Transdisciplinary Case Study Research Articles

Initiating, innovating and accelerating edible cities. A case study based on two transition experiments in the city of Dresden (Germany)

Civic transition experiments targeting sustainable food production increasingly engage with edible cities aiming at providing free food on public urban spaces. To deepen the understanding regarding how transition experiments can build urban transformative capacities, this paper presents a transdisciplinary case study on two civic edible city initiatives and their measures to cooperatively initiate, innovate, and accelerate edible cities in Dresden (Germany). We identified the two key action areas “civic participation” and “cooperative area activation” covering ten key transition activities to illustrate the variety and content of a transformation towards an edible city. Based on expert interviews and document analyses, we evaluated their process progression by linking research from urban ecology with transformation science. By visualizing its quantitative results, common and distinct patterns of the edible city initiatives could be made visible. Overall, we found that the level of activity is highest in the key action area of “citizen participation”. In this context, both transition experiments had different but specific foci in terms of their key transition activities (i.e. education, activation of stakeholders), whereby activities related to civic empowerment and social cohesion were lacking in both cases. To re-shape narratives pertaining to land access, food production, and participation under the principles of justice, we suggest that transition experiments related to “civic participation” and “cooperative area activation” must be approached together. Our systematic assessment can then enable civic transition teams to strategically identify common goals that need to be prioritized for initiating, innovating, and accelerating urban edible commons.

Is transdisciplinarity an achievable ideal? Lessons from our experience

ABSTRACT Transdisciplinarity (TDS) is claimed to be a necessary condition to support the agroecological transition. Based on an analysis of the literature and a cross-reading of seven French transdisciplinary case-studies, we point out the tensions generated by real TDS activity, especially when combining the logic of actions from researchers and non-academic actors, and with the norms of TDS. Our results concern three dimensions: composition of the multi-actor groups, management of temporalities and adaptive nature of a TDS approach. The lessons resulting from this analysis should be usable to fuel reflection on the ex ante or in itinere evaluation of TDS processes, and support other TDS practitioners.

Decision-making for circular economy implementation in agri-food systems: A transdisciplinary case study of cacao in Colombia

Sustainable food security represents a significant challenge in advancing the global agenda expressed in the Sustainable Development Goals, including feeding the growing world population while transitioning toward a circular economy. A growing body of literature is focused on developing concepts and documenting circular economic opportunities in agricultural food systems. However, the methodologies for implementing circular economy models at the farm level remain mostly theoretical. This study proposes a transdisciplinary based approach for evaluating circular economy alternatives in agri-food systems while enhancing farmers’ decision-making skills. The transdisciplinary based research methodology combines methods for simulating critical resource and production flows with multi-criteria decision-making, including training and obtaining feedback from farmers. We test the methodology on a cacao agri-food system in Meta (Colombia). Biomass waste and cost-benefit data allow evaluation for decision-making of four circular economy scenarios: composting, vermicomposting, drip irrigation, and valorization of cacao husks. Research outcomes recommend vermicomposting as a viable circular economy innovation for cacao farms to reduce biomass waste and improve economic income at farm level. Other outcomes include capacity building of farmers on circular economy –including resource flow analysis and cost-benefit calculation. Effective decision-making on circular economy adoption at farm level is evidenced by vermicomposting technology implementation. Policy recommendations call for transdisciplinary based approaches for promoting and scaling the transition towards a circular economy in agri-food systems at a farm scale involving farmers participation in operations research (analytics) modelling and interpretation. In addition, policy advise for circular economy technical assistance and finance, includes vermicomposting as a technology for scaling transition of agri-food systems such as cacao and comparable long-term crops.

Transdisciplinarity 101: Short-Term Training in Knowledge CoProduction to Face Global Environmental Change

