Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2019
We address competing perspectives on how social-indexical meaning is learned in language, using d... more We address competing perspectives on how social-indexical meaning is learned in language, using data from artificial language learning experiments and two studies in small-scale societies. Our results indicate that learning social-indexical meaning is primarily allocentric as opposed to egocentric: speaker success in learning a social-indexical meaning pattern depends on overall exposure to the pattern more than the pat-tern's relative importance to the speaker. We base these claims on data from American English-speaking adults, Datooga-speaking children, as well as adults and children speaking Murrinhpatha. The results highlight the importance of widening the sample of methods and data sources in studying how variation in language is learned and maintained.
Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments, 2020
This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Murrinhpatha use when recruiting assistance... more This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Murrinhpatha use when recruiting assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Mur-rinpatha, and reports language-specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project (see Chapter 2 of the volume). This chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of Murrinhpatha with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction. The chapter is a contribution to an emerging field of pragmatic typology.
This article investigates how children learn an infinitely expanding 'universal' system of classi... more This article investigates how children learn an infinitely expanding 'universal' system of classi-ficatory kinship terms. We report on a series of experiments designed to elicit acquisitional data on (i) nominal kinterms and (ii) sibling-inflected polysynthetic morphology in the Australian language Murrinhpatha. Photographs of the participants' own relatives are used as stimuli to assess knowledge of kinterms, kin-based grammatical contrasts, and kinship principles, across different age groups. The results show that genealogically distant kin are more difficult to classify than close kin, that children's comprehension and production of kinterms are streamlined by abstract merging principles, and that sibling-inflection is learned in tandem with number and person marking in the verbal morphology, although it is not fully mastered until mid to late childhood. We discuss how the unlimited nature of Australian kinship systems presents unusual challenges to the language learner, but suggest that, as everywhere, patterns of language acquisition are closely intertwined with children's experience of their sociocultural environment.*
Proceedings of Speaking of Location 2019: Communicating about Space, 2019
Australian languages are widely believed to exemplify abstract spatial conceptual systems, manife... more Australian languages are widely believed to exemplify abstract spatial conceptual systems, manifest as cardinal terms. In fact, Australian languages typically make heavy use of terms invoking local environmental features. We report on research investigating correlations between linguistic spatial systems and topography, and the role of socio-cultural factors in individual variation in spatial referential strategy choices. Acknowledgements We are grateful for the comments of three anonymous reviewers and to Mark Harvey and Nick Reid for discussions on Wagiman and Ngan'gityemerri. Any errors remain ours.
Building on earlier Conversation Analytic work on turn-taking and response mobilization, we use v... more Building on earlier Conversation Analytic work on turn-taking and response mobilization, we use video-recorded multiparty conversations to consider in detail how Australian Aboriginal participants in conversation select a next speaker in turns that are grammatically designed as questions. We focus in particular on the role of a range of embodied behaviors, such as gaze direction, body orientation, and pointing, to select—or avoid selecting—a next speaker. We use data from four remote Aboriginal communities to also explore the claims from ethnographic research that Aboriginal conversa- tions typically occur in nonfocused participation frames. Data are in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa, Gija, and Jaru with English translations.
Rather than using abstract directionals, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinhpa... more Rather than using abstract directionals, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinhpatha make reference to locations of interest using named landmarks, demonstratives and pointing. Building on a culturally prescribed avoidance for certain placenames, this study reports on the use of demonstratives, pointing and landmarks for direction giving. Whether or not pointing will be used, and which demonstratives will be selected is determined partly by the relative epistemic incline between interlocutors and partly by whether information about a location is being sought or being provided. The reliance on pointing for the representation of spatial vectors requires a construal of language that includes the visuo-corporal modality.
