Speech Play

Speech play transforms the verbal routines of ordinary discourse into derivative routines savored for their distinctive phonological and semantic patterning. It draws on latencies within the linguistic code, such as the phonetic resemblance of certain phonemes or the coincidence of two meanings on a single phonetic unit, to create palpable layers of verbal patterning tending to draw attention to speech itself as a medium of communication. Speech play may be as slight as a reduplicated syllable or as systematic as an epic poem built on an invariant rhyme and metric scheme. When its devices are institutionalized, speech play becomes verbal art or verbal game. These exhibit normative procedures themselves vulnerable to transformation through the subversive tendencies of speech play.

The child's involvement in speech play begins in infancy. Early cooing and babbling stages allow the infant to experiment with the production and combination of sounds. Mother and child often work out elaborate phonetic exchanges encouraging the child to explore and augment incipient verbal capacities. Stimulated by the attention of caretakers and by the enveloping acoustic environment, the infant gleefully produces large inventories of sounds, gradually settling on those particular sounds and combinations of sounds that are significant in the local speech ecology.

The young child's investment in speech play is passionate and total. Early forms betray a strong emphasis on sound to the virtual exclusion of sense, but by the age of seven the child insists on some level of semantic integrity in speech play that may still be largely determined by phonological considerations. The speech play of the four-to eleven year-old child is increasingly manifested in the conventional folkloric genres such as riddles, stories, jokes, and insults, though unincorporated forms of speech play continue to occur.

The teenager continues to play with speech, maintaining a delight in the creation of striking phonetic patterns, but also producing acute parodies of ordinary discourse routines. Our involvement in speech play transcends the period of childhood; as adults we participate in joking sessions, religious ritual, and literary experiences all founded on the essential transformational properties of speech play.

Children's speech play is a fragile thing and rarely survives transplantation out of its natural environment, the juvenile peer group. Those who would harken to the genuine sound of speech play among children must find ways of approaching and entering into the banter of peer-group interaction. One basic safeguard entails attending to groups of children on their native turf rather than to a single child isolated in some academic Laboratory. The presence of the adult colLector is initially disrupting, but if the peer group survives this initial impact, it may eventually regain much of its authenticity as the children return to their own business and pay increasingly less heed to their adult observer. The native fragility of children's speech play also requires that special measures be taken if it is to be introduced into the school classroom.

The essential research tool for those interested in children's speech play is the volume edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Speech Play: Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Creativity.¹ This volume contains an outstanding bibliography on the subject, as well as seminal articles by the editor and Mary Sanches,² and by Brian Sutton-Smith on riddles.³ Early research that continues to be of interest includes Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,⁴ and Martha Wolfenstein's Children's Humor.⁵ Each of these works contains a highly valuable account of the techniques of speech play and their developmental disposition.

The broad theoretical perspective on speech play can be obtained through consultation of Roman Jakobson's Closing Statement: "Linguistics and Poetics"⁶ and two articles by Jan Mukarovsky published in English translation in the Garvin reader.⁷ While these articles do not deal explicitly with children's speech play (except in occasional passages), they provide an excellent theoretical handle on verbal creativity which can readily be applied to the speech play of children.

Most of my own work in the area of children's speech play has been centered on children's riddling,⁸ and...