Pragmatic Disguise in Pronominal-affix Paradigms

Discussion questions regarding this article (download):

@incollection {heath.j:1991:disguise-pronominal,
    author = {Heath, Jeffrey},
    crossref = {plank.f+:1991:paradigms},
    pages = {75–89},
    title = {Pragmatic Disguise in Pronominal-affix Paradigms},
}

@collection {plank.f+:1991:paradigms,
    editor = {Plank, Frans},
    isbn = {3-11-012761-X},
    location = {Berlin~/ New York},
    pagetotal = {317},
    publisher = {Mouton de Gruyter},
    series = {Empirical Approaches to Language Typology},
    subtitle = {the economy of inflection},
    title = {Paradigms},
    volume = {9},
}

Discussion questions

• There seem to be two contradictory functional pressures regarding the marking of SAP: some language place them highest in a hierarchy of indexation (1>2>3, or the Algonquian so-called 2>1>3 hierarchy), meaning they get the morphological spotlight, while other languages (like those in the article) do all kinds of linguistic acrobatics in order to downplay them. Is a speech community either a ‘highlighting’, a ‘downplaying’ one or neither? Are there documented cases of a ‘clash’ between the two forces? Similar problematics in historical linguistics seem to be the contradictory forces of assimilation and dissimilation.

• While speaker intuition cannot serve as linguistic evidence on its own, it is still interesting, valuable and relevant; after all, it is the speakers who are the vectors of language and who make language change. How do speakers of those Australian languages perceive person and person marking in their language?

• Another extra-linguistic question: are there any clear correlations between communities which speak language that behave like those described in the article and certain sociological characteristics? Does what we know about their language correlate with what we know about their society and culture?

Critical review

Summary

This article challenges the concept of ‘one form, one meaning’ based on the skewing, formal irregularities and reduction of surface information in 1↔2 interaction found in Australian languages. This complex, ‘chaotic’, situation is said to evolve due to pragmatic factors of the speaker-addressee relationship, which the speakers of these languages try to avoid referring to directly.

1. Introduction. The problematics of the concept ‘one form, one meaning’. Heath states the origin of this concept is in the organization of binary features in phonology ([+/-voiced]) and morphology ([+/-plural], organizing morphemes into paradigmatic sets) in some schools of structural linguistics, with interference effects such as neutralization handled in terms of markedness patterning. Then he discusses the association between such interference effects and the semantic or real-world reality, including pragmatics, leading to the focus of this article: the pragmatic tendency to mitigate or disguise reference to speech-act participants.

2. Pronominal pragmatics. T-V distinction as an example of discrepancy between semantics (vous as ‘polite’) and linguistic expression (vous as ‘plural’). The tendency to omit SAP pronouns in East Asian languages as another example. The difficulty of assigning markedness values to 1 or 2.

3. Australian pronominal-prefix systems. The Maranungku (Western Daly › Marranj; North Australian) pronominal-prefix system as a case study of complex interaction between paradigms: (almost) nothing fits neatly within simple slots.

4. Pragmatic disguise in 1st ↔ 2nd combinations. Here Heath discusses how Australian languages use several strategies in order to mitigate or disguise interaction between SAP (1→2 or 2→1), concluding with referring to the situation in non-Australian languages (Chinook, Aymara, Cuzco Quechua, Trans-Himalayan, Spanish and French). Presenting the data from Australian languages is a major part of the article.

Critical assessment

This article expands on a topic discussed earlier on the course, viz. the relation between sociopragmatics and person marking (especially SAPs and interaction between SAPs), cf. Bickel and Gaenszle (2015). As Heath (1991) puts it lively: ‘1st ↔ 2nd forms are the messiest and most opaque of all transitive combinations’, calling them ‘dangerous’ three times (the danger and pragmatic sensitivity being due to the fact 1↔2 pronouns focus the attention on speaker-addressee relationship). The explanation for the vagueness / opaqueness / disguise in 1↔2 pronouns is it is being a way to avoid direct, upfront reference, thus avoiding sociopragmatically sensitive situations.

While this explanation is tempting and has a great explanatory force, one might say its explanatory force is too good, meaning it is so easy to explain these phenomena using this general explanation that it can say only a little about these languages (it is too general, broad and vague) and it is very hard to prove or disprove this explanation is really the motivation behind these peculiar paradigms.

This problem is strengthened by the fact that there is also an opposite explanation for the exact opposite situation in other languages: the higher place of SAPs in a hierarchy of person indexation (SAP>3; either 1>2>3, as seen in some Trans-Himalayan languages, or 2>1>3, as seen in Algonquian languages), meaning they get the morphological spotlight (definitely not behind the scenes!).

I am not saying the proposed sociopragmatic explanation for the motivation of the situation emerging from the data is wrong, not at all. What I do say is that the explanation can and should be used as a general direction, but has to be rigorously proven and refined when describing individual languages, not without proving correlation with relevant sociological data about these particular speech communities. Only this way it can be used in a scientifically sound way and be truly meaningful.

A side note concerning an interesting, possibly related, phenomenon in Modern Hebrew. There are speakers who call their children אבא ába ‘father’, אבאל׳ה ába-le ‘father-diminutive, daddy’ or אמא íma ‘mother’¹ in a vocative syntactic slot. For example:

• אבאל׳ה נשמה, תביא ת׳מלח.

  • ába-le nšamá, taví t-a-mélax.
  • father-diminutive soul, bring:2.sg.m.fut/imp acc-def-salt.
  • Dear son, pass on the salt.
  • (the nšama part is totally optional, although common in the same sociolect)

• איזה מתוק אתה, אבא!

  • éze matók atá, ába!
  • what.a (lit. ‘which’) sweet:sg.m 2.sg.m, father!
  • How sweet you are, son!

I don’t really know why the speakers who speak like this obfuscate and reverse the parent-child relationship in these utterances addressing their children, but it is very marked sociolinguistically and used almost entirely by Mizrahi Jews (Arab Jews), so this might be a (dialectal?) Arabic influence.