Over the past two decades or so, new linguistic research paradigms have arisen that no longer see grammar from a “bird’s-eye view” (Hopper 2011), but rather as a locally sensitive, usage-based, temporally unfolding resource for social interaction. As a consequence of this new conceptualization, grammar has begun to be studied in its natural ecology, i.e., talk-in-interaction, and in relation to embodied semiotic resources, in particular gaze and gesture. Owing to thriving research in the field of interactional linguistics (Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001), we are beginning to have a robust understanding of how specific linguistic constructions function as interactional resources for accomplishing specific social actions in a growing number of languages. These studies show that interactional use shapes grammar, which thus is understood as a continually evolving and emergent set of constructional patterns, rather than as an autonomous system of abstract rules which generate constructions. It is now time to broaden the analytic scope from studies of grammar and interaction in single languages to systematic comparative studies of different languages and how they work under the constraints of the temporally unfolding social interaction. There is evidence that different languages, although deploying different structural resources, respond to some basic contingencies of social interaction in similar ways. Hence, a key question arises: How do speakers use the distinct resources of different languages to accomplish fundamentally the same social actions?

In this project we focus on actions that develop a routinized grammar characterizable as complex clauses and study how these actions and structures compare across the studied language communities. We examine patterns of clause-combining across four typologically distinct languages that are not often compared in the linguistic literature: Estonian (Finno-Ugric), French (Romance), Hebrew (Semitic), and Swedish (Germanic). Together with Prof. Leelo Keevallik from the University of Linköping, Sweden, Prof. Dr. Simona Pekarek Doehler from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Prof. Jan Lindström from the University of Helsinki, Finland, each of whom is submitting a parallel proposal to their respective National Science Foundation, we approach the issue by exploring sequences of action involvingsyntactic constructions traditionally known as subordinate clauses of the relative, complement, cleft, and pseudo-cleft variety, but also cases which are less easily categorized according to this traditional classification.

Besides the unprecedented creation of a video-taped and carefully transcribed corpus of spoken Hebrew, the study has significance within at least the following realms:

- Clause-combining: The project’s focus on clause-combining will contribute to a better understanding of the grammar of clause-combining in each one of those languages.

- Grammar-in-interaction: The project’s interest in grammar-in-interaction will enrich our understanding of the role of grammar as a resource for interaction, and of the impact of its interactional use on the structure of grammar.

- Universal tendencies in grammaticization: The cross-linguistic comparisons between typologically distinct languages, based on synchronic studies of spoken interaction, will provide empirically-based findings regarding cross-linguistic, possibly universal, tendencies in grammaticization related to clause-combining.

- Universal aspects of grammar use for interaction: The cross-linguistic comparisons between typologically distinct languages will bring us a step further in understanding what is universal about speakers’ use of linguistic resources for interaction, and what is tied to the precise structures of specific languages.

In our view, it is this latter point, within the newly emerging field of pragmatic typology, that offers the most groundbreaking contributionof the project. While previous studies in pragmatic typology have identified actions having very little syntactic structure across languages, such as interjections or question words in other-initiated repair (e.g., Dingemanse, Blythe, and Dirksmeyer 2014), our study is heading for complex syntax.























מפגישת הזום של פרויקט ״טיפולוגית פרגמטית״ בהשתתפות פרופ׳ יעל משלר, ד״ר הלה פולק-יצחקי, גלית אגיון, אופיר פופליגר, ניקולאוס וילדנר, יותם בן משה, ורותם לגיל