Language and Communicative Practices by Hanks William F.;

Author:Hanks, William F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Linguistic Relativity and Mediation

We begin with the early development of North American linguistic anthropology and first formulations of the relativity hypothesis in the writings of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Whorf. Despite their being in certain ways outdated, these writings make a significant contribution to contemporary issues by clearly setting forth the relations among language form, routine patterns of speaking, and the ways that people experience. From here we move on to reconsider aspects of the relativity hypothesis from the vantage point of indexical categories. What does it mean to suggest, as we did in the last chapter, that Margot’s perceptions of her domestic context are “coordinated” or “channeled” by the deictic categories of her language? The question here is not so much whether Maya language is essentially different from, say, English, and hence whether Margot and Yuum inhabit a different world from Jack and Natalia. Their worlds are obviously different in some ways and alike in others. Rather, the key question is how to analyze indexical reference in such a way as to reveal the dynamics through which verbally mediated meaning is produced.

Boas’s classic “Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages” (1911) was a wide-ranging and influential essay that was to set the stage for the early development of anthropological linguistics. In it he focused on cross-linguistic variation and the relative boundedness of any given language. There is a strong parallel between his starting points and those of Saussure (Chapter 2), although, as we will see, his conclusions were quite different. Languages differ in two major ways, namely, the groups of sounds that they define as meaningful and the groups of ideas that they associate with fixed phonetic groups (i.e., words and morphemes). Whereas a language like English defines as meaningful the distinction between “p” and “b” (cf. pin ≠ bin) and “t” and “th” (cf. tin ≠ thin), Maya distinguishes “p” versus “p’“ (glottalized; cf. pik ‘appear’ ≠ p’ik ‘break up into pieces’) and “t” from “t”‘ (cf. taán ‘front’ ≠ faan ‘speak’). Hence the two languages have different phonemic inventories. Similarly, whereas the Maya expression kìik designates specifically “elder sister,” the same concept requires two words in English.

The languages also have different “semantic inventories.” This point is reminiscent of Saussure’s evidence for arbitrariness. For Boas, it was the point of departure in relating language to thought. He reasoned that if each word is associated with a limited number of ideas and the total number of words in any language is also limited, then the total inventory of ideas expressed by words in any language must itself be limited. Like thought, language is inherently classificatory. “So the infinitely large number of ideas have been reduced by classification to a lesser number, which by constant use have established firm associations, and which can be used automatically” (Boas 1966:21). The last part of this quote underscores the repeated use of words to routinize certain associations. From a logical perspective, this routine factor is significant, because if it were

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