THE ETHNOLINGUISTIC NOTES
Introduction: What They Are
In 1976 I wrote the first of what has turned out to be a long series (or actually by
now, four series) of what I labeled "Ethnolinguistic Notes" on questions concerning language and linguistics that I felt needed further investigation or discussion (I’ll say a bit more
below about the original motivation). There were eighteen Notes in the original series.
Then (in 1978) I started the "new series". This got a little confused because along the
way I did five Notes that I labeled "Notes on Content Form" which I now think are best considered
to have just been part of the same series. In addition to these five, there were eleven Notes
under the label "Ethnolinguistic Notes, ns." The last of this series (including the "Notes on
Content Form") was finished in 1979.
Only a limited number of copies of any of the Notes in these two series were ever
distributed. I typed all of them on ditto masters or mimeograph stencils and distributed copies
only to a small number of colleagues. A few more details can be found at elnser1&2.html.
In 1981 I finished the first Note of Series Three. The final Note of the series
was number 45, finished in 1993. All of these were done on a computer and printed on a computer
printer. Fortunately, I had retained a version of many of them in computer files, and
therefore was able post a number of them on the Internet without retyping. For more details on this
series, see elnser3.html.
In 1995 I began Series Four. These were written specifically for posting on my website, and they are available only there (for more details see elnser4.html). There are 25 Notes in this series. Although I don’t expect to add any more, I’m still not quite ready (as of this writing, September 2006) to declare the series finished.
There is another set of pieces that I probably ought to include here even though I didn’t label them “Ethnolinguistic Notes”. These are called “Reflections on the evolution of human language”; there are six of them and they were all posted during the period 2003-2005. See refl.html.
On the Title "Ethnolinguistic Notes"
The title calls for some explanation. Since I anticipated at the beginning
that the writings would probably range into topics beyond what people would think of as fitting
comfortably under the rubric "linguistic", I was looking for something that would be understood
as a little more inclusive. The appropriateness of the label "ethnolinguistic" to designate this
more general area was suggested to me in part by Dell Hymes (1964). In that paper Hymes used the
term "ethnolinguistic" to refer to an area of concern that included not only linguistic
systems in a strict sense but also, in Hymes's words, "the partial dependence between properties
of linguistic systems (however narrowly conceived) on the one hand, and characteristics of their
users and circumstances of use on the other" (1964: 6-7), in which the study of this
dependence would constitute not simply an addition to the theory of linguistic form but would
(1964: 44) "in some significant respects entail its recasting".
I subsequently realized that the designation "ethnolinguistic" is subject to
misinterpretation. But then so is "Notes", especially since some of them have gotten a bit longer
than I anticipated. However, I'd already been using this title for a long time, and
anyway I haven't thought of any better replacement for either word.
On Why I Started Them
The immediate stimulus that made me start writing and distributing these
“Notes” came from my ongoing research in Austronesian linguistics. The particular problem that
worried me was the remarkable difference in the ways different Austronesian languages had
changed over the period since their original unity. At one extreme were languages whose relationship
to the reconstructed protolanguage was immediately obvious so that many details of their histories
were easy to reconstruct. However, at another extreme there were languages for which it had
been difficult even to dig out enough evidence to assign them to any language family at all.
Although many such languages have ultimately been identified as Austronesian, most details of their
histories still remain obscure. Some scholars had been led to claim that these latter languages
were the result of language mixing. I had been taught that there was no such thing as a “mixed
language”, and I found the existence of languages like these disturbing.
However, the mixed language claims were vague in the extreme. What was a
“mixed language” actually supposed to be? Of course, it was obvious that languages are
affected by “contact” with other languages. But what is “contact”: How does the day-to-day behavior
of speakers of languages that are “in contact” reflect this “contact”?
Are there different kinds of contact situations? What are the possible ways in which languages respond? The “mixed language” advocates really threw no light on these questions. I found what seemed an important new slant on the matter in John Gumperz’s studies (with Robert Wilson--e. g., Gumperz and Wilson 1971 ) of Kupwar village in India. These studies convinced me that our traditional linguistic descriptions didn’t give us the right information for understanding the way contact actually affected languages (a conviction that was further reinforced by a comparison with some of the classical Sprachbünde). With only the information provided by linguistic descriptions, there seemed to be no way to judge whether “contact” was an important factor in explaining the Austronesian languages that I thought of as problematical. (I’ve used the term “aberrant” for these languages, although it has met some objections).
