Nick Enfield (MPI Nijmegen)
Timing of responses to questions: a 10-language comparison
Department Colloquium
Monday, February 2, 2009
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
182 Dwinelle
This talk reports on a large comparative project conducted in the ‘Multimodal Interaction’ project at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen. We have compared questions and responses to them in 10 languages, drawing on natural conversational materials. We coded for a number of features of both the questions and the responses to them, with one of our main interests being the relationship between the two. This is a site of order in language that is observed not just above the sentence level, but in the utterances of more than one speaker. The talk focuses on the length of time that elapses before a response comes. Cultural accounts would predict considerable variation across languages, but we don’t really find that. We do find variation of response time WITHIN languages, and this variation can be accounted for in the same way across languages, yielding possible universals of language use. The general principle is: ‘preferred responses should come faster’. It is a kind of cooperative principle, grounded in the idea that language use is a collaborative activity. This invokes aspects of cognition that are essentially social in kind.