The Belmont Forum and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) organized an online training workshop on transdisciplinary (TD) approaches at the Sustainability, Research, and Innovation Congress (SRI) in 2022. The IAI is an intergovernmental organization that brings together 19 countries from the Americas to support adaptation to the world’s changing environment. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of major funders and international science councils to promote knowledge about sustainability science. The workshop aimed to create a safe environment for participants to share their impressions of and experiences about transdisciplinary research, using the Americas (IAI mandate) as a launching point for TD approaches globally. The workshop consisted of two online sessions: Transdisciplinary Approach 101 and Transdisciplinary Case Studies. The objectives of the current workshop report are: 1) to identify the key takeaways regarding common challenges and opportunities for transdisciplinary practice among workshop participants’ experiences, upon which to base recommendations for best practices, e.g., managing power imbalances, conflicting priorities and timeframes, enhancing communication and consolidating contextual awareness. 2) to offer insights to build better strategies for “train the trainers'' processes around transdisciplinarity, especially in congresses and short-term events, including using an experience-based approach, offering specific tools and increasing the participation of non-academic partners. This report encourages the implementation of other training processes by experienced transdisciplinary researchers, practitioners, and funders, in order to build capacities for collaborative approaches in diverse scientific communities.

Health Impact Assessment to Promote Urban Health: A Trans-Disciplinary Case Study in Strasbourg, France

Health Impact Assessment (HIA), an inherently trans-disciplinary approach, is used to help evaluate and improve projects or programmes in sectors such as transportation, where new infrastructure is likely to have effects on health. This article describes the screening, scoping, appraisal, and recommendation steps of an HIA on a new 24 km highway around the conurbation of Strasbourg, France. Methods included a literature review and quantitative estimates of the health effects of air pollution and noise. Although planned, interviews and focus groups proved impossible due to political and administrative difficulties. In replacement, answers to a related public inquiry were submitted to a secondary, thematic analysis. The new infrastructure is likely to create or help maintain some jobs in the short term and might accelerate certain journeys, but it does not seem able to improve local mobility and air quality issues. It crystallises the dissatisfaction of a part of the local population and raises the question of the transparency of the design and validation processes of major infrastructure projects. Despite an unfavourable political context, the HIA approach described in this article was able to overcome methodological difficulties and obstacles thanks to creative research methods and trans-disciplinarity to finally yield relevant information and suggestions for urban health promotion.

Ocean Food Systems and Hybrid Seafood Production: Transdisciplinary Case Studies of Cod, Eels, Salmon, and Lobster

Capture fisheries and aquaculture are researched, planned, and managed throughout the world as if they are independent entities ignoring their complex and evolving interdependencies. Global attention on “blue foods” as an important part of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is focused on the restoration of capture fisheries and the sustainable expansion of aquaculture. Such a binary approach does not fit the current realities, opportunities, and innovations in ocean food systems (OFS), and does not integrate enough of the necessary transdisciplinary knowledge across professions. Integration of knowledge across professions is needed as modern ocean foods enter common marketplaces so interventions to increase sustainability must incorporate data on rural economic development, producers and their mixed ocean/land-based livelihoods and seasonal employment patterns, tourism, data on local to regional and global trade, and consumer behaviors. Four case studies detail the status and evolution of OFS typologies of American and spiny lobsters as fed fisheries, salmon as aquaculture-enhanced fisheries, and the capture-based aquacultures for cod and for eels. Objectives of this review were to examine for four OFS cases if there was adequate evidence to show that they were as productive, economically attractive, and as socially beneficial OFS that rival those of binary aquaculture or fisheries systems alone; and did they have significant potential to accelerate innovations as much as those sectors. For the four cases reviewed, productive, social and ecologically valuable, rapidly evolving OFS existed with demonstrable innovation trajectories. In the early part of this century it was estimated that capture-based aquaculture (CBA) accounted for about 20% of the total quantity of food fish production worth US$1.7 billion. Review of just four case studies having a limited number of participating countries found that annual value of the OFS exceeded US$4 billion: the value of eels as a capture-based aquaculture (CBA) was estimated US$2.3 billion for just two countries; for salmon as an aquaculture-enhanced fishery at $1.7 billion for only one state of the USA; and for lobsters as fed fisheries and a CBA, $825 million for the USA and Vietnam. However, OFS are disruptive as they require radically changed science, education, management, and development policies as current binary fisheries and aquaculture management approaches do not fit their current realities, or opportunities, or accelerate innovations, plus poorly integrate knowledge across professions. This was demonstrated by the example of dynamic management/regulatory situation for cod wild fisheries and the growing CBA for cod in Norway. The coming decades of accelerated climate and social changes will cause concomitant changes to ocean foods markets from local to global, and rural ocean foods livelihoods. These two systemic changes will drive the evolution and development of a greater diversity of OFS that will require much more attention of policy-makers and investors.

