Year: 2016Publisher: Frontiers, LausanneAuthor: N. J. Enfield A line of research in cognitive science over several decades has been dedicated to finding an innate, language-specific cognitive system, a faculty which allows human infants to acquire languages natively without formal instruction and within short periods of time. In recent years, this search has attracted significant controversy in…

Year: 2017Publisher: Language Science Press Editor: N. J. Enfield Dependency is a fundamental concept in the analysis of linguistic systems. The many if-then statements offered in typology and grammar-writing imply a casually real notion of dependency that is central to the claim being made—usually with reference to widely varying timescales and types of processes. But…

Year: 2014Publisher: Language Science PressAuthor: N. J. Enfield What causes a language to be the way it is? Some features are universal, some are inherited, others are borrowed, and yet others are internally innovated. But no matter where a bit of language is from, it will only exist if it has been diffused and kept…

Year: 2015Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton, BerlinEditors: N. J. Enfield and Bernard Comrie The studies in this book represent the rich, diverse and substantial research being conducted today in the linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. The chapters cover a broad scope. Several studies address questions of language relatedness, often challenging conventional assumptions about the status of…

Year: 2014Publisher: Cambridge University Press, CambridgeEditors: N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman and Jack Sidnell The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species’ special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey…

Year: 2015Publisher: Oxford University Press, OxfordAuthor: N. J. Enfield This book argues that the complex, anthropocentric, and often culture-specific meanings of words have been shaped directly by their history of ‘utility’ for communication in social life. N. J. Enfield draws on semantic and pragmatic case studies from his extensive fieldwork in Laos to investigate a…

Year: 2007Publisher: Cambridge University PressEditors: N. J. Enfield and Tanya Stivers How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name (‘Robert Smith’), reduced name (‘Bob’), description (‘tall guy’), kin term (‘my son’) etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person…

Year: 2013Publisher: Oxford University Press, New YorkAuthor: N. J. Enfield In Relationship Thinking, N. J. Enfield outlines a framework for analyzing social interaction and its linguistic, cultural, and cognitive underpinnings by focusing on human relationships. This is a naturalistic approach to human sociality, grounded in the systematic study of real-time data from social interaction in everyday…

Year: 2011Publisher: Pacific Linguistics, CanberraEditor: N. J. Enfield Human diversity is the central problem of all the fields of anthropology. Our languages, our genetics, our material cultures, our social organization: these are woven together by the ancient processes of change and diversification that produce the rich diversity we see today. What are these processes and…

Year: 2009Publisher: Cambridge University Press, UKAuthor: N. J. Enfield How do we understand what others are trying to say? The answer cannot be found in language alone. Words are linked to hand gestures and other visible phenomena to create unified ‘composite utterances’. In this book N. J. Enfield presents original case studies of speech-with-gesture based…