33.3591, Review: Anthropological Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Aikhenvald, Dixon, Jarkey (2022)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3591. Wed Nov 16 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3591, Review: Anthropological Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Aikhenvald, Dixon, Jarkey (2022)

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Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2022 17:58:29
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: The Integration of Language and Society

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-2156.html

EDITOR: Alexandra Y Aikhenvald
EDITOR: R.M.W.  Dixon
EDITOR: Nerida  Jarkey
TITLE: The Integration of Language and Society
SUBTITLE: A Cross-Linguistic Typology
SERIES TITLE: Explorations in Linguistic Typology
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

SUMMARY

Introductory linguistics courses often tell students that diverse language
structures are a window onto the diverse mental worlds of the respective
language-communities. But, as they progress in the subject, students often in
practice encounter little that makes good on that promise. In Franz Boas’s day
(his Introduction to the “Handbook of American Indian Languages” appeared in
1911) linguistics was virtually a branch of social anthropology, and much more
interested in languages of societies remote from European civilization than in
European languages. But perhaps the only really famous name in linguistics who
shared that anthropological orientation subsequently was Benjamin Lee Whorf,
and Whorf’s main substantial claim about languages structuring reality
diversely, namely his argument that the Uto-Aztecan language Hopi is in some
sense a “timeless” language (see e.g. the posthumously published Whorf 1950),
has been undermined by Helmut Gipper (1972) and Ekkehart Malotki (1983), who
hold that Whorf was just mistaken about Hopi language-structure.

Furthermore, leading names in linguistics since the 1960s have been arguing in
the opposite direction to Boas, claiming that differences between the
structures of human languages and between their speakers’ mental outlooks are,
and can be, at most fairly trivial – a view which I find baseless and
seriously mistaken (see e.g. Sampson and Babarczy 2014), but which at the
present day probably remains the majority view among those who discuss such
matters, even if not so overwhelmingly dominant as it was a few decades ago.

So there is an urgent need for linguists who are prepared to examine the
question of relationships between diverse language structures and diverse
social and intellectual structures by reference to detailed, scientifically
robust study of languages other than those which share what Whorf called the
“Standard Average European” profile. At present two of the most productive
scholars working on these lines are Alexandra Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon, two
of the three co-editors of the book under review; they both hold senior posts
at universities in Queensland. Dixon is an expert on Australian languages,
Aikhenvald on languages of Amazonia and Papua New Guinea, and both have also
produced important books which use their knowledge of exotic languages to
inform theorizing about language in general.

The book reviewed here emerged from a 2019 workshop organized by the three
co-editors on “The Integration of Language and Society”. The co-editors’
introductory chapter sets out their initial assumption or “hypothesis” by
writing “Language and society are closely integrated and mutually supportive
(rather than one being dependent on the other). An unusual (non-universal)
facet of a language may relate to a specific trait of social organization, or
life-style, etc., evidenced among the society of language users.” (The
negation of “one being dependent on the other” is intended to differentiate
their position from that of Whorf, who saw language as determining
extra-linguistic reality and not vice versa.) The editors go on to identify
five aspects of language, for instance possessive constructions, which they
see as particularly likely to correlate with features of a society, and six
aspects of society, for instance attitudes to information and its sources,
which are likely to be reflected in language structure.

There follow ten further chapters, all but one of which (to be discussed
later) describe particular correlations between linguistic and social
structure in some individual language. Half the authors work in Australia, the
others in Europe, the USA, and New Zealand. 

Chapter 2, by Nerida Jarkey, is on the use of honorifics in Japanese and
Korean. (She tells us among other things that – contrary to what one might
have guessed – modernization of Japanese culture since the nineteenth century
has led to a more rather than less complex honorific system, and also that
while honorific grammar is central to both languages, the social features to
which it relates are distinct in the two languages.) Later chapters deal with
languages spoken by remote communities whose ways of life remain close enough
to their pre-contact past to exhibit real contrasts with anything that will be
familiar to most readers. Some of these contrasts are truly striking. Luca
Ciucci’s Chapter 8 tells us that among the Ayoreo, who inhabit an area on the
borders of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina, within living memory a woman’s
first child was routinely buried alive immediately after birth, irrespective
of her wishes, because it was impractical for a woman to raise a child without
a husband to go hunting, and sexual freedom before marriage meant that there
was no knowing who had fathered a firstborn. (The same happened if a husband
died during his wife’s pregnancy.)

