This book integrates theories of intertextuality and framing in order to explore the role of repetition in everyday family interaction. Specifically, it investigates how and why family members repeat words, phrases, paralinguistic features, and speech acts previously produced in conversation by other family members. The book presents a case‐study analysis of the discourse of three dual‐income American families who recorded their own conversations over the course of one week; this unique data set enables analysis of repetition both within and across family conversations. Using the perspective o ... More

This book integrates theories of intertextuality and framing in order to explore the role of repetition in everyday family interaction. Specifically, it investigates how and why family members repeat words, phrases, paralinguistic features, and speech acts previously produced in conversation by other family members. The book presents a case‐study analysis of the discourse of three dual‐income American families who recorded their own conversations over the course of one week; this unique data set enables analysis of repetition both within and across family conversations. Using the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics and drawing on theories from linguistics, communication, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, the book's chapters collectively demonstrate how repetition serves as a crucial means of creating the complex, shared meanings that give each family its distinctive identity. The book thus uncovers how repetition in everyday talk serves as a resource for creating a family's private language or familylect, for constructing families as small‐group cultures, and for layering and negotiating meanings. In so doing, it puts forth the argument that intertextuality and framing, two powerful notions that have been applied widely (and largely independently) across disciplines, are best understood as fundamentally interconnected. The book also engages with intertextuality as both a theory and a methodological approach.