Pear Stories, 40 years later Chairperson Andrej A. Kibrik Institute of Linguistics RAS and Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia aakibrik@gmail.com Speakers Wallace Chafe University of California, Santa Barbara chafe@linguistics.ucsb.edu John W. Du Bois University of California, Santa Barbara dubois@linguistics.ucsb.edu Andrej A. Kibrik, Olga V. Fedorova, and Julia V. Nikolaeva Institute of Linguistics RAS and Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia aakibrik@gmail.com Mira B. Bergelson1, Yulia S. Akinina1, Mariya V. Khudyakova1, Ekaterina V. Iskra1, 2, and Olga V.Dragoy1 1 - National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia; 2 - Center for Speech Pathology and Rehabilitation, Moscow, Russia mirabergelson@gmail.com Jyrki Kalliokoski University of Helsinki, Finland jyrki.kalliokoski@helsinki.fi Ken Sasahara Reitaku University, Japan ksasahar@gmail.com This symposium is dedicated to the Pear Stories framework, conversion of thought into talk. started in mid-1970s in the University of California, Now the Pear Film is used by many researchers Berkeley, by Wallace Chafe and his coworkers. In the around the world as convenient stimulus material for course of this study, a silent film was created that was collecting natural discourse. Participants of the symposium subsequently used for multiple linguistic, cognitive, and are going to discuss methodological and empirical questions cross-cultural studies. associated with the Pear Film-based studies from its The monograph “The pear stories: Cognitive, beginning to the present time. Researchers from the USA, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production” Russia, Finland, and Japan report their Pear Film-based (Chafe, 1980) is one of the major early publications that led studies of a variety of languages, including, but not limited to the formation of linguistic discourse analysis, as we know to, English, Finnish, Upper Sorbian, Russian, and Russian it now. This approach allows one to elicit comparable Sign Language. The participants are looking at a variety of discourses in various languages and to look into the phenomena, such as verbalization of experience, use of underlying cognitive processes of understanding, prosody and gesture in discourse, and influence of a categorization, memorization, retrieval from memory, and speaker’s neurological state on produced discourse. 13 Overall, the Pear Film paradigm relives a new wave of inquiries, including cross-linguistic comparison on a global interest and helps to open up novel directions of natural scale, while avoiding the problem of translation bias. Yet it communication research in the 21st century. is useful to take some time to consider just why the Pear Film has been so successful in meeting the needs of the researchers who have used it – if only to re-imagine how we might use it in the future. The origin and subsequent use of the Pear Film In an influential position paper, a group of linguists Wallace Chafe pointed to the need for the field of linguistics to “break out of the current impasse of the arbitrariness of cross-linguistic Produced in 1975, the Pear Film was originally designed as categorizations”, by developing tools that allow “direct a way of fulfilling the requirements of a grant received from comparisons of (parallel) texts (allowing multiple values to the United States National Institutes of Mental Health in surface in the one language, measured with respect to the support of a project to investigate relations between statistical occurrence of different choices) as opposed to language and human experience. The goal was to produce grammatical descriptions in which structures tend to be something close to the same experience in people in essentialized.” (Dediu et al., 2013: 317). From the beginning different parts of the world: people who belonged to diverse this has been precisely the raison d’être for the Pear Film cultures and spoke a variety of languages. and the methodologies that have developed around it: to It was decided that a film would be the most gather parallel texts from the languages of the world practical way to accomplish this goal, since its use would representing the verbalization of a common experience, not be restricted to people in a single location. The seven- allowing cross-linguistic comparisons that would avoid the minute film we produced was designed to present viewers biases introduced by translation and other standard with a range of differing experiences, memories of which comparative methodologies. might be verbalized in diverse ways across a broad range of This talk begins by presenting some of the ideas cultures and languages. Reasons for including certain that went into creating the Pear Film, including details of objects and events within the film will be described in the how the script was written so as to elicit a wide variety of paper. typologically interesting linguistic constructions. We then Data were initially obtained from speakers of ten go on to explore what the Pear Film can offer to the next different languages scattered around the world. The original generation of researchers engaged in functional, cognitive, six participants in the project analyzed those data with a typological, and other linguistic research, as we harness new variety of results that were reported in Chafe (1980). web-based technologies and corpus linguistic methodologies Subsequent interest in the use of the film has exceeded in a global collaborative effort to build a new Pear Film expectations. The forty years since it was produced have World Corpus. witnessed a continuing stream of projects that have extended its use to a variety of other languages and cultures in pursuit of a variety of goals. I conclude by describing ways in which this film has influenced my own research. Russian Pear Stories: Sign language, gesticulation, multimodality Andrej A. Kibrik, Olga V. Fedorova, and Julia V. Pear Film World Corpus: New directions for Nikolaeva cross-linguistic research John W. Du Bois Despite the iron curtain that existed between the Soviet Union and the West until the late 1980s, the Pear Stories project somehow was known to Moscow linguists back On one level, it doesn’t matter why the Pear Film works: it’s then. enough that it just works. The Pear Film (Chafe, 1980) The first Russian studies based on the Pear Film as works in the sense that it successfully evokes a cognitive stimulus material were devoted to Russian Sign Language: and interactional situation that frames a verbalization task the diploma thesis Prozorova, 2006 and the dissertation which yields, in a relatively natural way, the simple act of Prozorova, 2009; see also Kibrik & Prozorova, 2007, using language to verbalize an experience, as one person Kibrik, 2011. RSL discourse was demonstrated to make tells a story to another. In this semi-controlled task extensive use of zero reference and consist of quanta, environment, established by the interviewer’s request to tell functionally parallel to prosodic units of spoken discourse. what happened in the film, speakers of languages all over The work of