Dingemanse2020a
| Dingemanse2020a | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Dingemanse2020a |
| Author(s) | Mark Dingemanse |
| Title | Recruiting assistance and collaboration: a West-African corpus study |
| Editor(s) | Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi, N. J. Enfield |
| Tag(s) | EMCA |
| Publisher | Language Science Press |
| Year | 2020 |
| Language | English |
| City | Berlin |
| Month | |
| Journal | |
| Volume | |
| Number | |
| Pages | 369–421 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.5281/zenodo.4018388 |
| ISBN | |
| Organization | |
| Institution | |
| School | |
| Type | |
| Edition | |
| Series | Diversity Linguistics |
| Howpublished | |
| Book title | Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments |
| Chapter | |
Abstract
Doing things for and with others is one of the foundations of human social life. This chapter studies a systematic collection of 207 recruitments of assistance and collaboration from a video corpus of everyday conversations in Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana. A range of social action formats and semiotic resources reveals how language is adapted to the interactional challenges posed by recruitment. While many of the formats bear a language-specific signature, their sequential and interactional properties show important commonalities across languages. Two tentative findings are put forward for further cross-linguistic examination: a "rule of three" that may play a role in the organization of successive response pursuits, and a striking commonality in animal-oriented recruitments across languages that may be explained by convergent cultural evolution. The Siwu recruitment system emerges as one instance of a sophisticated machinery for organizing collaborative action that transcends language and culture.
Notes
