Journal
JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS
Volume 168, Issue -, Pages 119-138Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2020.06.009
Keywords
Conversation analysis; Sequence organization; Cross-cultural; Universals
Categories
Funding
- Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics
- ERC [240853, 269484]
- Dobes initiative of Volkswagen Foundation [81821, 83448]
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Anneliese Maier Research Award)
- European Research Council (ERC) [240853] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
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This article makes the case for the universality of the sequence organization observable in informal human conversational interaction. Using the descriptive schema developed by Schegloff (2007), we examine the major patterns of action-sequencing in a dozen nearly all unrelated languages. What we find is that these patterns are instantiated in very similar ways for the most part right down to the types of different action sequences. There are also some notably different cultural exploitations of the patterns, but the patterns themselves look strongly universal. Recent work in gestural communication in the great apes suggests that sequence organization may have been a crucial route into the development of language. Taken together with the fundamental role of this organization in language acquisition, sequential behavior of this kind seems to have both phylogenetic and ontogenetic priority, which probably puts substantial functional pressure on language form. (c) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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