But this apparent dead end made me wonder. Why did traditional linguistic descriptions reveal so little of what we needed to know to describe the effects of contact? And as I thought further about it, it seemed that contact wasn’t the only linguistic phenomenon on which their information provided a misleading perspective. But what were the kinds of critical information that were lacking? What other kinds of information should linguistic description undertake to provide? And if I was right, why were the traditional descriptions designed to provide instead the kinds of information that they did provide?
These were some of the questions I was trying to answer as I began writing the Notes. A reviewer of one of my books observed that it sometimes seemed as if I were writing for myself. That criticism may have had some validity for the book; it is certainly true of the Ethnolinguistic Notes. They were first and foremost an attempt to think through various things for myself and reach some further understanding. A main motive in sharing them with colleagues was simply to try them out, to see if I could elicit helpful ideas, and also--particularly in the beginning--to reassure myself that I wasn’t making egregious errors or otherwise taking positions that could get me in trouble. But of course, when I thought I had come up with an interesting discovery, I did want to let the world know about it.
On What They’ve Wound Up Being About
Not long ago I was asked if I could provide abstracts for those series that were posted on the Web (i.e., Series 4 and much of Series 3). My first reaction was that trying to write overall abstracts wouldn’t make sense at all, that each Note had a different subject. But wait! Wouldn’t it be equally nonsensical to suggest that the Notes are a random series of unrelated pieces? When I thought further about it I realized that the questions with which each of them is concerned do in fact trace back by a more or less direct route to the original one: why our linguistic descriptions didn’t tell us some of the things we needed to know about the languages they purported to describe.
One complication is that the four series aren’t all that separate--not enough
to describe their content separately--they’re really a continuation of the same quest. Of course,
some questions that are more novel than others were thought of from time to time. But the reason
I started each new series (at least the “New Series” and Series 3) was that I had written a book
that attempted to sum up what I regarded as the results of the previous series. (The first book
was published [Grace 1981], but the second [entitled Ordinary Language] never was.)
As I look back on it, I suppose Series 4 is the only one that I started without
at least some idea that it would lead up to a book. I actually wrote two books based on parts
of Series 3: Grace 1987 and a never-published one (entitled Culture in Language and
Linguistics). I suppose one might describe Series 4 as mainly an attempt to tie together and
flesh out ideas I’d developed previously. However in practical terms, the main reason I ended
Series 3 and began 4 was that the means of production--large-scale computer printouts--was no
longer available, while at the same time the web was becoming attractive. Series 4 was designed for
web publication.
Still the realization that all four series did trace back to the single original question presented a challenge. If there was some sort of unity in their subject matter, shouldn’t I be able to provide some succinct clues as to its nature? I could hardly hope to do this within the expected scope of an abstract, but it should be possible to say something informative in a relatively limited scope. Anyway, that’s what I’m attempting to do here.
I can’t try to treat them as a sequence designed to present an argument; that’s not the kind of thing they are. Rather they, especially the earlier ones, represent my attempt to think through various things, to follow various leads that occurred to me and seemed worth investigating. Still, as I’ve reviewed the Notes, I’ve come to recognize that there is a
central conclusion to which most of the questions discussed lead back. That conclusion is that the
reason why our linguistic descriptions provide the particular information that they do--why
they are designed to answer those particular questions rather than others--is to be found in the
assumptions about the nature of language that underlie them. And the reason why these descriptions
are more revealing about some languages and linguistic situations than others is that the picture
of language--what I’ll call their ideology--that they yield is seriously culture-centric.
The ideology of linguistics
.
Contemporary linguistic theory, in my view, errs in seeing languages mainly in terms of the properties that are emphasized--indeed,
required--for [written] expository prose in the Western (rapidly becoming global) tradition.
