ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, various methods that young children deploy in pursuing a response to their initial assessment if no response is immediately forthcoming were described and discussed. In this chapter, I will be analyzing extracts in which parents respond to their children’s assessments with an agreement. I will first present preliminary observations on the frequency and the sequential/formal organization of parents’ agreements and discuss these preliminary observations— in particular, the fact that weak and delayed agreements are recurrently used— in light of the existing literature regarding adults’ organization of assessment sequences and their orientation toward the preference for agreeing responses over disagreeing ones. The discussion of these preliminary observations makes apparent that parents’ agreements present structural/formal traits that are different from those observed in research covering the preferred way in which adults produce an agreement following an initial assessment. In the second part of this chapter, I will therefore investigate the implications that parents’ use of different types of agreements have on what follows in the interaction. Taking into account the actions children achieve with their initial assessments and the embodied resources participants deploy to organize the sequences of interaction initiated in this way, this second part aims to determine the perspectives of the participants, which is to say the relevance and meaning that the children and parents themselves respectively attribute to the different types of agreements formulated by the parents.
