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

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Christian – The thing is, every language has multiple norms. Traditionally, these are what we call ‘registers’, and in reality, they often are continua. Speakers choose more complex and longer utterances and less frequent words when they evaluate the occasion as more prestigious, and shorter, simpler, and often elliptical utterances with higher-frequency words when they consider the situation to be of low prestige. These registers are typically partially conventionalized and partially are better thought of as strategies that can be used productively to make utterances more/less formal = prestigious.

On top of that, you have individual variation – what contemporary sociolinguists talk about in terms of stylistic repertoires. An ideal descriptive linguist would be able to incorporate all those sociolinguistic variables into their description. Of course, in practice, you have to be exposed to any variation for a sufficiently long time to be able to notice it, so much of this is unfortunately lost to most field researchers.

What’s my point? I think I’d like to attach a note of caution to the idea of a unitary norm that documentary/descriptive linguists should aim to discover. If the norm exists, it does so in the form of a system of sociolinguistic variables. It’s a bit of a moving target.

This is not to say that we’re unable to detect errors. We are. A speaker says something we didn’t expect. We check with them the next day and they say “Oh no, that’s not right, I should have said X.” The problem here is of course that it’s our expectation that allowed us to detect the error. In other words, our ability to detect errors, at least apart from spontaneous self-corrections, is unfortunately driven by confirmation bias.

Disclaimer: If I’m making our work sound hopeless, it’s not because I don’t believe that it can succeed – it obviously does succeed all the time. It’s because I’m trying to understand how that really happens 😊

Best – Juergen

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 Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Monday, July 7, 2025 at 02:38
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Traditional view of language and grammar in indigenous societies
In principle, we may distinguish two types of deviation from the norm in a text:
1.      utterances containing slips of the tongue/pen
2.      utterances which follow a pattern which is not part of the norm.
(And here the specific status of the 'norm'  does not seem to be relevant: it may be a prescriptive norm that not everybody observes, or may be the system which has been traditional for a relevant portion of the speech community.)

In theory, the difference between #1 and #2 is clear. Moreover, many of us have an interest to make it in our analysis of corpora. Deviations of type #1 are of interest for psycholinguistics, but generally not for grammatical analysis. Deviations of type #2 may cast some light on what is currently going on in the language.

Given this, it is an interesting methodological problem in our empirical work with corpora to make the distinction in practical cases. Sometimes it has helped me to ask the speaker: 'Is that what you intended to say?' This kind of question will help to purge the text from occurrences of #1 (if one wants this [I do]). However, it would not seem to be excluded that some speakers who are conscious of a norm would react to such a question by additionally changing utterances of type #2.

I would be interested to learn whether you have other methods to make the above distinction.
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Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
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christianw_lehmann at arcor.de<mailto:christianw_lehmann at arcor.de>
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