There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if the... more There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of ‘other-initiated repair’, where the recipient of an unclear message can signal trouble and the sender can repair the original message. We find that this system is frequently used (on average about once per 1.4 minutes in any language), and that it has detailed common properties, contrary to assumptions of radical cultural variation. Unrelated languages share the same three functionally distinct types of repair initiator for signalling problems and use them in the same kinds of contexts. People prefer to choose the type that is the most specific possible, a principle that minimizes cost both for the sender being asked to fix the problem and for the dyad as a social unit. Disruption to the conversation is kept to a minimum, with the two-utterance repair sequence being on average no longer that the single utterance which is being fixed. The findings, controlled for historical relationships, situation types and other dependencies, reveal the fundamentally cooperative nature of human communication and offer support for the pragmatic universals hypothesis: while languages may vary in the organization of grammar and meaning, key systems of language use may be largely similar across cultural groups. They also provide a fresh perspective on controversies about the core properties of language, by revealing a common infrastructure for social interaction which may be the universal bedrock upon which linguistic diversity rests.
By initiating repair on an interlocutor’s prior turn, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal langu... more By initiating repair on an interlocutor’s prior turn, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinh- Patha seek to manage slips in intersubjectivity. The various formats for Other-Initiated Repair (OIR) act as pointers to likely trouble sources and possible trouble types. These trouble types might relate to audibility, speech production, or, with understanding what has been articulated. Some OIR formats are quite specialized whereas other formats are more versatile. Whatever the repair initiator (RI), the trouble source producer must consider the format of the initiator in the light of the interactional alignment of co-participants, so as to decide which repair operations are required to fix the particular problems that rendered their prior turn inadequate. The analysis undertaken here is interdisciplinary. For the most part, this paper applies the qualitative methods of conversation analysis. However, these analyses have been augmented by quantitative methods that utilise a modified version of the coding scheme included in this special edition (Dingemanse, Kendrick, and Enfield forthcoming). Certain coding questions have been adapted following qualitative analyses of several extracts. There is thus feedback between these methodological approaches. These quantitative analyses give a measure of how certain formats tend to selectively target particular repair operations while other formats show more versatility.
Blythe, Joe. (in press) In Skin, Kin and Clan: The Dynamics of Social Categories in Indigenous Australia, edited by Patrick McConvell and Piers Kelly. Canberra: ANU EPress.
Blythe, Joe. (2013) Language 89 (4): 883–919. doi:10.1353/lan.2013.0057., 2013
Kin-enriched morphosyntax has emerged many times in distantly related Australian languages. An ex... more Kin-enriched morphosyntax has emerged many times in distantly related Australian languages. An examination of language use in conversation reveals that this emergence can be explained in terms of convergent evolutionary pressures. All Australian Aboriginal societies have classificatory kinship, and all have taboos limiting the use of personal names. A conversational preference for avoiding restricted names (Levinson 2007) and preferences for achieving recognition and being succinct (Sacks & Schegloff 1979, Schegloff 1996) provide selection principles that assist speakers in choosing the most suitable expressions for the given occasions of reference. Because kin- based expressions are not names, but are nevertheless useful for securing recipients’ recognition of referents, they are regularly selected when names are unsuitable. Through repeated selection in conversation, the same preferences ultimately drive the diachronic development of kin-based morphosyntax. The Murrinh-Patha case study in this article presents the development of kin-based morphology through reanalysis. It then draws on fragments of face-to-face conversation exemplifying how conversational pressures bias the selection of kin-based structures. Finally, the micro- and macrocausal domains are linked through an ‘invisible hand’ explanation (Keller 1994).
Dingemanse, Mark, Joe Blythe, and Tyko Dirksmeyer. (2014) Studies in Language 38 (1): 5–43. doi:10.1075/sl.38.1.01din., 2014
In conversation, people regularly deal with problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. We ... more In conversation, people regularly deal with problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. We report on a cross-linguistic investigation of the conversa- tional structure of other-initiated repair (also known as collaborative repair, feedback, requests for clarification, or grounding sequences). We take stock
of formats for initiating repair across languages (comparable to English huh?, who?, y’mean X?, etc.) and find that different languages make available a wide but remarkably similar range of linguistic resources for this function. We exploit the patterned variation as evidence for several underlying concerns addressed by repair initiation: characterising trouble, managing responsibility, and handling knowledge. The concerns do not always point in the same direction and thus provide participants in interaction with alternative principles for selecting one format over possible others. By comparing conversational structures across languages, this paper contributes to pragmatic typology: the typology of systems of language use and the principles that shape them.