Stephen Watters’s and Pema Wangdi’s Chapters 3 and 4 are again about honorific
speech, in Dzongkha and in Brokpa (both Bhutan). In Chapter 5, R.M.W. Dixon
describes how the vocabulary avoidance system works in Dyirbal, an Australian
“mother-in-law language”. Chapter 6, by Alexandra Aikhenvald, discusses
grammatical coding of information source in Tariana (Amazonia). Katarzyna
Wojtylak’s Chapter 7 is about the social basis of the system of noun
classifiers in Murui (also Amazonia). Luca Ciucci’s Chapter 8, already
mentioned, concerns relations between grammatical gender and mythology. In
Chapter 9 Dineke Schokkin discusses how multilingualism in an area of New
Guinea where everyone speaks several languages relates to social structures,
including marriage practices. Maarten Mous’s Chapter 10 examines the Iraqw
society of Tanganyika, in which community coherence is socially very
significant, more important than kinship, and he identifies features of the
(Cushitic) Iraqw language which, he claims, reflect this ideal of
“togetherness”.

The chapter which is quite unlike all the others is the last, by Anne Storch,
entitled “Waiting”. It is an example of the genre of discourse which students
of literature identify simply as “theory” without further specification; it is
replete with references to “liminality”, “hegemony”, “transgressiveness”, and
Jacques Derrida, and contains passages of purely personal reminiscence about
hanging out with African immigrants in Spanish holiday resorts. (It also
includes at least one straightforward misrepresentation of fact: on p. 355
Storch translates the German word ‘Ausnahme’ in a passage by Walter Benjamin
as “emergency”; that translation might suit Storch’s argument, but ‘Ausnahme’
means “exception”.) I have never understood how this genre can claim to be any
kind of contribution to scholarship (see e.g. Sampson 1989); in the remainder
of my review I shall ignore Chapter 11.

A feature of the book is that successive chapters (other than the last) show
the reader in detail and in accordance with modern scholarly standards how
some exotic feature of a language, such as linguists might typically have
encountered briefly in a first-year course, really works in practice. Most
linguists are familiar with the passage in which Franz Boas (1911: 39)
explained that what in English is a simple statement of fact, “The man is
sick”, if translated into the Kwakiutl (or Kwakwala) language of British
Columbia, would have to indicate the speaker’s basis for making the assertion:
“in case the speaker had not seen the sick person himself, he would have to
express whether he knows by hearsay or by evidence that the person is sick, or
whether he has dreamed it.” Not many of us know more than that. A section of
Aikhenvald’s Chapter 6 in this book gives us much more detail on a comparable
phenomenon in Tariana. Evidential markers are used in main but not subordinate
clauses, and “No evidentiality distinctions are made in the future (which is
what one would expect).” The evidential system has five terms, and Aikhenvald
draws on her fieldwork to show the kinds of situation which would lead to the
use of each alternative in a statement about someone frying chicken. Modern
technology has created new information-sources, and Tariana grammar has had to
adapt to these. When telephones were still a rarity, information derived from
phones was related using the nonvisual evidential, since the information was
spoken rather than seen, and “Currently, those who do not have continuous
access to mobile phones, still use the nonvisual evidential. Those who use a
mobile phone on a day-to-day basis treat phone interactions on a par with
face-to-face chat, and use the visual form.” Some Tariana now have access to
Brazilian television, and information derived from that is naturally related
using the visual evidential. The Tariana language is very different from
English, but Aikhenvald portrays it as a concrete, down-to-earth component of
the real world, whereas anthropological linguists of earlier periods sometimes
made exotic language structures feel as abstract and disconnected from our
world as the verb forms of Classical Latin are for many of us – we learned
them and we can reproduce them, but it is not so easy to think of them as
forms which real people really used in everyday conversation.

Interestingly, while Whorf seemed to treat speakers’ world-views as so rigidly
controlled by their languages that they are unaware of the possibility of
seeing the world differently, in the case of Tariana evidentials, at least,
the speakers are prepared to discuss the system, and why one evidential is
used rather than another in a given situation. Some of them “comment that
White people are not to be trusted because they never tell you how they know
things. They are thus suspected of having something to hide or perhaps of
having some hidden malicious powers.”

In recounting fascinating facts about exotic languages, Aikhenvald et al.’s
book sometimes raises questions that it does not answer (which is not intended
as a criticism – it could be thought a virtue). For instance, most linguists
have heard of Australian “mother-in-law languages”, which require a man to use
a special vocabulary when in the presence of his mother-in-law (or a woman
likewise when in the presence of her father-in-law). In Chapter 5 Dixon
explains that in one of the two Australian languages in which this feature was
most fully developed, Dyirbal of N.E. Queensland (now apparently extinct, but
from the 1960s onward Dixon was able to gather extensive data from older
informants), the grammars of the two speech styles were virtually identical
but their lexicons were disjoint, with “mother-in-law words” (my term)
typically being hyperonyms of groups of “ordinary words” – e.g. the
mother-in-law noun ‘guruŋun’ was “applied to six varieties of oak tree, each
of which has its own name in [ordinary language] (and there is no generic term
in [the latter]).” Furthermore, avoidance of ordinary vocabulary was only one
aspect of the special relations between the pairs of kin in question; two such
people “should not sit close; they must not look at each other, nor speak
directly with each other.”

