Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change

298 Pages·1977·18.996 MB·

by  Ben G. Blount, Mary Sanches

LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND CULTURE: Advances in the
Study of Cognition
Under the Editorship of: E. A. HAMMEL
DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
BERKELEY
Michael Agar, Ripping and Running: A Formal Ethnography of Urban
Heroin Addicts
Brent Berlin, Dennis E. Breedlove, and Peter H. Raven, Principles of Tzeltal
Plant Classification: An Introduction to the Botanical Ethnography of
a Mayan-Speaking People of Highland Chiapas
Mary Sanches and Ben Blount, Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use
Daniel G. Bobrow and Allan Collins, Representation and Understanding:
Studies in Cognitive Science
Domenico Parisi and Francesco Antinucci, Essentials of Grammar
Elizabeth Bates, Language and Context: The Acquisition of Pragmatics
Ben G. Blount and Mary Sanches, Sociocultural Dimensions of Language
Change
Susan Ervin-Tripp and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (Eds.), Child Discourse
In preparation
Eugene S. Hunn, Tzeltal Folk Zoology: The Classification of Discontinuities
in Nature
James N. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the Organization of Conversational
Interaction
Sociocultural Dimensions
of Language Change
Edited by
BEN G. BLOUNT
MARY SANCHES
DepartmentofAnthropology
UniversityofTexas
Austin, Texas
With an introduction by John J. Gumperz
ACADEMIC PRESS New York San Francisco London
ASubsidiaryofHarcourt BraceJovanovich, Publishers
COPYRIGHT © 1977, BY ACADEMIC PRESS, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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United Kingdom Edition published by
ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. (LONDON) LTD.
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Sociocultural dimensions of language change.
(Language, thought, and culture series)
Includes bibliographies and index.
1. Linguistic change-Addresses, essays,
lectures. 2. Sociolrnguistics-Addresses, essays,
lectures. 3. Anthropological linguistics-
Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Blount, Ben G.,
Date II. Sanches, Mary.
P142.S6 301.2Ί 76-2943
ISBN 0-12-107450-1
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
List of Contributors
Numbers in parentheses indicate the pages on which the author's contributions begin.
Ned Anderson (227), Office of Arid Land Studies, University of Arizona,
Tuscon, Arizona
Keith H. Basso (227), Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona,
Tuscon, Arizona
Brent Berlin (63), Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Berkeley, California
Ben G. Blount (1), Department of Anthropology, University of Texas,
Austin, Texas
Lilyan A. Brudner (271), Department of Anthropology, University of
Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Janet Wynne Dixon Dougherty (103), Department of Linguistics, Massa­
chusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley,
California
Robert French (35), Department of Anthropology, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Ian F. Hancock (161), Department of English, University of Texas, Austin,
Texas
Nicholas A. Hopkins (185), Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del
Instituto Nacional de Antropologia Historia, Mexico
Frances Karttunen (173), Department of Linguistics, University of Texas,
Austin, Texas
Paul Kay (21), Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Berkeley, California
Keith T. Kernan (35), Neuropsychiatric Insitute, Mental Retardation
Center, University of California, Los Angeles, California
ix
χ List of Contributors
Carol H. Molony (131), Universität Essen, Gesamthochschule Anglistik,
Essen, Germany
Joan Rubin (253), East-West Center, University of Hawaii, Honolulu,
Hawaii
Mary Sanches (1, 51), Department of Anthropology, University of
Texas, Austin, Texas
Gillian Sankoff (119), Department of Anthropology, University of
Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
John Sodergren (35), Department of Anthropology, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Preface
Each of the articles in this collection deals with the topic of language
change. In that respect, they continue a long fruitful area of scholarship.
The study of changes in the forms of languages has been a rich field of
inquiry, but considerably less attention has been devoted to changes in
sociocultural terms. The articles here raise questions about language as a
social phenomenon functioning in cultural contexts. While building on the
solid foundations of earlier research in linguistic structure and linguistic
change, they suggest a new, broader perspective. Language is treated in
terms of a social and cultural world. Changes in language form must
require not only a linguistic accounting but a social description and
explanation. Changes of form may often involve differences in communi­
cation, though a particular change in form may be linguistically minimal.
