#cross-linguistic

Place reference in story beginnings: A cross-linguistic study of narrative and interactional affordances

By: Mark Dingemanse, Giovanni Rossi, and Simeon Floyd

Published by: Language in Society Volume 46, Issue 2 Pages 129-158   

LL Abstract:

In this article, Dingemanse, Rossi, and Floyd look at the use of place references in narratives from 3 societies/languages (Cha’palaa, a Barbacoan language of Ecuador; Northern Italian, a Romance language of Italy; and Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana). The authors find that place references are used in all three languages to set the stage or foreshadow events and to make the story cohere by anchoring elements of the developing story. This systematic study identifies possible uses of place reference that are generic to narratives across all three languages, suggesting that storytelling in conversation is a useful area to perform such comparative research.

LL Summary:

The article begins with noting the intersubjective notion of place referencing and by defining what exactly is a place reference: a possible answer to a “where-question” - in other words, a place that is logically connected to other places (recursive) and can be represented in a variety of forms. Dingemanse et al. then begin with an example analysis from a conversion in the British TV quiz show QI, demonstrating peoples’ normative understandings for how to begin stories as seen in the words of comedians Jimmy Carr and Sue Perkins. Observing how listeners in this orient to what place references evoke (i.e. inferences to a story’s point or a story’s later events) in this example, the authors introduce their aim in this paper: to identify the affordances of place references in narratives and to find cross-linguistic evidence for their use in conversational storytelling. The article then reviews previous literature from conversation analysis on the structure of story beginnings in various cultures and languages, introducing the background of the data in their current study: 108 narratives from videotaped natural conversations in the three languages of interest: Cha’palaa, Northern Italian, and Siwu. In 56 of these narratives, the analysts find place references that generally perform two affordances across all three languages: setting the stage and making the story cohere. Using a story about graveyard snakes from Siwu and 2 stories (about boar-hunting and women downriver) from Cha’palaa, the authors show how inclusion of place references serve to signal the start of a story and what it’s about (while it’s exclusion leads to sidebar conversation). Next, story beginnings from all three languages are analysed to show the second function of place references- making the story cohere, or providing a reference point for subsequent elements and developments of the story. Again, the authors use counter-examples to illustrate how the lack of a place reference in the appropriate place in a story leads to consequences (such as the humorous asides following one Northern Italian speakers’ lack of specificity). Dingemanse et al. argue that this and other examples reveal that references to places act as a binding technique to introduce and contextualise other elements and developments of the story. The article continues by introducing examples where place is under-specified, usually in narratives about the here and now, where narrators can draw on their current situation or elements of prior talk to make up for the lack of place in their narrative. In the final section, the authors discuss the differences between ‘location’ and ‘setting,’ how references can be ‘recognitional’ (known to the audience) or ‘non-recognitional’ (not intended to be known to the audience), and different language-specific practices for referring to place. Finally, they conclude that speakers flexibly use the interactional affordances of place references to meet the challenges of telling a story in conversation and call for further study of cross-linguistic features in this area of interaction.

LL Recipe Comparison:

This article reminds me of the recipe for Linguine with Cauliflower, Pine Nuts, and Currants:

While Dingemanse et al. find similarities in the ways that three cultures use the same linguistic strategy (place reference) in storytelling, you will count yourself lucky that this recipe combines three different ingredients into the same delicious dish! The brown butter sauce in this recipe brings out the flavor of the savory ingredients, much as the research of Dingemanse et al. brings out the interesting aspects of what makes a story compelling no matter what culture you belong to. And just like a story is incomplete without a grounding in place, this dish would be incomplete without generous amounts of Parmesan! Good Cooking!

A recent paper looks at the relationship between vision and smell, and asks whether certain smells are associated with certain colours. The paper in Psychonomic Bulletin from Josje M. de Valk, Ewelina Wnuk, John L. A. Huisman & Asifa Majid was published late last year, and is a great piece of cross-linguistic research, involving speakers of Dutch, Thai and Maniq (spoken in Thailand). They also have a great summary of the paper on their website:

Do you think the smell of lemon is yellow and that of lime green? Or are both of these smells the same color? Studies have shown that people often agree as to what colors go with odors, but it is unclear how exactly they come to create these associations. One possibility is they could be using language–they label the odors they smell and select a color matching with their label. To see whether this is true, we investigated odor-color associations among speakers of three different languages: Dutch, Thai and Maniq (a language spoken by a small hunter-gatherer community in Thailand). These groups differ in the way they describe odors: Dutch speakers usually describe the odor object (e.g smells like banana), whereas Thai and Maniq speakers (also) use abstract smell terms, i.e. words that describe a smell quality (e.g. musty). We found that people chose different colors depending on the labels they used to describe the odors: When people described the odor with an object, they more often chose colors matching the odor object (e.g. peanut butter odor – brown) than when they used smell terms (e.g., musty odor — ? color). They especially chose matching colors when they correctly identified the object. This suggests that people indeed use language to form odor-color associations.

The full paper is available to read as a PDF from their website. It has some great visualisations - Figure 1 shows all the different colours people chose for difference smells, it’s very pretty.

Reference: De Valk, J. M., Wnuk, E., Huisman, J. L., & Majid, A. (2016). Odor–color associations differ with verbal descriptors for odors: A comparison of three linguistically diverse groups. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1-9.

This research is yet another awesome project from the Meaning, Culture and Cognition team in the Centre for Language Studies at  Radboud University. More about what the Meaning, Culture and Cognition group are interested in, from their website:

الضَّرْب root: ض-ر-ب / form I verbal noun / definition: beating, hitting I left the house this morning, planning to attend the 10:30am sit-down-and-write session at my university. But after window-(and actual)-shopping in Regent Street, I bought myself a matcha oat latte (why does everything have oats in nowadays?) and decided to work from a café instead. I was actually very productive at the…