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Pragmatic competence without a language model: Other-Initiated Repair in Balinese homesign
Safar,Josefina de Vos,Connie
Safar,Josefina
de Vos,Connie
Abstract
Homesigners are deaf individuals who have grown up in the absence of a conventional language model and have co-created a unique communication system with their hearing relatives and other interlocutors. This paper presents the first analysis of Other-Initiated Repair (OIR) sequences as a window into the pragmatic competence of homesigners. Our conversation analyses are based on 2:24 h of video data from five homesigners and their interlocutors from the Buleleng regency of Bali, Indonesia. On a par with speakers and signers of conventional languages, we find that all main OIR formats are adopted in these conversations. Moreover, we find that restricted repair formats are preferred over open ones. Homesigners also upgrade their repair strategies in multiple repair sequences just like speakers and signers of conventional languages do to achieve increasing specificity. Yet, as reported for other sign languages, OIR is more frequent in our dataset compared to previously studied spoken languages. All in all, our findings support the hypothesis that pragmatic competence and interactional abilities develop even in the absence of a language model and can therefore be seen as a foundation for language emergence to take off.
Description
Funding Information: This research has been supported by the European Research Council under the ERC Starting Grant Emergence of Language in Social Interaction (ELISA - 852352) awarded to Connie de Vos. Funding Information: We wish to thank the Balinese homesigners and their families for participating in our research, and our team of research assistants – Satyawati, Ni Made Dadi Astini, Ni Made Sumarni and Ketut Kanta – for identifying participants and collecting the data. Furthermore, we are grateful to Kristian Skedsmo and Myriam Vermeerbergen for their insightful reviews of our manuscript, to Prof. Sri Satyawati for her collaboration, as well as to Rehana Omardeen, Mark Dingemanse and Elizabeth Manrique for inspiring discussions and feedback. This research has been supported by the European Research Council under the ERC Starting Grant Emergence of Language in Social Interaction (ELISA - 852352) awarded to Connie de Vos. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors
Date
2022-12
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Keywords
Conversation analysis, Homesign, Interaction, Language emergence, Other-Initiated Repair, Sign language
Citation
Safar, J & de Vos, C 2022, 'Pragmatic competence without a language model : Other-Initiated Repair in Balinese homesign', Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 202, pp. 105-125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.10.017