“What does curious even mean do you know?”: Orientations to word meanings in family interactions

Abstract In family interactions, children's proper language use often becomes the focus of conversation. Drawing on a primary corpus of nearly 31 h of video recordings of family interactions from 20 families with at least one child between 3 and 6 years of age, this article uses the methodology of conversation analysis to examine how parents and children orient to issues of word meanings. Findings indicate that family members display a K− epistemic stance towards word meanings through repair and candidate understandings, and accomplish other actions by displaying a K+ epistemic stance towards word meanings. This study shows how these orientations to word meanings are not always didactic in nature, but simply part of everyday family life.