N J Enfield
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 30346 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | N J Enfield |
| NOMBRES | N J |
| APELLIDO | Enfield |
| FIRMA | ENFIELD N J |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3891-6973 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 74 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 625 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 69 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
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Multimodality’s role in nano-scale niche construction
Human communicative discourse can be understood as a form of nano-scale niche construction. If our burst-like communicative moves in the medium of language are to create niches that persist long enough to be exploited as shared informational environments, then we need ways to bind individual moves into larger, temporarily stable structures. One important resource for this purpose is multimodality, as found in pioneering work in gesture research b…
Legibility and Agency
This paper argues that legibility is foundational to human agency. The argument critiques the implication that legibility is exclusively modern or necessarily disempowering. On the contrary, legibility is necessary for the existence of any sociocultural system and for the agency of its members. Using examples from fieldwork in upland Laos and beyond, we define legibility as a relation between agents and environments, both physical and social in k…
Legibility in culture
This paper theorizes legibility-the potential for an environment to be interpreted by an agent-as a central mechanism for the possibility of culture. I critically evaluate the concept of legibility and explicate the mechanisms by which it underpins social and cultural practice. I define legibility and its role in the flow of meaning in social interactions and environments, where it has four functions: it mediates, rationalizes, organizes, and dis…
Information structure and changes in Moklen word-form
In this study, we investigate an apparent discourse-based alternation between monosyllabic and disyllabic word-forms in Moklen, an Austronesian language spoken in Thailand. We explore whether factors of information structure condition the variable elision of the first syllable of certain disyllabic lexemes. Data was obtained through the implementation of a picture-based field stimulus to elicit a range of lexical material within narrow discourse …
Flow Piracy and Percolation in a Hydropower Watershed
This article draws on findings of long-term field research in upland central Laos, examining the rapidly changing dynamics of language among multilingual Indigenous communities in the upper reaches of Laos's massive Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project. The case study of sudden language shift in the context of new transport infrastructure finds disruption of distributional flow at multiple levels, from natural forces to built networks to the circulatio…
Moorings
Contains fulltext : 309689.pdf (Publisher's version ) (Open Access
The limits of thematization
A fundamental capacity of language is its reflexivity. But not every aspect of language is equally accessible to being reflected upon. Michael Silverstein's 1981 paper, the "Limits of Awareness," set the terms of this discussion in linguistic anthropology with his study of speakers' "awareness" of pragmatic forms and their corresponding capacity to talk about them. His notion of differential "awareness" of aspects of language has since been found…
The unbearable heaviness of being Kri
Kri people in central Laos traditionally engage in 'heavy' practices, including a stipulation that houses must be relocated and the flooring discarded upon a death in the family. Such 'heavy' practices are considered 'real Kri', and they are not adhered to by those who identify as Kri Phòòngq. This article examines the adoption of more enduring housing construction among the Kri, and the dynamics of ethnic identity implied by the dilemmas raised …
The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia
Mainland Southeast Asia is one of the most fascinating and complex cultural and linguistic areas in the world. This book provides a rich and comprehensive survey of the history and core systems and subsystems of the languages of this fascinating region. Drawing on his depth of expertise in mainland Southeast Asia, Enfield includes more than a thousand data examples from over a hundred languages from Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thail…
Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia
Roots of Human Sociality
Introduction: Human Sociality as a New Interdisciplinary Field N.J. Enfield and Stepehn C. Levinson * Part 1: Properties of Human Interaction * On the Human 'Interaction Engine' Stephen C. Levinson * Interaction: The Infrastructure for Social Institutions, the Natural Ecological Niche for Language, and the Arena in which Culture is Enacted Emanuel A. Schegloff * Human Sociality as Mutual Orientation in a Rich Interactive Environment: Multimodal U…
Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages
Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. This predicts that humans ought to …
Interaction
Social interaction is central to the lives of many species. In humans it involves higher‐level cognition and complex patterns of mutual engagement, with mechanisms for social fission and fusion in the context of large social groups. Human interaction is a domain of order in itself, articulating a link between the social cognition and motivations of individuals and the higher‐level structures of society and culture. Core features of human interact…
Polar answers
How do people answer polar questions? In this fourteen-language study of answers to questions in conversation, we compare the two main strategies; first, interjection-type answers such as uh-huh (or equivalents yes , mm , head nods, etc.), and second, repetition-type answers that repeat some or all of the question. We find that all languages offer both options, but that there is a strong asymmetry in their frequency of use, with a global preferen…
Co-Operative Action by Charles Goodwin Cambridge
Distributed Agency
