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

Mon Jul 7 06:28:54 UTC 2025

Dear Randy,

While I understand some aspects of your argument, I think that you are too
extreme in claiming that there are no ungrammatical sentences in natural
speech corpora in non-standardized languages. Obvious examples occur when
speakers immediately correct themselves after a slip of the tongue (purely
phonological error), or incomplete sentences, or when the speakers changes
their mind in the middle of a sentence. In the case of syntactic errors, it
may be slightly more difficult to distinguish between genuine errors and
subtle constructions with complex pragmatic factors at play, but there are
inevitably processing errors, especially when sentences reach a certain
size.
That doesn't mean of course that we should throw away incorrect forms, on
the contrary we can learn a lot, even from errors, and these should be
marked as such in our speech corpora. In my grammar of Japhug
<https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295> I have several sections on
speech errors (pp. 66-68; pp. 603-604; p.1381), and I think that this is an
important topic, but it is also crucial not give them the same status as
grammatically correct sentences.
However, I agree that the notion of "error" in a non-standarized and
unwritten language is different from what we have in the languages taught
at school, where "error" can also mean "non-standard form". This is
different from what I am talking about here.

Best wishes,

Guillaume

Le lun. 7 juil. 2025 à 05:47, randylapolla via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> 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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-- 
Guillaume Jacques

Directeur de recherches
CNRS (CRLAO) - EPHE- INALCO
https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=1XCp2-oAAAAJ&hl=fr
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295
<http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques>
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
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