Ethnosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture (review)

The twelve papers in this book look at how far culture can account for language variation, how culture and grammar connect to each other, and what influence one has over the other.

The introductory essay by N. J. Enfield (3–30) in Part 1 gives an overview of the development of ethnosyntax and the methodological issues involved. In this connection, Anthony V. N. Diller and Wilaiwan Khanittanan (31–51) show that all syntactic inquiries are likely to be determined by the analyst’s cultural presuppositions about the language. As highlighted by Cliff Goddard (52–73), ethnosyntactic research can legitimately be conceived in a ‘narrow’ sense (culture-related meanings as encoded in the morphosyntax) or in a ‘broad’ sense (further relations between culture and syntax). John Newman (74–95) presents the narrow perspective when he establishes that ‘give’ constructions in Maori, Nahuatl, and Zulu exhibit no obvious correlates outside the grammatical systems they are part of.

The papers in Part 2 deal with the relations between culture, semantics, and grammar. As shown by Wallace Chafe (99–109), the male-oriented culture of early North Iroquoian reflected in the gender morphology persists until the present even if male dominance is no longer the case. Andrew Paley (110–37) focuses on rules for gender assignment for inanimate objects in informal Tasmanian English: he for portable things about which the speaker is emotionally indifferent, and she otherwise. Plants, animals, and male genitals are considered masculine while other objects are feminine. Ronald W. Langacker (138–61) shows some common grammaticalization paths in English and Mixtec locative constructions. According to Anna Wierzbicka (162–203), English let reflects these possible meanings: permission, noninterruption, apparent indifference, nonprevention, tolerance, shared information, cooperative dialogue, interaction, thinking, and an offer to perform a service, with let’s proposing joint action as opposed to let us, which expresses authority.

Part 3 is devoted to culture, pragmatics, and grammaticalization. Kate Burridge (207–30) explains that the loss of the subjunctive of wishful thinking, wotte, in Pennsylvania German (Standard German wollte) and its subsequent development into a lexical verb meaning ‘to wish’ is due to the influence of the basic Anabaptist worldview, that is, separateness, nonconformity, humility, and simplicity. She also claims that the development of zehle ‘to count’ as future marker is consistent with the strong Anabaptist belief that future things lie exclusively in God’s will. N. J. Enfield (231–58) attempts to show how Lao’s ideas about the proper bodily postures in doing certain activities weighs considerably on the productivity of certain serialization-involving verbs describing such postures. Alan Rumsey’s paper (259–86) discusses some aspects of social life which are reflected in Ku Waru (New Guinea) existential clauses, the use of 1st and 2nd singular and dual pronouns, and oratorical style. Finally, Jane Simpson (287–307) suggests that some syntactic constructions in Walpiri grammaticalize some commonly held assumptions and expectations that provide some common ground upon which people usually start a conversation.