" Distributed Agency presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it's like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The book's 25 chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from anthropology, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, geography, law, economics, and sociology. While each chapter takes up different materials us…
Elements of Agency
This chapter provides a thumbnail sketch of a framework for understanding agency, which is a complex and scalar notion with multiple elements, beginning with a distinction between flexibility and accountability. Within flexibility, agents are more or less able to determine the time and place of production of meaningful behavior (control); the precise behavior to be produced, and the kinds of thing that behavior might mean (composition); and antic…
Place Reference In Interaction
The language of place and space has been intensively studied in relation to grammatical characteristics, cross-linguistic variation, and cognition, as well as with regard to further questions central to social anthropology, psychology, and more. With this special issue, we focus on the pragmatic functions of references to places, as observed in informal social interaction. When people make reference to places in casual, everyday conversation, how…
On the concept of action in the study of interaction
What is the relation between words and action? How does a person decide, based on what someone is saying, what would be an appropriate response? We argue that (1) every move combines independent semiotic features, to be interpreted under an assumption that social behavior is goal directed; (2) responding to actions is not equivalent to describing them; and (3) describing actions invokes rights and duties for which people are explicitly accountabl…
How to distinguish a wink from a twitch
Comment on Duranti, Alessandro. 2015. The anthropology of intentions: Language in a world of others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Action
Response to comments on Enfield, N. J., and Jack Sidnell. 2017. The concept of action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
A Coding Scheme for Other-initiated Repair Across Languages
We provide an annotated coding scheme for other-initiated repair, along with guidelines for building collections and aggregating cases based on interactionally relevant similarities and differences. The questions and categories of the scheme are grounded in inductive observations of conversational data and connected to a rich body of work on other-initiated repair in conversation analysis. The scheme is developed and tested in a 12-language compa…
Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems
There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world's languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of 'other-initiated repair…
Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia
Linguistics; Anthropology; Mainland Southeast Asia
A coding scheme for question–response sequences in conversation
Question–response sequences in conversation across ten languages
Language Diversity and Social Action
The classic version of the linguistic relativity principle, formulated by Boas and developed especially in the work of Whorf, suggests that the particular lexicogrammatical patterns of a given language can influence the thought of its speakers. A second version of the argument emerged in the 1970s and shifted the focus to the indexical aspect of language: any given language includes a particular set of indexical signs, and these essentially shape…
Projecting the End of a Speaker's Turn
A key mechanism in the organization of turns at talk in conversation is the ability to anticipate or PROJECT the moment of completion of a current speaker's turn. Some authors suggest that this is achieved via lexicosyntactic cues, while others argue that projection is based on intonational contours. We tested these hypotheses in an on-line experiment, manipulating the presence of symbolic (lexicosyntactic) content and intonational contour of utt…
Primary and secondary pragmatic functions of pointing gestures
Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia
Mainland Southeast Asia provides a dramatic demonstration of the areal phenomenon in linguistics: When languages are spoken historically in the same location they often show significant parallels in the organization of a wide range of structural domains, whether the languages descend from the same historical source. The effects of areal diffusion raise fundamental questions for the traditional essentialist vision of languages as entities with off…
Polar answers
How do people answer polar questions? In this fourteen-language study of answers to questions in conversation, we compare the two main strategies; first, interjection-type answers such as uh-huh (or equivalents yes , mm , head nods, etc.), and second, repetition-type answers that repeat some or all of the question. We find that all languages offer both options, but that there is a strong asymmetry in their frequency of use, with a global preferen…
Principles of event segmentation in language
We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previous typological studies have focused on segmentation into syntactic (Pawley 1987) or intonational units (Givón 1991). We argue that the correlation between such units and semantic/conceptual event representations is language-specific. As an alternative, we introduce the MACRO-EVENT PROPERTY (MEP): a construction has the MEP if it packages event represen…
The Theory of Cultural Logic
The social world is an ecological complex in which cultural meanings and knowledges (linguistic and non-linguistic) personally embodied by individuals are intercalibrated via common attention to commonly accessible semiotic structures. This interpersonal ecology bridges realms which are the subject matter of both anthropology and linguistics, allowing the public maintenance of a system of assumptions and counter-assumptions among individuals as t…
The Body as a Cognitive Artifact in Kinship Representations
Central to cultural, social, and conceptual life are cognitive artifacts, the perceptible structures which populate our world and mediate our navigation of it, complementing, enhancing, and altering available affordances for the problemsolving challenges of everyday life. Much work in this domain has concentrated on technological artifacts, especially manual tools and devices and the conceptual and communicative tools of literacy and diagrams. Re…