Nikolaeva (2014) addressed another the world have reliably responded by expressing themselves visual-kinetic phenomenon — spontaneous co-speech about a series of events they have witnessed, if only gesticulation. On the basis of Russian retellings of the Pear vicariously through the medium of film. The result is a set Film she found that individual gestures are temporally of elicited narratives with a number of valuable properties coordinated with elementary discourse units. She also that allow this research protocol to support a wide variety of described the phenomenon of gesture assimilation, that is 14 series of gestures with repeated properties (catchment and text consisting of complete lexical items); glosses (lexical inertia) and demonstrated that such series are coordinated items with grammatical markers) in Russian and English; with higher level discourse units, such as sentences and clause boundaries; c-units (Loburn, 1963); lexical errors of episodes. different types; and laughter. Sample narratives are also Fedorova & Pavlova (2014) employed the being annotated for rhetorical structure (Mann & Bartlett’s methodology of consecutive retelling: participants Thompson, 1987), narrative elements (Labov, 2001), watched videorecorded retellings of the Pear Film, and later prosody-based elementary discourse units (Kibrik & one retold it to still other participants. This corpus of Podlesskaya eds., 2009), and other linguistic parameters, for secondary retellings helped to explore the role of specific research purposes. protagonist as encoded in the verbal and the gestural The ultimate goal of the project is making the channels. In another ongoing project within the same multimedia “Russian CLiPS” available online for extensive paradigm we look at still longer (up to ten) sequences of linguistic analysis of speech samples and accompanying retellings. gestures in brain-damaged populations. Finally, in our recently commenced project “Language as is: Russian multimodal discourse” (funded by the Russian Science Foundation, grant 14-18-03819) we use the following procedure: two participants watch the Pear Revisiting empathy and grammar in Finnish Film, and then one of them retells it to a third participant Pear Stories who has not seen the film. The second participant adds the Jyrki Kalliokoski details missed by the first participants, and then the third participants asks clarification questions to those who The studies of Wallace Chafe and his colleagues on the flow watched the film. In this project we create a multi-layer of discourse, emergence of syntactic units and preferred multimodal transcript of the discourse, including the verbal argument structure, partly originating from the Pear Stories component, prosody, gesticulation, and eye gaze captured project, have given inspiration and new insights to Finnish with the help of an eyeglasses-inbuilt eye tracker. The goal linguists during the past three decades. The Finnish Pear is to create a resource in which all components of natural Stories were recorded by John Du Bois in the mid 1980’s. multimodal interaction are registered and their interrelations Since then, the Pear Stories corpus has been used by Finnish and coordination can be explored. scholars working on functional syntax and interactional linguistics. Just recently the Finnish Pear Stories data were ‘restored’, and the transcripts of the stories were checked Pear Stories by Russian speakers with aphasia and the whole corpus is now in digital form and easily accessible. Mira B. Bergelson, Yulia S. Akinina, Mariya V. The focus of the presentation will be on the Khudyakova, Ekaterina V. Iskra, Olga V.Dragoy interface of pragmatics and grammar. I will explore the relationship between the speakers’ linguistic choices and Aphasia is a language impairment associated with brain empathy (and irony) in the stories. The notions of pathology (Ardila, 2014). Our project “Russian CliPS” – involvement and detachment as introduced by Chafe (e.g. Russian Clinical Pear Stories – aims at creating a corpus of 1982, 1985) help us to understand the fluctuation of stances narratives told by people with aphasia (PWA), other brain and their linguistic manifestations both within one story and pathologies, and neurologically healthy people (NHP), using across stories. The Pear Stories are produced in a form of a Pear Stories (Chafe, 1980) methodology adjusted for the monologue, addressed to a (mostly) silent interviewer. purposes of the project. The corpus is being annotated for a Nevertheless, many of the stories can also be characterized number of micro- and macrolevel units critical for as dialogic (Linell 2009, Du Bois 2014) as they echo voices comprehensive linguistic and discourse analysis. from other genres and display different stances. The goal of The data collection procedure consists of audio and the paper is to interpret the interplay between the linguistic video recordings of the Pear Film retellings. At present there choices and the speakers’ multidirectional engagement (Du are twenty-nine recordings of both types from NHP (total Bois 2011) during the act of narrating a Pear Story. length 1:23:31) and twenty-three audio recorded narratives from PWA (ten fluent and thirteen non-fluent; total length What can be added in a sentence when it is 2:00:14), of which thirteen are also video recorded. Collection of narratives in other clinical cohorts is in completed? - Evidence from Upper Sorbian progress. Pear Stories The corpus is being annotated using ELAN Ken Sasahara software (https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/) in separate tiers: quasi-phonetic transcription (orthographically As far as I know, the Pear Film is designed for the research transcribed text with pauses, abrupted and non-verbal of “how people talk about things they have experienced and output); lexical transcription (otrhographically transcribed later recall” (Chafe, 1980: xi) and to collect the cross- 15 linguistic data for them. In this presentation I will exhibit a case study of an individual language, applying the Pear Stories in Upper Sorbian (Indo-European, West Slavonic). In the language whose grammar determines (more or less) its word order, the speaker usually produces grammatically correct sentences (using the word order determined by grammar). But sometimes he utters a sentence which may or may not fulfill the grammatical order. One case is when some sentence elements appear after completing the sentence, thus violating the grammar. Examples are tag question (as in You read this book by tomorrow, yes?), afterthought, detailed explanation, paraphrasing, emphasizing and so on. My contribution will typologize the sentence elements appearing after the completion of the sentence and will try to find which elements are more frequent. It will also be pointed out that the speaker utters elements that come to mind one after another, whether it is grammatically correct or not. This study helps to understand more deeply how the nature of the cognitive (and communicative) way of text production looks like and which correlation exists between grammar and text production. 16