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This Element tries to discern the known unknowns in the field of Pragmatics, the 'Dark Matter' of the title. The authors can identify a key bottleneck in human communication, the sheer limitation on the speed of speech encoding: Pragmatics occupies the niche nestled between slow speech encoding and fast comprehension. Pragmatic strategies are tricks for evading this tight encoding bottleneck by meaning more than you say. Five such tricks are reviewed, which are all domains where the authors have made considerable progress. The authors can then ask for each of these areas, where have the authors neglected to push the frontier forward? These are the known unknowns of pragmatics, key areas, and topics for future research. The Element thus offers a brief review of some central areas of pragmatics, and a survey of targets for future research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

▪ Abstract  This review describes some recent, unexpected findings concerning variation in spatial language across cultures, and places them in the context of the general anthropology of space on the one hand, and theories of spatial cognition in the cognitive sciences on the other. There has been much concern with the symbolism of space in anthropological writings, but little on concepts of space in practical activities. This neglect of everyday spatial notions may be due to unwitting ethnocentrism, the assumption in Western thinking generally that notions of space are universally of a single kind. Recent work shows that systems of spatial reckoning and description can in fact be quite divergent across cultures, linguistic differences correlating with distinct cognitive tendencies. This unexpected cultural variation raises interesting questions concerning the relation between cultural and linguistic concepts and the biological foundations of cognition. It argues for more sophisticated models relating culture and cognition than we currently have available.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Figures -- List of Contributors -- Introduction: Human Sociality as a New Interdisciplinary Field -- Part 1: Properties of Human Interaction -- 1 On the Human "Interaction Engine -- 2 Interaction: The Infrastructure for Social Institutions, the Natural Ecological Niche for Language, and the Arena in which Culture is Enacted -- 3 Human Sociality as Mutual Orientation in a Rich Interactive Environment: Multimodal Utterances and Pointing in Aphasia -- 4 Social Actions, Social Commitments -- Part 2: Psychological Foundations -- 5 Infant Pointing at 12 Months: Communicative Goals, Motives, and Social-Cognitive Abilities -- 6 The Developmental Interdependence of Theory of Mind and Language -- 7 Constructing the Social Mind: Language and False-Belief Understanding -- 8 Sylvia's Recipe: The Role of Imitation and Pedagogy in the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge -- Part 3: Culture and Sociality -- 9 The Thought that Counts: Interactional Consequences of Variation in Cultural Theories of Meaning -- 10 Cultural Perspectives on Infant-Caregiver Interaction -- 11 Joint Commitment and Common Ground in a Ritual Event -- 12 Habits and Innovations: Designing Language for New, Technologically Mediated Sociality -- Part 4: Cognition in Interaction -- 13 Meeting Other Minds through Gesture: How Children Use their Hands to Reinvent Language and Distribute Cognition -- 14 The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction -- 15 Social Consequences of Common Ground -- 16 Why a Deep Understanding of Cultural Evolution is Incompatible with Shallow Psychology -- Part 5: Evolutionary Perspectives -- 17 Culture and the Evolution of the Human Social Instincts -- 18 Parsing Behavior: A Mundane Origin for an Extraordinary Ability? -- 19 Why Don't Apes Point?.

Reciprocals are an increasingly hot topic in linguistic research. This reflects the intersection of several factors: the semantic and syntactic complexity of reciprocal constructions, their centrality to some key points of linguistic theorizing (such as Binding Conditions on anaphors within Government and Binding Theory), and the centrality of reciprocity to theories of social structure, human evolution and social cognition. No existing work, however, tackles the question of exactly what reciprocal constructions mean cross-linguistically. Is there a single, Platonic 'reciprocal' meaning found in all languages, or is there a cluster of related concepts which are nonetheless impossible to characterize in any single way? That is the central goal of this volume, and it develops and explains new techniques for tackling this question. At the same time, it confronts a more general problem facing semantic typology: how to investigate a category cross-linguistically without pre-loading the definition of the phenomenon on the basis of what is found in more familiar languages.

This lecture was written in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and thus with the likelihood it would never actually be delivered! This virus is just one of the pestilences that has swept over Eurasia from the east in the last two millennia, retracing the networks that have linked the continents over the vast temporal and geographic scales that interested Jack Goody. Thanks to the internet, the lecture originally scheduled for May was delivered on 6th October 2020. I was pleased to expunge at least partially the debt to one of my intellectual ancestors. Goody himself would surely have been fascinated by the effects of a new medium of communication, in the age of Zoom.