N. J. Enfield

N. J. Enfield
The University of Sydney · Department of Linguistics

Professor LInguistics

About

208
Publications
69,280
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7,253
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2015 - present
The University of Sydney
Position
  • Professor
November 2000 - December 2014
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Position
  • Researcher

Publications

Publications (208)
Chapter
Human evolution is defined by a multifaceted interplay of biological and cultural factors, which comprise the focus of a diverse spectrum of scientific fields. This edited volume aims to establish interdisciplinary links through a series of nine studies that critically discuss the current methods, hypotheses frameworks, and future perspectives for...
Article
A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when “everything is connected.”...
Article
A review of recent work on interactive repair across the language and cognitive sciences. Key to this piece is the observation that interactive repair is central to the language system. Far more than a remedial procedure, it is an integral part of what makes generative language so flexible and resilient; it is a key locus for reflexivity; and it en...
Article
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Prosociality and cooperation are key to what makes us human. But different cultural norms can shape our evolved capacities for interaction, leading to differences in social relations. How people share resources has been found to vary across cultures, particularly when stakes are high and when interactions are anonymous. Here we examine prosocial be...
Article
What are the properties of mind that make language the way it is, and languages the way they are? To answer those questions, it is necessary to look at the causal processes by which languages become the way they are. The relevant dynamic processes take place in different causal frames, including the familiar diachronic, phylogenetic, ontogenetic, a...
Chapter
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This chapter provides an annotated coding scheme for analyzing recruitment sequences in video-recorded social interaction. The scheme provided a basis for the research presented in the eight language-specific chapters of this book, and as such it gives necessary context for understanding the comparative project reported on here and in associated wo...
Book
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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 person’s behaviour solicits or occasions another’s assistance or collaboration share common structural properties that provide a basis for the systemat...
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Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding...
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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...
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Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects—social, psychological and even physical. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, servi...
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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-...
Article
How are language, thought, and reality related? Interdisciplinary research on this question over the past two decades has made significant progress. Most of the work has been Neo-Whorfian in two senses: One, it has been driven by research questions that were articulated most explicitly and most famously by the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee...
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Download here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078273 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...
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Practices of other-initiated repair deal with problems of hearing or understanding what another person has said in the fast-moving turn-by-turn flow of conversation. As such, other-initiated repair plays a fundamental role in the maintenance of intersubjectivity in social interaction. This study finds and analyses a special type of other-initiated...
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This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Lao language (a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia). The article reports findings specific to the Lao language from the comparative project tha...
Article
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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 resourc...
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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....
Article
While it has been shown that languages can select quite different formal resources for performing similar pragmatic functions in social interaction, our focus in this paper is the possibility that some types of form-function mapping are essentially universal. Our case study looks at how polar questions are confirmed. For confirming a polar question...
Book
The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species’ special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the n...
Chapter
The distinctive character of human social interaction - including the capacities that underlie it and the consequences that flow from it - forms an important pillar of research in linguistic anthropology. The five essays in this Part address a range of aspects of interaction and intersubjectivity. A basic premise underlying the chapters in this Par...
Chapter
Interdisciplinary perspectives The title of Part V should immediately suggest the usual caveats. For example, disciplines are artificial entities, the products of historical happenstance and cultural commitments, rather than the rational effects of well-defined and naturally bounded subject matters. Attempts to bring them together often only succee...
Chapter
The ancient Greeks divided the study of discourse into three parts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The study of grammar is premised on the idea that language is structured while the study of logic acknowledges that it can be used to say things that are true or false. The study of rhetoric, on the other hand, is based on the idea that speaking is con...
Chapter
The formations of meaning explored in Part I include not only languages and cultures as highly complex systems, they also include linguistically competent and culturally socialized agents, as well as the capacities to speak languages and to inhabit cultures. What explains the nature of those formations? D’Arcy Thompson (On Growth and Form, Cambridg...
Chapter
System and function Language is real, students of linguistics are taught, but languages are only imagined. Things we call languages - Japanese, for instance - can readily be identified insofar as one might hear a person talking and say "She’s speaking Japanese." But as soon as one tries to define the full contents and precise borders of "the Japane...
Article
This introductory chapter points out some issues that are central to the anthropology of language. The subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology in the narrow sense is an indispensable source of questions, methods, and solutions in the anthropology of language. The chapter raises some challenges that linguistic anthropology must meet, articulates th...
Article
Listening in on conversations around the world reveals that human dialogue follows some universal rules that enable and enrich our social interactions
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In conversation, the initial pitch of an utterance can provide an early phonetic cue of the communicative function, the speech act, or the social action being implemented. We conducted quantitative acoustic measurements and statistical analyses of pitch in over 10,000 utterances, including 2512 questions, their responses, and about 5000 other utter...
