ABSTRACT
The topic of this chapter is the use of language features that are closely associated with one phase of the lifespan by speakers who belong, object ively, to a different one. In the previous chapter, I illustrated how 8-and 9year-olds draw on the ways adults often speak to children, and reported that they did this both when adopting adult roles in play and when talking ‘down’ to pets and younger children. I also noted that there is rarely a status advant age to be gained by playing ‘the baby’ in fantasy games, but the use of baby talk occasionally has its place. For example, 9-year-old Emma adopted the intonation of a much younger child in one interaction in the school play ground, as she admired her friend’s ‘easter bonnet’ with its decoration of daffodils. She also phrased her remark with an object pronoun in subject position, as beginning speakers sometimes do: ‘oh it’s pretty. . . me want it.’ Maybin (1996: 45) discusses how one of the 10-year-old girls she studied ‘announced “Me got this little dog to swap”’, and Maybin links this baby talk, in context, with ‘the cuteness and vulnerability of the dog’. The same girl uses ‘a high pitched baby’s voice’ when reporting to a friend her younger sister’s request to ‘bowwow’ [i.e. ‘borrow’] a rubber. Maybin reviews some potential evaluations of the younger sister’s behaviour ‘as stupid, annoying, or cute and naive’; in fact the friend responds, ‘Ah, isn’t that sweet!’ This example is quite clearly located in the reported speech of a specific other speaker (Julie’s younger sister), but the two previous examples are more in the category of quoting from the language resources at large, where drawing on the way a younger child might have made the utterance seems somehow
appropriate. In the sections which follow, I shall consider the contexts within which adults, as well as older children, may use various childly language resources, and those within which adults may find themselves addressed in ways usually associated with child addressees, drawing on data from literat ure written for adults and an elicitation survey I carried out among 40 adult speakers of English.
