[Lingtyp] Traditional view of language and grammar in indigenous societies

Fri Jul 4 02:30:32 UTC 2025

Dear all – At the risk of being a wet blanket, I think there are slightly more parsimonious explanations for each of the three stories in this (let’s just treat it as a new) thread – albeit different explanations in different cases. What Adam seems to be talking about is metapragmatics (I think it was Michael Silverstein who coined that term) – speakers’ (technically, language users’) awareness of, and discourse about, what (not) to say in particular circumstances. Naturally, metapragmatic knowledge/practice tends to be particularly rich around matters of social deixis in the broadest sense, including politeness and taboos. I don’t think metapragmatic practices presuppose a notion of languages as abstract objects (codes). However, as Adam points out, it does require an ability to talk about the linguistic forms/expressions involved in the particular practices. Still, this is “just” an example of people expressing normative ideas about expected behavior.

OTOH Randy’s and Eva’s stories invoke yet another issue in my mind: the epistemological strangeness of elicitation, and the poor job we linguists often do in navigating this strangeness with the speakers who try to help us in our work. The example I routinely use to illustrate this problem is one I suspect many people on Lingtyp are familiar with – I know Eva is 😊 Imagine you try to elicit locative descriptions using the Topological Relations Picture Series, better known as the BowPed pix. And you follow the instructions from the original field manual entry, Bowerman & Pederson (1993). So you show the speaker the first stimulus item, a line drawing of a cup on a table. You ask the speaker, ‘Where is the cup?’ And the speaker gives you that look that betrays a sudden regret at having agreed to work with a weirdo, as they point to the picture and say something to the general effect of ‘Well, it’s right here, int it?!’.

This is not the speaker’s failure to understand – this is entirely on the researcher, who failed to explain to the speaker that they were attempting to engage them in an artful game of make-belief, let alone what the purpose of this peculiar exercise might be. Here, too, I do not think that an understanding of languages as abstract objects is either required or even helpful for this purpose.

Mind you, I don’t doubt in the slightest that writing has profound effects on the way people think about languages, and on cognition more broadly.

Now, as to the question of the habituation to thinking of languages as abstract objects, I personally would prefer to approach this question by looking at how commonly the speakers of a given language use proper nouns to refer to different languages, especially to distinguish them from one another. I would assume that every such act involves an implicit objectification of the languages involved. But such basic ontological acts of objectification should not be confused with folk theories of the nature of language and languages.

So, let me end with a new question: are there languages/communities out there that do not use proper nouns to refer to particular languages?

Best – Juergen

Bowerman, M. & Pederson, E. (1993). Topological relations pictures. In E. Danziger & D. Hill (eds.), 'Manual' for the Space Stimuli Kit 1.2. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. 40-50.

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Adam Singerman via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Thursday, July 3, 2025 at 20:22
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Traditional view of language and grammar in indigenous societies
Dear Randy,

Thanks for providing this very interesting description of your experience working with the non-literate elderly Qiang historian. Did the (presumably younger) Qiang speakers you worked with later also insist on talking about the content of narratives/histories rather than the code? From what you described, it sounds like there was a mismatch between what you wanted to learn about (the language) and what the historian wanted to teach you (the history of his people). If he felt that his pedagogical goal was to teach you the histories themselves, then it's not surprising that he rejected the hypothetical sentences you constructed.

What I'm less comfortable with is the suggestion that this individual teacher's preference for the content of the histories rather than the linguistic code itself tells us anything deep about the distinction between oral and literate cultures. (But I am open to being persuaded that I am wrong about this.)

My experience working with the speakers of Tupari, a Tupian language spoken in the Brazilian state of Rondonia, has taught me that even non-literate speakers can have quite impressive metalinguistic awareness about the structure of their language. The Tupari pronominal inventory doesn't encode a formal-informal distinction, but the language has lots of number-sensitive verbal suppletion and agreement; and traditional speakers always make sure to talk to/about their in-laws as duals rather than singulars, with many morphological consequences seen in the suppletive verbal roots and in the agreement suffixes. The reason I mention this is because many speakers I have worked with, including speakers who aren't literate in Tupari or in Portuguese, know how to talk about this aspect of their language: they explain that one must speak about one's in-laws as if each individual in-law were two people, not just one. There's even a specific term for this kind of respectful speech (kiarowak ara). I'm not claiming that non-literate Tupari speakers have metalinguistic awareness about all of their language's grammatical properties, but in this area at least they can and do talk about structure.

I would like to bring up one other potential counterexample to the idea that a society without writing is automatically going to be one in which "speakers are not familiar with the concept of analyzing it as a thing in the world separate from its daily use" (quoting Chris Donley). Didn't Panini (https://w.wiki/EP5f) compose and teach his treatises on Sanskrit grammar orally, centuries before the language came to be written down? Perhaps the important distinction isn't oral versus literate cultures but rather the question of whether there are schools or educational institutions in which language is taught as a subject in its own right. We're used to schools emphasizing written language, but as the case of Panini shows, language can be taught without writing, too.

If I'm wrong about Panini, Sanskrit, etc, please let me know — I'm just regurgitating what I'd read in the literature on non-Western grammatical traditions.

All the best from Syracuse,
Adam
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