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B*~ti!tllli"f:4l;[Current Trends in Pragmatics Oversea]

A Report from Overseas Research on Pragmatics
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands*

Hiroaki Tanaka
Kyoto Institute of Technology

1. About the institute: an overview
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (hereafter MPI for Psycholinguistics) is one of the 80 institutes around the world that comprise the Max Planck Socie~ty, founded in 1948, and is the successor organization to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society
for the Advancement of Science. 1 Below is the building of MPI for Psycholinguistics
from their website: 2* I would like to thank to the people at the MPI for Psycholinguistics and elsewhere, particularly
Stephen C. Levinson who cordially invited me to the institute and made many insightful comments on
my presentation, Nick Enfield who stirred up and energized my research interest, Gunter Senft, Mellisa
Bowerman, Ad Foolen (Radboud University), Gertie Hoymann, Thomas Widlok (Radboud University),
Paul Drew (The University of York) whose talk I unfortunately missed on the last day of my 2010 visit; Kaoru Hayano and Yufuko Takashima (Kyoto University), without both of whom I could not havespent happy days at the institute, Makiko Sadakata (Radboud University), and Penelope Brown, andespecially to the Japanese researchers I chanced to meet there.
Most regrettably, Professor Emeritus Mellisa Bowerman passed away unexpectedly on Oct. 31st
after I left the institute at the end of September 2011. See the website at http://www.mpi.nl/news/remembering-our-dear-colleague-melissa-bowerman and her obituary at https://www.mpi.nl/condolenceViewController-context-root/faces/Home? _afrLoop= 7019657 636724 779&Adf-Window-ld=wO&_afrWindowMode=O&_adf.ctrl-state= 1dbd9can9a_3&_afrRedirect= 701965 8241707815.
I extend my heartfelt condolences to her friends and family.
1 See the details at the website of the Max Planck Gesellschaft at
http://www.mpg.de/english/portal/index.html, and at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Wilhelm_Society about the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.
2 I got out of the cab at a building in the beautiful woods of the Radboud University
Nijmegen(a.k.a the University of Nijmegen) campus on the 6th of September to find a surprisingly modernized,
compact and comfortable place, The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where I was invitedby Stephen C. Levinson to stay for almost three weeks in September, 2010, and also by Nick Enfieldin September, 2011. See the website at http://www.ru.nl/english/.
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When they search for MPI for Psycholinguistics on the net, humanities-based linguistic people will be slightly surprised to find it grouped into cognitive research in the
Biology and Medicine Section. As explained on the first page of the website of MPI
for Psycholinguistics (http://www.mpi.nl/) in the general introduction to the world-renowned institute,(1)

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German
Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological, social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts
with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different
types.
The institute is situated on the campus of the Radboud University. We
participate in the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, andhave particularly close ties to that institute's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. We also participate in the Centre for Language Studies. A joint graduate
school, the IMPRS in Language Sciences, links the Danders Institute, the
CLS and the MPI.
(http://www.mpi.nl/)

As the introductory notes show, the institute not only does research in linguistics, butalso collaborative work on "the psychological, social and biological foundations of language" encompassing cognitive and neuropsychological processing of, and interaction
with, other aspects of mind and language learning. The three key words of the introduction are "psychological, social and biological," whose implication will be apparent if
you read further into the website to see what these people are doing now.

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The research departments and groups are as follows: 3(2)· Individual differences in language processing department: Why are somepeople better with words than others? Director: Antje Meyer.
· Language acquisition department: How do we learn a first, second or
third language? Director: Wolfgang Klein.
· Language and cognition department: What is the relationship between
language and general cognition? Director: Stephen Levinson.
· Language and genetics department: Which genes underlie human language, and how do they explain its evolution and variability? How does the
genome help build a language-ready brain? Director: Simon Fisher.
· Language comprehension department: How do we understand spoken
language? Director: Anne Cutler.
· Neurobiology of language department: How does the brain support language? Director: Peter Hagoort.