Relationship thinking and human pragmatics
Demonstratives in Space and Interaction
The semantics of simple (i.e. two-term) systems of demonstratives have in general hitherto been treated as inherently spatial and as marking a symmetrical opposition of distance (‘proximal’ versus 'distal'), assuming the speaker as a point of origin. More complex systems are known to add further distinctions, such as visibility or elevation, but are assumed to build on basic distinctions of distance. Despite their inherently context-dependent nat…
Lip-pointing’
‘Lip-pointing’ is a widespread but little-documented form of deictic gesture, which may involve not just protruding one or both lips, but also raising the head, sticking out the chin, lifting the eyebrows, among other things. This paper discusses form and function of lip-pointing with reference to a set of examples collected on video in Laos. There are various parameters with respect to which the conventional form of a lip-pointing gesture may va…
Cross-linguistic categorisation of the body
The definition of what-d'you-call-it
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies
To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is alw…
Elicitation guide on parts of the body
On the concept of action in the study of interaction
What is the relation between words and action? How does a person decide, based on what someone is saying, what would be an appropriate response? We argue that (1) every move combines independent semiotic features, to be interpreted under an assumption that social behavior is goal directed; (2) responding to actions is not equivalent to describing them; and (3) describing actions invokes rights and duties for which people are explicitly accountabl…
Producing and Editing Diagrams Using Co-Speech Gesture
This article presents a description of two sequences of talk by urban speakers of Lao (a southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos) in which co-speech gesture plays a central role in explanations of kinship relations and terminology. The speakers spontaneously use hand gestures and gaze to spatially diagram relationships that have no inherent spatial structure. The descriptive sections of the article are prefaced by a discussion of the semiotic co…
Questions and responses in Lao
Marked Initial Pitch in Questions Signals Marked Communicative Function
In conversation, the initial pitch of an utterance can provide an early phonetic cue of the communicative function, the speech act, or the social action being implemented. We conducted quantitative acoustic measurements and statistical analyses of pitch in over 10,000 utterances, including 2512 questions, their responses, and about 5000 other utterances by 180 total speakers from a corpus of 70 natural conversations in 10 languages. We measured p…
Linguistic Relativity from Reference to Agency
How are language, thought, and reality related? Interdisciplinary research on this question over the past two decades has made significant progress. Most of the work has been Neo-Whorfian in two senses: One, it has been driven by research questions that were articulated most explicitly and most famously by the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, and two, it has limited the scope of inquiry to Whorf's narrow interpretations of the key te…
The unbearable heaviness of being Kri
Kri people in central Laos traditionally engage in 'heavy' practices, including a stipulation that houses must be relocated and the flooring discarded upon a death in the family. Such 'heavy' practices are considered 'real Kri', and they are not adhered to by those who identify as Kri Phòòngq. This article examines the adoption of more enduring housing construction among the Kri, and the dynamics of ethnic identity implied by the dilemmas raised …
Natural causes of language
historian, sociologist, and anthropologist of Southeast Asia.In our conversations over nearly 20 years, Grant always challenged my natural tendency to focus on items.He never stopped pushing me to acknowledge the causal reality of socio-cultural systems.His intellectual engagement has been one of the main motivations for me to confront the item/system problem that is at the heart of this book.Preface can be found in the literature referred to.The…
The limits of thematization
A fundamental capacity of language is its reflexivity. But not every aspect of language is equally accessible to being reflected upon. Michael Silverstein's 1981 paper, the "Limits of Awareness," set the terms of this discussion in linguistic anthropology with his study of speakers' "awareness" of pragmatic forms and their corresponding capacity to talk about them. His notion of differential "awareness" of aspects of language has since been found…
On linguocentrism
The Theory of Cultural Logic
The social world is an ecological complex in which cultural meanings and knowledges (linguistic and non-linguistic) personally embodied by individuals are intercalibrated via common attention to commonly accessible semiotic structures. This interpersonal ecology bridges realms which are the subject matter of both anthropology and linguistics, allowing the public maintenance of a system of assumptions and counter-assumptions among individuals as t…
Remarks on John Haiman, 1999. ‘Auxiliation in Khmer
Preview this article: Remarks on John Haiman, 1999. ‘Auxiliation in Khmer: the case of baan.’ Studies in Language 23:1. 149–1, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.25.1.05enf-1.gif
Semantic analysis of body parts in emotion terminology
Investigation of the emotions entails reference to words and expressions conventionally used for the description of emotion experience. Important methodological issues arise for emotion researchers, and the issues are of similarly central concern in linguistic semantics more generally. I argue that superficial and/or inconsistent description of linguistic meaning can have seriously misleading results. This paper is firstly a critique of standards…
Parallel Innovation and ‘Coincidence’ in Linguistic Areas
Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian Linguistics (2002)
