Meaning in linguistic forms

Universal Grammar and the specific claims he makes about innatism, most formal linguists today, especially in the US, are committed to the study of the universal properties of human languages. Anthropologists do not talk about a Universal Culture and are divided over the extent and nature of a “universal human character” that would be at the basis of all cultures (but see the discussion of cognitive views of culture in section 2.2).

The object of investigation for formal linguists is native speakers’ intuitions of acceptability (e.g. “Can you say this sentence? Does it mean the same as this other one?”), not native speakers’ theories about why language behaves the ways it does. Anthropologists, instead, not only spend a considerable amount of time asking people what they think about things, events, and relationships, they also take members’ conceptualizations as local theories in need of explanation. Linguists differ as to the extent to which actual speech behavior is considered relevant for linguistic descriptions and linguistic theory. Formal linguists tend to look at only a subset of the phenomena one might call “language” – the ones that can be studied under the assumption that language is a property of the human mind. For such phenomena, the study of speakers’ intuitions is judged sufficient and even optimal. Anthropologists do not usually draw sharp boundaries around the notion of culture and do more than ask questions of informants. They also observe and describe a fair amount of public behavior, rituals in particular. This means that anthropologists are, by definition, into a realm of human activity linguists would call “performance” (see section 1.4.1).

These and other factors make it difficult to decide the extent to which the emic/ etic distinction originally drawn on a homology between linguistic sounds and human behavior can be applied in a generalized way across situations and cultures.

6.4Relationships of contiguity: from phonemes to morphemes

As mentioned earlier, in addition to relations of opposition, signs, including linguistic sounds, typically enter into relations of contiguity with other signs. When phonemes are combined together in sequences, they form morphemes, the smallest sequences of sound to carry independent meaning. For example, the sounds /p/, /i/, and /n/ have no meaning of their own but when combined in the sequence /pin/ they produce the English word pin. The sounds /i/ and /ŋ/ make up the ending /iŋ/(spelled -ing) of verbs, like in liv-ing or jok-ing. The individual sound /s/ conveys the meaning of “plural” when added to book, seat, lip.

To isolate a morpheme, a grammarian must be able to establish that a particular sound or sequence of sounds regularly conveys a particular meaning. Morphologists usually ignore the problems one encounters when trying to accurately describe such a meaning and feel satisfied when native speakers intuitively recognize a given form as “roughly meaning the same” across different words – e.g.

174

6.4 Relationships of contiguity

un- in unorthodox or unusual, or -ism in Marxism and Cubism. Native speakers’ intuitions can sometimes contradict historical records and point to similarities between parts of etymologically unrelated words, like, for example, the -ust of must, rust, crust, fust, and dust – meaning roughly “surface formation” (Bolinger 1950: 120). Similarly, the word ambush is heard by speakers as suggesting that someone is hiding in the bushes (ibid. p. 128). Linguistic theories vary in the extent to which such intuitions are recognized in the morphological analysis.

With the same type of arguments used for talking about allophones (section 6.3.1), morphologists talk about allomorphs, that is, variants of what can be considered as the same basic form. A classic example is the plural ending in English, which can have three different phonetic realizations, as shown by the following examples:

(8)books /buks/ dogs /dogz/ glasses /glasəz/

The three endings, /s/, /z/, and /əz/ respectively, are considered realizations of the same morpheme, which morphologists usually represent as -Z, to distinguish it from the phoneme /z/ (Spencer 1991: 6).

The notion of morpheme is important in the study of speech because it makes the analyst particularly attuned to the role that different parts of words or phrases play in conveying a particular meaning. Just as no description of a language is possible without an understanding of the basic sound distinctions made by native speakers, no in-depth understanding of a language can be reached without a careful analysis of the ways in which words are formed and different linguistic elements are combined together to form larger, meaningful units.

Linguistic anthropologists have often been attracted to the study of morphological phenomena because they have found that natural languages are quite rich in the ways in which they use variations in the shape of a word to signal changes in context and interpretive frame.

For instance, in many languages, social features of the situation or the relationship among participants are marked through special morphemes that convey respect for the addressee, the occasion, or even bystanders (Agha 1994; Levinson 1983). These morphemes, often seen as belonging to the more general category of honorifics, might be independent words or affixes (a general category that covers prefixes, infixes, and suffixes). Thus, in Korean there are different sets of endings for verbs, depending, among other factors, on the social relationship between the speaker and the addressee as defined in the situation (Lewin 1971; Martin 1964). As shown in table 1, within each set, there are sometimes different forms according to the type of utterance or speech act (see chapter 7):

175

Meaning in linguistic forms

Table 6.1 Verbal suffixes indexing social relationship between speaker and addressee (from Lewin 1971: 201)

There is also an honorific (Hon) infix (-si-) that is inserted in a verb to express deference to the referent of the subject of the utterance:

Similarly, in Pohnpeian (Micronesia), special verbs are used either by themselves or in combination with locative suffixes of various sorts to form what Keating (1996, 1997) calls humiliative and exaltive forms, that is, linguistic expressions that carry with them information about the relative status of their referent and the stance taken by the speaker vis-à-vis the situation or (some of) the participants in the event. An example is given in (10) below, where the daughter of a chief first refers to her own action by means of the humiliative form patoh and then later uses the exaltive form ket in referring to her father’s movement. Given the polysemy of these morphemes, they will be glossed interlinearly with the generic label “locative verb” (abbreviated “LocVerb”):

((a few seconds later))

176

The same morphemes, patoh and ket can be used to form other verbs in combination with suffixes that specify directionality, as shown by the following example taken from the same interaction:

(11)(The chief’s daughter is addressing one of the young men present)

“Mwohnsapw (=the chief) (can) move there ...”

As shown in table 6.2 (from Keating 1994), the morphological process of adding suffixes to form new verbs is quite productive in Pohnpeian:9

Table 6.2. Humiliative and exaltive verbs in Pohnpeian

The productivity of this kind of morphology is exhibited in the following excerpt, where we find patoh used three different times in combination with three different suffixes:

(12)(The chief and several other titled and untitled people are sitting around before a sakau ceremony)

8Although ket by itself is a stative verb, it acquires here the meaning of a motion verb without having an added suffix (see table 6.2 below). There are at least two possible explanations of this: either ket- is short for ket-la (see [11] below) or it acquires the motion meaning from the following directive particle men (Elizabeth Keating, personal communication).

9 Keating found examples of all these forms except ket-sang and ket-di-wei.

177