Sequence organization: a universal infrastructure for social action

TY - JOUR

T1 - Sequence organization

T2 - a universal infrastructure for social action

AU - Kendrick, Kobin H.

AU - Brown, Penelope

AU - Dingemanse, Mark

AU - Floyd, Simeon

AU - Gipper, Sonja

AU - Hayano, Kaoru

AU - Hoey, Elliott

AU - Hoymann, Gertie

AU - Manrique, Elizabeth

AU - Rossi, Giovanni

AU - Levinson, Stephen C.

N1 - ©2020 Elsevier B.V. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.

PY - 2020/10/1

Y1 - 2020/10/1

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Conversation analysis

KW - Cross-cultural

KW - Sequence organization

KW - Universals

U2 - 10.1016/j.pragma.2020.06.009

DO - 10.1016/j.pragma.2020.06.009

M3 - Article

SN - 0378-2166

VL - 168

SP - 119

EP - 138

JO - Journal of Pragmatics

JF - Journal of Pragmatics

ER -