and other people in their lives. Why is this kind of recreated dialogue, like Michelle’s quoting of the boy’s voice in the example above, such a ubiquitous feature in the children’s talk? What does reproducing a voice accomplish that a straight account would not? In this chapter I begin to answer these questions by focussing on examples in children’s talk where the reported voice is fairly clearly marked as separate from the speaker’s own.¹ In Chapters 5 and 6, I look at the animation and orchestration of reproduced voices by children within their anecdotes and stories and, in Chapter 7, I move on to examine examples from their talk where the boundaries between the speaker and the voices they are reproducing are less clear-cut and other voices appear to merge with the children’s own. These four chapters provide the heart of my argument about the crucial role of reported and appropriated voices in the evaluative processes in children’s talk.

In real life we hear speech about speakers and their discourse at every step … people talk most of all about what others talk about — they transmit, recall, weigh and pass judgement on other people’s words, opinions, assertions, information.

(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 338)