Other research groups funded by the MPG:
· Adaptive listening group: How do listeners understand language spoken with aforeign accent? Headed by: Andrea Weber.
· Communication before language group: How do infants communicate before
they have language? Headed by: Ulf Liszkowski.
· Comparative cognitive anthropology group: How much does human cognition
vary across cultures? Headed by: Daniel Haun.
· Evolutionary processes in language and culture group: How do languages
evolve? What is possible, what is probable, and why? Headed by: Michael Dunn.
· Syntax, typology, and information structure group: What are the communicative functions of grammatical structures in different languages? Headed by: Robert Van Valin.
Externally funded research groups:· Human sociality and systems of language use: What is the relationship between language and social cognition? Headed by: Nick Enfield.
· INTERACT: An interdisciplinary science of human communicative interaction,
focusing on the underlying properties of sequences of contingent actions. Headed by: Stephen C. Levinson.
· Language in our hands: sign and gesture: Research investigates to what extent
using visual-gestural modality shapes language. Headed by: Asli Ozyurek.
(http://www.mpi.nl/institute/research-departments-groups)

3 The institute named them just "Group" until 2010, but renamed it "Department and Subgroup" in
2011.

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Of the groups listed above, I attended a couple of meetings of the "Language and Cognition group" directed by Stephen Levinson and sometimes hosted by Nick Enfield.
According to the group's home on the website, the aims are mainly twofold:(3)

The Language and Cognition group investigates the relationship between language and general cognition, making use of the "natural laboratory" of language variation. To this end, it maintains about a dozen field sites around theworld, where languages are described often for the first time, the semantic
categories examined and field experiments conducted.
Table 1.

(4)

The Language and Cognition field sites in 20ll.

Current research has two main strands. The first concerns the use of language
in interactive situations and its foundations in cognition - the MultimodalInteraction Project. The second concerns the nature of semantic categories
across languages, explores their diversity, and investigates the significance ofdiverse linguistic categories for human cognition - the Categories Project.
(http://www.mpi.nl/institute/research-groups/language-and-cognition-group)(Italics mine) (http://www.mpi.nl/institute/research-groups)

As this map shows, the institute has conducted research in almost every part of theworld. Most of the languages on the map are endangered. Each dot on the map4 (Table 1) links to the details of the language investigated. Point A, for example, is the language Yeli Dnye, on which Stephen Levinson is working. Yeli Dnye "is a language isolate, not clearly related to any other language." 5
A key notion specifically referred to in passage (4) above is the diversity of language, as I have italicized. I will discuss the universals and diversities of language later, in my discussion of a key paper written by Evans and Levinson (2009).

4
5

The dots have increased by 10 to 25 in 2011.
See the details at
http://www.mpi.nl/institute/research-groupsllanguage-and-cognition-group/fieldsites/yeli-dnye.

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What people are doing at the institute.

The Language and Cognition Department is composed of Director Stephen C. Levinson, Senior investigators Nick Enfield, Asifa Majid and Gunter Senft, 8 Research staff
members, 15 Ph.D students, 5 affiliated members, 2 research assistants, and Secretary
Edith Sjoerdsma, along with many others. 6 The department's main task, as noted above,
includes two research programs. One is field work, such as that in Table 1, and theother is analysis from perspectives ranging from psycholinguistics to pragmatics, anthropological linguistics, cognitive linguistics, conversational analysis, sociolinguistics
and ethnomethodology, psychology, anthropology, biology, neurology, semantics andpragmatics. Compared to Japanese universities and research institutes, I was surprised
to find that people there are well organized, get along well enough to do collaborative
work, led by the world's leading scholars, two of whom are Director Stephen Levinson
and Senior staff member Nick Enfield who have been sending a message to the linguistic camps worldwide for more than 20 years. That message is, in a word, the integration of humanities-based and science-based linguistic methodologies, and is aimed atpeople who only specialize in one aspect of language study, and who have been sitting,as it were, each sunk deep in his/her own armchair, living in a separate world from eachother. The institute is sounding the alarm about the present state of academic linguistics and its capacity to contribute to society in the future after having faced with, andsuffered from, substantial educational budget cuts.
Specifically, institute members' everyday work is consists of meetings of eachgroup, lectures by speakers from other universities and institutes, so-called "lunch talks"(which were very intriguing to me during my stay) where one or two graduate or post
graduates give brief presentations for about half an hour which are discussed overlunch, and some workshops held by outside and inside scholars, mostly sponsored by
grants. 7 Inside the institute, they do their research, such as experimental work and interviewing, and give the sort of talks mentioned above, just as researchers, post-docs, aswell as ordinary graduate students do at every other university or institute. But outside
the institute, especially, in spring and summer, they go to a dozen or more field sitesaround the world to collect research data and describe target languages.

