Joe Blythe

Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems.

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.

Huh? What? - a first survey in twenty-one languages

A state-of-the art review of conversational repair, with contributions from internationally recognized leaders in the field of conversation analysis.

Prosodic Person Reference in Murriny Patha Reported Interaction

This chapter deals with the pragmatic role of prosody in deixis. For recipients of conversational narratives, referential tracking is particularly challenging when the storyteller reports dialogue from prior conversations. When Murriny Patha storytellers need to avoid the name of an individual participating in the prior discourse, prosodic reference assists story recipients keep track of who had been speaking to whom. Murriny Patha is a polysynthetic language from the Northern Territory of Australia, spoken predominantly in the Aboriginal community of Wadeye. The language is unusual for having grammaticalized the ‘‘sibling’’ category of its kinship system. As such, Murriny Patha verbs make a three-way opposition between groups of siblings (gender unspecified), groups of all male non-siblings, and groups of nonsiblings that include at least one female. In Wadeye, every Aboriginal person can be related to every other by means of real or classificatory kinship links. Murriny Patha speakers observe many taboos on pronouncing the personal names of certain individuals. Kinterms and the kin-based verbal morphosyntax provide conversationalists with referential resources for referring to persons whose names should be avoided. For reporting prior interaction, prosody provides further resources. Passages of a storyteller’s talk that are ‘‘globally’’ marked with distinctive prosody are interpreted by story recipients as hailing from a ‘‘storyworld’’ of prior discourse. Stark changes in the bundling of global prosodic features are usually To access supplementary sound content for this chapter, go to http://intouch.emeraldinsight.com/sip8. See page viii for details. (though not always) interpreted as signalling prior speaker change. In a different fashion, pairs of referential items may be ‘‘locally’’ marked either similarly, or dissimilarly, in order to mark coreference, or non-coreference, respectively. Both global and local prosodic reference assists the teller in providing a referentially coherent storytelling, while maintaining the appropriate restrictions on naming certain individuals within the story.

Self-Association in Murriny Patha Talk-in-Interaction

When referring to persons in talk-in-interaction, interlocutors recruit the particular referential expressions that best satisfy both cultural and interactional contingencies, as well as the speakers own personal objectives. Regular referring practices reveal cultural preferences for choosing particular classes of reference forms for engaging in particular types of activities. When speakers of the northern Australian language Murriny Patha refer to each other, they display a clear preference for associating the referent to the current conversations participants. This preference for Association is normally achieved through the use of triangular reference forms such as kinterms. Triangulations are reference forms that link the person being spoken about to another specified person (e.g. Bills doctor). Triangulations are frequently used to associate the referent to the current speaker (e.g. my father), to an addressed recipient (your uncle) or co-present other (this blokes cousin). Murriny Patha speakers regularly associate key persons to themselves when making authoritative claims about items of business and important events. They frequently draw on kinship links when attempting to bolster their epistemic position. When speakers demonstrate their relatedness to the events protagonists, they ground their contribution to the discussion as being informed by appropriate genealogical connections (effectively, ‘I happen to know something about that. He was after all my own uncle’).

Pointing Out Directions in Murrinhpatha

Abstract 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.

Other-initiated repair in Murrinh-Patha

Abstract The range of linguistic structures and interactional practices associated with other-initiated repair (OIR) is surveyed for the Northern Australian language Murrinh-Patha. By drawing on a video corpus of informal Murrinh- Patha conversation, the OIR formats are compared in terms of their utility and versatility. Certain “restricted” formats have semantic properties that point to prior trouble source items. While these make the restricted repair initiators more specialised, the “open” formats are less well resourced semantically, which makes them more versatile. They tend to be used when the prior talk is potentially problematic in more ways than one. The open formats (especially thangku, “what?”) tend to solicit repair operations on each potential source of trouble, such that the resultant repair solution improves upon the troublesource turn in several ways.

Universals and cultural diversity in the expression of gratitude

Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects—social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying ‘thank you’ as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. We find that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be equated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on gratitude with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.

Tools of Engagement: Selecting a Next Speaker in Australian Aboriginal Multiparty Conversations

ABSTRACT 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 conversations typically occur in nonfocused participation frames. Data are in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa, Gija, and Jaru with English translations.

Genesis of the trinity: the convergent evolution of trirelational kinterms

While ordinary kinterms encode kinship relations between pairs of individuals, trirelational kinterms are semantically dense expressions that encode kinship relations between three individuals. Several times, these terms have emerged independently on the Australian continent. This emergence is explained as a convergent evolutionary process driven by interactional preferences that shape the design and use of person reference items in conversation. The case in point is the pragmatically motivated lexicalisation of trirelational kinterms in Murrinhpatha.

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding: Huh? What? – a first survey in twenty-one languages

A state-of-the art review of conversational repair, with contributions from internationally recognized leaders in the field of conversation analysis.