Kelly, Barbara, Gillian Wigglesworth, Rachel Nordlinger, and Joe Blythe. 2014. “The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages.” Language and Linguistics Compass 8 (2): 51–64. doi:10.1111/lnc3.12062., 2014
One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult w... more One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult would, and thus, a considerable amount of acquisition research has focused on morphological production and comprehension. Most of this research, however, has focused on the acquisition of morphology in isolating languages, or languages (such as English) with limited inflectional morphology. The nature of the learning task is different, and potentially more challenging, when the child is learning a polysynthetic language – a language in which words are highly morphologically complex, expressing in a single word what in English takes a multi-word clause. To date, there has been no cross-linguistic survey of how children approach this puzzle and learn polysynthetic languages. This paper aims to provide such a survey, including a discussion of some of the general findings in the literature regarding the acquisition of polysynthetic systems.
Enfield, N. J., Dingemanse, Baranova, Blythe et al. (2013). In Conversational Repair and Human Understanding, Hayashi, Raymond, and Sidnell (eds), 343–80. Cambridge: CUP.
Blythe, Joe (2012). Journal of Pragmatics 44 (4): 508–28., 2012
Just as interlocutors can manipulate physical objects for performing certain types of social acti... more Just as interlocutors can manipulate physical objects for performing certain types of social action, they can also perform different social actions by manipulating symbolic objects. A kinship system can be thought of as an abstract collection of lexical mappings and associated cultural conventions. It is a sort of cognitive object that can be readily manipulated for special purposes. For example, the relationship between pairs of individuals can be momentarily re- construed in constructing jokes or teases.
Murriny Patha speakers associate certain parts of the body with particular classes of kin. When a group of Murriny Patha women witness a cultural outsider performing a forearm-holding gesture that is characteristically associated with brothers-in-law, they re-associate the gesture to the husband–wife relationship, thus setting up an extended teasing episode. Many of these teases call on gestural resources. Although the teasing is at times repetitive, and the episode is only thinly populated with the telltale ‘‘off-record’’ markers that characterize teasing proposals as non-serious, the proposal is sufficiently far- fetched as to ensure that the teases come off as more bonding than biting.
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2019
We address competing perspectives on how social-indexical meaning is learned in language, using d... more We address competing perspectives on how social-indexical meaning is learned in language, using data from artificial language learning experiments and two studies in small-scale societies. Our results indicate that learning social-indexical meaning is primarily allocentric as opposed to egocentric: speaker success in learning a social-indexical meaning pattern depends on overall exposure to the pattern more than the pat-tern's relative importance to the speaker. We base these claims on data from American English-speaking adults, Datooga-speaking children, as well as adults and children speaking Murrinhpatha. The results highlight the importance of widening the sample of methods and data sources in studying how variation in language is learned and maintained.
Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments, 2020
This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Murrinhpatha use when recruiting assistance... more This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Murrinhpatha use when recruiting assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Mur-rinpatha, and reports language-specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project (see Chapter 2 of the volume). This chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of Murrinhpatha with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction. The chapter is a contribution to an emerging field of pragmatic typology.
