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

Mon Jul 7 07:44:17 UTC 2025

Hi Jocelyn,
Thanks for your message. The rub here is that those “mistakes” can have explanations, and can reflect the change going on. For example, almost everyone now says “Between Bob and I” and “It’s me”, both of which have been considered ungrammatical, but are simply changes that make sense given other changes in the language. In the first case it is due to people being told that they should use “I” in a coordination, and following the first reference phrase, but they forget that this is only when the coordination is acting as the subject. They use it after prepositions and after the verb in some cases. In the second case, just like with the change from “Me thinks” in Shakespeare’s time (from Hamlet) to “I think”, the use of the pronouns in English is more based on position than the original cases, so “me” in initial position became “I”, and “I” in postverbal position became “me”. Agreement in English is also understandably variable, not wrong: We have constructions with the subject after the verb or copula, with a dummy subject in initial position. According to the grammatical/ungrammatical view, the post-verbal subject should control agreement, so a plural post-verbal subject should cause the verb to take the plural form, e.g. "There are six boys over there”, but we often are influenced by the singularity of “There” or “It” when acting as a dummy subject and the usual reduction of “is” to "’s”, so say “There’s six boys over there”. I don’t consider that a mistake. I just don’t have the concept of “grammaticality”, as it is a pedagogical concept which ignores language change and the fact that languaging is a form of behaviour; language is not a thing. Language is habit, but it can change over time, as with other habits we have. We think our habits are “correct” and other people’s habits are “wrong” (think of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—a parody of how people can fight over the smallest difference in habits). What we think of as grammatical or correct is just the snapshots of the languaging habits captured in grammars and dictionaries, but these should never be taken as prescriptive except by non-natives learning the language, but if they use these materials they still need to be aware of changes in the language. For example, a student I had in China shortly after the Cultural Revolution had only one book during the Cultural Revolution, a dictionary of English, and so memorised the whole book. But that included all of the historical uses of words, so he had no way to know what was current or not. For example he used “moot” to mean “important”, its original meaning, rather than “irrelevant” or “unimportant”, as we use it now.

There is also all the research on slips of the tongue, “mistakes” that can be used to investigate psycholinguistic aspects of speech. In my own speech, I have found that I make slips of the tongue when speaking Chinese because I am trying to decide between to roughly equivalent words, e.g. biāozhǔn and shuǐpíng, both ‘level’, and end up using the segmental form of one word of the two with the tonal pattern of the other word. This is interesting because we normally think of the tone as an integral part of the word, and not separable. This is why Y. R. Chao, in creating his romanisation of Chinese, wrote the tones into the segmental spelling of the words rather than as diacritics above the letters.

There are also languages, like Tagalog, where there is an incredibly robust morphological system of prefixes, infixes, suffixes, clitic pronouns and markers, but people don’t always use them unless they are trying to be very clear. They will often use a bare root with the intended meaning being the same as a fully inflected (actually derived) form. I would not consider that a mistake.

I also don’t separate language out from the rest of the communicative situation and behaviour, as I don’t think it is a question of semiotics, i.e. decoding symbols, but of inferring the intention of the communicator in using a particular type of behaviour, which might include language (but not necessarily), gesture, facial expressions, and body motions, almost anything. You need to take the entire behaviour together in inferring (abductively) the intention of the communicator.

All the best,
Randy

> On 7 Jul 2025, at 2:01 PM, Jocelyn Aznar via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>
> 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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