Communicating climate change and biodiversity loss with local populations: exploring communicative utopias in eight transdisciplinary case studies.

Climate change and biodiversity loss trigger policies targeting and impacting local communities worldwide. However, research and policy implementation often fail to sufficiently consider community responses and to involve them. We present the results of a collective self-assessment exercise for eight case studies of communications with regard to climate change or biodiversity loss between project teams and local communities. We develop eight indicators of good stakeholder communication, reflecting the scope of Verran's (2002) concept of postcolonial moments as a communicative utopia. We demonstrate that applying our indicators can enhance communication and enable community responses. However, we discover a divergence between timing, complexity and (introspective) effort. Three cases qualify for postcolonial moments, but scrutinising power relations and genuine knowledge co-production remain rare. While we verify the potency of various instruments for deconstructing science, their sophistication cannot substitute trust building and epistemic/transdisciplinary awareness. Lastly, we consider that reforming inadequate funding policies helps improving the work in and with local communities.

The role of institutions in food system transformations: lessons learned from transdisciplinary engagements in Ethiopia, the Philippines, and Indonesia

ABSTRACT In many parts of the Global South, food systems are confronted with complex sustainability challenges including high levels of poverty, food insecurity, malnutrition, disempowerment, and degraded environments. Transformation is broadly discussed in research, policy, and planning as the systemic change required to address complex sustainability issues. Transformation of food systems has become a global priority for research and action. However, transformation processes are not neutral, but are associated with losses and gains that are unevenly distributed. Institutions play an important role in relation to how transformation of food systems occur and with what outcomes. Empirical understandings of how institutions can influence transformation processes in a way that avoids risks or the so-called dark side of transformation are needed. This article aims to contribute towards understanding the roles that institutions play in transformation processes in the context of Global South food systems through synthesising insights from transdisciplinary case studies. The three case studies include multi-purpose cooperative institutions in farming areas in southwest Ethiopia, fisherfolk organisations in aquatic food-producing areas in northern Philippines, and Gotong Royong for irrigation canal management for pond aquaculture in Indonesia. The article examines whether and how institutions advance inclusion and participation in food systems, and whether institutions enable or constrain food system actors in mitigating or avoiding transformation risks. The paper reflects on the role of community-level institutions and hybrid governance arrangements, and the interplay of structure and agency in transformation processes.

Pop-up cycling infrastructure as a niche innovation for sustainable transportation in European cities: An inter- and transdisciplinary case study of Berlin

• Air quality measurements show that pop-up bike lanes reduce cyclists’ exposure to NO 2 . • Survey data shows high social acceptance for pop-up bike lanes. • Usage data reveals 73% increase in cycling on the pop-up bike lane. • Pre-existing multi-actor collaboration enabled fast infrastructure implementation. • Pop-up bike lanes can accelerate the implementation of the mobility transition. Mobility behavior changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic have opened a window of opportunity for an accelerated transition towards sustainable mobility. Many European cities installed temporary cycling infrastructure which can be considered a niche innovation in the Multi-Level-Perspective of transitions (Geels, 2002). We empirically assess the effects of such temporary infrastructure in terms of air quality, behaviour, and acceptance, with a focus on the city of Berlin, Germany. The numerous pop-up bike lanes installed serve as an inter- and transdisciplinary case study to systematically capture these effects. We conducted a survey among Berlin citizens (n= 1,661), analysed cycling usage data, and measured the exposure of cyclists to air quality before and after the implementation of one pop-up bike lane during the first wave of COVID-19. Results show that pop-up bike lanes receive high levels of acceptance, increase cycling usage on the respective street, and reduce cyclists’ exposure to nitrogen dioxide. Their implementation fosters an innovative mind-set of transport planning: to temporarily try out new street designs, learn from these practical experiences, improve the designs, and then permanently implement the ones best proven in practice. We conclude that PUBL can accelerate the regime shift from car-oriented to bicycle-friendly cities because of its many demonstrated positive impacts.

