6.6 Grammar in language socialization studies

Furthermore, it is not uncommon for propositions that would be expressed by a transitive clause in English to be expressed in Samoan with an intransitive clause

in which the participant who performed a particular task appears as a modifier of

–

the Subject of the predicate. Thus, in (45) the Subject nominal, le lauga a le kamaloa `o Pua “the (formal) speech of the man (named) Pua” contains a description of a referent that in English can be rendered with an Agent of a transitive clause:

(45)(“The watch”; three chiefs are discussing the virtues of various orators they are familiar with and remembering specific cases in which each of them performed)

Given these recurrent patterns, I became interested in analyzing the contexts in which lexical Agents do appear. In order to pursue this goal, I examined the speeches of several political meetings or fono I had recorded in 1979. I found that speakers tended to express lexical Agents when praising or blaming someone. Thus, it was not unusual for a lexically expressed Agent to be the Christian God (in positive assessments) or a person or group that was being accused of having violated some social norm (in negative assessments). Furthermore, I found that those who were perceived as the most authoritative members of the council used transitive constructions with lexical Agents more often than other members. Less powerful speakers, instead, avoided the use of explicit Agents. This suggests not only that there is a special moral force in the use of a transitive clause with a fully expressed Agent, but that there is a correlation between grammatical forms and the political stature of people in the community. Powerful members of the community tend to use a type of discourse that is higher on the transitivity scale than the discourse of less powerful members. In this perspective, Hopper and Thompson’s discussion of transitivity acquires a new meaning. It becomes an important tool for sociocultural anthropologists to assess the strategies through which hierarchies are socially constructed. The tools of discourse analysis combined with ethnography allow us to move towards a better understanding of what we might call the culture of grammar.

6.6The acquisition of grammar in language socialization studies

The integration of grammatical and cultural analysis has been particularly successful in the study of language acquisition done by linguistic anthropologists.

197

Meaning in linguistic forms

This work was partly stimulated by the growth of psycholinguistics in the 1960s and 1970s inspired by Chomsky’s claims about innateness in language acquisition (Chomsky 1959, 1966, 1968).

Although the acquisition of language was often mentioned by cultural and linguistic anthropologists as intimately connected to the acquisition of culture, most of the work in linguistic anthropology up to the mid-1960s was almost exclusively devoted to adult speech. The importance of collecting acquisition data from non-Indo-European languages was first understood by psycholinguists eager to test Chomsky’s (1965) notion of “Universal Grammar” and the supposedly innate “Language Acquisition Device” (LAD). It was in this intellectual climate that psychologists like Dan Slobin at the University of California at Berkeley began to collaborate with linguists and anthropologists in search of new methods for obtaining data across societies that could be compared with data from English-speaking children in white middle-class America. The Berkeley group produced a Field Manual (Slobin 1967) that was meant to be used as a guide for collecting linguistic data that would be comparable to the considerable English corpus already available. Despite the good intentions, however, the five dissertations written on language acquisition in non-Indo- European languages based on the field manual were disappointing. Their failure reinforced the need for a contextualized, ethnographically based study of language acquisition:

These disappointing results seem to have come about in part due to the fact that researchers encountered a number of unanticipated difficulties in following the research design in the field situation. Experiments could not be successfully administered and carried out because this type of activity was culturally inappropriate in the societies under study. Researchers found, moreover, that the speech samples they recorded could be collected only in what they admitted were culturally inappropriate situations ...

(Schieffelin 1979: 75)

A new wave of language acquisition research started in the 1970s mostly (but not exclusively) by linguistic anthropologists focused on the situations in which a child would be likely to interact with more mature speakers of the language instead of trying to bring to the field an experimental design that originated in a scientific lab and had little if anything to do with real-life situations (Crago 1988; Demuth 1983; Heath 1983; Kulick 1992; Ochs 1988; Platt 1982; Schieffelin 1990). Once a different, more ethnographically based approach to language acquisition was in place, language appeared not only as the goal of child-adult or younger child-older child verbal interaction but also as an essential instrument of social-

198