Pragmatic typology - Panel at IPrA 2015

[Giovanni Rossi]

Dear colleagues

(with apologies for cross-posting)

This is a call for contributions to a panel at the 14th IPrA conference, 
26-31 July 2015, Antwerp, Belgium.

PRAGMATIC TYPOLOGY: NEW METHODS, CONCEPTS AND FINDINGS IN THE 
COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LANGUAGE IN USE

Typology is the comparative study of linguistic systems. Just like one 
can develop typologies of sound systems, syntax, and semantics, so one 
can typologise pragmatic and conversational structure. This panel 
focuses on new methods, concepts and findings in the domain of pragmatic 
typology: the comparative study of language use and the principles that 
shape it.

Pragmatics has long had a comparative outlook, and some of its important 
results have come from major cross-linguistic studies of politeness 
(Brown and Levinson 1987) and speech acts such as requests and apologies 
(Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989). Recent developments in this domain 
have been characterized by a renewed interest in the study of naturally 
occurring face-to-face interaction, resulting in an upsurge of 
comparative research focusing on pragmatic phenomena in conversation 
(e.g. Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson 1996; Luke and Pavlidou 2002; 
Enfield and Stivers 2007; Sidnell 2009; Stivers et al. 2009; Sidnell and 
Enfield 2012; Zinken and Ogiermann 2013; Dingemanse, Blythe, and 
Dirksmeyer 2014; Nuckolls and Michael 2014). Comparative work on 
pragmatics has grown to encompass a diverse set of methods and has 
already generated exciting new findings.

This panel aims to bring together international experts to discuss 
recent work in this emerging field, with a special focus on fundamental 
research questions and methods to address them. The growing availability 
of rich records of language usage enables us to address long-standing 
questions, but also to pose new ones. How general are proposed pragmatic 
universals? How do the exigencies of conversation shape and constrain 
the evolution of linguistic systems? How are systems of language use 
inflected by differences in the lexico-grammatical resources of 
typologically different languages? If systems of language use form 
paradigms, how are these paradigms to be compared across languages? How 
do different modes of social interaction (e.g., technology-mediated 
forms of communication) influence linguistic choices and pragmatic 
affordances?

We invite contributions to the field of pragmatic typology, broadly 
conceived, focussing on topics such as the systematic comparison of 
action sequences, systems of linguistic practices, and pragmatic 
principles across different situations, settings, and societies. 
Contributions should be primarily data-driven, and should present 
findings as well as address one or more of the following methodological 
challenges: How do we achieve high standards of comparability, 
accountability and replicability? How do we compare like with like in 
conversation? What are promising baseline contexts for comparison across 
languages and societies? How do we build a cumulative set of findings 
that can serve as stepping stones for new research? How do we deal with 
the distortion that comparison of distinct social and linguistic systems 
inevitably brings? How do we construct corpora and databases that can 
serve similar functions as the dictionaries and grammars of traditional 
typology?

The current panellists are Mark Dingemanse, Giovanni Rossi, Sandra 
Thompson and Yoshi Ono, Jörg Zinken.

We invite those interested in participating to send a 350-word abstract 
describing their data, research questions and methods to 
mark.dingemanse at mpi.nl and giovanni.rossi at mpi.nl. Please include title 
of paper, author name and affiliation, and contact details.

Mark Dingemanse
Giovanni Rossi
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics


REFERENCES

Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper, eds. 1989. 
Cross-Ultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex 
Publishing Corporation.

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some 
Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dingemanse, Mark, Joe Blythe, and Tyko Dirksmeyer. 2014. “Formats for 
Other-Initiation of Repair across Languages: An Exercise in Pragmatic 
Typology.” Studies in Language 31(1):5–43.

Enfield, Nicholas J., and Tanya Stivers, eds. 2007. Person Reference in 
Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives. Cambridge, 
UK: Cambridge University Press.

Luke, Kang Kwong, and Theodossia Pavlidou, eds. 2002. Telephone Calls: 
Unity and Diversity in Conversational Structure across Languages and 
Cultures. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Nuckolls, Janis B., and Lev Michael, eds. 2014. Evidentiality in 
Interaction. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Ochs, Elinor, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, eds. 1996. 
Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sidnell, Jack, ed. 2009. Conversation Analysis. Comparative 
Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Sidnell, Jack, and Nicholas J. Enfield. 2012. “Language Diversity and 
Social Action: A Third Locus of Linguistic Relativity.” Current 
Anthropology 53(3):302–33.

Stivers, Tanya et al. 2009. “Universals and Cultural Variation in 
Turn-Taking in Conversation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of 
Sciences 106(26):10587–92.

Zinken, Jörg, and Eva Ogiermann. 2013. “Responsibility and Action: 
Invariants and Diversity in Requests for Objects in British English and 
Polish Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 
46(3):256–76.