Reflexiveness and human language

[Jim Wilce]

I agree with Janina. This is, of course, what Benveniste argued, and 
what Michael Silverstein argues in terms of the fundamental social fact 
being irreducibly dual, i.e. there is no pragmatic function of language 
that is not always already the object of metapragmatic reflection. And 
that is fundamentally human. Bambi Schieffelin has recently been arguing 
that the biggest challenge in translating a text from (e.g.) an 
Indo-European or Semitic language (e.g. the Bible) into a language 
spoken by people with radically different assumptions about personhood 
and speech is not the likes of how to translate "lamb" when there are no 
sheep around, but what to do with metapragmatic forms/practices from the 
source language/community that have no direct counterpart in the 
"target" language and its community (such as reporting the thought of 
another person).

Jim

Janina Fenigsen wrote:
> Do you think it would make sense to suggest that --to the extent the
> empirical findings are solid-- those baboons seem to have the pragmatics
> of communication but not language in the sense we do. BTW, I've long
> felt that perhaps the most distinctive aspect of human language is
> its/our metalinguistic ability. Intuitively, one can imagine that a
> baboon's call may stand for, say, "snake, run!" It is much harder to
> imagine another elderly baboon hard on the hearing and witnessing the
> communication, utter:"what did he say?"
>
> janina fenigsen
>
>   
>>>> "Kerim Friedman" <oxusnet at gmail.com> 10/14/07 6:56 AM >>>
>>>>         
> I found the paper that the NY times statement seems to be referring to.
>
> Seyfarth, R.M., Cheney, D.L. & Bergman, T.J. 2005. Primate social
> cognition and the origins of language. Trends in Cognitive Science 9,
> 264-266.
>
> http://www.psych.upenn.edu/%7Eseyfarth/Publications/tics.pdf
>
> It confirms my reading that they were referring to the ways in which
> the listener parses the social relations while listening to the
> utterances rather than the nature of the utterances themselves.
>
> Here is what they say in the conclusion:
>
> "Of course, this call sequence differs strikingly from a sentence
> because it was produced by two individuals, each of whom was using a
> single call type that is predictably linked to a narrowly defined
> social situation. Taken alone, neither animal's calls could even
> remotely be described as linguistic. Together, however, the two
> animals produce a sequence that is interpreted by listeners in a
> manner that resembles the way we interpret sentences, both in the
> information acquired and in the manner of its construction. Baboons
> acquire propositional information by combining their knowledge of call
> types, callers, and the callers' places in a social network, and by
> assuming a causal relation between one animal's vocalizations and
> another's.
>
> The sound sequence created by the combination of Sylvia's
> threat-grunts and Hannah's screams is also striking because, from the
> listener 's perspective, it represents a concatenation of two
> vocalizations, each meaningful on its own, into a larger meaningful
> utterance. In principle, a very large number of such combinations is
> possible, limited only by the size of the group. Among non-human
> species, such call combinations are rarely produced by a single
> individual; however, listeners in group-living primates confront them
> whenever they hear two animals vocalizing to one another. "
>
> - kerim
>
>   

-- 
Striving to teach and publish the best in linguistic anthropology--an ethnographic approach to the analysis of semiotic and discursive forms in relation to sociocultural processes

Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology
Editor, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
Box 15200
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011-5200
Bldg. 98D, Room 101E
928-523-2729
jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22