Dark Matter of the Mind
Page 29
In any case, if we focus on grammar at the sentence level only, we miss important principles of the formal organization of language above the sentence, which is arguably also grammar but whose principles are more diverse. These include the principles of sentence-grammars as a subset. By way of example, I will consider some coarse-grained features of a couple of small Pirahã texts.
CULTURAL LEARNING
First, however, I want to review evidence that cultural learning takes place without language. This is important because such evidence falsifies the claim that culture is necessarily subsequent to language.
In chapter 3, we discussed how dark matter is formed. In this formation, a significant portion of cultural knowledge and dark matter are learned independently of language. I want to come at this issue again with evidence from my own field research with the Banawás of the Brazilian Amazon (Buller, Buller, and Everett 1993; Ladefoged, Ladefoged, and Everett 1997).
Banawá males must all master the making of blowguns, from gathering raw materials to assembling the weapon. Consider in this regard the non-linguistic aspects of learning of how to make a blowgun, which I have done while among the Banawás.2 Sons observe, imitate, and work alongside their fathers. Surprisingly little linguistic instruction takes place in the transmission of this set of skills. The wood for the blowgun comes from a narrow range of wood species. The vine used to tie the blowgun and render it airtight is a specific kind found in certain places in the jungle. The needle used for the darts likewise requires highly specific knowledge of local flora; so does the kind of large jungle vine used to extract the poison (strychnine) and the other ingredients of the poison that help it enter the bloodstream more effectively. All of these steps and bits of knowledge can be transmitted without much language, by the son traveling with the father and observing. While learning how to find and gather blowgun components, the son also learns about hiking in the jungle, fortitude, bravery, flora and fauna, and so on. Often lessons are learned without a single word being exchanged between father and son.
The cultural transmission of dark matter, like genetic transmission, is nearly always corrupted in some way, leading to “mutations” (Newson, Richerson, and Boyd, 2007; Schönpflug, 2008). For example, a Banawá may be forced to use a different type of wood, or tie the blowgun slightly differently, or use a novel binding agent for the poison for some reason. Moreover, at any step of the transmission process error, or innovation can occur by the father or the son, in turn leading to changes in traditional blowgun construction. It does not matter whether the deviation was intentional or not—only that there has been a deviation that provides a potential for a mutation, whether resulting in an inferior or superior blowgun. Clearly such deviations have occurred, because in closely related Arawan communities (e.g., Jarawara and Jamamadi), blowguns differ (as do the languages themselves) in nontrivial ways. The technology varies and the language varies due to imperfect imitation and innovation. Although language enriches and accelerates the process of culture learning, allowing for the construction of different sorts of cultural institutions (e.g., the family, school, the military, church), differences in dark matter from one individual to another can arise without linguistic guidance.
Ethnophonology
I want to begin my discussion of the effects of culture on grammar with an ethnophonological analysis of Pirahã phonemes and “channels of discourse.” Though I have discussed these data elsewhere (D. Everett 1979; 1985; 2008; 2015), it is worth reviewing them here to round out our picture of the effects of culture on grammar more generally. As pointed out in D. Everett (1979, 1982, 1985), Pirahã phonology cannot be fully described or understood without knowledge of how it interacts with culture. To demonstrate the independence of these prosodic features, let me present two examples of “ethnophonology” in Pirahã (taken from Everett [2014b]).
To set the stage, imagine that a language could have various systems/modalities of sound structure, beyond its phonetics and phonology. And then consider the possibility that one modality could affect another, but not necessarily via standard devices of phonological theory proper (e.g., rules). If so, then to understand the sound system of language, L, at any level (e.g., “what happens” or “what native speakers know when they know the sound system of their language”) we must look carefully at the modalities of expression made available via an ethnography of communication (Hymes 1974) and not merely at a supposed universal formal apparatus. Corollaries of this scenario might include, for example, the appearance of new roles for old constraints. If this were true, then coherent fieldwork (D. Everett 2004)—the idea that not only our analyses but in fact our intellectual life more generally must cohere with our personal and professional values in life and science—would evolve from a curiosity to a desideratum to an imperative. Is there such a case? Indeed. There is, as we see by examining the following facts about Pirahã phonology. We begin with its phonemes (table 6.1; also shown in chap. 1).
