Joint attention, interaction-management, and other factors

Abstract The study explores Chafe’s one-new-idea constraint in two short extracts of natural multimodal interaction in two Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) languages: Burmese and Anal Naga. It corroborates the overall tendency in both extracts for one new idea per intonation unit on average. However, the examination of frequent exceptions to this tendency indicates that this is not a cognitive constraint, as informatively much denser intonation units are processed with no challenge for interactants. The counterexamples suggest that the phenomenon emerges from more basic factors, and primarily from attention allocation, joint attention alignment and its interactional monitoring, and intonational partitioning for turn-management. As such, the observed tendency is a joint product of communicative and cognitive factors that shape conversation structure into sequences of locally monitored attention shifts.