What is significant is the interpretation given to the change, and that
significance must be described in sociocultural terms and dimensions.
These dimensions are theoretically diverse in scope and number, and
include factors such as age, sex, generation and status differences, ritual,
community contact and boundaries, urbanization, religious affiliation, and
political organization. The particular social factors and cultural bases that
operate to produce change also vary from situation to situation, and a
major objective of research is to determine precisely what complex of
sociocultural dimensions are present and activated in a given language
change situation. It is to that objective that the articles in this collection
are mainly addressed, and the authors illustrate clearly that the appropriate
perspective is sociological/anthropological and that the necessary re­
search methodology is ethnographic.
An anthropological perspective is an asset, if not a necessity, in a
sociocultural approach to language change, since changes in language
structure are related to and often dependent on social action and inter-
xi
xii Preface
action in a speech community. An investigator of change must consider
the uses of language and the diverse functions of language within the
daily social intercourse of a community. A detailed, sensitive ethno­
graphic record of the routines is the first priority of research, and it is in
this regard that sociology and anthropology are in strong position to make
timely contributions. We hope that this collection will stimulate further
social research on the dynamics of language change.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to the contributors, first for their
cooperation, and second, for their patience throughout the inevitable
delays in producing the volume. Also, some liberties were taken in the
interpretation of the articles in the Introduction. As case studies, the
articles are individual units and stand on their own. Several were not
written specifically to document language change, although they all
contain discussions of change. We stressed in the Introduction the impli­
cations of the case studies for language, and we wish to emphasize that
our selective interpretation did not always do justice to the articles in
terms of content or focus.
We are grateful to John Gumperz for his encouragement and support
during the preparation of this collection. Helpful suggestions and com­
ments were also provided by Jan Brukman, Keith and Claudia Kernan,
Brian Stross, and Dorothy Wills. We also thank Holly Hayataka and
Janice Edmiston for assistance with the typing of the manuscripts. Our
deepest debt of gratitude is to Elise Padgug for her editorial assistance
and for her good-humored patience and support throughout the project.
Foreword: Sociocultural Dimensions
of Language Change
JOHN J. GUMPERZ
In dealing with the interrelationship of linguistic and social processes of
change, this volume takes up a familiar theme. Modern linguistics, as the
editors point out in their introduction, developed out of a concern with
history and evolution. Throughout the nineteenth and for much of the
present century, the study of language was seen as an integral part of the
wider search into the cultural origins of modern societies. This inquiry
was motivated in part by abstract scientific interest, but in part also by the
desire to provide a historical basis for and thus legitimize the national
ideologies of the newly formed nation states.
Because of the lack of direct documentary sources and the great gaps in
the published literature, scholars began to seek new ways of recovering
what the German Romantics had called Versunkenes Volksgut, the
"sunken treasures" of the past. Along with the quest for new unpublished
folk manuscripts, the search for historical evidence also stimulated direct
ethnographic investigation of tribal languages and peasant dialects
throughout the world. The need to commit spoken words to paper led to
the rediscovery of the ancient Indian science of phonetics and ultimately
to modern grammatical theory.
Since the turn of the century, comparative analysis of both written and
hitherto unrecorded languages has become established as a major tool of
culture history. Among other things, it has clarified the role that folk tradi­
tions play in the growth of modern nation states, so that it is now generally
recognized, for example, that the classical cultures to which we trace so
many of our modern institutions are not the only sources of civilization.
They are themselves descended from earlier preliterate cultures similar to
the folk societies that existed alongside them and that continue to exist in
many parts of the world. It follows that literary traditions and written
codes of law are not a prerequisite for the existence of historically stable
forms of social life. A common language provides the essential anteced­
ents from which more complex forms of social sharing can evolve.