Book
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...
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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 univers...
Article
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Speakers of Lao (Southwestern Tai, Laos) use a number of forms of nominal classification, including numeral classifiers, modifier classifiers, class terms, and kin prefixes. The numeral classifier system is a typologically prototypical one, with dozens of classifiers making fine semantic distinctions in the context of enumeration. Repeater construc...
Article
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Review of the books Virtually you. The dangerous powers of the e-personality, by Elias Aboujaoude; The big disconnect. The story of technology and loneliness, by Giles Slade; and Net smart. How to thrive online, by Howard Rheingold.
Article
The study of language in relation to anthropological questions has deep and varied roots, from Humboldt and Boas, Malinowski and Vygotsky, Sapir and Whorf, Wittgenstein and Austin, through to the linguistic anthropologists of now. A recent book by the linguist Daniel Everett, Language: the cultural tool (2012), aims to bring some of the issues to a...
Chapter
Full-text available
A comparison of conversation in twenty-one languages from around the world reveals commonalities and differences in the way that people do open-class other-initiation of repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks, 1977; Drew, 1997). We find that speakers of all of the spoken languages in the sample make use of a primary interjection strategy (in Engli...
Chapter
This chapter proposes that the ideas of cultural item and cultural system are reconciled by something that they have in common: Neither idea exists without the simpler idea of a functional relation. Functional relations are the interface that joins items and systems together, and one can look to them for a solution to the item/system problem. Cultu...
Chapter
The cultural evolution of language in historical time can only be understood in terms of an explicit causal account. This chapter proposes a framework for such an account, explicated in terms of a ‘four-stroke engine’ for cultural transmission, consisting of a chain of events in social transmission of innovation from exposure to representation to r...
Chapter
Fulltext: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0012-5F49-1 This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Lexical Selection in Reference: Introductory Examples of Reference to Times Multiple “Preferences” Future Directions Conclusion
Chapter
Fulltext: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0010-241D-9 forthcoming 2013
Chapter
Any account of social action presupposes an ontology of action whether this is made explicit or not. This chapter reviews the problem of defining and analyzing action in interaction, and to propose a solution. It describes three dimensions of contrast in the analysis of action. A first point is that both purposive action and non-intentional effects...
Chapter
The view that questions are 'requests for missing information' is too simple when language use is considered. Formally, utterances are questions when they are syntactically marked as such, or by prosodic marking. Functionally, questions request that certain information is made available in the next conversational turn. But functional and formal que...
Article
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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 la...
Chapter
Fulltext: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-D1BB-0
Chapter
Fulltext: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-D1BC-E
Article
Full-text available
Reviewed work(s): Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. By Nicholas Evans. Indianapolis: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. On the Death and Life of Languages. By Claude Hagège, translated by Jody Gladding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
Article
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This article examines vocabulary for taste and flavor in two neighboring but unrelated languages (Lao and Kri) spoken in Laos, southeast Asia. There are very close similarities in underlying semantic distinctions made in the taste/flavor domain in these two languages, not just in the set of basic tastes distinguished (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, um...
Article
Full-text available
Semantic typology is the study of semantic categorization. In the simplest case, semantic typology investigates how an identical perceptual stimulus is categorized across languages. The problem examined in this article is that of event segmentation. To the extent that events are perceivable, this may be understood as the representation of dynamic s...
Chapter
Fulltext: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-D1CF-4
Chapter
(from the chapter) Recognizing others' goals in the flow of interaction is complex, not only for analysts but for participants too. This chapter explores a semiotic approach, with the utterance-in-context as a basic-level unit, and where the interpreter, not the producer, is the driving force in how utterances come to have meaning. We first want to...
Chapter
Fulltext: http://bit.ly/Enfield2011Dynamics
Chapter
Fulltext: http://bit.ly/Enfield2011LinguisticDiversity
Chapter
Full-text available
This revised version supersedes all previous versions (e.g., Field Manual 2010).
Chapter
This version is reprinted from the 2010 Field Manual
Article
This paper surveys the structure of questions and their responses in Lao, a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Data are from video-recordings of naturally occurring conversation in Vientiane, Laos. An outline of the lexico-grammatical options for formulating questions describes content (‘WH’) questions and polar (‘yes...
Article
Full-text available
In this document, we outline the coding scheme that was developed and used in the 10-language comparative project on question–response sequences in ordinary conversation, carried out from 2007 in the Multimodal Interaction Project at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.The introduction to this special issue (Enfield, Stivers, and Levinso...
Article
Both of these considerations of the evolution of language draw on research from a wide range of fields, although Enfield believes they do not pay sufficient attention to the dynamic context of human social behavior.
Article
Full-text available
Both of these considerations of the evolution of language draw on research from a wide range of fields, although Enfield believes they do not pay sufficient attention to the dynamic context of human social behavior.
Article
Reviews the book, Gesturecraft: The Manu-Facture of Meaning by Jurgen Streeck (see record 2009-03892-000). This book on gesture goes back to well before the recent emergence of a mainstream of interest in the topic. The author of this book presents his vision of the hands' involvement in the making of meaning. The author's stance falls wi...
Article
Full-text available
Review method: peer-reviewed
Chapter
People of all cultures have some degree of concern with categorizing types of communicative social action. All languages have words with meanings like speak, say, talk, complain, curse, promise, accuse, nod, wink, point and chant. But the exact distinctions they make will differ in both quantity and quality. How is communicative social action categ...
Chapter
http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2007/language-of-perception-background/

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