In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Case and kinship: grammar as a social narrative in Old English Students approaching Old English for the first time so frequently go through a period of disorientation provoked by the unfamiliar categories of even so little inflected a language. The most perplexing of these categories is usually that of case: the process according to which words assume different forms when used differentiy in a clause, which seems so alien and gratuitous an idea from the point of view of English of the present day. But many of the most alien ideas may seem so because of our point of view, and our failuretorelate them to processes w e know very well. Among the Land Dayaks of Sarawak it is only children that are called by their given names. After puberty a person is called 'mother of so-and-so' or 'father of so-and-so', and when people get to forty or so this changes to 'grandmother of or 'grandfather of as the case may be. Those who are infertile or have not yet produced children are taken care of by aflexibilityin the system: the 'so-and-so' does not have to be a person, but could be a pet pig or a favourite tree or whatever else was necessary to make the conventions work But it is not necessary to travel to exotic locationstoencounter the same kind of process. At a pre-school in a more upmarket part of the city, when a mother (characteristically) anives to collect her toddler, another woman may greet her with 'You must be James's mother', while on the rare occasions when her male partner puts in an appearance instead he will be greeted with 'You must be Sarah's husband'. In this society the child defines the mother, who in her role of wife defines her husband. N o other relationships are possible—the woman is the focus, reaching out to the two people with a relation to her body unlike that enjoyed by anyone else, and those two people and the woman are distinguished by a chain of definition reaching from child to mother to husband. And who is the most important in this little world? The answer could depend on where you are looking from—the one-time Meadow Lea margarine jingle sums it all up: You're a mother You're a wife You're m y lover You're our life You ought to be congratulated. It's all about relations—the familial relation of husband and child to wife/mother, the defining relation leading from child to mother to husband, and the precedence relation which puts the one that uses the margarine at the centre of the lives of the others. Approve it or not, it is a cultural nanative about family life. Throw in the neighbours—'Meadow Lea is the one that lives next door to Flora—you know' (relations that are defining but not familial), and a few PARERGON ns 10.2, December 1992 60 A. I. Jones other acquaintances glimpsed in the background on festive occasions (precedence without definition or relationship), and you have the whole social network. And somehow the relationships are very like those in a text. Whatever view one takes of meaning, a text means something as a whole, and it is typically made up of parts that mean something by themselves put together in meaningful ways. W e are accustomed to think of the elementary items as conesponding in some way to things in the real world—that in 'the cat sat on the mat', 'cat', 'saf, and 'mat' have some experiential content. It is not so obvious that the way the items are put together may just as well conespond to the way things gotogetherin the real world. A grammar describes how items are related to make a culturally accepted narrative. In M o d e m English it can be considered a nanative in which there are three kinds of relation. One is like the relation between a woman on the one hand and her partner and child on the other: between the possessor of the body and those who have privileged access to it. The grammatical equivalent...

pdf

Share