This 3-year project (2026-2029) is a comparative study of how and why people give and ask for reasons in everyday social interaction across cultures. This project is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (AUD 783k, DP260103317) “Reason-giving in the wild: a cross-linguistic study”, awarded to Nick Enfield and Jack Sidnell (U Toronto).

This project has three main strands:

1. A major comparative study of how reasons are given in informal social interaction in diverse languages from across the world; this team effort draws on video recordings of informal home/village interaction;
2. A typological linguistic study of the lexical, morphological, grammatical, and pragmatic resources that languages provide for referring to, and differentially framing, reasons;
3. An empirical exploration and theoretical analysis of the interactional infrastructure for reason-giving in our species, and the role of reason-giving in social relationships, collective sense-making, and the maintenance of social systems.

The project started in mid-2026; updates on progress to come.