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116 results

Page 1 of 6

The Interaction Engine
  • Language in Social Life and Human Evolution
  • Stephen C. Levinson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
The Dark Matter of Pragmatics

The Dark Matter of Pragmatics
  • Known Unknowns
  • Stephen C. Levinson
  • Published online:
    12 March 2024
    Print publication:
    11 April 2024
    • Element
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  • This Element tries to discern the known unknowns in the field of pragmatics, the 'Dark Matter' of the title. We can identify a key bottleneck in human communication, the sheer limitation on the speed of speech encoding: pragmatics occupies the niche nestled between slow speech encoding and fast comprehension. Pragmatic strategies are tricks for evading this tight encoding bottleneck by meaning more than you say. Five such tricks are reviewed, which are all domains where we have made considerable progress. We can then ask for each of these areas, where have we neglected to push the frontier forward? These are the known unknowns of pragmatics, key areas, and topics for future research. The Element thus offers a brief review of some central areas of pragmatics, and a survey of targets for future research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

  • Early language experience in a Papuan community

  • Marisa CASILLAS, Penelope BROWN, Stephen C. LEVINSON
  • Journal:
    Journal of Child Language / Volume 48 / Issue 4 / July 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 September 2020, pp. 792-814
    • Article
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  • The rate at which young children are directly spoken to varies due to many factors, including (a) caregiver ideas about children as conversational partners and (b) the organization of everyday life. Prior work suggests cross-cultural variation in rates of child-directed speech is due to the former factor, but has been fraught with confounds in comparing postindustrial and subsistence farming communities. We investigate the daylong language environments of children (0;0–3;0) on Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea, a small-scale traditional community where prior ethnographic study demonstrated contingency-seeking child interaction styles. In fact, children were infrequently directly addressed and linguistic input rate was primarily affected by situational factors, though children's vocalization maturity showed no developmental delay. We compare the input characteristics between this community and a Tseltal Mayan one in which near-parallel methods produced comparable results, then briefly discuss the models and mechanisms for learning best supported by our findings.

  • Polar answers

  • N. J. ENFIELD, TANYA STIVERS, PENELOPE BROWN, CHRISTINA ENGLERT, KATARIINA HARJUNPÄÄ, MAKOTO HAYASHI, TRINE HEINEMANN, GERTIE HOYMANN, TIINA KEISANEN, MIRKA RAUNIOMAA, CHASE WESLEY RAYMOND, FEDERICO ROSSANO, KYUNG-EUN YOON, INGE ZWITSERLOOD, STEPHEN C. LEVINSON
  • Journal:
    Journal of Linguistics / Volume 55 / Issue 2 / 01 April 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    20 September 2018, pp. 277-304
    Print publication:
    01 April 2019

  • How do people answer polar questions? In this fourteen-language study of answers to questions in conversation, we compare the two main strategies; first, interjection-type answers such as uh-huh (or equivalents yes, mm, head nods, etc.), and second, repetition-type answers that repeat some or all of the question. We find that all languages offer both options, but that there is a strong asymmetry in their frequency of use, with a global preference for interjection-type answers. We propose that this preference is motivated by the fact that the two options are not equivalent in meaning. We argue that interjection-type answers are intrinsically suited to be the pragmatically unmarked, and thus more frequent, strategy for confirming polar questions, regardless of the language spoken. Our analysis is based on the semantic-pragmatic profile of the interjection-type and repetition-type answer strategies, in the context of certain asymmetries inherent to the dialogic speech act structure of question–answer sequences, including sequential agency and thematic agency. This allows us to see possible explanations for the outlier distributions found in ǂĀkhoe Haiǁom and Tzeltal.

Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
  • Edited by Stephen C. Levinson, Sarah Cutfield, Michael J. Dunn, N. J. Enfield, Sérgio Meira
  • Published online:
    12 July 2018
    Print publication:
    19 July 2018
  • Demonstratives play a crucial role in the acquisition and use of language. Bringing together a team of leading scholars this detailed study, a first of its kind, explores meaning and use across fifteen typologically and geographically unrelated languages to find out what cross-linguistic comparisons and generalizations can be made, and how this might challenge current theory in linguistics, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Using a shared experimental task, rounded out with studies of natural language use, specialists in each of the languages undertook extensive fieldwork for this comparative study of semantics and usage. An introduction summarizes the shared patterns and divergences in meaning and use that emerge.

Politeness
  • Some Universals in Language Usage
  • Penelope Brown, Stephen C. Levinson
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987
  • This study is about the principles for constructing polite speeches. The core of it first appeared in Questions and Politeness, edited by Esther N. Goody (now out of print). It is here reissued with a fresh introduction that surveys the considerable literature in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences that the original extended essay stimulated, and suggests distinct directions for research. The authors describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express themselves in different languages and cultures. A motive for these parallels is isolated and a universal model is constructed outlining the abstract principles underlying polite usages. This is based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures: the Tamil of South India, the Tzeltal spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, and the English of the USA and England. This volume will be of special interest to students in linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, and the sociology and social psychology of interaction.

Pragmatics
  • Stephen C. Levinson
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 June 1983
  • Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. This textbook provides a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics - deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic approach can resolve some of the problems semantics have been confronting and simplifying semantic analyses. The exposition is always clear and supported by helpful exemplification. The detailed analyses of selected topics give the student a clear view of the empirical rigour demanded by the study of linguistic pragmatics, but Dr Levinson never loses sight of the rich diversity of the subject. An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language usage - psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literature.

  • 12 - Language evolution

  • from Part II - Process and formation
  • Edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, Yale University, Connecticut, Jack Sidnell, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
    Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    11 September 2014, pp 309-324

  • Summary

    This chapter overviews scholarship in functional linguistics, and focuses on constituency, a specific problem which has attracted significant attention from functionalists. It examines constituency from the perspective of a natural outgrowth of functionalism in linguistics, namely a concern with the function of grammar in its ecological habitat, conversational interaction. Functional approaches to patterning in language, then, have recently shifted the focus away from synchrony to diachrony and grammaticization. The chapter explores the role of constituent schemas in allowing conversational interactants to produce and monitor turns at talk for their trajectories and what it might take for them to be finished. It discusses three ways in which constituency works to help speakers manage interactional tasks. The operations of projection, expansion, and retraction are first and foremost interactional tasks, for which constituent schemas afford a solution.

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