N. J. Enfield

Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation

Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations.

Relationship thinking: Agency, enchrony, and human sociality

Introduction 1 Relationships 1.1 The data of relationships 1.2 Context 1.3 Relationship thinking 1.4 Enacting relationships and relationship types 1.5 Relationship-grounded society 2 Sociality 2.1 Human social intelligence 2.2 Social motivations 2.3 Tools for assessment and management 2.4 Semiotic process 2.5 Norms and heuristics 2.6 Communication as tool use 2.7 Two primitive imperatives for communication 3 Enchrony 3.1 Enchrony and its scope 3.2 Causal frames for understanding meaning 3.3 Normative organization 4 Semiosis 4.1 Anatomy of the semiotic process 4.2 Flexibility in semiotic processes 4.3 Inference as a semiotic process 4.4 Cultural epidemiology as a semiotic process 4.5 Elements of the semiotic process and their possibilities 4.6 Payoffs of this framework 4.7 The Saussurean sign: a convenient untruth 4.8 A frame-content dynamic 4.9 Meaning as a public process 5 Status 5.1 Status predicts and explains behavior 5.2 Entitlements, commitments, enablements 5.3 Relationships as statuses 6 Moves 6.1 Moves are composite signs 6.2 Composite utterances are interpreted as wholes 6.3 Turn-taking: moves in linguistic clothing 6.4 The move as a privileged level of semiosis 7 Cognition 7.1 Behavior-reading 7.2 Cognition and language 7.3 Psychology as interpretative heuristic 7.4 Fear of cognition? 8 Action 8.1 Natural action versus social action 8.2 Courses of action 8.3 Speech acts and actions-en 8.4 Categories of action-en? 8.5 A composite notion of actions-en 8.6 Ontology of actions-en 8.7 A generative account of action-en 9 Agency 9.1 Flexibility and accountability 9.2 Agent unity heuristic 9.3 Joint agency 9.4 Distributed agency 10 Asymmetry 10.1 Propositions and the relativity of knowledge 10.2 Epistemic Authority 10.3 Distribution of agency in practice 10.4 Sources of Asymmetry 10.5 Our imperfect communication system 11 Culture 11.1 Cultural systems 11.2 The Kri house as a system context for social relations 11.3 Ritual in communication 11.4 Kri residence 11.5 Practical interpretation of the Kri residence: to follow a norm 11.6 Spatial distribution and diagrammatic iconicity 11.7 Sanction of norms: making the tacit explicit 11.8 Everyday ritual and social relations 12 Grammar 12.1 Language as a system 12.2 Syntagmatic relations: grammar for turns 12.3 Paradigmatic relations in linguistic grammars 12.4 Markedness: special effects of choice within a system 12.5 The Lao system of person reference 12.6 Default reference to persons in Lao 12.7 Pragmatically marked initial references 12.8 Grammar expresses social relations under the radar 13 Knowledge 13.1 Common ground 13.2 Sources of common ground 13.3 Fuel for Gricean amplicative inference 13.4 Grounding for inferring 13.5 Audience design 13.6 Affiliation and information 13.7 From information to social relations Conclusion References Index

Language Diversity and Social Action A Third Locus of Linguistic Relativity

The classic version of the linguistic relativity principle, formulated by Boas and developed especially in the work of Whorf, suggests that the particular lexicogrammatical patterns of a given language can influence the thought of its speakers. A second version of the argument emerged in the 1970s and shifted the focus to the indexical aspect of language: any given language includes a particular set of indexical signs, and these essentially shape the contexts produced in speaking that language. In this article, we propose a third locus of linguistic relativity. Our argument is based on recent work in conversation analysis that has shown how the resources of a given language provide the tools for accomplishing basic actions in interaction. To develop our argument, we consider the way in which the resources of three different languages (Caribbean English Creole, Finnish, and Lao) are deployed by speakers to agree with a prior assessment while at the same time claiming greater epistemic authority over the matter assessed. Our case study indicates that the language-specific tools used to accomplish this action (the lexicogrammatical resources) introduce collateral effects and in this way give the action a local spin or inflection.

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.

Is “Huh?” a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items

A word like Huh?–used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said– is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe. We investigate it in naturally occurring conversations in ten languages and present evidence and arguments for two distinct claims: that Huh? is universal, and that it is a word. In support of the first, we show that the similarities in form and function of this interjection across languages are much greater than expected by chance. In support of the second claim we show that it is a lexical, conventionalised form that has to be learnt, unlike grunts or emotional cries. We discuss possible reasons for the cross-linguistic similarity and propose an account in terms of convergent evolution. Huh? is a universal word not because it is innate but because it is shaped by selective pressures in an interactional environment that all languages share: that of other-initiated repair. Our proposal enhances evolutionary models of language change by suggesting that conversational infrastructure can drive the convergent cultural evolution of linguistic items.

