Multimodal dairy cow-human interaction in an intensive farming context

In our consideration of how to decentre an anthropocentric view in linguistics, we will address the following research question: how do dairy cows and humans imbue their interspecies interaction as a semiotic resource with meaning that makes sense for both species under specific social conditions (Jorgensen, 2008:167). We address the question by using a social-interactional approach informed by conversation analysis (CA) (Goodwin, 2017, Mondada, 2016, 2018; Mondeme, 2021), which enables us to examine what the dairy cow makes relevant in the sequential organisation when interacting with a human. We show that the dairy cows make gaze important in their interaction. Gaze alone is sufficient to mobilize human interlocutor response, and gaze withdrawal by the human should take place for a successful communication (case-study 1 versus study 2). The case-studies of dairy cow-human interactions show that these interactions include much more than (human) sounds and (human) signs only: language is taken as languaging, as a social practice, embedded in a multimodal interactional exchange (Levinson and Holler 2014) that includes nonhuman animals as well. This also implies that linguists should therefore look beyond 'sound' and 'sign'.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

This article discusses how to decenter an anthropocentric view in linguistics and uses the interaction between dairy cows and humans as an example to explore how they imbue their interspecies interaction with meaning. The research shows that gaze plays an important role in the interaction, and successful communication requires the human to avoid gaze. The article argues that linguists should go beyond "sound" and "sign" and consider language as a social practice embedded in multimodal interaction.