saturated environment.13 Our first type of example comes from our own data concerning
Zulu infants of between three and four months of age interacting with their mothers, and
suggests an answer to this question.
Thula! (or Shhhhhhh)
As noted above, there are times when a caregiver will want an infant to fall silent, or in
isiZulu to ‘thula’. Zulu children are traditionally expected to be less socially active than
contemporary Western children, to initiate fewer interactions, and, crucially, to show a
respectful attitude towards adults. An early manifestation of this is in behaviours where a
mother attempts to make an infant keep quiet, sometimes saying ‘thula’ (‘quiet’), ‘njega’
(‘no’), while simultaneously gesturing, moving towards or away from the infant, and
reacting to details of the infants’ own behaviour (see Cowley et al., in press).
At these times the mother regularly leans forward, so that more of the infants visual field
is taken up by her face and palms. New vocalisations, and movements or re-orientations
of gaze by the infant are often ‘nipped in the bud’ by dominating vocalisations
(sometimes showing prosodic properties indicative of disapproval, comforting, attention
and/or arousal towards the mother herself) from the mother, sometimes accompanied by
increasingly emphatic hand-waving, and even closer crowding of the infant’ s visual field.
While there are distinctive, repeated, elements in many of these episodes, it is important
to note that significant portions of the interaction are usually constituted by ‘inter-
subjective downtime’ where levels of joint co-ordination are low, and that the interactive
‘game’ being played is characterised by extreme flexibility, manifest in the availability
of different routes to a number of acceptable (to the mother) goal states. There are no
simple regularities here where infant distress leads to comforting vocalisations, in turn
leading to reduced distress. Rather one sees a rapid alternation of different strategies -
comfortings, calls for attention, expressions of disapproval, with, usually, an overall
convergence on a parental goal state in which the infant is quiet. Although it is common
to draw on analogies with dancing to describe these interactions, as Stern (1977) noted,
boxing also makes an appropriate comparison. Boxers spend a lot of time feinting and
otherwise exploring different possible lines of attack, at the same time detecting and
closing off their opponent’ s explorations. Actual punches thrown, let alone landed, form
a small sub-set of a larger number of candidate blows which never make it beyond a
slight shifting of weight, or re-orientation of the body.
In spite of this, since our third example below (‘Oeu!’) makes detailed reference to
contingent details of interaction on the fly, for the present we focus specifically on the
repeated and strikingly salient aspects of the episodes. With high regularity, and within
relatively little time, the particular infant often does ‘thula’, at which point it is generally
rewarded with smiling, gentle touching, and other comforting.
At this stage there is no reason to believe that the infant knows what ‘thula’ or ‘njega’
means, or even that it could reliably re-identify the words, let alone produce or
contemplate them, so it is extremely unlikely that the word-based aspects of maternal
utterance-activity provide labels for the infant. We are considering infants before the
stage linguists call ‘babbling’, let alone recognisable speech production. It is not even
necessary to suppose that it ‘knows’ that it is supposed to be quiet when behaved at in
the ways we have just described. We know that the mother wants the child to be quiet,
that this expresses itself in behaviour by the mother, and that the infant comes to be
quiet.
If we examine the mother’ s behaviour, though, we can make sense of it. She ensures that
it is difficult for the infant to attend to anything else by crowding its visual field. She
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