Breaking in and spinning out: Repetition and decalibration in Thai children’s play genres

Children’s humorous play is a cultural activity with its own particular aesthetic – an aesthetic in which highly creative, incongruent, and unexpected speech and action are valorized, appreciated, and rewarded. Drawing on Bauman’s concept of calibration, the adjustments by which speakers align their intertextual utterances to new contexts and purposes, this paper argues that an aesthetic of decalibration is at work in children’s metalinguistic...