Meaning in linguistic forms

view of the highest participant in the topicality hierarchy (nominative-accusative languages). Subjects tend to be topics, that is, they tend to present participants that have already been introduced in the discourse and about whom more is being said – they present what Chafe (1976) calls “given information.” Languages for which the Subject category is the most relevant tend to treat humans alike, whether they are Agents – as in the woman opened the door –, Actors – as in the woman ran – or Experiencers – as in the woman is happy. On the other hand, languages that favor semantic distinctions over topicality tend to mark humans differently depending on the role they have in the event. Thus, ergative languages tend to separate human participants who are Agents from human participants who are not and to group the latter with the Object of transitive clauses; hence, – the woman in the woman ran – would be marked in the same way as the door in the woman opened the door. Other types of languages might make other kinds of distinctions.22

6.5.4Sentence types and the preferred argument structure

John Du Bois (1987) studied how nominative vs. ergative languages present information in narratives and concluded that the ways in which discourse is typically organized can be a motivation for either type of system, depending on which factors a given language chooses to favor. Du Bois pointed that out that in narratives, there is a tendency for only one participant (or, in logical-grammati- cal terms, one “argument” of the verb) to be expressed by a full noun (this is what he calls the “One Lexical Argument Constraint”). This one participant usually is not the Agent – this finding is summarized in the “Non-lexical A[gent] Constraint”). Instead, it is either the Subject of an intransitive clause or the Object of a transitive clause. Agents, instead, tend to be participants that have already been introduced before in other kinds of roles and are hence referred to via anaphora, that is, by a pronoun or a zero morpheme. This discourse pattern he refers to as the “Preferred Argument Structure” (or PAS).23 Du Bois sug-

22By no means do the two types discussed so far exhaust the possible ways in which languages encode participant roles. There are, for instance, so called “active languages” (or “split S languages”) that distinguish between Subjects that are active and Subjects that are not (Dixon 1994: ch. 4; Mithun 1991). Durie (1987, 1988) discusses Acehnese, an Austronesian language spoken in the province of Aceh, Indonesia, which has two main grammatical relations, which he calls, following Fowley and Van Valin (1984), Actor and Undergoer – the latter term replaces “Object.” Intransitive verbs take either an Actor or an Undergoer, depending on their semantics. For a discussion of “split intransitive” languages, see DeLancey (1981), Garrett (1990), Merlan (1985), Van Valin (1990).

23Similar conclusions were independently reached by Elinor Ochs and myself working on Samoan discourse. See Duranti (1981), Duranti and Ochs (1990), and Ochs (1988). See section 6.6 below.

192

6.5 From morphology to the framing of events

gested that by looking at discourse we can see a number of conflicting motivations for one grammatical system over another. The discourse distinction between Subject and Object on the one hand and the Agent on the other would favor the development of an ergative-absolutive system. But Agents and Subjects are linked in other ways, including the factors that make them high in the topicality hierarchy (see figure 6.2 above). Agents and Subjects tend to be human, topical, and definite. Objects tend to be non-human, non topical, and indefinite.

6.5.5Transitivity in grammar and discourse

One of the main lessons of discourse-oriented studies of grammar like the one just mentioned has been the realization that what grammarians might analyze as autonomous syntax, discourse analysts might re-analyze as the product of social, psychological, and narrative factors.

Combining language typology with discourse analysis (in this case mostly based on written discourse) Hopper and Thompson (1980) presented a complex argument in favor of the notion of transitivity as a universal dimension of grammar. They showed that if we think of transitivity as a property of clauses that share certain types of semantic and pragmatic features, we are able to explain why languages may use the same morphological and syntactic devices for constructions that would otherwise seem quite unrelated and may not use the same morphological and syntactic devices for constructions that would otherwise seem quite similar. Starting from a pre-theoretical understanding of transitivity as “a global property of an entire clause, such that an activity is ‘carried-over’ or ‘transferred’ from an agent to a patient,” they introduced a number of parameters, that is, semantico-pragmatic features of transitive clauses. They included information about whether in the depicted event:

A.there are one or two participants,

B.the sentence represents an action,

C.the action is complete (telic) or not (atelic),

D.it occurs at one particular point,

E.there is volitionality (willingness) in carrying out the action,

F.it is affirmative or negative,

G.it is presented as actually occurring (realis) or as hypothetical (irrealis),

H.there is a high or low degree of potency in the way the action is performed,

I.the Object is totally affected,

J.the Object is individuated, that is, identifiable, specific, or definite.

193

Meaning in linguistic forms

The eight parameters or features are here reproduced schematically in table 6.4.

Table 6.4 Parameters of transitivity

Hopper and Thompson showed that these parameters help explain the extent to which a clause is likely to exhibit morphological and syntactic features associated with transitivity.

