Sequence organization: A universal infrastructure for social action

Abstract

This article makes the case for the universality of the sequence organization observable in informal human conversational interaction. Using the descriptive schema developed by Schegloff (2007), we examine the major patterns of action-sequencing in a dozen nearly all unrelated languages. What we find is that these patterns are instantiated in very similar ways for the most part right down to the types of different action sequences. There are also some notably different cultural exploitations of the patterns, but the patterns themselves look strongly universal. Recent work in gestural communication in the great apes suggests that sequence organization may have been a crucial route into the development of language. Taken together with the fundamental role of this organization in language acquisition, sequential behavior of this kind seems to have both phylogenetic and ontogenetic priority, which probably puts substantial functional pressure on language form.

Actions in practice: On details in collections

“…So turn-taking, the organization of sequences, the organization of repair mechanisms in talk, the conversational preference for particular actions -all part of that procedural infrastructure -are proving to be empirically robust across the structural variation and diversity of languages and language groups (see e.g. Clift, 2016;Enfield et al, 2017;Kendrick et al, 2014;. And, of course, such cross-linguistic analysis is also able to identify the extent to which specific practices may be universal.…”

“…Here again, the distinction between actions and practices becomes relevant as one considers the generalizability of conversation-analytic claims regarding epistemics: while action types extend cross-linguistically and cross-culturally as of universal import, the specific practices used to implement those actions can vary significantly. We already saw cross-linguistic variation in our initial examples of Arabic and English responsive utterances: the action of returning a greeting, for instance, remains constant across languages and cultures as a sequentially normative expectation (see Kendrick et al, 2014), yet the particular linguistic resources available to second speakers with which to design that action can vary. With regard to polar questions, the distinction between interrogative and declarative syntax, which is unambiguously relevant to speakers of English (as we just saw in (11)), is obviously not available (and therefore cannot be relevant) to speakers of 16% of the 842 languages surveyed by Dryer (2008) that do not possess interrogative syntax.…”

Why study turn‐taking sequences in interspecies interactions?

“…Non-human primates seem to remain the favored model for investigating the evolution of human language. This raises several issues, because despite frequent claims 13 (for instance see Kendrick et al, 2020: "one of the most basic units of human social interaction [turn-taking, author's note] has apparent homologs in the social interaction of nonhuman primates" (2020: 134)), it is still unclear whether turn-taking mechanisms identified in non-human primates are indeed homologous or simply analogous (Pika et al, 2018). This is a critical question (Laland & Brown, 2008).…”

“…Originally coined as systematic 'mechanisms' (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, 1974), and sometimes referred to as 'universals' (Stivers et al, 2009;Kendrick et al, 2020) or 'universal infrastructure' (Pika et al, 2018), turn-taking and conversational mechanisms are treated as analytical entry points to open the black box of communication.…”

“…One parameter in particular has been scrutinized: turn‐taking and its correlate, sequential organization. Originally coined as systematic ‘mechanisms’ (Sacks et al., 1974), and sometimes referred to as ‘universals’ (Kendrick et al., 2020; Stivers et al., 2009) or ‘universal infrastructure’ (Pika et al., 2018), turn‐taking and conversational mechanisms are treated as analytical entry points to open the black box of communication.…”