Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!: Object requests, ownership and entitlement in a children's play session

Abstract

The exchange of objects is a ubiquitous feature of children's play. Yet we know little about how children choose amongst the plethora of strategies at their disposal for getting and maintaining control of objects in the play space. In the present study, the methods of conversation analysis are applied to reveal Aboriginal children in remote Central Australia relying heavily on two ‘toy getting’ strategies: ‘gimme’ requests and grabs. Both strategies carry with them an expectation of compliance. The analysis will reveal that in the play session, this expectation of compliance arises from two situational factors: who owns the toy at the time of the request, and the request-maker's ‘entitlement’ to have the toy. The former can be signalled by various in-turn design features such as assertions of ownership, possessive pronouns and a range of justifications which point to various ownership rights. Entitlement is justified with explicit or tacit reference to ‘rules of the game’.