he‐said‐she‐said: formal cultural procedures for the construction of a gossip dispute activity

Abstract

Formal cultural procedures utilized by urban black female children to construct a type of gossip dispute they call “he‐said‐she‐said” are analyzed. The procedures employed to construct opening accusations produce utterances with a characteristic syntactic structure as well as a field of activity constituted through particular types of events, actions, and identities for the participants and rules for sequencing these phenomena through time. These procedures thus generate not only linguistic structures but also social configurations and cultural events, [conversation analysis, social organization, ethnography of communication, legal anthropology, Black English Vernacular]