This article investigates how children learn an infinitely expanding 'universal' system of classi... more This article investigates how children learn an infinitely expanding 'universal' system of classi-ficatory kinship terms. We report on a series of experiments designed to elicit acquisitional data on (i) nominal kinterms and (ii) sibling-inflected polysynthetic morphology in the Australian language Murrinhpatha. Photographs of the participants' own relatives are used as stimuli to assess knowledge of kinterms, kin-based grammatical contrasts, and kinship principles, across different age groups. The results show that genealogically distant kin are more difficult to classify than close kin, that children's comprehension and production of kinterms are streamlined by abstract merging principles, and that sibling-inflection is learned in tandem with number and person marking in the verbal morphology, although it is not fully mastered until mid to late childhood. We discuss how the unlimited nature of Australian kinship systems presents unusual challenges to the language learner, but suggest that, as everywhere, patterns of language acquisition are closely intertwined with children's experience of their sociocultural environment.*
Proceedings of Speaking of Location 2019: Communicating about Space, 2019
Australian languages are widely believed to exemplify abstract spatial conceptual systems, manife... more Australian languages are widely believed to exemplify abstract spatial conceptual systems, manifest as cardinal terms. In fact, Australian languages typically make heavy use of terms invoking local environmental features. We report on research investigating correlations between linguistic spatial systems and topography, and the role of socio-cultural factors in individual variation in spatial referential strategy choices. Acknowledgements We are grateful for the comments of three anonymous reviewers and to Mark Harvey and Nick Reid for discussions on Wagiman and Ngan'gityemerri. Any errors remain ours.
Building on earlier Conversation Analytic work on turn-taking and response mobilization, we use v... more Building on earlier Conversation Analytic work on turn-taking and response mobilization, we use video-recorded multiparty conversations to consider in detail how Australian Aboriginal participants in conversation select a next speaker in turns that are grammatically designed as questions. We focus in particular on the role of a range of embodied behaviors, such as gaze direction, body orientation, and pointing, to select—or avoid selecting—a next speaker. We use data from four remote Aboriginal communities to also explore the claims from ethnographic research that Aboriginal conversa- tions typically occur in nonfocused participation frames. Data are in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa, Gija, and Jaru with English translations.
Rather than using abstract directionals, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinhpa... more Rather than using abstract directionals, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinhpatha make reference to locations of interest using named landmarks, demonstratives and pointing. Building on a culturally prescribed avoidance for certain placenames, this study reports on the use of demonstratives, pointing and landmarks for direction giving. Whether or not pointing will be used, and which demonstratives will be selected is determined partly by the relative epistemic incline between interlocutors and partly by whether information about a location is being sought or being provided. The reliance on pointing for the representation of spatial vectors requires a construal of language that includes the visuo-corporal modality.
There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if the... more There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of ‘other-initiated repair’, where the recipient of an unclear message can signal trouble and the sender can repair the original message. We find that this system is frequently used (on average about once per 1.4 minutes in any language), and that it has detailed common properties, contrary to assumptions of radical cultural variation. Unrelated languages share the same three functionally distinct types of repair initiator for signalling problems and use them in the same kinds of contexts. People prefer to choose the type that is the most specific possible, a principle that minimizes cost both for the sender being asked to fix the problem and for the dyad as a social unit. Disruption to the conversation is kept to a minimum, with the two-utterance repair sequence being on average no longer that the single utterance which is being fixed. The findings, controlled for historical relationships, situation types and other dependencies, reveal the fundamentally cooperative nature of human communication and offer support for the pragmatic universals hypothesis: while languages may vary in the organization of grammar and meaning, key systems of language use may be largely similar across cultural groups. They also provide a fresh perspective on controversies about the core properties of language, by revealing a common infrastructure for social interaction which may be the universal bedrock upon which linguistic diversity rests.