Drought-Induced Civil Conflict Among the Ancient Maya

The influence of climate change on civil conflict and societal instability in the premodern world is a subject of much debate, in part because of the limited temporal or disciplinary scope of case studies. We present a transdisciplinary case study that combines archeological, historical, and paleoclimate datasets to explore the dynamic, shifting relationships among climate change, civil conflict, and political collapse at Mayapan, the largest Postclassic Maya capital of the Yucatán Peninsula in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE. Multiple data sources indicate that civil conflict increased significantly and generalized linear modeling correlates strife in the city with drought conditions between 1400 and 1450 cal. CE. We argue that prolonged drought escalated rival factional tensions, but subsequent adaptations reveal regional-scale resiliency, ensuring that Maya political and economic structures endured until European contact in the early sixteenth century CE.

Making transdisciplinarity happen: Phase 0, or before the beginning

Both within science and society, transdisciplinary approaches are increasingly employed to address today’s sustainability challenges. Often transdisciplinary research processes are structured in three core phases: a) problem identification and formation of a common research object; b) co-production of solution-oriented and transferable knowledge; c) embedding co-produced knowledge through transdisciplinary reintegration. In all phases of this ideal-typical model, the involvement of non-academic actors is essential to meet the challenges of real-world problems, and of transformative research practices. Despite existing guidance for the core transdisciplinary process, its initiation often remains an uncharted area because of its strong context dependency. Based on a concrete transdisciplinary case study addressing sustainability transformation in Transylvania, we bring together our learned experience with initiating a transdisciplinary process using a research-driven approach. To this end, we introduce the notion of Phase 0, as an initiating phase prior to beginning an ideal-typical transdisciplinary process. Within Phase 0, we propose three empirically and literature informed sub-phases: Sub-Phase 0.1) selecting the case study; Sub-Phase 0.2) understanding the case study context from a transdisciplinary perspective; Sub-Phase 0.3) fostering premises for coming together. We outline the general rationale behind these sub-phases, and we illustrate how we carried out each sub-phase in practice. By deriving cross-cutting lessons from the three sub-phases, we enhance the practice of transdisciplinary sustainability research with the aim to leverage its transformative potential.

A case study of instrument design

While searching for a way to unify my creative process into an artistic practice, I was led to design a new instrument. This instrument resembles a cello in certain respects but also integrates important values and discussions from the current century, notably Communication, Integration, Representation and Autonomy. My goal has been to use the process of design development of the instrument as research for discovering new ways of practicing music and composing. For this research project, I am testing my 2021 release of the instrument: producing artworks with a diverse range of collaborators and multidisciplinary interactive concerts. At its core, this is a transdisciplinary case study combining instrument design, composition, and performance.

Neighbourhood bushfire hazard, community risk perception and preparedness in peri-urban Hobart, Australia

Background Information campaigns about bushfire preparedness are often based on the assumption that residents of bushfire-prone neighbourhoods underestimate their risk. However, there are complex relationships between bushfire hazard, perceived risk and adaptive action. Aims We investigate how residents’ understanding of bushfire risk relates to biophysical risk in the City of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia’s most fire-prone state capital. Methods A transdisciplinary case study using a survey of 406 residents living close to the wildland–urban interface, focus groups in four bushfire-prone neighbourhoods, and geospatial fire risk assessment. Key results Neighbourhood concern about bushfire is statistically associated with biophysical measurement of local bushfire risk. This awareness does not necessarily translate into adaptive action, in part because residents underestimate the risk to their homes from fuels on their own property and overestimate the risk from bushland and neighbouring properties, leading to a common response that preparing for bushfire is futile if your neighbours do not also prepare. Neighbourhoods with high levels of positive community interaction, however, are more likely to access preparedness information, and develop fire-adaptive behaviours. Conclusions/Implications Our findings highlight the need for social adaptation pathways using local communication interventions to build the neighbourhood knowledge, networks and capacities that enable community-led bushfire preparedness.

The motivations, desired outcomes, and visions of partner organizations to Collective Impact tree planting: A transdisciplinary case study of CommuniTree in Northwest Indiana, U.S.