Although initially unintended, from the point of view of social science,
xiii
xiv Foreword
perhaps the most important consequence of the efforts to account for the
multivariate patterns of language uncovered by the early historical studies
was the development of the construct of grammar as the underlying
explanatory dynamic of all language behavior. Grammatical rules can be
regarded as reflecting abstract, functionally related symbolic processes
that constrain and channel our perception of environmental and behav­
ioral cues. These rules are learned indirectly through early informal
childhood socialization and subsequent interactive experience and thus
reflect the conventions and values of interacting groups. They operate
automatically as motor habits and are for the most part not immediately
accessible to conscious recall. Yet although sharedness of grammatical
rules is not usually overtly discussed, it is nevertheless taken for granted
in everyday communication and in fact is a precondition of successful in­
teraction. In other words, the mere fact that human populations live
together successfully, cooperate in the pursuit of their daily affairs, and in­
teract using a particular set of speech varieties is in itself prima facie evi­
dence for the existence of stable systems of values and functionally
related rules, which are subject to the same laws of change as those of the
better known classical literary societies.
Although all human groups have language, and at the highest, most gen­
eral level of abstraction all grammatical processes are similar, the actual
form that language usage takes in any one population is a function of the
history and the culture of that population. The way individuals express
what they want to communicate, apart from the content it conveys, also
provides information about speakers' social background and about the
relationship to others. Potentially at least, therefore, language study could
become an important source of information about otherwise unverbalized
and relatively inaccessible social processes. So far, however, in spite of
many insightful statements by nineteenth century pioneers of anthropol­
ogy such as Humboldt, as well as Sapir, Whorf, and many others since
them in this century, the value of linguistics to the study of social relations
and social change has not been worked through theoretically.
The disciplines of linguistics and social relations studies have devel­
oped independently of each other, despite attempts to bring about intel­
lectual collaboration. The linguist's concern with culture has remained
limited to long-term prehistoric change, no systematic attempts have been
made to use language data in the study of ongoing social processes. In
fact, during the last decades, as our knowledge of languages increased and
awareness of the real complexity of grammatical processes grew, atten­
tion has increasingly turned away from the sociocultural implications of
verbal behavior to concentrate on the formal aspects of grammatical rules
themselves. The shift in interest began with the structural linguists of the
Foreword xv
nineteen forties and fifties and, paradoxically, received its greatest im­
petus from the generative grammar of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's use of
data from English syntax to demonstrate the claim that stimulus response
theories of behavior cannot account for the real complexity of human cog­
nitive processes has opened up new areas of research in a wide range of
disciplines. But the thrust of these developments has been in the direction
of seeking explanations in terms of universal, individual psychological
processes, rather than in the direction of a sociological concern with the
recognition of social difference and social change. Furthermore, since it
was the abstract structural relationships in terms of which the rules are
couched that were seen to reflect the connection between language and
human behavior, priority was assigned to increasing the logical consis­
tency and explanatory power of formalizations as such. As so often
happens, this also meant a narrowing of the data base. Only those verbal
abilities that could be accounted for in terms of the existing research
paradigms, such as the most widely shared core features of phonology,
morphology, and syntax were recognized as grammatical. Others were set
aside as part of performance, i.e., not part of grammatical competence and
thus perhaps not subject to systematization. Thus, formal linguistic analy­
sis became an exercize in abstraction divorced from the study of everyday
verbal abilities.
The articles in this book, by contrast, take a different perspective and
concentrate directly on those levels of language that most clearly reflect
and signal social differences and are thus most readily affected by change.
By demonstrating that the linguistic phenomena in question can be ac­
counted for in terms of underlying rules, which, while perhaps less widely
shared, are directly related in form and function to those governing the
more commonly studied grammatical phenomena, these articles attempt
to restore a historical and social perspective to the study of language
change.
Contributions fall into three main thematic areas: lexical semantics,
speech variation and language contact, and incipient processes of lan­
guage change. The first two of these fields have already begun to receive
increasing attention. Following the pioneering writings of Sapir and
Whorf, linguistic anthropologists during the last two decades have em­
barked on in-depth analyses of terminological systems in domains such as
kinship, color terms, and ethnobotany, to name just a few, in a number of
folk societies and have provided empirical verification on the effect that
language has on speakers' perception of behavioral cues. Several papers
in this volume add a new comparative dimension to this work by showing
that the structure of lexical systems changes with changes in the socio­
economic complexity of the social systems in which it is embedded and