Traditional linguistic description has been designed to look for those properties. But how
relevant they are to the kind of oral language use that predominates in non-literate--often multilingual
in varying degrees--communities such as are common in the Austronesian-speaking world seems very
uncertain. Note that this should be a matter of concern even for those who care little about the
languages of non-literate peoples. If the foundational assumptions of this ideology are only
valid for a special set of more or less artificially-designed languages, as I believe is the case,
they provide a very shaky basis for investigating the properties of “natural” language.
I think further that this view of language is in large part the result of a
prescriptive tradition in the Western world that extends back for several centuries at
least. Differently put, it is basically a continuation of the sanctioned linguistic ideology of
Western (rapidly becoming global) Civilization.(1)
Some Unrecognized Facts obscured, if not contradicted, by the ideology
1. Human language is not clearly partitioned into distinct (or well-defined) languages. Therefore, natural languages are what I’ve called “intrinsically open systems”, that is, it is not necessarily determinate what--e. g., what strings--belong to a given natural language system and what does not.
2. The distinction between speakers’ dictionary knowledge (the knowledge necessary to recognize linguistic expressions) and grammar knowledge (the knowledge necessary to figure them out from their elements) is not a sharp one. In particular, there’s much more dictionary-type knowledge than we recognize, and it plays a much bigger role in our language processing. There’s also a lot of overlap (both kinds of knowledge being involved in processing the same expression).
3. The distinction between knowledge of language and “knowledge of the world” is also far from clear.
4. In fact, “knowledge of the world”--or more accurately, the construction of realities--is of central importance to any understanding of the true nature of language. Languages have been a main epistemological instrument throughout the history of our species. They are necessary for us to construct any understanding of the world more complex than that attained by other species. They enable us to do this by modeling reality or more accurately, by “constructing realities”. I would maintain that languages are mainly (or can profitably be looked at as being mainly) collections of ways of talking about things--talking about particular chunks of reality. These ways of talking about things amount to constructed realities; the sum of the ways of talking about things of a language (or of a people) can be thought of as the constructed reality of the speakers/people. Reality construction is central at all levels: to languages, to ways of talking about things, and to utterances.
5. What I call “the intertranslatability postulate”--the claim that anything that can be said in any given language can also be said in any other one--is not true in any meaningful interpretation that can be given it.
7. These conclusions have important implications for many other problems such as language continuity and change, language contact, phonology, hypotheses about the evolution of language, and the spread of Western ideologies to the rest of the world (“globalization”).
In conclusion
So concludes my attempt to explain what the Ethnolinguistic Notes are about. I realize that it in no way qualifies as an abstract. And it certainly doesn’t present anything like a chronological (or logical) account of the steps toward my conclusions. What I hope is that it will give anyone who is interested some clues about what can be found in the Notes.
NOTE
1. There doesn’t seem to be any satisfactory way to describe assumptions that are never explicitly stated and that aren’t held in the same form by everyone. In spite of these difficulties, I propose the following propositions as a rough, and I hope not-too-misleading, picture of their general tenor:
I. The prototypical function of language is to communicate factual information.
II. The prototypical procedure for this communication of information involves the encoding and decoding of propositions.
III. This encoding and decoding is governed by individual systems ("languages") whose prototypical function is to govern the construction and interpretation of linguistic expressions (most notably proposition-sized expressions--i.e., sentences). The individual language consists essentially of a grammar that governs what sentences are authorized within the system and specifies the meaning of each authorized sentence (i.e., provides the means for working it out).
IV. Accordingly, the prototypical manifestation of human language is in the form of such distinct individual systems ("languages").]
REFERENCES
Grace, George W. 1981. An essay on language. Columbia SC: Hornbeam Press.
Grace, George W. 1987. The Linguistic Construction of Reality. London: Croom Helm.
Gumperz, John J. and Robert Wilson. 1971. Convergence and creolization: A case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border. In Dell Hymes (ed.). Pidginization and creolization of languages. London: Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1964. Directions in (ethno-)linguistic theory. pp. 6-56 in A. Kimball Romney and Roy Goodwin D'Andrade (eds.), Transcultural studies in cognition. American Anthropologist, volume 66, number 3, part 2.
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Fundamentally revised 2 October 2006
© Copyright 2006 George Grace, Honolulu Hawaii. All Rights Reserved