In Northwest Indiana, a new urban forestry effort called CommuniTree has emerged with a goal of helping solve some of the region’s post-industrial social and ecological issues. Though no panacea, tree planting can have significant benefits, including air pollution abatement, temperature moderation, stormwater management, and beautification. CommuniTree is a Collective Impact-style collaborative of over a dozen partner groups (public, nonprofit, private, and partnership organizations) that plants trees on public and industrial properties in post-industrial Northwest Indiana communities where urban forestry governance and resources are relatively lacking. This paper presents the results of the first phase of a transdisciplinary research program that draws insights from urban forest governance scholarship and transdisciplinary sustainability science as well as from urban forest professionals involved in CommuniTree who helped design the research. We used a transdisciplinary case study approach with qualitative interviews with key informants from CommuniTree partner organizations to investigate partner organizations’ motivations for participating, desired outcomes, and long-term visions for CommuniTree. We find that the CommuniTree partnership itself is an intrinsic incentive to partners’ participation: once an influential champion brought the group together, they were motivated to stay involved by the work and structure of CommuniTree. The scant existing urban forest governance in the region also motivated partners to contribute to CommuniTree collective action. For desired outcomes, we find that partners are interested in the potential improvements to ecological quality that may result for the region such as improved stormwater management and air quality, but that more than ecological outcomes, partners are interested in the social outcomes that might come of the CommuniTree, including engaging communities in ecological stewardship activities and the beautification and general improvements to public spaces that result from tree planting. And for its future, partners conveyed a plurality of visions for CommuniTree’s growth including expanding the program to new communities, planting trees on new types of locations, and involving more partners, the general public, and new volunteer groups. However, current CommuniTree structure has vulnerabilities to its sustainability and longevity, including a reliance on predominantly grant funding, shifting organizational dynamics within/among partners, and a lack of systematic integration of the voices of local community members. In conclusion, this research on CommuniTree’s structure and function (i.e., the governance and activities) and on what partners value as desired outcomes and for the future informs an understanding of the vulnerabilities and opportunities for CommuniTree as the program evolves to better meet the needs of current partners, future stakeholders, and, most importantly, community members.

Collaborative design prototyping in transdisciplinary research: An approach to heterogeneity and unknowns

This paper provides insights into the practice of design-based interventions in transdisciplinary research and demonstrates how design prototyping can be made fruitful in processes of transformation and collaborative knowledge production. It shows how heterogeneous perspectives and stocks of knowledge can be related to each other and moments of integration generated by working with conceptual designs. Due to their open character, design methods are discussed as particularly promising when dealing with a high degree of complexity, uncertainties, and unknowns. After a characterization of design research and prototyping, common strategies of design research and transdisciplinary research for addressing heterogeneity and unknowns will be explored. This serves to frame the transfer of design practices to support integration processes in transdisciplinary teams. Using an example from a transdisciplinary case study in Transylvania, the implementation of design prototyping will be demonstrated and initial findings presented. Different integration dimensions from transdisciplinary sustainability research serve as a basis for investigating the epistemic, social-organizational, and communicative integration performance of design prototyping. For transdisciplinary research, design practices expand the methodical canon for working in heterogeneous teams and tackling uncertainty and unknowns in openness.

Integrating systems and design thinking in transdisciplinary case studies

In the new Bachelor-level courseUmweltproblemlösen (Tackling environmental problems), a part of ETH Zurich’s Environmental Sciences Bachelor’s programme, we teach students to zoom in on elements of practice (design thinking) and to zoom out on the whole system (systems thinking). Participants take stakeholders’ interests and needs into account and prepare possible measures, thus developing transformation knowledge and anticipating their future role as transdisciplinary sustainability scientists.Umweltproblemlösen (Tackling environmental problems)is a Bachelor-level course that carries on a long tradition of transdisciplinary (td) case studies in the Environ mental Sciences curriculum at ETH Zurich. Td case studies introduce students to key features of transdisciplinarity. Two corres ponding learning goals of the case studies are 1. to not only analyse problems, but to also suggest solutions, and 2. to take the complexity of the tackled socio-ecological system into account. In the new course we address both learning goals by integrating systems and design thinking. We present this approach in detail to show how features of transdisciplinarity are transferred to learning contexts. We compare it to the approaches of other td case studies by asking how each interprets and addresses the two learning goals. The comparison shows that the case study approaches implicitly impart different ideas about how a td environmental scientist should support societal problem solving. A key difference to previous approach es is that the new course asks students to enter deeply into the world of practice and the stakeholders’ divergent needs.

