Thanks for mentioning Holly Giffin's chapter in the Bretherton (1984)
volume. I liked it so much that I ordered her dissertation, which is
also great. Giffin's work is important because she is one of the first
to argue that children use in-character, implicit play strategies to
metacommunicate about the play frame. These are dialogic strategies
because they combine the play character's voice with the narrator's, or
director's voice.
My explorations of metacommunication/metapragmatics as both implicit and
explicit, both in-character and out-of-character, is an
extension and elaboration of these ideas.
Do you know of any more recent work by Giffin? I have not found any in
my general lit searches.
Keith Sawyer
Department of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064