Informal conversation is the primary context for all central processes of language: acquisition, comprehension, production, change, and evolution. Yet it is the least studied. The many advances of traditional linguistic typology—the systematic description and comparison of the world’s languages—have been empirically based on isolated sentences, or sentences from monologues. This limitation has been due to the significant difficulties in collecting recordings of language in natural conversation. Now that field workers can readily collect this kind of data on high quality video, it is time to build on the achievements of linguistic typology and meet the challenge of bringing our understanding of language into line with its predominant empirical format: sequences of interlocking ‘turns’ at conversation within a rich social context. The project pioneers a systematic approach to the comparison of language use, that is, language in the context of informal social interaction.

This not only forges a new field of comparative linguistics, it opens up a new horizon in the study of language and mind. ‘Mind’ means not just perception, categorization, and other individual psychological faculties but also the high-order social-relational intelligence that defines what is unique about being human: our ‘human sociality’. This term refers to our special intelligence tailored for dealing with interpersonal relationships in large, complex social groups. The proposed project stands to build on established traditions in the study of language and mind by showing that language is a window onto the social mind.

A team of six will work on seven languages (English, and two languages of Southeast Asia, West Africa, and South America, respectively), to meet three project objectives. Objective 1 is collection of extensive corpora of video-recorded natural conversation in the field. Objective 2, drawing on these Objective 1 corpora, is a systematic description of three defined systems of language use in each language: (1) repair (how problems in speaking and understanding are corrected), (2) reference (focusing on reference to places), and (3) requests (how people use language to get others to do things). Because of the great challenge involved in collecting data of the required kind to be able to examine these systems, they have been difficult to study in traditional structural and descriptive linguistics. Each domain is a window onto core aspects of human sociality: The descriptions will focus on the relation between informational imperatives (common knowledge and perspectives) and affiliational imperatives (matters of face and social manipulation). Objective 3, drawing on Objective 2, is a detailed coding and quantitative comparison of the three systems across the seven languages. This systematic comparison of systems of language use will do two things: 1. set the agenda for a new tradition in linguistics—a ‘typology of language use’—which will look for both universals and constraints on diversity, and 2. bring new evidence to bear upon interdisciplinary questions of the nature and cultural variability of human sociality.

This project is funded by a European Research Council Starting Independent Researcher Grant from January 2010 to December 2014