Doctoral Dissertation Research: On Space in Conversation: Coordinating Perspectives in Spatial Reference

为了成功地沟通，演讲者使用一套工具来评估他们的对话者所知道的。以前对这些工具的研究表明，说话者可能会假设听话者拥有与自己相似的知识和能力。他们还可以尽可能使所有参与者都能轻松地进行对话。这一点在关于物体所在位置的对话中尤为重要。理解一个位置的描述通常需要推断出它所给出的视角。研究发现，说话人在进行空间描述时，经常使用听话人的视角，例如听话人的“右”和“左”。然而，有些语言和语言社区不使用“右”和“左”等术语，至少不像英语使用者那样。相反，这些语言的使用者更喜欢使用来自环境的视角的描述，例如从当地的山脉。这些描述要求说话者和听话者都在头脑中进行计算，这可能会使它们更加困难，但它们的好处是独立于对话者的观点，回避了诸如“权利”是指说话者的权利还是听话者的权利之类的问题。在一个日益全球化的世界中，语言社区如何描述物体的位置以及如何对描述的角度进行推断的差异可能导致误解。 本论文将首次研究在会话中，说话人对环境描述的偏好与对听话人知识的评估之间的相互作用。为此，将对一种名为Tseltal Maya的墨西哥土著语言进行研究，该语言的使用者更喜欢使用当地景观来描述物体的位置。为了进行比较，还将从英语使用者那里收集数据，这些人已经被证明更喜欢以说话者为中心或以听话者为中心的描述。Tseltal玛雅人和英语发言者将参加一系列的任务，在两个参与者一起工作，以重建一个场景使用的对象已提供给他们。这些任务旨在生成富含空间描述的语言数据。 该项目的目的是更好地了解社区偏好如何与人类的愿望和能力相互作用，以促进对话中的空间描述的理解。

In order to successfully communicate, speakers use a set of tools to assess what their interlocutors know. Previous research on these tools suggests that speakers may assume that hearers have knowledge and abilities similar to their own. They may also do what they can to make the conversation easy to follow for all of the participants involved. This is particularly important in conversations about where objects are located. Understanding a description of a location often requires inferring the perspective from which it has been given. It has been found that speakers often use their hearer's perspective when giving a spatial description, for example the hearer's 'right' and 'left'. However, there are languages and linguistic communities that do not use terms such as 'right' and 'left', at least not in the same ways that English speakers do. Instead, speakers of such languages prefer to use descriptions with a perspective derived from the environment, for example from local mountains. These descriptions require calculations to take place in the minds of both the speaker and the hearer, possibly making them more difficult, but they have the benefit of being independent of the interlocutors' perspectives, evading such questions as whether 'right' refers to the speaker's right or the hearer's right. In an increasingly globalized world, differences in how linguistic communities describe the location of objects and make inferences about the perspectives from which descriptions are given can lead to miscommunications. This dissertation will examine for the first time how preferences for using environment-centered descriptions interact with how speakers assess the knowledge of hearers in conversation. To do this, research will be conducted on an indigenous language of Mexico called Tseltal Maya, in which speakers prefer to use the local landscape to describe the locations of objects. For comparison, data will also be collected from English speakers, who have been shown to prefer speaker-centered or hearer-centered descriptions. Both Tseltal Maya and English speakers will participate in a series of tasks in two participants work together to rebuild a scene using objects that have been provided for them. The tasks are designed to generate linguistic data that is rich in spatial descriptions. The aim of this project is to better understand how community preferences interact with human desires and abilities to facilitate understanding of spatial descriptions in conversation.