See http://www.mpi.nl/institute/research-groups/language-and-cognition-group/people.
See the website titled "Levinson awarded prestigious ERC Advanced Grant", recently upgraded to
the website at http://www.mpi.nl/news/levinson-awarded-prestigious-erc-advance-grant, according towhich he has been awarded 2.5 million Euros. See the website of ERC-European Research Council
at http://erc.europa.eu/advanced-grants, whose main purpose is "ERC Advanced Grants allow exceptional established research leaders of any nationality and any age to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk
projects that open new directions in their respective research fields or other domains. The ERC Advanced Grant funding targets researchers who have already established themselves as independent research leaders in their own right."
6

7

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According to the website of the institute, (the site says, "as of 2007, the institutehas switched to a bi-annual format with selective publication lists only" and unfortunately, The Research Report for 2009-2010 is highly restricted for copyright reasons sothat I am unable to directly cite from it here), group members get together and collaboratively report on completed research work. The Annual Report 2006 lists the 11
projects which were, have been, and will continue to be the institute's major focus ofinvestigations, including Phonological Learning for Speech Perception; Decoding Continuous Speech; Utterance Encoding, Multimodal Interaction; Categories and Concepts
across Language and Cognition; Language Production Units; Information Structure in
Language Acquisition; The Comparative Study of L2 Acquisition; The Dynamics of Multilingual Processing; Sign Language Typology, and Other Research. The project whichinterests me most is the fourth one, Categories and Concepts across Language andCognition, which concerns the ongoing dispute among a group of scholars who have
not only crossed the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, but also gone further
to bridge more distant interdisciplinary fields that relate to the study of language. The
participants participants in this group are Penelope Brown, Nick Enfield (coordinator),
Trine Heinemann, Marijn Lamers, Stephen Levinson, Jan Peter de Ruiter (coordinator),
Gunter Senft, and Tanya Stivers; Ph.D. students Gertie Hoymann, Lilla Magyari, Federico Rossano, and Connie de Vos; and other external collaborators. 8"Interactional engine" and exploring linguistic diversity

3.

"Interactional engine"
One of the main themes of Stephen Levinson's group is that, as Levinson (2006:44) says, "humans are endowed with a set of cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions that synergistically work together to endow human face-to-face interaction withcertain special qualities," which he called "human interactional engine." Kataoka (2011)
describes this notion as the move toward seeking the foundations of acquiring humansociability based on human interaction, by incorporating other interdisciplinary schools
into linguistic research. The current research aim of this group is that of looking in
more detail into the total interactive activities of human beings to gain ground in the exploration of the "human interactional engine," which purports to the essence of human's
embodiment and language use, such as joint attention, joint intention, and environmentally coupled gesture as well as intersubjectivity. Pragmatics, on which their work cen3.1.

The details at http://www.mpi.nl/institute/annual-reports/annual-reports, and for the Annual Report
2006 which is open to the public, and the full version,
http://www.mpi.nl/institute/annual-reports/archive-annual-reports/MPI-Anrep-2006-print.pdf.
Also refer to 2007-2008 Research Report for overall research of the institute. See the pdf file at
http://www.mpi.nl/institute/annual-reports/ archive-annual-reports/copy_ of_BiAnRep2007 _ 08 _MPI_f_
PSYL.pdf.
8

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ters, has paved the way for humanities-based sciences in the 21st Century, in my view.
3.2.

Subprojects, talks, and workshops
One of the characteristics of the institute, common to each department, is (bi-)
weekly or sometimes monthly meetings on individual projects, the precise theme ofwhich the members decide and discuss, sometimes hosted by renowned researchers fromoutside the institute. Paul Drew at York University came to Levinson's group to provide
and gather raw data for the members' database, (to be published by Cambridge University Press as a collection of papers, titled Conversational repair and human understanding, edited by M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, & J. Sidnell.) The special issue of the Journalof Pragmatics above in 2010, mentioned below, was also a result of such meetings.
You will find as many as 52 workshops and conferences listed in the Research Report for 2007-2008 (pp. 36-37, see the website at http://www.mpi.nl/institute/annual-reports/archive-annual-reports/copy_of_BiAnRep2007_08_MPI_f_PSYL.pdf)
Lastly, let me focus, for the rest of this report, on one subproject, "Question andtheir responses" in chapter 4.1. of the Annual Report for 2006. The issue is devoted to"investigating questions in conversation across a wide range of often unrelated languages" (p. 43). This section of the report bore fruit in the special issue of Journal of Pragmatics 2010, vol. 42, issue 10, compiled and introduced by Nick Enfield, "Question-response sequences in conversation across ten languages". This issue casts new light on
quantitatively based conversational analysis, although "earlier studies of questioning haveoften been qualitative" and "[Q]uantitative analysis relying on behaviour coding a laBales (1950) has been much criticized for losing all the rich qualitative texture of verbal
interaction" (Enfield et al., 2010: Introduction). Languages included in the project are:Language name

Language group

Data collected by+Akhoe Haillom (Namibia)
DanishDutch
English (US)
ItalianJapanese
KoreanLao
Tzeltal (Mexico)
Yeli Dnye (Papua New Guinea)

KhoisanGermanic
Germanic
Germanic
Romance
IsolateUral-Altaic
Tai
Mayan
IsolateHoymann
Heinemann
Englert
Stivers
RossanoHayashiYoon
Enfield
Brown
Levinson(Enfield 2010: Introduction) 99Refer to http://www.cis.kit.ac.jp/-htanaka/ for more of my own comments on the issue.

