Proverbs

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear FunkNet,

To someone unfamiliar with the data, Viktor's claim that metaphorical speech in general 
is little used in North American cultures is quite fascinating.  It goes way beyond the
idea that proverbs might be missing, and touches on issues right at the core of basic assumptions
being made by psychologists and anthropologists about human cognition, mental models, and belief.
Before accepting Victor's observations, I was hoping for a bit more input from others on
FunkNet about the generality of the claim.

I  had earlier learned just a little bit of Navajo and been impressed by the way in which the parts of the car were 
mapped metaphorically onto the human body image, much as suggested by the role of the BODY as
source metaphor in Conceptual Metaphor Theory.  It had never occurred to me that 
all the other types of metaphors that we find so regularly in languages like English, Chinese, and
Japanese would actually be missing in North America.

So, I took a look at what Whorf wrote on this subject about Hopi on p. 146 and it seems that the 
focus there is on the absence of the shape metaphors for extent, because of the high
level of availability of built-in quantifiers or "tensors".  Whorf also claims that the "conduit"
metaphor for communication is completely missing in Hopi, along with the metaphor of KNOWING IS
SEEING.  In the most extreme case, one could interpret what Whorf is writing as saying that
Hopi's do not develop mental models of either their own thoughts or the thoughts of others.
How this avoidance of metaphor and mental models could square with the intense religious experiences 
in North America is something that puzzles me.

Perhaps Whorf is not saying this.  Perhaps I have misunderstood what Victor and Marianne and Pamela
are saying.  Perhaps this is all JUST about proverbs and not really about metaphor.

Elizabeth's question about alternatives to proverbs led me to think of the rich tradition of folk tales in 
North America, which could easily be understood as expanded proverbs, much as Aesop's Fables ca
be compressed into proverbs.  Marianne notes that stories serve other functions.  However, I wonder
whether one can refer to acts of protagonists in stories and thereby effectively avoid a frozen proverb.

-- Brian MacWhinney

On Nov 13, 2012, at 11:40 AM, Marianne Mithun <mithun at linguistics.ucsb.edu> wrote:

> And I was just going to chime in with the same thing. I think Victor put it exactly right.
> 
> Marianne Mithun
> 
> 
> --On Tuesday, November 13, 2012 7:31 AM -0800 Pamela Munro <munro at ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
>> I second what Victor says here. I have never seen anything like a proverb
>> in the North American languages I've studied.
>> 
>> Pam
>> 
>> On 11/13/12 2:43 AM, Victor Golla wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 9:31 PM, Bernd Heine<heine39 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> 
>>>>                                             Why should proverbs not
>>>>                                             have a place in a
>>>> (comprehensive) reference grammar? After all, they appear to occur in
>>>> all languages that have been appropriately documented, and they are
>>>> part of the knowledge speakers have about their language.
>>> Proverbs are far from universal.  They are notably rare in North American
>>> Indian languages, where riddles, too, are virtually unattested, except
>>> for a few post-contact borrowings from English or French.
>>> 
>>> I don't think that the absence of these genres across an entire
>>> continent can be written off as due to the lack of appropriate
>>> documentation.  Rather, it's a matter of  metaphorical speech in general
>>> being little used in aboriginal North American cultures for reasons that
>>> are ultimately historical and distributional.
>>> 
>>> I'm not sure what this says about speakers' knowledge of their languages
>>> in North America, but it at least suggests that certain elements of
>>> cognitive style can co-vary with differences in discourse=level patterns
>>> of encoding. This is apparently what Whorf meant when he wrote in "The
>>> Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" (in Carroll, ed.,
>>> Language, Thought and Reality, p. 146) that Hopi does not have metaphor
>>> "built into it" in the same way that European languages do.
>>> 
>>> --Victor Golla
>>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Pamela Munro,
>> Distinguished Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
>> UCLA Box 951543
>> Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
>> http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>