The detailed information Dixon gives about this remarkable phenomenon is most
valuable, going well beyond anything I have seen elsewhere. But, in the
Introduction, he and Aikhenvald tell us that very similar phenomena are also
found in certain Amazonian languages, and Maarten Mous in his chapter
describes a similar phenomenon in Iraqw. This, to me, immediately raises the
question how such a specific feature came to occur in areas as far apart as
Africa, Australia, and South America. I take it (perhaps mistakenly?) that
cultural diffusion over such distances is ruled out, yet the only alternative
seems to be that for our species it is somehow psychologically natural for
in-laws of opposite sex to minimize social interaction. Why should that be so?
And if it is, why do we Europeans not feel it? Dixon and Aikhenvald do not
comment on the point.

EVALUATION

Overall this is a very welcome book, and it contains abundant references to
other writings by the co-editors and by others which evidently give fuller
information on some of the phenomena discussed. I very much hope that these
and other publications in a similar vein may represent a wider reorientation
of linguistics towards the study of the real differences between human
languages, and away from the vain efforts of linguists of the recent past to
portray all languages as “underlyingly” alike. (Unfortunately, opportunities
to study languages which have not been heavily influenced by European ways of
thought must have become much sparser in the decades since Dixon began his
work.)

Naturally, there are some things here which I feel might have been done
better. The co-editors present the idea that distinctive grammatical
structures and social organization are interrelated as a “hypothesis”, but for
some of their contributors this idea feels like an assumption which the data
are made to fit even when the fit is uncomfortable.

Consider Katarzyna Wojtylak’s discussion in Chapter 7 of noun classifiers in
Murui. She tells us that these, “as noun categorization devices, are known to
mirror social, cultural, and environmental conditions”, and she describes her
chapter as aiming to illustrate “what linguistic features of the Murui
language (if any) [are] motivated by non-linguistic traits specific to Murui
society”; her concluding section says that noun classifiers are one feature
“that show[s] firm integration with the society of the Murui people”. But from
her detailed analysis of the Murui noun-classifier system it is not apparent
that this is so. She tells us that the language has more than 110 noun
classes, which categorize nouns “on the basis of properties such as animacy,
sex, shape, size, function, and arrangement”; her first example is the
classifier suffix ‘-fo’ for “cavity-like forms” such as beehives. We can agree
that animacy and sex are socially-significant properties of an entity (though
not more so for the Murui, surely, than for other societies), but how is that
true of shape and size? Does it have special social significance for the Murui
that some objects, including beehives, are hollow and others not? (If so, the
author does not spell this out.) It is not very easy to think of any
properties of a noun referent that could not be brought under one or another
of Wojtyla’s headings “animacy, sex, shape [etc.]”.

I am probably disposed to scepticism here because the language having a
noun-classifier system which I am familiar with is Chinese, where classifiers
are based largely on physical shape and scarcely or not at all on social
characteristics – and one cannot even surmise that the system might have
descended from some prehistoric stage of Chinese society which had myths
ascribing humanity to inanimate objects, as Wojtyla says is or was true for
the Murui, because the Chinese classifier system came into being within the
historical period (Pulleyblank 1995: 59). Reading Wojtyla’s chapter does not
convince me that Murui noun classifiers are much more closely bound up with
distinctive features of the speakers’ society than is the case in Chinese.

In the course of his argument that community as opposed to kinship is a
specially important social parameter for the Iraqw, Maarten Mous says that for
some verbs and nouns “togetherness is one aspect of the meaning of the lexical
item”, giving examples which include:

 ‘gixsa’ (f)  town, village, place with many houses like beads sewn to a
garment

Presumably Mous does not mean that the disyllable ‘gixsa’ contains morphemes
literally translatable as “like beads sewn to a garment”, so what does he
intend to imply by adding this complex gloss to the simple terms “town,
village”? Is it that beads on a garment illustrate the concept that items are
not merely physically adjacent but indissolubly bound together? That would
raise the suspicion that Mous is making his claim about the special importance
of community for the Iraqw feel plausible through his choice of gloss, instead
of arguing it explicitly as he needs to do.