Concluding remarks 10

4.

Since my allotted space is running out, see Levinson's (2006) 'Interactional Engine' and Evans and Levinson (2009) for more detailed discussion on the diversity anduniversality of language. Diversity of language is the main theme of the institute, andone that greatly interests me personally. Other studies which will be explored at the institute include language and thought, language and evolution, and language comprehension. Lastly, let me cite the final passage of Levinson and Majid (2009) regarding thefuture orientation of research at the institute, which I found very intriguing.
Our senses, and arguably our more abstract thoughts too, may be set up innately
to deliver veridical information and inference, but rapidly in infancy we imbibe
the language and categories of our culture and use these to make the discriminations and inferences that the culture has found useful through historical adaptation to its environment. As psychology enters an era of preoccupation with individual differences, we can be sure that many more ways in which language andI was invited to a Ph.D defense ceremony, which is always held in the Radboud University aulanext to the institute-aula means "hall" in Latin. It looked to me to be a very solemn, heated discussion. The following is an explanatory passage at
http:/!kumlandereng.blogspot.com/2008/09/dutch-phd-defense-ceremony.html.
Dutch PhD defense ceremony: The Dutch thesis defense reminds me most of a traditional
American wedding. The defense takes place in a chapel. The players include the defender,
two paranimf (the groomsmen role), the promotor (advisor), a Pedel (an official position in theuniversity), who plays a master of ceremonies role and eight opponents. The defender andparanimf are in full tux and tails, the Pedel and full professors in academic gowns and the other opponents in suits. In the audience are the defender's friends and family.
The ceremony starts by the defender giving a short description of this thesis to the audiencefrom a Podium in front of the chapel. Led by the Pedel, the promotors and opponents enter
the chapel from the back and march to sit in the choir seats. For forty-five minutes the opponents, one at a time, ask hard questions to the defender about his thesis. At the end the Pedel
reenters the chapel marches to the front, hits her staff on the ground and says "Hora Est" (Timehas expired). The opponents and promotors march out of the chapel to a discussion room
where they vote on the defense and sign the thesis. After that they return back, present the diploma where the promoters read some traditional text and give a short speech. The ceremony
is followed by a receiving line and reception with dinner.
This picture below was taken by me on Sept. 23, 2011:10

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culture influence cognition (and, no doubt, constraints on those effects) will be
discovered.
*MPI for Psycholinguistics(http://abstrakkt.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html)

References
Enfield, N. J., T. Stivers, and S. C. Levinson. 2010. "Question-response Sequences in Conversation across Ten Languages: An Introduction." Journal of Pragmatics 42, 2615-2619.
Evans, N. and S. C. Levinson. 2009. "The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and
Its Importance for Cognitive Science." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 5, 429-492.
Kataoka, Kuniyoshi. 2011. "Goyouron: Goyouron Kenkyuu no Atarashii Tenkai (Pragmatics: A
New Development)." Nihongogaku (Japanese Linguistics) vol. 30-14. Rinji zoukan gou
2011.11 (1112011. Special edition). Tokyo: Meji Shoin.
Levinson, S. C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. (Japanese translation by Hiroaki Tanaka and Kairi
Igarashi, 2007, Imino Suitei:Shin-Grice Gakuha no Goyoron. Tokyo: Kenkyusha.)
Levinson, S. C. 2006. "On the Human "Interaction Engine"." InN. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson(eds.) Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, 39-69. Oxford: Berg.
Levinson, S. C. 2010. "Questions and Responses in Yeli Dnye, the Papuan Language of Rossel

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Island." Journal of Pragmatics 42, 2741-2755.
Levinson S.C. and A. Majid. 2009. "The Role of Language in Mind." InS. Nolen-Hoeksema, B.
Fredrickson, G. Loftus, and W. Wagenaar (eds.) Atkinson and Hilgard's Introduction toPsychology, 15th ed., pp. 352. London: Cengage Learning.