Proverbs

Marianne Mithun mithun at linguistics.ucsb.edu
Tue Nov 13 17:11:56 UTC 2012


Sorry, you're right, Brian.

Actually, I think the use of metaphor in North America is more 
culture-specific. Iroquoian languages raise metaphor to great, dazzling 
heights. It was surely there before contact, and is something that has long 
been prized, cultivated, and enjoyed. It infuses the whole of language. And 
I've seen constant use of metaphor in Navajo too, like you have. But not at 
all, really, in some other languages I've worked with.

Marianne

--On Tuesday, November 13, 2012 12:02 PM -0500 Brian MacWhinney 
<macw at cmu.edu> wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>



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