Final Report Summary - HSSLU (Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use)
This project carried out the first ever large-scale and systematic global comparison of language in social interaction in very different cultures based on video-recordings of everyday life. Contributors to the project conducted field expeditions in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Western Europe, and Aboriginal Australia, building databases on the use of language as a tool for conducting social life. The project began with the knowledge that the languages spoken around the world are structured in very different ways, and it asked whether the underlying strategies by which languages are actually used are the same or different. The project pursued the hypothesis that the ways in which languages are used in social life should be very similar across cultures, based on the idea that there is a universal core to human sociality, namely the underlying social cognition and social group dynamics that motivate and regulate our ways of interacting. The project developed a methodology for gathering raw data in field expeditions around the world, using collectively guided observations in those data to formulate and refine coding schemes that targeted defined research questions, and then to reliably code, analyse, and systematically compare data from very different languages and cultural settings in order to test the project’s hypotheses. A first major project examined principles for 'repairing' problems of attention, perception, and understanding in social interaction; we found that these principles are strongly similar in different linguistic and cultural contexts, involving the same basic options of strategies for solving problems, and even involving almost identical forms for the most basic types of 'repair' operation. A second major subproject examined principles for 'recruiting' the assistance of other people in everyday interaction; we found that strongly similar principles are followed across languages and cultures, including the tendency to avoid imposing upon those of 'higher' social standing, as well as a tendency to minimize effort where possible, even when those cultures and languages differ radically. A smaller research subproject on how language is used to refer to places supported the view that all languages allow a similar range of strategies for referring to a place, where selection from among options is guided by speakers’ social goals. Taken together, the findings of these three projects show that despite great diversity in the structures and meanings encoded in languages from different parts of the world, human social interaction has a mostly universal underlying cognitive and social infrastructure. This implies that while the meanings and grammatical structures encoded in different languages can vary radically, the principles by which those meanings and structures are used in the flow of social interaction do not vary radically but are strongly similar. The findings support the view that systems of language use follow basic principles that emerge from universals of human sociality.