By initiating repair on an interlocutor’s prior turn, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal langu... more By initiating repair on an interlocutor’s prior turn, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinh- Patha seek to manage slips in intersubjectivity. The various formats for Other-Initiated Repair (OIR) act as pointers to likely trouble sources and possible trouble types. These trouble types might relate to audibility, speech production, or, with understanding what has been articulated. Some OIR formats are quite specialized whereas other formats are more versatile. Whatever the repair initiator (RI), the trouble source producer must consider the format of the initiator in the light of the interactional alignment of co-participants, so as to decide which repair operations are required to fix the particular problems that rendered their prior turn inadequate. The analysis undertaken here is interdisciplinary. For the most part, this paper applies the qualitative methods of conversation analysis. However, these analyses have been augmented by quantitative methods that utilise a modified version of the coding scheme included in this special edition (Dingemanse, Kendrick, and Enfield forthcoming). Certain coding questions have been adapted following qualitative analyses of several extracts. There is thus feedback between these methodological approaches. These quantitative analyses give a measure of how certain formats tend to selectively target particular repair operations while other formats show more versatility.
Blythe, Joe. (in press) In Skin, Kin and Clan: The Dynamics of Social Categories in Indigenous Australia, edited by Patrick McConvell and Piers Kelly. Canberra: ANU EPress.
Blythe, Joe. (2013) Language 89 (4): 883–919. doi:10.1353/lan.2013.0057., 2013
Kin-enriched morphosyntax has emerged many times in distantly related Australian languages. An ex... more Kin-enriched morphosyntax has emerged many times in distantly related Australian languages. An examination of language use in conversation reveals that this emergence can be explained in terms of convergent evolutionary pressures. All Australian Aboriginal societies have classificatory kinship, and all have taboos limiting the use of personal names. A conversational preference for avoiding restricted names (Levinson 2007) and preferences for achieving recognition and being succinct (Sacks & Schegloff 1979, Schegloff 1996) provide selection principles that assist speakers in choosing the most suitable expressions for the given occasions of reference. Because kin- based expressions are not names, but are nevertheless useful for securing recipients’ recognition of referents, they are regularly selected when names are unsuitable. Through repeated selection in conversation, the same preferences ultimately drive the diachronic development of kin-based morphosyntax. The Murrinh-Patha case study in this article presents the development of kin-based morphology through reanalysis. It then draws on fragments of face-to-face conversation exemplifying how conversational pressures bias the selection of kin-based structures. Finally, the micro- and macrocausal domains are linked through an ‘invisible hand’ explanation (Keller 1994).
Dingemanse, Mark, Joe Blythe, and Tyko Dirksmeyer. (2014) Studies in Language 38 (1): 5–43. doi:10.1075/sl.38.1.01din., 2014
In conversation, people regularly deal with problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. We ... more In conversation, people regularly deal with problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. We report on a cross-linguistic investigation of the conversa- tional structure of other-initiated repair (also known as collaborative repair, feedback, requests for clarification, or grounding sequences). We take stock
of formats for initiating repair across languages (comparable to English huh?, who?, y’mean X?, etc.) and find that different languages make available a wide but remarkably similar range of linguistic resources for this function. We exploit the patterned variation as evidence for several underlying concerns addressed by repair initiation: characterising trouble, managing responsibility, and handling knowledge. The concerns do not always point in the same direction and thus provide participants in interaction with alternative principles for selecting one format over possible others. By comparing conversational structures across languages, this paper contributes to pragmatic typology: the typology of systems of language use and the principles that shape them.
Kelly, Barbara, Gillian Wigglesworth, Rachel Nordlinger, and Joe Blythe. 2014. “The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages.” Language and Linguistics Compass 8 (2): 51–64. doi:10.1111/lnc3.12062., 2014
One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult w... more One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult would, and thus, a considerable amount of acquisition research has focused on morphological production and comprehension. Most of this research, however, has focused on the acquisition of morphology in isolating languages, or languages (such as English) with limited inflectional morphology. The nature of the learning task is different, and potentially more challenging, when the child is learning a polysynthetic language – a language in which words are highly morphologically complex, expressing in a single word what in English takes a multi-word clause. To date, there has been no cross-linguistic survey of how children approach this puzzle and learn polysynthetic languages. This paper aims to provide such a survey, including a discussion of some of the general findings in the literature regarding the acquisition of polysynthetic systems.
