Nicholas Evans

Department of Linguistics, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra. /

Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Köln

Coordinating Minds: Engagement in grammar

Our ability to interact with others by building a shared and complex mental world through social cognition is increasingly recognised as a central driver of human evolution, and as the key capacity underpinning the evolution of culture, including language. It is social cognition which enables us to construct functioning societies sharing knowledge, values and goals, and to undertake collaborative action. It is also crucial to empathising and communicating with others, to enriching imprecise signs in context, to maintaining detailed, differentiated representations of the minds and feelings of those who share our social universe, to coordinating the exchanges of information that allow us to keep updating these representations, and to coopting others into action.

Linguistically, the centrality of social cognition raises several questions. Can we develop an elaborated architecture of what speaker/hearers encode in representing social cognition? How far does this architecture vary across languages, in other words how far have languages come up with different engineering solutions to the many difficult demands made on our minds by the complexities of social cognition? Can we harness the vast variation of the world’s languages to achieve what Ortega y Gasset called an ‘audacious integration’ of human possibilities for linguistically-mediated social cognition?

This talk will draw on ongoing research on cross-linguistic differences in one crucial area of social cognition: the problem of monitoring how far mind-states of attention, knowledge or expectation – either of speaker and hearer, or successive mind-states of the speaker – are ‘on the same page’. While this includes some familiar phenomena, such as the use of articles or indefinite pronouns to track presumed identifiability by the hearer, or of discourse particles like German doch or Italian mica to monitor differences between expectation and actuality, more extensive typological research  finds that these are only a small part of the full possibility space. Less familiar phenomena to be covered in this talk include demonstrative systems where speaker or hearer attention or knowledge plays a crucial role beyond spatial considerations, systems of verbal inflection which indicate the extent to which the phenomenon is deemed already known to the address, and a family of categories leading out from the ‘mirative’ (evaluating states of affairs as new to the speaker, at the moment of speech) to evaluations of cognitive newness at earlier points in time.

There have been recent calls for a ‘second person neuroscience’ in studies of social cognition – for an approach that places dialogue at the centre of social interaction. If language differences are capable of significantly reshaping cognition, as seems increasingly clear, it is likely that they will target social cognition as well. By laying out how differently grammars can configure the task of mental and attentional coordination, we gain an initial map of where psycholinguistic studies can go on to look for likely cognitive effects.