Another issue is that contributors, who are clearly very close to the
phenomena they discuss, do not always appreciate how much explanation the
average linguist will need. Dineke Schokkin, describing pervasive “egalitarian
multilingualism” among people in southern New Guinea, says that “the languages
or lects are held in equilibrium through their mutual culturally prescribed
presence. Language use is often sanctioned by specific myths. One such example
is a widespread myth in which the first human being hears speech issuing from
a palm … or fig tree and releases the people one by one as he seeks his own
people.” These facts sound so alien to modern societies (the only ones of
which I have personal experience) that I cannot begin to understand what it
means to say that this myth “sanctions language use” or “holds languages in
equilibrium”; I would need Schokkin to tell us much more than she does. Again,
Table 3 in Stephen Watters’s Chapter 3 contains six rows each of three
columns, labelled as Dzongkha “common noun”, “honorific” equivalent, and
English gloss, respectively; below the table appears the remark “construed
linguistically as turning the head” – but we are not told what is so
construed. (This may be a fault of copy-editing, but if so it is a bad one
which should have been caught in proof.)

A related problem is that contributors use a number of technical grammatical
terms which are not (as far as I know) standard in linguistics, but are never
explained here. Thus, Luca Ciucci tells us that “In Zamucoan … nouns which are
directly possessed have pertensive prefixes (term from Dixon 2010: 268).” It
is good to cite the place where a term of art was first defined, but if we are
not given at least a few words as a rough gloss of “pertensive”, his remark
tells us nothing. Not every reader will want to look up Dixon’s book, and the
etymology of “pertensive” is opaque. And the same author identifies
“para-hypotaxis” as an unusual feature of Zamucoan, again not explained.

In some cases contributors (perhaps because they are not English native
speakers) use ordinary, non-technical words in idiosyncratic ways. That
applies to Schokkin’s use of “vestiges” on p. 294, or Mous’s statement on p.
313 that the Iraqw have “no chronology of time” – a phrase which seems as
tautologous as “aqueousness of water”.

A point mentioned repeatedly by these authors, which may be correct but which
puzzled me, was the claim that comparative constructions tend to be absent
from the languages of societies that lack the idea of competition. Even if
true this could be only a tendency: in Chapter 4 Pema Wangdi points out that
“Brokpa is a small egalitarian society, so we may not expect notions such as
competition and hierarchy to be important, and yet the language does have a
comparative construction.” But in any case I cannot see why the fact that a
society is egalitarian and uncompetitive should be any reason not to develop a
comparative construction; what proportion of uses of the English comparative
relate to competition? “You’d better take this bag, it’s bigger”; “the theatre
is further than I can walk”; “the music sounds louder now we’re out of the
trees” – all utterly ordinary things to say, surely, but nothing to do with
competition. Perhaps this point comes under the earlier heading of questions
which are raised but not answered.

Even if my criticisms in this section are justified, though, they do not
negate the fact that Aikhenvald et al.’s book is a very valuable addition to
the linguistic literature.

REFERENCES

Boas, F. 1911. Introduction to “Handbook of American Indian Languages”. My
page reference is to the publication in one volume with J.W. Powell, Indian
Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico, University of Nebraska Press,
1991.

Dixon, R.M.W. 2010. Basic Linguistic Theory, vol. 2: grammatical topics.
Oxford University Press.

Gipper, H. 1972. Gibt es ein sprachliches Relativitätsprinzip? Untersuchungen
zur Sapir–Whorf-Hypothese. S. Fischer (Frankfurt/Main).

Malotki, E. 1983. Hopi Time: a linguistic analysis of the temporal concepts in
the Hopi language. Mouton (Berlin).

Pulleyblank, E.G. 1995. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. UBC Press
(Vancouver).

Sampson, G.R. 1989. “That strange realm called theory”. Critical Review
3.93–104. Online at <www.grsampson.net/ATsr.pdf>.

Sampson, G.R. and Anna Babarczy. 2014. “Minds in uniform”. Chapter 15 of
Sampson and Babarczy, Grammar Without Grammaticality: growth and limits of
grammatical precision, de Gruyter (Berlin); a revised version of a paper first
published in Marion Grein and Edda Weigand, eds, Dialogue and Culture, John
Benjamins (Amsterdam), 2007. Online at <www.grsampson.net/AMiu.html>.

Whorf, B.L. 1950. “An American Indian model of the universe”. International
Journal of American Linguistics 16.67–72, 1950; reprinted in J.B. Carroll,
ed., Language, Thought, and Reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf,
Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in
1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at
Yale before teaching at Oxford and other British universities, together with
visiting posts in Switzerland and South Africa and intervals in industrial
research. After retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he spent some
years as a research fellow at a South African university. Sampson has
published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of other subjects. His
most recent linguistics book is ''The Linguistics Delusion'' (Equinox, 2017);
in 2020 he published ''Voices from Early China'' (Cambridge Scholars
Publishing), a translation of an anthology of Chinese poems dating from about
1000–600 B.C.





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