Project-Based Learning in a Transinstitutional Research Setting: Case Study on the Development of Sustainable Food Products

Project-based learning (PBL) has been thoroughly integrated in university sustainable development curricula, but has not been well-established in curricula used at pre-university educational levels. Integrating real-world settings into the teaching of secondary school students can help to promote problem-solving skills and competencies at younger ages, which is a crucial task in sustainability education. Therefore, in this article we describe the results of a case study on the development of sustainable food products that involved a university and two secondary schools in Austria. The methods used in this case study were drawn from the transdisciplinary case study (TCS) and the PBL literature. Data were collected by carrying out participatory research methods such as photovoice, focus group discussions, food diaries, student evaluations, and surveys. We divided the study design into three phases: (1) exploration, (2) product ideation, and (3) product prototyping and optimisation. The case study illustrates that the use of PBL research approaches by students at different levels of education provides promising results, if the research process is clearly structured and managed. When a demand for learning is encountered by students, secondary school teachers and university researchers must provide the students with additional sources of information. The establishment and management of a transinstitutional research setting is a promising, yet time-consuming endeavour.

How do you teach transdisciplinary competences for food and farming systems research? Insights from the course “System Analysis and Scenario Technique”

Abstract In this paper we evaluate whether the course “System Analysis and Scenario Technique” at BOKU University can equip students with the necessary competencies to perform transdisciplinary research to foster the integration of science, technology, policy and practice. Furthermore, we investigate what the most effective didactic methods applied in the course are, and whether the course qualifies as transdisciplinary pedagogy. The course follows the simplified framework of a transdisciplinary case study and tries to transfer such an approach into the traditional curricula of Master programs. An online survey among former participants of the course was conducted. Results for the years 2015/16 and 2016/17 indicate that the course indeed has potential to increase transdisciplinary competencies among participants and could therefore qualify as transdisciplinary pedagogy. Students expressed that work with real-world cases and stakeholders from outside the university was the most effective didactic method. However, the study also showed that there were limits in integrating real-world cases within the course. Students complained about the high workload and time constraints. Short-term solutions might include optimizing case selection and student guidance. Long-term solutions beg for a reorganization of traditional Austrian curricula that would allow for the appropriate arrangement of the course with other classes. These results highlight some of the advantages, but also drawbacks of moving transdisciplinary education outside of standard curricula.

Moving Health Upstream in Urban Development: Reflections on the Operationalization of a Transdisciplinary Case Study.

This paper describes the development, conceptualization, and implementation of a transdisciplinary research pilot, the aim of which is to understand how human and planetary health could become a priority for those who control the urban development process. Key challenges include a significant dislocation between academia and the real world, alongside systemic failures in valuation and assessment mechanisms. The National Institutes of Health four‐phase model of transdisciplinary team‐based research is drawn on and adapted to reflect on what has worked well and what has not operationally. Results underscore the need for experienced academics open to new collaborations and ways of working; clarity of leadership without compromising exploration; clarification of the poorly understood “impacts interface” and navigation toward effective real world impact; acknowledgement of the additional time and resource required for transdisciplinary research and “nonacademic” researchers. Having practitioner‐researchers as part of the research leadership team requires rigourous reflective practice and effective management, but it can also ensure breadth in transdisciplinary outlook as well as constant course correction toward real‐world impact. It is important for the research community to understand better the opportunities and limitations provided by knowledge intermediaries in terms of function, specialism, and experience.

Deconstructing variation in pragmatic function: A transdisciplinary case study

AbstractDespite recent advances (e.g. Cheshire 2007; Pichler 2010; Denis 2015), discourse-pragmatic variables continue to challenge variationist theory and methods. An overarching dilemma concerns multifunctionality, raising difficulties for semantic equivalency and the circumscription of the variable context. In this article we present a case study to illustrate that deconstructing a discourse-pragmatic marker into its composite parts reveals clear criteria for disambiguating its principal function and its contextually derived functions. The discussion centres on the pragmatic marker eh in Canadian English. We illustrate that its multifunctionality is derivable from four parts: principal function, syntactic context, prosodic context, and discourse context. Our deconstruction uses a two-pronged methodology, drawing on storyboard elicitation and sociolinguistic interview data, which mutually reinforce our theoretical arguments. Under this transdisciplinary lens, the exponents of form and function become predictable, constrainable, and systematically derivable for probabilistic modelling within and across speech communities. (Confirmationals, multifunctionality, pragmatic markers, eh, speech acts)*