ABSTRACT
Children’s folklore concerns are much more extensive than have been dealt with in folklore research. Indeed most of the chapters that follow in this central section of the Sourcebook are about some form of speech play, whether rhymes, songs, riddles, teases, or tales. This focus on speech play has its source in the predominant influence of the “ethnography of speaking” in folklore research during the past twenty years. Increasingly in those years folklorists have become interested in the social basis of human communication in how individuals actually communicate at particular times and places and in particular groups. Within folklore the leading scholars who have had the greatest influence, direct or indirect, upon the chapters that follow are Dell Hymes (1969), Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (1974) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. In particular, Speech Play by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, (1976b) with its bibliographic survey of children’s play, word play, nursery lore, nonsense and limericks, play languages, numbers, letters, mnemonics and counting-out rhymes, names, humor, joking relationships and interaction, verbal contests, obscenity, proverbs and speech metaphor, riddles, and narrative and audio-visual resources, is the essential forerunner and complement to the present volume. A central position must be given also to John McDowell’s Children’s Riddling (1979), which is unique in establishing the viability of research on a particular genre of a particular children’s group. With only recent exceptions (L. Hughes 1983; Beresin 1993), most researchers of childhood consider the notion of dissertation work on, say, the jump rope of one group of players, or hopscotch, or jacks of a specific group too trivial to be worth considering. McDowell’s Children’s Riddling, and Hughes’s and Beresin’s work in the present volume, exposes the scholarly shallowness of that adultcentric attitude.