Enfield, N. J., Dingemanse, Baranova, Blythe et al. (2013). In Conversational Repair and Human Understanding, Hayashi, Raymond, and Sidnell (eds), 343–80. Cambridge: CUP.
Blythe, Joe (2012). Journal of Pragmatics 44 (4): 508–28., 2012
Just as interlocutors can manipulate physical objects for performing certain types of social acti... more Just as interlocutors can manipulate physical objects for performing certain types of social action, they can also perform different social actions by manipulating symbolic objects. A kinship system can be thought of as an abstract collection of lexical mappings and associated cultural conventions. It is a sort of cognitive object that can be readily manipulated for special purposes. For example, the relationship between pairs of individuals can be momentarily re- construed in constructing jokes or teases.
Murriny Patha speakers associate certain parts of the body with particular classes of kin. When a group of Murriny Patha women witness a cultural outsider performing a forearm-holding gesture that is characteristically associated with brothers-in-law, they re-associate the gesture to the husband–wife relationship, thus setting up an extended teasing episode. Many of these teases call on gestural resources. Although the teasing is at times repetitive, and the episode is only thinly populated with the telltale ‘‘off-record’’ markers that characterize teasing proposals as non-serious, the proposal is sufficiently far- fetched as to ensure that the teases come off as more bonding than biting.
Successful communication hinges on keeping track of who and what we are talking about. For this r... more Successful communication hinges on keeping track of who and what we are talking about. For this reason, person reference sits at the heart of the social sciences. Referring to persons is an interactional process where information is transferred from current speakers to the recipients of their talk. This dissertation concerns itself with the work that is achieved through this transfer of information.
The interactional approach adopted is one that combines the “micro” of conversation analysis with the “macro” of genealogically grounded anthropological linguistics. Murriny Patha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language spoken in the north of Australia, is a highly complex polysynthetic language with kinship categories that are grammaticalized as verbal inflections. For referring to persons, as well as names, nicknames, kinterms, minimal descriptions and free pronouns, Murriny Patha speakers make extensive use of pronominal reference markers embedded within polysynthetic verbs. Murriny Patha does not have a formal “mother-in-law” register. There are however numerous taboos on naming kin in avoidance relationships, and on naming and their namesakes. Similarly, there are also taboos on naming the deceased and on naming their namesakes. As a result, for every speaker there is a multitude of people whose names should be avoided.
At any one time, speakers of the language have a range of referential options. Speakers’ decisions about which category of reference forms to choose (names, kinterms etc.) are governed by conversational preferences that shape “referential design”. Six preferences – a preference for associating the referent to the co-present conversationalists, a preference for avoiding personal names, a preference for using recognitionals, a preference for being succinct, and a pair of opposed preferences relating to referential specificity – guide speakers towards choosing a name on one occasion, a kinterm on the next occasion and verbal cross-reference on yet another occasion. Different classes of expressions better satisfy particular conversational preferences. There is a systematicity to the referential choices that speakers make. The interactional objectives of interlocutors are enacted through the regular placement of particular forms in particular sequential environments. These objectives are then revealed through the turn-by-turn unfolding of conversational interaction.
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The analysis undertaken here is interdisciplinary. For the most part, this paper applies the qualitative methods of conversation analysis. However, these analyses have been augmented by quantitative methods that utilise a modified version of the coding scheme included in this special edition (Dingemanse, Kendrick, and Enfield forthcoming). Certain coding questions have been adapted following qualitative analyses of several extracts. There is thus feedback between these methodological approaches. These quantitative analyses give a measure of how certain formats tend to selectively target particular repair operations while other formats show more versatility.
of formats for initiating repair across languages (comparable to English huh?, who?, y’mean X?, etc.) and find that different languages make available a wide but remarkably similar range of linguistic resources for this function. We exploit the patterned variation as evidence for several underlying concerns addressed by repair initiation: characterising trouble, managing responsibility, and handling knowledge. The concerns do not always point in the same direction and thus provide participants in interaction with alternative principles for selecting one format over possible others. By comparing conversational structures across languages, this paper contributes to pragmatic typology: the typology of systems of language use and the principles that shape them.
