Two seemingly disparate areas of English language structure-thegrammar of reported speech and of textual cohesion-are&nctionally related in that both entail a distinction between "wording" and "meaning. " This is consistent with the Western ideological disjunction between language and reality, talk and action. Neither these language structures nor this linguistic ideology are found among the Ngariny'n people of northwestern Australia, suggesting a WhorJian hypothesis about their possible interrelationship. NCOMMON WITH WHORF (1956), I BELIEVE THATTHE BEST WAY to study the relation-I ship between language structure and other aspects of social life is by looking for what he called "fashions of speaking": global complexes of features that "cut across the typical grammatical classifications, so that such a 'fashion' may include lexical, morphological, syntactic and otherwise systemically diverse means coordinated in a certain frame of consistency" (Whorf 1956: 158).To what did Whorfseek to relate such "fashions"? Most of the research that has been done on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been about language and perception or "cognitive processing" (cf. Lucy 1985). For present purposes, a better reading of Whorf is the revisionist one in Silverstein (1979), which takes him to be addressing himself to the Boasian problem of the relation between language as "primary ethnological phenomenon" and the "secondary rationalizations" in terms of which speakers of the language understand it to operate (Boas 1974:23ff.).Accordingly, I am looking here for possible links between language structure and what Silverstein calls "linguistic ideology"-shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world. My examples are from English and Ungarinyin, an Aboriginal language spoken by the Ngarinyin people of northwestern Australia.For each language, I examine two seemingly quite disparate areas of language structure: ( I ) the grammar of "reported speech" (Voloshinov 1973) and (2) anaphoric pronouns, ellipsis, and other devices used to create cohesive text. I argue that the differences between Ungarinyin and English in each of these two areas are related to differences in the other-that is, "coordinated in a certain frame of consistency." I then discuss possible relationships between these two "fashions of speaking" and aspects of Standard Average European ("SAE") versus Ngarinyin "common sense"-namely, the presence or absence of a sharp dichotomy between words and "things," talk and action.
The Grammar of Reported SpeechEnglish has a grammatical opposition between direct and indirect discourse. ' Concerning the formal realization of this opposition, linguists (e.g., Jesperson 1929:290ff.;Partee 1973; Halliday 1985:228ff.;Coulmas 1986) agree that in indirect as opposed to direct discourse, person, spatial deixis, tense, and mode are "shifted" so as to anchor them with respect to the speech situation in which the utterance is "reported," and interrogative or imperative sentences are shifted into declarative...
Sahlins bases his account of Polynesian ‘heroic history’ partly on the fact that chiefs used the pronoun ‘I’ in reference to their whole group. Mosko (1992) argues that Sahlins’s consequent emphasis on ‘encompassment’ as the modality of chiefly action is diametrically opposed to Strathern’s on ‘partibility’, the effacement of parts of the person as a condition of action. Drawing on comparative material from the New Guinea Highlands, where big men also use ‘I’ for their whole group, and on Benveniste’s and Urban’s accounts of the meaning and use of personal pronouns, I argue instead that moments of both encompassment and partibility are inherent in language, corresponding to two distinct dimensions in which the pronouns are meaningful (the ‘direct indexical’ and the ‘anaphoric’), and that close attention to the interaction between the two can yield new insights into the nature of personhood and social agency.
The myth/history and orality/literacy oppositions are interrelated ones, through which Aboriginal culture has been stereotyped as the simple inverse of European. The Dreaming has been seen as antithetical to historical consciousness, as it assimilates contingent events to a pre-existing order which is objectified in natural features of the landscape. I argue that The Dreaming is one instance of a more general mode of orientation through which a good deal of what we call history -the purposeful acts of living persons and their known forebearsis also memorialised in the landscape. What is specific to Aboriginal sociality is not orality or a mythic mentality, but a particular economy of inscriptive and interpretive practices through which 'country' becomes 'story'.
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