Year: 2025Publisher: Bristol University PressAuthor: N. J. Enfield Truth is for striving at, for the sake of good collective action. With new media technologies, it seems that falsehoods can spread faster and further than ever. And with new norms of public discourse, while being caught in a lie would once end a politician’s career, today…

Year: 2022Publisher: MIT PressAuthors: N. J. Enfield and Jack Sidnell What is it about humans that makes language possible, and what is it about language that makes us human? If you are reading this, you have done something that only our species has evolved to do. You have acquired a natural language. This book asks,…

Year: 2022Publisher: MIT Press, CambridgeAuthor: N. J. Enfield A fascinating examination of how we are both played by language and made by language: the science underlying the bugs and features of humankind’s greatest invention. Language is said to be humankind’s greatest accomplishment. But what is language actually good for? It performs poorly at representing reality.…

Year: 2020Publisher: University of Hawaii PressEditors: N. J. Enfield, Jack Sidnell, and Charles H. P. Zuckerman The papers in this special issue were first written for a workshop held at the University of Sydney in August 2019, titled The Anthropology of Language in Mainland Southeast Asia. Of special interest in the workshop was the fact…

Year: 2020Publisher: Language Science Press (2020), BerlinEditors: Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield Getting others to do things is a central part of social interaction in any human society. Language is our main tool for this purpose. In this book, we show that sequences of interaction in which one person’s behaviour solicits or…

Year: 2021Publisher: Cambridge University Press, CambridgeAuthor: N. J. Enfield Mainland Southeast Asia is one of the most fascinating and complex cultural and linguistic areas in the world. This book provides a rich and comprehensive survey of the history and core systems and subsystems of the languages of this fascinating region. Drawing on his depth of…

Year: 2019Publisher: Cambridge University PressAuthor: N. J. Enfield This highly accessible introduction explores the core systems and subsystems of the languages of mainland Southeast Asia, applying the main concepts of language typology, phonology, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, language variation, and language contact, to this diverse language area. Written by a leading expert in the languages of…

Year: 2017Publisher: Basic Books, New YorkAuthor: N. J. Enfield We all had teachers who scolded us over the use of um, uh-huh, oh, like, and mm-hmm. But as linguist N. J. Enfield reveals in How We Talk, these “bad words” are fundamental to language. Whether we are speaking with the clerk at the store, our boss, or our spouse, language is dependent…

Year: 2017Publisher: Cambridge University PressAuthors: N. J. Enfield and Jack Sidnell When people do things with words, how do we know what they are doing? Many scholars have assumed a category of things called actions: ‘requests’, ‘proposals’, ‘complaints’, ‘excuses’. The idea is both convenient and intuitive, but as this book argues, it is a spurious…

Year: 2017Publisher: Oxford University Press, New YorkEditors: N. J. Enfield and Paul Kockelman Distributed Agency presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it’s like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The book’s 25 chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from…