467 research outputs found
Let's talk: Universal social rules underlie languages
Recent developments in the science of language signal the emergence of a new paradigm for language study: a social approach to the fundamental questions of what language is like, how much languages really have in common, and why only our species has it. The key to these developments is a new appreciation of the need to study everyday spoken language, with all its complications and âimperfectionsâ, in a systematic way. The work reviewed in this article âon turn-taking, timing, and other-initiated repair in languages around the worldâ has important implications for our understanding of human sociality and sheds new light on the social shape of language. For the first time in the history of linguistics, we are no longer tied to what can be written down or thought up. Rather, we look at language as a biologist would: as it occurs in nature
Other-initiated repair across languages: Towards a typology of conversational structures
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 language
A Coding Scheme for Other-initiated Repair Across Languages
We provide an annotated coding scheme for other-initiated repair, along with guidelines for building collections and aggregating cases based on interactionally relevant similarities and differences. The questions and categories of the scheme are grounded in inductive observations of conversational data and connected to a rich body of work on other-initiated repair in conversation analysis. The scheme is developed and tested in a 12-language comparative project and can serve as a stepping stone for future work on other-initiated repair and the systematic comparative study of conversational structures
Individual variation in ageâdependent reproduction: Fast explorers live fast but senesce young?
Adaptive integration of life history and behaviour is expected to result in variation in the paceâofâlife. Previous work focused on whether âriskyâ phenotypes live fast but die young, but reported conflicting support. We posit that individuals exhibiting risky phenotypes may alternatively invest heavily in earlyâlife reproduction but consequently suffer greater reproductive senescence.
We used a 7âyear longitudinal dataset with >1,200 breeding records of >800 female great tits assayed annually for exploratory behaviour to test whether withinâindividual age dependency of reproduction varied with exploratory behaviour. We controlled for biasing effects of selective (dis)appearance and withinâindividual behavioural plasticity.
Slower and faster explorers produced moderateâsized clutches when young; faster explorers subsequently showed an increase in clutch size that diminished with age (with moderate support for declines when old), whereas slower explorers produced moderateâsized clutches throughout their lives. There was some evidence that the same pattern characterized annual fledgling success, if so, unpredictable environmental effects diluted personalityârelated differences in this downstream reproductive trait.
Support for ageârelated selective appearance was apparent, but only when failing to appreciate withinâindividual plasticity in reproduction and behaviour.
Our study identifies withinâindividual ageâdependent reproduction, and reproductive senescence, as key components of lifeâhistory strategies that vary between individuals differing in risky behaviour. Future research should thus incorporate ageâdependent reproduction in paceâofâlife studies
Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments
Getting others to do things is a central part of social interaction in any human society. Language is our main tool for this purpose. In this book, we show that sequences of interaction in which one personâs behaviour solicits or occasions anotherâs assistance or collaboration share common structural properties that provide a basis for the systematic comparison of this domain across languages. The goal of this comparison is to uncover similarities and differences in how language and other conduct are used in carrying out social action around the world, including different kinds of requests, orders, suggestions, and other actions brought together under the rubric of recruitment
Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments
Getting others to do things is a central part of social interaction in any human society. Language is our main tool for this purpose. In this book, we show that sequences of interaction in which one personâs behaviour solicits or occasions anotherâs assistance or collaboration share common structural properties that provide a basis for the systematic comparison of this domain across languages. The goal of this comparison is to uncover similarities and differences in how language and other conduct are used in carrying out social action around the world, including different kinds of requests, orders, suggestions, and other actions brought together under the rubric of recruitment
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