The body as a cognitive artifact in kinship representations: Hand gesture diagrams by speakers of Lao

Central to cultural, social, and conceptual life are cognitive artifacts, the perceptible structures which populate our world and mediate our navigation of it, complementing, enhancing, and altering available affordances for the problemsolving challenges of everyday life. Much work in this domain has concentrated on technological artifacts, especially manual tools and devices and the conceptual and communicative tools of literacy and diagrams. Recent research on hand gestures and other bodily movements which occur during speech shows that the human body serves a number of the functions of cognitive technologies, affording the special cognitive advantages claimed to be associated exclusively with enduring (e.g., printed or drawn) diagrammatic representations. The issue is explored with reference to extensive data from videorecorded interviews with speakers of Lao in Vientiane, Laos, which show integration of verbal descriptions with complex spatial representations akin to diagrams. The study has implications both for research on cognitive artifacts (namely, that the body is a visuospatial representational resource not to be overlooked) and for research on ethnogenealogical knowledge (namely, that hand gestures reveal speakers conceptualizations of kinship structure which are of a different nature to and not necessarily retrievable from the accompanying linguistic code).

The theory of cultural logic: How individuals combine social intelligence with semiotics to create and maintain cultural meaning

The social world is an ecological complex in which cultural meanings and knowledges (linguistic and non-linguistic) personally embodied by individuals are intercalibrated via common attention to commonly accessible semiotic structures. This interpersonal ecology bridges realms which are the subject matter of both anthropology and linguistics, allowing the public maintenance of a system of assumptions and counter-assumptions among individuals as to what is mutually known (about), in general and/or in any particular context. The mutual assumption of particular cultural ideas provides human groups with common premises for predictably convergent inferential processes. This process of people collectively using effectively identical assumptions in interpreting each others actions—i.e. hypothesizing as to each others motivations and intentions—may be termed cultural logic. This logic relies on the establishment of stereotypes and other kinds of precedents, catalogued in individuals’ personal libraries, as models and scenarios which may serve as reference in inferring and attributing motivations behind peoples actions, and behind other mysterious phenomena. This process of establishing conceptual convention depends directly on semiotics, since groups of individuals rely on external signs as material for common focus and, thereby, agreement. Social intelligence binds signs in the world (e.g. speech sounds impressing upon eardrums), with individually embodied representations (e.g. word meanings and contextual schemas). The innate tendency for people to model the intentions of others provides an ultimately biological account for the logic behind culture. Ethnographic examples are drawn from Laos and Australia.

Other-initiated repair across languages: Towards a typology of conversational structures

Abstract This special issue reports on a cross-linguistic study of other-initiated repair, a domain at the crossroads of language, mind, and social life. Other-initiated repair is part of a system of practices that people use to deal with problems of speaking, hearing and understanding. The contributions in this special issue describe the linguistic resources and interactional practices associated with other-initiated repair in ten different languages. Here we provide an overview of the research methods and the conceptual framework. The empirical base for the project consists of corpora of naturally occurring conversations, collected in fieldsites around the world. Methodologically, we combine qualitative analysis with a comparative-typological perspective, and we formulate principles for the cross-linguistic comparison of conversational structures. A key move, of broad relevance to pragmatic typology, is the recognition that formats for repair initiation form paradigm-like systems that are ultimately language-specific, and that comparison is best done at the level of the constitutive properties of these formats. These properties can be functional (concerning aspects of linguistic formatting) as well as sequential (concerning aspects of the interactional environment). We show how functional and sequential aspects of conversational structure can capture patterns of commonality and diversity in conversational structures within and across languages.

Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies

Abstract To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception.

The definition of what-d'you-call-it: semantics and pragmatics of recognitional deixis

Words such as what-d’you-call-it raise issues at the heart of the semantics/pragmatics interface. Expressions of this kind are conventionalised and have meanings which, while very general, are explicitly oriented to the interactional nature of the speech context, drawing attention to a speaker’s assumption that the listener can figure out what the speaker is referring to. The details of such meanings can account for functional contrast among similar expressions, in a single language as well as cross-linguistically. The English expressions whatd’you-call-it and you-know-what are compared, along with a comparable Lao expression meaning, roughly, ‘that thing’. Proposed definitions of the meanings of these expressions account for their different patterns of use. These definitions include reference to the speech act participants, a point which supports the view that what-d’you-call-it words can be considered deictic. Issues arising from the descriptive section of this paper include the question of how such terms are derived, as well as their degree of conventionality. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.