This thesis considers two alternative views of purposeful action and shared understanding. The first, adopted by researchers in Cognitive Science, views the organization and significance of action as derived from plans, which are prerequisite to and prescribe action at whatever level of detail one might imagine. Mutual intelligibility on this view is a matter of the recognizability of plans, due to common conventions for the expression of intent, and common knowledge about typical situations and appropriate actions. The second view, drawn from recent work in social science, treats plans as derivative from situated action. Situated action as such comprises necessarily ad hoc responses to the actions of others and to the contingencies of particular situations. Rather than depend upon the reliable recognition of intent, successful interaction consists in the collaborative production of intelligibility through mutual access to situation resources, and through the detection, repair or exploitation of differences in understanding. As common sense formulations designed to accomodate the unforseeable contingences of situated action, plans are inherently vague. Researchers interested in machine intelligence attempt to remedy the vagueness of plans, to make them the basis for artifacts intended to embody intelligent behavior, including the ability to interact with their human users. The idea that computational artifacts might interact with their users is supported by their reactive, linguistic, and internally opaque properties. Those properties suggest the possibility that computers might 'explain themselves: thereby providing a solution to the problem of conveying the designer's purposes to the user, and a means of establishing the intelligence of the artifact itself. I examine the problem of human-machine communication through a case study of people using a machine designed on the planning model, and intended to be intelligent and interactive~ A conversation analysis of \"interactions\" between users and the machine reveals that the machine's insensitivity to particular circumstances is a central design resource, and a fundamental limitation. I conclude that problems in Cognitive Science's theorizing about purposeful action as a basis for machine intelligence are due to the project of substituting plans for actions, and representations of the situation of action, for action's actual circumstances. XEROX PARe. ISL-6. FEBRLARY 1985

Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine Communication.

Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian "Formalists," and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such "core" areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life

The motivation, planning, production, comprehension, coordination, and evaluation of human social life may be based largely on combinations of 4 psychological models. In communal sharing, people treat all members of a category as equivalent. In authority ranking, people attend to their positions in a linear ordering. In equality matching, people keep track of the imbalances among them. In market pricing, people orient to ratio values. Cultures use different rules to implement the 4 models. In addition to an array of inductive evidence from many cultures and approaches, the theory has been supported by ethnographic field work and 19 experimental studies using 7 different methods testing 6 different cognitive predictions on a wide range of subjects from 5 cultures.

The four elementary forms of sociality : framework for a unified theory of social relations

How do gender and language interact? For the past 20 years or so, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and feminist thinkers have explored many aspects of this question. There are now dozens of books and hundreds of course offerings on gender and language (14, 20, 41, 60, 67, 92, 98, 99), specialized articles are found in many journals and collections (15, 21, 59, 78, 87, 90, 109, 110, 115), and review articles continue to appear (8, 32, 47, 74, 76, 89). Topics treated include sexist, heterosexist, and racist language; interruptions; graffiti and street remarks; names and forms of address; politeness; tag questions; directives; motherese; children's talk during play; schoolroom discourse; bilingualism and language contact; metaphors; shifts in word meanings; the language of science, religion, and war; silence and volubility; intonation; emotional expressiveness; religious and political rhetoric; sociolinguistic variation; and language change. This list is far from comprehensive but its scatter suggests an absence of theoretical coherence in language and gender studies. Partial integration of the range of linguistic phenomena that seem sensitive to gender is sometimes attempted by trying to explain them all in terms of a

Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice

Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations.

John Clammer

Papers

Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking

Lexical Reconstruction: The case of the Proto-Athapaskan Kinship System

Language Acquisition and Communicative Choice, Language in Sociocultural Change