Murriny Patha speakers associate certain parts of the body with particular classes of kin. When a group of Murriny Patha women witness a cultural outsider performing a forearm-holding gesture that is characteristically associated with brothers-in-law, they re-associate the gesture to the husband–wife relationship, thus setting up an extended teasing episode. Many of these teases call on gestural resources. Although the teasing is at times repetitive, and the episode is only thinly populated with the telltale ‘‘off-record’’ markers that characterize teasing proposals as non-serious, the proposal is sufficiently far- fetched as to ensure that the teases come off as more bonding than biting.
The analysis undertaken here is interdisciplinary. For the most part, this paper applies the qualitative methods of conversation analysis. However, these analyses have been augmented by quantitative methods that utilise a modified version of the coding scheme included in this special edition (Dingemanse, Kendrick, and Enfield forthcoming). Certain coding questions have been adapted following qualitative analyses of several extracts. There is thus feedback between these methodological approaches. These quantitative analyses give a measure of how certain formats tend to selectively target particular repair operations while other formats show more versatility.
of formats for initiating repair across languages (comparable to English huh?, who?, y’mean X?, etc.) and find that different languages make available a wide but remarkably similar range of linguistic resources for this function. We exploit the patterned variation as evidence for several underlying concerns addressed by repair initiation: characterising trouble, managing responsibility, and handling knowledge. The concerns do not always point in the same direction and thus provide participants in interaction with alternative principles for selecting one format over possible others. By comparing conversational structures across languages, this paper contributes to pragmatic typology: the typology of systems of language use and the principles that shape them.
Murriny Patha speakers associate certain parts of the body with particular classes of kin. When a group of Murriny Patha women witness a cultural outsider performing a forearm-holding gesture that is characteristically associated with brothers-in-law, they re-associate the gesture to the husband–wife relationship, thus setting up an extended teasing episode. Many of these teases call on gestural resources. Although the teasing is at times repetitive, and the episode is only thinly populated with the telltale ‘‘off-record’’ markers that characterize teasing proposals as non-serious, the proposal is sufficiently far- fetched as to ensure that the teases come off as more bonding than biting.
The interactional approach adopted is one that combines the “micro” of conversation analysis with the “macro” of genealogically grounded anthropological linguistics. Murriny Patha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language spoken in the north of Australia, is a highly complex polysynthetic language with kinship categories that are grammaticalized as verbal inflections. For referring to persons, as well as names, nicknames, kinterms, minimal descriptions and free pronouns, Murriny Patha speakers make extensive use of pronominal reference markers embedded within polysynthetic verbs. Murriny Patha does not have a formal “mother-in-law” register. There are however numerous taboos on naming kin in avoidance relationships, and on naming and their namesakes. Similarly, there are also taboos on naming the deceased and on naming their namesakes. As a result, for every speaker there is a multitude of people whose names should be avoided.
At any one time, speakers of the language have a range of referential options. Speakers’ decisions about which category of reference forms to choose (names, kinterms etc.) are governed by conversational preferences that shape “referential design”. Six preferences – a preference for associating the referent to the co-present conversationalists, a preference for avoiding personal names, a preference for using recognitionals, a preference for being succinct, and a pair of opposed preferences relating to referential specificity – guide speakers towards choosing a name on one occasion, a kinterm on the next occasion and verbal cross-reference on yet another occasion. Different classes of expressions better satisfy particular conversational preferences. There is a systematicity to the referential choices that speakers make. The interactional objectives of interlocutors are enacted through the regular placement of particular forms in particular sequential environments. These objectives are then revealed through the turn-by-turn unfolding of conversational interaction.