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

[Jocelyn Aznar]

Dear Randy,

Like many here I guess, I do agree with the importance of not being 
normative, but I think the production of ungrammatical sentences can 
also result from mental processing difficulties, that have not much to 
do with the language as a semiotic system. Here is a short list of what 
come to my mind quickly: tiredness, stress, drugs, quick speech rate, 
long discourse thus losing track of the grammatical properties of the 
reference. I'm sure that there are many other reasons to produce 
grammatically incorrect sentences.

As a native speaker of French, I do from time to time mistakes in 
conjugating verbs and agreeing properly nouns. And I'm not referring 
only to complex sentences, and following old and strange grammatical 
rules that actually no one follows. Learning German and Polish, I do 
hear from time to time people doing mistakes agreeing in case properly. 
And I'm sure we all have heard people doing mistakes in their native 
language from time to time.

I think the reasons behind those mistakes, while not having much to do 
with speech as a semiotic system, should still be acknowledged as they 
might affect our analysis at some point.

Best regards,
Jocelyn Aznar

Le 07/07/2025 à 05:45, randylapolla via Lingtyp a écrit :
> Hi Adam,
> What I said is a response to some linguists, particularly teachers of the standard language, who tell me than natural corpora have many ungrammatical sentences, so we shouldn’t use them. This is a common view in China, and has consequences. For example, one of my students did a beautiful analysis of a naturally occurring multi-negation complex construction one hears in China, but each time she tried to submit it for publication in linguistics journals it was rejected, and she was told “This sentence is ungrammatical, and so it should not be discussed". Think also about how the French Academy fought against the "il y a” construction, even though it was commonly used, but it is now considered normal. Sixty years ago, when I was in primary school they told us “Hopefully he is coming today” is ungrammatical, because the adverb is not modifying the verb. And of course they tried to get us to stop using “ain’t” because it was supposedly ungrammatical. They also tried to get us to pronounce “what, where, etc.” with a voiceless “w”, but none of us in the class ever spoke that way (we use a voiced “w”, which is now accepted). So one problem is the fact that languages are continually changing, but as it is habit, some will resist changes in progress. For example, when I was young, “impact” was only used as a noun, and not as a verb, and so when I first heard it used as a verb I was surprised (and considered it “wrong”), but now it is quite normal to use it as a verb.
> 
> A second problem is that many of us who collect natural data have had the experience of recording natural texts, then extracting constructions from the text for publication or whatever, and then asking native speakers about the construction, and being told, “You can’t say that”, but then after showing the speaker the construction in the original context, the speaker then says the construction is fine. This is because when you ask for acceptability judgements you are asking them to imagine a context in which the construction would make sense. So you are testing their imagination, how well they can imagine a context. With positive judgements that isn’t so much of a problem, as it would show the construction is used in many frequent contexts and so it is easy to imagine a context, but it is problematic for negative judgements, as it is easy to say something exists, but difficult to say something does not exist. This is another reason to use natural corpora: you are only responsible for what is in the data you collect, and so empirically you are on much more solid ground than using elicitation and claiming to document the whole language.
> 
>> Speakers make mistakes — repetitions, disfluencies, etc. Suppose
>> a speaker tells me a narrative and afterwards, when we review the
>> recording together, I ask the speaker about the meaning of a sentence
>> where there's an agreement paradigm I didn't expect, and the speaker
>> says "oh, I said that wrong" and then offers a revised version.
>> Wouldn't this be a case of an ungrammatical sentence (what I would
>> call an unacceptable sentence) in naturally produced data? Also, if
>> there is variation between speakers of a language, as there always is,
>> it's possible that something in our corpus will sound right to a
>> particular group of speakers but not to another group, so depending on
>> one's perspective there is in fact an unacceptable/ungrammatical
>> sentence in the data.
> 
> No, I don’t consider these phenomena ungrammaticalities. They are also data to be understood, and they can lead to insights into the language. I had a case like your agreement example when working on Rawang, and when I delved into why the “wrong” form was used, it turned out that it is part of the system for marking evidential meanings. If I had just ignored that sentence based on preconceived notions of correctness, I would not have discovered that aspect of the system. I also don’t consider geographic or social stratum variation to be ungrammatical; it is again more data for understanding the language. For example, one of my students currently documenting an undocumented and unclassified language in northern Guangdong found variation among the speakers in the village, and when she explored that, she found the differences brought to light the importance of two large clans in the village, and when she looked further into it, found that the two clans had migrated into the village at different times and possibly from different places. As one of the things I am interested in is how the migrations created the Sinitic varieties (China’s history is one of wave after wave of massive migrations of millions of people and small migrations of just a village or two, often into the same areas, and often into places where there are already people speaking different languages, thereby influencing the language in the new area; LaPolla 2001), and this variety might help us understand the migrations out of Jiangxi into Guangdong, it is important information. I also argue that you can’t really understand the history of the language unless you know the history of the speakers of the language.
> 
> So I teach my students to “Trust the language, it is your best teacher”. That means not bringing in preconceived notions of correctness or grammaticality, but working inductively on the language data to extract the actual patterns found.
> 
> All the best,
> Randy
> 
> LaPolla, Randy J. 2001. The role of migration and language contact in the development of the Sino-Tibetan language family. In RMW Dixon and A. Y, Aikhenvald (eds), Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: Case studies in language change, 225-255. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
> 
>> On 7 Jul 2025, at 3:03 AM, Adam Singerman <adamsingerman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Randy,
>>
>> Many thanks for these clarifications. I agree 100% that being trained
>> in a majority/dominant language's grammatical tradition doesn't always
>> translate into success when it comes to making sense of the structure
>> of a minority language, especially one that is typologically different
>> from (or unrelated to) the majority language. I have seen this myself
>> in Brazil, where the grammatical categories of Portuguese can be
>> easily misapplied to Indigenous languages.
>>
>> Just to clarify my own terminology, I use the terms "acceptable" and
>> "unacceptable" when referring to speakers' judgments but reserve the
>> terms "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" for talking about linguists'
>> analyses. Speakers don't tell the linguist whether something is
>> grammatical or not; they only tell us whether something is acceptable
>> or not. And if a speaker says something is unacceptable, it's up to
>> the linguist to figure out why (morphosyntactic ill-formedness;
>> semantic anomaly; pragmatic infelicity, including impoliteness; etc).
>> This is why when I teach field methods I insist that my students pay
>> attention to the distinction between (un)acceptability and
>> (un)grammaticality.
>>
>> With this terminology clarified, I would like to ask about this
>> statement of yours: "There is no such thing as ungrammatical sentences
>> in natural linguistic data." I don't see how this claim can be
>> maintained, at least not in the very strong version you put forward
>> here? Speakers make mistakes — repetitions, disfluencies, etc. Suppose
>> a speaker tells me a narrative and afterwards, when we review the
>> recording together, I ask the speaker about the meaning of a sentence
>> where there's an agreement paradigm I didn't expect, and the speaker
>> says "oh, I said that wrong" and then offers a revised version.
>> Wouldn't this be a case of an ungrammatical sentence (what I would
>> call an unacceptable sentence) in naturally produced data? Also, if
>> there is variation between speakers of a language, as there always is,
>> it's possible that something in our corpus will sound right to a
>> particular group of speakers but not to another group, so depending on
>> one's perspective there is in fact an unacceptable/ungrammatical
>> sentence in the data.
>>
>> Can you clarify for me what you mean by your claim that natural
>> linguistic data do not include ungrammatical sentences? Are you and I
>> disagreeing about terminology or about something deeper?
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Adam
>>
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