Entries — January 2010
Participation and Posture
Human ethologists have shown that humans are both attracted to others and at the same time fear them. They refer to this kind of fear with the technical term ‘social… More →
Landscape Terms and Place Names Elicitation Guide
Landscape terms reflect the relationship between geographic reality and human cognition. Are ‘mountains’, ‘rivers, ‘lakes’ and the like universally recognised in languages as naturally salient objects to be named? The… More →
Melanesian Kinship and Culture
Kin terminology structure and other social and cultural traits cluster in particular ways on a global level, such that “disharmonic” features can be interpreted as retentions of earlier systems, resulting… More →
Lexical Comparison Between Papuan Languages: Inland Bird and Tree Species
The Pioneers project seeks to uncover relationships between the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia. One basic way to uncover linguistic relationships, either contact or genetic, is through lexical comparison. We… More →
Multimodal Multiperson Interaction with Infants Aged 9 To 15 Months
Interaction, for all that it has an ethological base, is culturally constituted, and how new social members are enculturated into the interactional practices of the society is of critical interest… More →
Response Systems and Signals of Recipiency
Listeners’ signals of recipiency, such as “Mm-hm” or “uh-huh” in English, are the most elementary or minimal “conversational turns” possible. Minimal, because apart from acknowledging recipiency and inviting the speaker… More →
Repair Sequences in Interaction
This sub-project is concerned with analysis and cross-linguistic comparison of the mechanisms of signaling and redressing ‘trouble’ during conversation. Speakers and listeners constantly face difficulties with many different aspects of… More →
Question Sequences in Interaction
When people request information, they have a variety of means for eliciting the information. In English two of the primary resources for eliciting information include asking questions, making statements about… More →
Initial References to Persons and Places
This task has two parts: (i) video-taped elicitation of the range of possibilities for referring to persons and places, and (ii) observations of (first) references to persons and places in… More →
Building a Corpus of Multimodal Interaction in your Field Site
Research on video- and audio-recordings of spontaneous naturally-occurring conversation in English has shown that conversation is a rule-guided, practice-oriented domain that can be investigated for its underlying mechanics or structure.… More →