Volume 16 (2012): Issue 2 (December 2012)
Language as a Tool for Interaction, Issue Editor: Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi

In the face of the complexity of language as an object of study, it becomes crucial for researchers who investigate its various facets to communicate and to understand each-others’ terminology, methods and results. The feasibility and utility of striving for the elegance of formal models of isolated aspects of the linguistic system (for example, set of generative rules in an individual’s head) are called into question: a theory of language needs to account for how it functions in multiple systems and on multiple time-scales. This short introduction to the special issue on Language as Social Coordination situates works in this issue on the map of collective effort to formulate such a theory. It is also a reflection on the form of a theory of language that could integrate this variety of data and results.

Recent studies have taken advantage of newly available, large-scale, cross-linguistic data and new statistical techniques to look at the relationship between language structure and social structure. These ‘nomothetic’ approaches contrast with more traditional approaches and a tension is observed between proponents of each method. We review some nomothetic studies and point out some challenges that must be overcome. However, we argue that nomothetic approaches can contribute to our understanding of the links between social structure and language structure if they address these challenges and are taken as part of a body of mutually supporting evidence. Nomothetic studies are a powerful tool for generating hypotheses that can go on to be corroborated and tested with experimental and theoretical approaches. These studies are highlighting the effect of interaction on language.

The issue of signal reliability (‘honesty’) is widely recognised in language evolution research as one of the most fundamental problems concerning the evolutionary emergence of protolanguage, i.e. early language-like communication. We propose that nonverbal communication is likely to have played an important but underestimated role in language evolution: not directly in the transfer of message contents, but rather in stabilising the emerging protolanguage. We single out one subset of nonverbal cues - nonvocal nonverbal paralinguistic adaptors (NNPAs) - based on their role as indicators of reliability in present-day communication of humans. We suggest that the relatively involuntary and therefore reliable NNPAs might have served to stabilise more volitionally controlled, and therefore less reliable, verbal communication at the initial, bootstrapping stages of its phylogenetic development.

Linguistic creativity is a manifestation of communities’ and cultures’ innovativeness. The initial results will be presented of an empirical project analysing the character and speed of the social spread of winged words and neologisms in a microblogging site, using the tools of social network analysis applied to big-scale data. Investigating the diffusion of linguistic innovation requires an approach pooling competences from human, social, and computational sciences. Such a complex systems perspective can lead to a deeper understanding of how mutual relations and communication between Internet users impact the cultural evolution of language in time and space, and the shape and dynamics of the interactions themselves, delivering quantitative estimates on the expansion of linguistic expressions and allowing the prediction of future trends and their scale.

Bilingualism and biculturalism are of growing importance in the world today and of increasing research interest in social sciences. Since the seminal paper by Hong et al. (2000), researchers have explored cognitive consequences of cultural and/or linguistic frame switching on cognitive functioning, mainly causal attributions (Benet-Martinez et al., 2002). It was repeatedly found that when primed by either Chinese or Americans symbols, bicultural Chinese-Americans would act as monoculturals on each side of their hyphenated identity. Paradoxical effects of conflicting bicultural identity were also reported (Benet-Martinez, Haritatos 2005). Boski (2008) extended the arguments built on a particular cultural mix of Chinese-Americans category and the analytic - holistic cognitive divide, to other groups and to axiological domains among Polish-Americans. In the current study, bilingual Tunisians of two generations were asked questions pertaining to values entrenched in their immediate cultural milieu and about those reflecting their personal convictions. Also, they answered questions about their readiness to act according to extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, as well as about conflicts between these two tendencies. Language (Arabic vs. French) was the key contrasting variable in our study. The findings clearly demonstrated that when using the French language, participants of both generations became not only less extrinsic but also less intrinsic in their motivations based on the local Arabic culture. However, the degree of conflict between these two motivational tendencies became stronger among participants using French as a tool for communication. This research demonstrates the power of cultural representations based on language and adds to the arguments falsifying naïve beliefs in “perfect translations”.

In the last decade we witness an increase in approaching issues in language, and more generally, cognition, from a dynamical standpoint. This theoretical shift necessitates new research methods and statistical / analytical tools. Some of these tools gain popularity and are being applied to language in many of its multifaceted perspectives. Recurrence analysis is one of those methods. Its relative simplicity of application and quite unconstrained statistical assumptions give researchers an insight into the dynamical nature of the phenomena under scrutiny. The aim of this paper is an introduction to this method, a review of its convincing applications in the language research on several levels of language analysis and finally, a reflection on its possible further uses.