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Asking for help:An empirical exploration into social grammar
No full textThis paper explores the interface between linguistic form and social meaning by focusing on correlations between sentence type and the social distance between interlocutors—a central aspect of the social meaning component of politeness. We present a forced-choice experiment with four different groups of speakers (L1 British English speakers, L1 American English speakers, L2 English/German speakers, and L1 German speakers). In this experiment, we manipulated the linguistic form of asking for help along the syntactic dimension of sentence type (declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives) and recorded the addressee our participants picked for each form (brother, coworker, or stranger). We broaden the empirical picture by going beyond highly conventionalized forms (e.g., Can you VP?) and therefore also varying the modal auxiliary verbs (e.g., Will you VP?). Based on this comprehensive picture of ways of asking for help, we identify clusters of linguistic forms depending on their felicity in different social scenarios. Our descriptive cluster analysis as well as the statistical comparisons between sentence types indicate that there are systematic correspondences between linguistic form and social meaning across different groups of speakers and languages, and we propose that our empirical data provide a potential starting point for rethinking speech act grammar in terms of ‘social grammar’
Children's Trait Inference and Partner Choice in a Cooperative Game
No full textA series of experiments conducted in Central Europe (Hungary, Austria) and East Asia (Japan) probed whether 5- to 10-year-old children (n = 436, 213 female) and adults (n = 71, 43 female; all data collected between July 2020 and May 2023) would infer traits and choose partners accordingly, in a novel touchscreen game. The participants observed third-party actions and interactions of animated agents whose behavior varied in prosociality and skill, and subsequently selected whom to play with in potentially cooperative endeavors. Overall, the results indicate (1) that trait inference may not naturally follow from action understanding but relies on learning and experimental task framing, and (2) that by 7 years of age, children begin to capitalize on such inferences in partner choice
Caging and Uncaging Pride:Di(s)visibility and the Borders of Budapest Pride
No full textIn 2008, following right-wing attacks in 2007, Budapest’s Pride march was ‘caged’ by a cordon of police barricades which remained until repudiated by march organisers in 2017. Both caging and uncaging resulted in fundamental transformations of the march, its spectacle of identity, politics, and belonging, and the meanings of Hungarian sexual politics. Grounded in ethnographic research from 1999 to the present, this paper explores the implications of these transformations for Budapest Pride’s layered visibilities and invisibilities, and their borders of desire, being, politics, and belonging. Weaving together queer concepts of ‘disidentification’, anthropological thinking on ‘friction’, and postsocialist analysis of queer ‘in/visibility’, I argue that that Budapest Pride’s shifting caged and uncaged state renders it a critical site of ‘di(s)visibility’: contingent frictions, simultaneously productive and destructive, between queer and other visibilities and invisibilities, whose ambiguous, ambivalent relations both crystallise and dissolve multiple borders of identity, politics, and belonging
Cultural evolution, social ratcheting and the evolution of human division of labour
No full textWhile ecological specialization, social differentiation and division of labour are found in many species, extensive and irreversible interdependence among culturally specialized producers is a characteristic feature of humans. By extending the concept of cultural ratcheting (or the evolution of cultural products of such complexity that they become very unlikely to be recreated from scratch by naive individuals), we present simulation models showing how cumulative cultural evolution may have engendered a parallel process of 'social ratcheting' or the origin of culturally differentiated and irreversible interdependent individuals and groups. We provide evidence that the evolution of cultural division of labour in humans may have been associated with social network structures splitting the cognitive costs of cultural production across differentiated specialists, significantly reducing the burden of cultural learning on individual cognition and memory. While previous models often assumed agents with unlimited memories, we show that limiting individual memories to a fraction of available cultural repertoires has a noticeable accelerating effect on both cultural evolution and social differentiation among producers. We conclude that cultural and social ratcheting may have been two linked outcomes of cultural evolution in the hominin lineage. This article is part of the theme issue 'Division of labour as key driver of social evolution'