Lip-pointing’
‘Lip-pointing’ is a widespread but little-documented form of deictic gesture, which may involve not just protruding one or both lips, but also raising the head, sticking out the chin, lifting the eyebrows, among other things. This paper discusses form and function of lip-pointing with reference to a set of examples collected on video in Laos. There are various parameters with respect to which the conventional form of a lip-pointing gesture may va…
The definition of what-d'you-call-it
Demonstratives in Space and Interaction
The semantics of simple (i.e. two-term) systems of demonstratives have in general hitherto been treated as inherently spatial and as marking a symmetrical opposition of distance (‘proximal’ versus 'distal'), assuming the speaker as a point of origin. More complex systems are known to add further distinctions, such as visibility or elevation, but are assumed to build on basic distinctions of distance. Despite their inherently context-dependent nat…
Producing and Editing Diagrams Using Co-Speech Gesture
This article presents a description of two sequences of talk by urban speakers of Lao (a southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos) in which co-speech gesture plays a central role in explanations of kinship relations and terminology. The speakers spontaneously use hand gestures and gaze to spatially diagram relationships that have no inherent spatial structure. The descriptive sections of the article are prefaced by a discussion of the semiotic co…
Ethnosyntax
Nominal classification in Lao
On linear segmentation and combinatorics in co-speech gesture
Article On linear segmentation and combinatorics in co-speech gesture: A symmetry-dominance construction in Lao fish trap descriptions was published on May 26, 2004 in the journal Semiotica (volume 2004, issue 149)
Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia
Mainland Southeast Asia provides a dramatic demonstration of the areal phenomenon in linguistics: When languages are spoken historically in the same location they often show significant parallels in the organization of a wide range of structural domains, whether the languages descend from the same historical source. The effects of areal diffusion raise fundamental questions for the traditional essentialist vision of languages as entities with off…
The Body as a Cognitive Artifact in Kinship Representations
Central to cultural, social, and conceptual life are cognitive artifacts, the perceptible structures which populate our world and mediate our navigation of it, complementing, enhancing, and altering available affordances for the problemsolving challenges of everyday life. Much work in this domain has concentrated on technological artifacts, especially manual tools and devices and the conceptual and communicative tools of literacy and diagrams. Re…
Languages as Historical Documents
This paper reviews current discussion of the issue of just what is lost when a language dies. Special reference is made to the current situation in Laos, a country renowned for its considerable cultural and linguistic diversity. It focuses on the historical, anthropological and ecological knowledge that a language can encode, and the social and cultural consequences of the loss of such traditional knowledge when a language is no longer passed on.…
Lao body part terms
Cross-linguistic categorisation of the body
Elicitation guide on parts of the body
Projecting the End of a Speaker's Turn
A key mechanism in the organization of turns at talk in conversation is the ability to anticipate or PROJECT the moment of completion of a current speaker's turn. Some authors suggest that this is achieved via lexicosyntactic cues, while others argue that projection is based on intonational contours. We tested these hypotheses in an on-line experiment, manipulating the presence of symbolic (lexicosyntactic) content and intonational contour of utt…
Person Reference in Interaction
This book was first published in 2007. How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person in context, and allow us to take a particular perspective on them. This book brings together a team of leading linguists, sociologists and …
Lao separation verbs and the logic of linguistic event categorization
While there are infinite conceivable events of material separation, those actually encoded in the conventions of a given language's verb semantics number only a few. Furthermore, there appear to be crosslinguistic parallels in the native verbal analysis of this conceptual domain. What are the operative distinctions, and why these? This article analyses a key subset of the bivalent (transitive) verbs of cutting and breaking in Lao. I present a dec…
Encoding three-participant events in the Lao clause
Any language will have a range of predicates that specify three core participants (e.g. ‘put’, ‘show’, ‘give’), and will conventionally provide a range of constructional types for the expression of these three participants in a structured single-clause or single-sentence event description. This article examines the clausal encoding of three-participant events in Lao, a Tai language of Southeast Asia. There is no possibility in Lao for expression …
Primary and secondary pragmatic functions of pointing gestures
Principles of event segmentation in language
We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previous typological studies have focused on segmentation into syntactic (Pawley 1987) or intonational units (Givón 1991). We argue that the correlation between such units and semantic/conceptual event representations is language-specific. As an alternative, we introduce the MACRO-EVENT PROPERTY (MEP): a construction has the MEP if it packages event represen…
Transmission Biases in Linguistic Epidemiology
There is growing interest in approaching research on language contact and change through an epidemiological, population-based model which takes 'linguistic items' or equivalent as a key unit of analysis. This paper explores a number of elements of such a model, with particular attention to a set of biases which may act as conduits or filters for the transmission of linguistic items in populations. These include a number of such biases introduced …
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