Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology

Abstract

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...

Defenestration: deconstructing the frame-in relation in Ungarinyin

“…13 More detailed discussions can be found in Rumsey (1990; properties of frame-in we minimally need to account for, in this section I will attempt to characterise it in 341 semantic, typologically valid terms. for its respective components.…”

“…While Ungarinyin does not allow elision of verbal elements in a similar 535 way to English (cf. Rumsey, 1990), the contrast between the evidential p E n and modal P ns can be brought 536 out clearly in the language as well through the use of the discourse connective aka 'not so' in (30). 24 For our present purposes, I consider the labels 'mood' and 'modal' as synonymous.…”

Flowing and framing

“…Conflict is indeed an inevitable supplement of power, and Briggs (1998) has questioned the tendency to articulate a given society to a single language ideology too closely (cf. Gal 1993;Rumsey 1990). If we assume with Raymond Williams (1977: 21) that "a definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world", it is valid to conclude that disputes concerning the nature and boundaries of language are inherently normative (Voloshinov 1973;Bakhtin 1981).…”

Worrorra: a language of the north-west Kimberley coast

“…present discussion, which concerns a language-specific encoding of the direct-indirect distinction itself, rather than the motivations for each category. 94 Rumsey (1990) has maintained for Ungarinyin that these three pragmatic functions are not emically distinguished, and that this situation is reflected in Ungarinyin sentence structure.…”