September 8, 2020 Book section Open Access

Mark Dingemanse

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{
  "publisher": "Language Science Press", 
  "DOI": "10.5281/zenodo.4018388", 
  "ISBN": "978-3-96110-278-5", 
  "container_title": "Getting others to do things", 
  "language": "eng", 
  "title": "Recruiting assistance and collaboration: A West-African corpus study", 
  "issued": {
    "date-parts": [
      [
        2020, 
        9, 
        8
      ]
    ]
  }, 
  "abstract": "<p>Doing things for and with others is one of the foundations of human social life. This chapter studies a systematic collection of 207 recruitments of assistance and collaboration from a video corpus of everyday conversations in Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana. A range of social action formats and semiotic resources reveals how language is adapted to the interactional challenges posed by recruitment. While many of the formats bear a language-specific signature, their sequential and interactional properties show important commonalities across languages. Two tentative findings are put forward for further cross-linguistic examination: a &quot;rule of three&quot; that may play a role in the organization of successive response pursuits, and a striking commonality in animal-oriented recruitments across languages that may be explained by convergent cultural evolution. The Siwu recruitment system emerges as one instance of a sophisticated machinery for organizing collaborative action that transcends language and culture.</p>", 
  "author": [
    {
      "family": "Mark Dingemanse"
    }
  ], 
  "page": "369-421", 
  "publisher_place": "Berlin", 
  "type": "chapter", 
  "id": "4018388"
}