Academic home pages are a special genre. Publication lists are a key part of it: our published scholarly work pretty much defines us (at least as far as our academic persona is concerned). I think every academic should have a full publication list somewhere —why do some universities make this so hard?— but home pages often just have a list of selected papers.
How do people make this selection? Usually the papers listed are the “big” ones: they may represent important contributions or appear in prominent venues. This makes sense, but it is also a bit boring. This is the stuff that is easiest to find anyway: it does the rounds on social media and, over time, likely floats to the top of Google Scholar profiles. When I check out someone’s scholarly work, I often already know at least a few of their bangers and I’m more curious to find out the weird ones. I want to put in a word for niche papers.
Let’s define niche papers informally as work to be proud of even if it managed to remain a bit obscure; good work that would deserve more readers. Niche papers may not contain the most flashy results. They may not appear in the most glamourous venues. They may be book chapters. They don’t easily gather drive-by citations. They might be things that fall into the “slowly cited” category for whatever reason. 1 Only the authors know the work that went into them, the hidden gems they contain, the methodological and theoretical contributions. Others are yet to discover them.
A few I’ve discovered
Since authors rarely highlight their niche papers, often it is up to us to discover them. Here are some golden ones that I have discovered over the years.
- Figueroa, E. (2005). Rude sounds: Kiss Teeth and negotiation of the public sphere. In S. Mühleisen & B. Migge (Eds.), Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles. John Benjamins Publishing.
Until a few years ago I did not know about the phenomenon of “kiss teeth” nor about the work of Esther Figueroa. My loss on both counts. I came across the phenomenon when I was looking for research that could help me understand an interesting lateral click sound with a disapproving connotation that I found in my data from eastern Ghana. Figueroa’s work on this helped me make sense of the phenomenon and led me to other literatures. This paper has under 25 citations on Google Scholar. It deserves to be known more widely. It ends with this banger of a quote that I often use in lectures:
- Amha, A. (2013). Directives to Humans and to Domestic Animals: The Imperative and some Interjections in Zargulla. In M.-C. Simeone-Senelle & M. Vanhove (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International conference on Cushitic and Omotic languages. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.
Azeb Amha’s work is always interesting. This here is an unassuming article in the proceedings of a niche conference that you’d be excused for not reading cover to cover if you’re not an area specialist. Amha reports on “directives to humans and to domestic animals”, as one does. In this piece we learn about Zargulla imperatives but also about interjectional summonses and dispersal terms directed at oxen and other domestic animals. As Amha notes, “They constitute a subsystem of the lexicon and grammar of the language which speakers must learn for communication.”
(Amha has a knack for finding interesting phenomena like this. Here’s a 2021 paper on whistled names in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea for which it is too early to tell whether it’ll remain niche or travel more widely. At least this one already has had some nice pop sci coverage in The Conversation.)
- Enfield, N. J. 2012. ‘Tolerable Friends’. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.
This paper is not just niche but impossible to find. Nick Enfield circulated it as a ms in 2007 and it was supposed to be published in a BLS Proceedings that never materialized. Its content appears as part of Nick’s book The Utility of Meaning (OUP), though not under the same title.
I think the notion of ‘tolerable friends’ is a perfect example of a new term we didn’t know we needed: it draws attention to a hugely interesting phenomenon (the fact that word meanings are rarely perfectly identical across people, but that we can tolerate this), and it does so using a clear and useful term. As the paper explains: “With a tolerable friend, your version of the word’s meaning might not quite match the listener’s version, but you will never realize it. And the difference will never make a difference. Like the false friend, appearances deceive, but with the tolerable friend this deception never matters.”
