Abstract
A word like Huh?–used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said– is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe. We investigate it in naturally occurring conversations in ten languages and present evidence and arguments for two distinct claims: that Huh? is universal, and that it is a word. In support of the first, we show that the similarities in form and function of this interjection across languages are much greater than expected by chance. In support of the second claim we show that it is a lexical, conventionalised form that has to be learnt, unlike grunts or emotional cries. We discuss possible reasons for the cross-linguistic similarity and propose an account in terms of convergent evolution. Huh? is a universal word not because it is innate but because it is shaped by selective pressures in an interactional environment that all languages share: that of other-initiated repair. Our proposal enhances evolutionary models of language change by suggesting that conversational infrastructure can drive the convergent cultural evolution of linguistic items.
Highlights
A fundamental tenet of linguistic science is that the sound of a word has a purely arbitrary connection to the word’s meaning [1,2]
From a systematic comparison of 10 spoken languages from 5 continents we find evidence suggesting that a word like ‘Huh?’–used as a ‘repair initiator’ when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said [5,6]–is a universal word
We studied the exact same conversational environment across languages: that of other-initiated repair (OIR), in which one participant produces a turn at talk, the other signals some trouble with this turn, and the first produces a turn which aims to solve the trouble, usually by means of repetition and/or modification
Summary
A fundamental tenet of linguistic science is that the sound of a word has a purely arbitrary connection to the word’s meaning [1,2]. While the possibility space for sound systems of the world’s language is enormous, any given language makes use of only a restricted portion of the possible sounds [3,4]. It follows from these two basic principles –the ‘arbitrariness of the sign’, and the ‘selectiveness of particular sound systems’– that the words that exist in the world’s languages should sound quite different from each other, and that the likelihood that there are universal words is extremely small. From a systematic comparison of 10 spoken languages from 5 continents we find evidence suggesting that a word like ‘Huh?’–used as a ‘repair initiator’ when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said [5,6]–is a universal word
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