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This article investigates children's procedures for constructing oppositional stances in argumentative exchanges. While most previous research on children's arguments entails a monolingual bias, the present analysis focuses on bilingual practices of code-switching in disputes emerging during play activities. Drawing on more than ten hours of video-taped play interaction in a bilingual school setting, it is shown how the language contrast arising through code-switching displays and highlights the affective intensity of oppositional stances. Sequential analyses show how code-switching works to escalate social opposition, often to the peak of an argument, resulting in subsequent back down or full termination of the dispute. Moreover, in certain participant constellations code-switching may be used to constrain opponents' opportunities to engage in further adversative interaction. Finally, it is argued that an approach to play discourse concerned with children's methods for accomplishing accountable actions allows for a view of bilingualism as socially distributed; that is, as an emergent and interactionally managed feature of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Goffman's classic paper (1979), bilingual code-switching was seen as a prototypical device for accomplishing shifts in footing. Yet his work has not informed research on code-switching to any great extent. The present study of primary school children's play interaction in an English-Swedish school setting combines a sequential approach to code-switching with an analysis of footing (cf. Auer 1984), extending prior work in showing that code-switches often involve subtle shifts of footing, both in terms of production formats and participation frameworks. Code-switches were employed as important rhetorical and dramaturgic play devices, e.g. when contextualizing changes of addressee and shifts of frame (e.g. serious, nonserious). In contrast to earlier, often speaker-centered work, reception is discussed in-depth in the present analyses, and it is shown that footings are truly interactional achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]