Transitivity, then ... can be broken down into its component parts, each focusing on a different facet of this carrying-over in a different part of the clause. Taken together, they allow clauses to be characterized as MORE or LESS Transitive: the more features a clause has in the “high” column in [the list] A-J, the more Transitive it is – the closer it is to CARDINAL Transitivity.

(Hopper and Thompson 1980: 253)

This list allows us to rank any two sentences in any language along a hierarchy of transitivity. Take for instance the three sentences below. According to the hierarchy presented above, (37) is more transitive than (38) and (39):

(37)The boy ate the fish

(38)The boy ate

(39)The boy likes fish

According to the list of parameters presented above, (37) is the highest in transitivity because it describes an event in which there are two participants (feature A), it is an action (feature B), it is described from the end point (as accomplished), that is, its aspect is telic (feature C), the action is described as punctual (it happens at a precise point) (feature D), the object (the fish) is directly and totally affected (feature I), and is individuated (an animate referent expressed by a singular definite

194

6.5 From morphology to the framing of events

noun) (feature J). On the other hand, (38) describes a situation with only one participant, and (39) depicts a scene in which, although there are two participants, the event depicted is not an action, is not completed, and is not punctual; furthermore, the Object of the sentence is non-individuated (a common noun with a generic meaning) and is not affected by the state of mind attributed to the referent of the Subject. Given the Transitivity Hierarchy, we would expect languages that mark transitivity morphologically and syntactically to treat those sentences differently. This is indeed what happens in Samoan, an ergative language. Only in the first type of sentence – see (40) below – do we find the ergative marker on the Subject (Agent), whereas the Subject of the second sentence is marked as an Absolutive (with no preposition) – see (41). The third type of sentence – in (42) – treats the nominal that is the Direct Object in English as an Oblique Object, with a preposition (i), which encodes a different type of participation:

“The boy likes (the) fish”

Hopper and Thompson argued that these features of transitivity are discourse related, in the sense that they correlate with the types of sentences that tend to appear in what they call foreground and background.

Users of a language are constantly required to design their utterances in accord with their own communicative goals and with their perception of their listeners’ needs. Yet, in any speaking situation, some parts of what is said are more relevant than others. That part of a discourse which does not immediately and crucially contribute to the speaker’s goal, but which merely assists, amplifies, or comments on it, is referred to as BACKGROUND. By contrast, the material which supplies the main points of the discourse is known as FOREGROUND . (Hopper and Thompson 1980: 280)

This work, in other words, continues in the tradition of looking at language as mainly having a referential and denotational function, but it adds the important dimension of the speaker’s (or writer’s) point of view (or, as Polanyi-Bowditch calls it, grounding). Speakers are seen as framing their speech to present

195

Meaning in linguistic forms

particular perspectives on the world and linguistic structures are in turn shown to be sensitive to such discursive and interactional goals.

This kind of work is important to linguistic anthropologists for a number of reasons: (i) it shows that what appear as different morphological systems might in fact be sensitive to the same set of semantic or pragmatic features; (ii) it claims that semantic distinctions are important in the evolution and use of morphosyntactic categories; (iii) it connects morphological, syntactic, and lexical distinctions to discourse features such as foreground and background information; and, finally, (iv) it presents an implicit theory of agency and participation that can be relevant to the work of ethnographers interested in local theories of action, causation, and responsibility.

I pursued some of these questions in my own work on Samoan grammar (Duranti 1994). In 1978–79, while collecting and starting to analyze Samoan adult and child language data, Elinor Ochs, Martha Platt, and I discovered that transitive clauses with fully expressed (that is, lexical) Agents – such as the one in (40) above – were very rare in spontaneous Samoan discourse. As also discovered by Du Bois in analyzing Sacapultec and English narratives (see above), in Samoan discourse Agents are often talked about without being expressed lexically, as shown in (43) below, where the referent of the Agent of the predicate “take your picture” (pu`e le aka o `oe) is understood from the context, through what grammarians call “zero anaphora”:24

(43)(Pesio, book 16; Mother talks to her daughter about researcher

stand Prep top to dance so-that take the picture of you “Stand up to dance so that (she) will take your picture.”

Other times, the referent of the Agent is introduced in prior discourse and is not repeated inside of the transitive clause, as in (44), where the sentence e le`i faia le

– –

mea la i lumafale “has not done (i.e. completed) the place there in front of the house” is understood as having Gimei as its Agent:

(44)(“The inspection”; Orator T. points out to Chief Salanoa that

the grass in front of Gimei’s house has not been properly cleaned)

“look at Gimei (she) hasn’t done that part in front of the house, Mr. Salanoa.”

24 For a pragmatic treatment of zero anaphora, see Levinson (1987).

196