[Lingtyp] Fwd: Workshop: Fifty years of The Pear Film by Wallace Chafe: An Overview and New Perspectives

[Mira Ariel]

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From: John DuBois <dubois at ucsb.edu>
Date: 5 December 2025 at 7:50:00 GMT-8
To: Mira Ariel <mariel at tauex.tau.ac.il>
Subject: Workshop: Fifty years of The Pear Film by Wallace Chafe: An Overview and New Perspectives



Workshop:

Fifty years of The Pear Film by Wallace Chafe: An Overview and New Perspectives

Date: December 6, 2025, 16:00 – 19:30 (GMT+3 Moscow)

In 1975, a small team of linguists led by Wallace Chafe wrote the script for a new kind of film, intended to be shown to speakers of languages around the world, to elicit their tellings of what happened in it. Paradoxically, the film itself – now known as the Pear Film – contains no language of any kind, neither spoken nor written, not even a title or credits. On its 50th anniversary, the time is ripe to consider why this film was made the way it was; why the role of linguists as visual scriptwriters was key; and why the design of the Pear Film still matters for researchers in linguistics and cognitive science today. On one level, the Pear Film was designed simply as a new method for the experimental elicitation of narrative discourse. But on a deeper level, its design was profoundly shaped by linguistic theory from the outset. The goal was to support exploratory research on topics in cognitive linguistics, functional linguistics, discourse, and linguistic typology. Taken together, these goals motivated the complete absence of language from a film designed for linguistic research. The film was intended to serve as an experiential stimulus: a proxy for the pre-verbal human experience of a meaningful series of events, one that could be experienced by anyone in any culture, and verbalized by users of any language. The design as a purely visual stimulus was intended to avoid bias toward any specific language, while giving the viewers plenty to talk about, in ways that would reveal – hopefully – the natural contours of their language.

Chafe set goals for the Pear Film that were ambitious and innovative at the time. The enduring relevance of these research goals, and of the research tool they engendered, is attested by the variety of new projects that have been conceived and carried out all over the world during the last 50 years, a creative outpouring that continues to this day. This workshop seeks to advance the state of the art in current Pear Film research, showcasing projects that continue to develop novel ways of using this experiential stimulus to explore new research directions in cognitive science and linguistics.

PROGRAM

December 6, 2025, 16:00 – 19:30 (GMT+3 Moscow)

16:00 – 16:15. Opening Remarks by Vladimir Glebkin

16:15 – 16:40. Wallace Chafe. Origins of the Pear Film (video presentation from the workshop "Stories About Pears: 40 Years Later," held on September 25, 2015, in Turin, Italy).

16:40 – 17:10. John W. DuBois (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA). How the Pear Film Was Designed to Elicit Typological Diversity. (online)

17:10 – 17:40. André Coneglian (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil). The Pear Stories in the Context of Cross-Linguistic Comparison: Theory, Method, and Possibilities. (online)

17:40 – 18:40. Yulia Nikolaeva (Lomonosov Moscow State University; National Research University Higher School of Economics). The Pear Film in the Study of Speech and Gesticulation in Aphasia.

18:40 – 19:10. Vladimir Glebkin (School 1514, Moscow; RANEPA). The Pear Film as a Stimulus Material for Investigating Cognitive Development.

19:10 – 19:40. Natalia Sukhova (National University of Science and Technology MISIS; Russian State Humanities University). Hold Your Head Up, or How the Cephalic Channel Works.



Venue: School 1514, Moscow, Krupskoi St., 12.

Connection link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87857114836?pwd=Z2xrdlYyUWd1OWZBT25IN1VxY2hmQT09

Conference ID: 878 5711 4836

Access Code: 337928



SPONSORS

Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University

Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences

Department of Cultural Studies and Social Communication, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)

Laboratory of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at School 1514, Moscow



=======================================

John W. DuBois
Professor of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California 93106
USA
Email: dubois at ucsb.edu<mailto:dubois at ucsb.edu>
Zoom: Zoom room<https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/9851117049>
Web page: http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/dubois/
Rezonator: https://rezonator.com
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