Against all odds, this non-existing paper still received 12 citations (one of them mine). It deserves more. 2
A few of my own
For some years now I’ve had a list of niche papers on my home page. It is probably no coincidence that most of mine are book chapters. Books have the unfortunately property of being hard to find. Perhaps people in some disciplines also have a prejudice against reading books? Or against citing book chapters? I think that would be a little myopic (never assume your own disciplinary conventions are the measure of everything) but I definitely know people who think that it’s not worth reading if it isn’t a journal article — their loss. 3 Anyway, here are some of my niche papers:
- Dingemanse, Mark. 2017. Brain-to-brain interfaces and the role of language in distributing agency. In Enfield, N. J. & Kockelman, Paul (eds.), Distributed Agency, 59–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (pdf)
This one is dear to my heart because it’s a constructive-critical piece that combines my interests in language, cyberpunk, and Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Few people read it and even fewer cite it. I wrote it in 2015 in the wake of the first experimental brain-to-brain interfaces. It hasn’t travelled far, maybe because it’s a book chapter, maybe also because it does dares to feature a stretch of interaction between speakers of Siwu instead of an English interaction that would have been much easier on readers. A few years later, amidst the hype Neuralink and the like, I wrote a popular science piece on the topic for Aeon which was translated into a bunch of languages and even inspired a sci-fi story. As far as its academic influence goes, the work is still niche though.
I’ve thought about this chapter also as an author. Building on it for a pop-sci version gave me the opportunity to revise some of the framing. For instance, the original speaks of “negotiability” and “selectivity” as two powerful features of language. This obscures the role of people in the process, so in the Aeon version I chose to frame it from the perspective of language users. In interaction, we have the superpowers of negotiation and selection, and any interactive interface that diminishes this is one that diminishes our agency.
- Dingemanse, M. (2015). Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork. In J. Essegbey, B. Henderson, & F. McLaughlin (Eds.), Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa (pp. 215–238). John Benjamins. (pdf)
This paper is based on a chapter from my PhD thesis, extending some of its insights from ideophones to linguistic fieldwork more generally. It proposes that something every fieldworker does at some point (relying on informal paraphrases) can be turned into a powerful systematic method for fieldwork on semantics and multimodality. It’s cited a bunch of times, but mostly for what it says about ideophones. I still think it has broader applicability: the elicitation sessions and metalinguistic discussions we have when investigating languages offer precious information. Too often, they are treated as only an ephemeral thing on the way to the right definition or analysis. Again, this is a book chapter, which I feel doesn’t help for discoverability (even if the PDF has always been openly avaible).
- Dingemanse, M. (2020). Recruiting assistance and collaboration: a West-African corpus study. In S. Floyd, G. Rossi, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments (pp. 369–421). Language Science Press. (pdf)
Of all items on the list this one probably represents the most serious amount of empirical work: it is based on a systematic collection of over 200 multimodal sequences sampled from a larger corpus of Siwu conversations and worked up as part of a large-scale comparative project on Recruitments. It is also by far the longest one at 53 pages (46 excluding references), though the many conversational transcripts account for about a third of its length. It is a bit of a monster, packing data-driven description and ambitious generalizations in one.
But still I like it. I worked hard to make it not just a description of Siwu practices but a piece with a comparative outlook, offering broader insights. Somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, it also contains two proposals for possible universals of language form and function. The first is about the common occurrence of sibilants in shooing words (e.g. Siwu shuɛ, English shoo); I think my paper is the first to make this observation, document it for >15 languages and provide an explanation with evidence from ethology. The second is a tentative “three strikes principle” for pursuits in interaction: it seems that people rarely go beyond three successive attempts when pursuing a response.
I definitely violated the maxim of “one idea, one paper” for this one, and perhaps the punishment for this is that it will remain niche.
What are your niche papers? I hope you’ll have fun checking out the work by Figueroa, Amha and Enfield above. And if you are an academic, I hope you’ll consider adding a list of niche papers to your home page. Blog about them, share them on social media and tell us why you love them.
- Slowly cited is a term I made up for interesting work that hasn’t reached escape velocity yet. One of my favourite things to do is find such work and give it a well-earned cite.[↩]
- I suppose the canonical citation now would be the chapter in the 2015 book:
Enfield, N. J. 2015. ‘Meanings Are Distributed’. In The Utility of Meaning: What Words Mean and Why, 148–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[↩]
- FWIW, books and edited volumes can offer more room for creativity and stylistic liberties than the average journal article, so they do often make for more interesting reading.[↩]