Proverbs

Daniel Everett dan at daneverett.org
Tue Nov 13 17:42:37 UTC 2012


This is funny. I have been reading this as "pro-verbs" and wondering what people had in mind (verbs like English "do", etc).

My response is roughly the same, though, whichever is in mind. If we believe that language fulfills functions, then there is no reason to think that the same function will be fulfilled in the same way in every language, nor that every culture will have the same range of functions for language. 

Careful, "thick" descriptions of discourse are needed, but so are comparative anthropological studies and attempts to advance the agenda of Dell Hymes (and to a lesser degree one that I have advocated) -  finding out where each language fits in the system of values of a people and how and where this is expressed in the language and society.


Dan

On Nov 13, 2012, at 12:02 PM, Brian MacWhinney 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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