Table 6.1. Pirahã Phonemes
Pirahã’s segmental inventory is one of the smallest in the world (the only two other languages with inventories of similar size are Rotokas and Hawaiian—though unlike Pirahã, Rotokas lacks tones and has an even smaller inventory overall). As a reminder, the /s/ is in parentheses because it is not generally found in women’s speech, though always in men’s (women use /h/ where men use /s/ and /h/).
Yet even though Pirahã has one of the simplest segmental phonemic inventories in the world, Pirahã prosody contrasts dramatically in complexity. The Pirahã stress rule is a good place to begin, since it is well known. This rule, from D. Everett and K. Everett (1984), is considered one of the more complex and unusual stress rules in the literature, mainly for its theoretical consequences (rather than, say, any difficulty in stating or recognizing it):
Pirahã stress rule: Stress the rightmost token of the heaviest syllable type in the last three syllables of the word.
The phonetic basis of the “heaviness” referred to in this rule is that voiceless consonants are always longer than voiced consonants, and there are five syllable weights based partially on this contrast: Pirahã’s five syllable weights are:
CVV>GVV>VV>CV>GV
(where C = voiceless consonant, G = voiced consonant, and V = vowel)
Pirahã is a tonal language as well, and stress, tone, and syllable weight vary independently in the language. (For a phonetic study of these features, see K. Everett 1998. Data in what follows is from K. Everett 1998 as well as my own field research.) To see this, I review the simple set of examples below. In these examples, tone is independent of stress. ´ = high tone; no mark over vowel = low tone. The stressed syllable is marked by !. There are no secondary stresses.
a. !tígí
“small parrot”
b. !pígí
“swift”
c. !sábí
“mean, wild”
d. !ábí
“to stay”
e. tíí!híí
“bamboo”
f. í!tì
“forehead”
g. tí!í
“honeybee”
h. tí!hí
“tobacco”
Thus, alongside Pirahã’s extremely simple segmental phonology, the language possesses a rich prosodic system. This leads us to ask whether the language exploits this differential complexity in any way. Indeed, as D. Everett (1985) describes it, Pirahã communication makes crucial use of channels of discourse, where Hymes (1974) defines a channel as a “sociolinguistically constrained physical medium used to carry the message from the source to the receiver.” The four principal modalities or channels in Pirahã after “normal” speech are:
Channel Functions
a. Hum speech
Disguise
Privacy
Intimacy
Talk when mouth is full
Caregiver-child communication
b. Yell speech
Long distance
Rainy days
Most frequen
t use: between huts and across river
c. Musical speech (“big jaw”)
Women produce this in language-teacher sessions more naturally than men. Women’s musical speech shows much greater separation of high and low tones, greater volume.
New information
Spiritual communication
Dancing, flirtation
d. Whistle speech (sour or “pucker mouth”—same root as “to kiss” or shape of mouth after eating lemon)
Hunting
Men only
One unusual melody used for aggressive play
The example below illustrates how prosodic information in Pirahã is exploited to create these channels. The inventory above also partially shows how little the segments contribute to the total set of phonological information in a given Pirahã word. We see that the phrase There is a paca there has a quasi-musical tonal representation (where an acute accent over a vowel represents high tone and no mark over the vowel represents low tone), the basis for the channels just summarized (see fig. 6.1).
Figure 6.1
kai?ihí?ao-?aaga gaihí
paca
poss/exist-be
there
There is a paca there.
All channels must include full prosodic information (stress, tone, length, intonation), though only the consonant and vowel channel needs to include the vowels and consonants. In the musical form, there is a falling tone followed by a short low, with a preceding break in the whistle (where the glottal stop, , would have been in kaiihi), followed by another short break (where the h would be) and a short high tone, and so on. Thus, the syllable boundaries are clearly present in whistle (and humming and yelling) channels, even though the segments themselves are missing. The syllable in this case indicates length and offers an abstract context for tone placement; the overall word is stressed according to syllable weight (D. Everett 1988). The syllable in these cases is vital to communication in differing channels, primarily in parsing the input.
One might now reasonably ask whether the discovery of such channels implies any causal interaction between culture and grammar. Or are these channels outside the grammar proper? Notice that the channels rely crucially on the syllable weights and stress rule above. So, if nothing else, they help account for what is otherwise an anomalous level of complexity in the stress rule, since this rule is possible only because of the larger complexity. Yet the facts cut deeper than this. Consider the following example of what D. Everett (1985) calls the “sloppy phoneme effect”:
tí píai ~ kí píai ~ kí kíai ~ pí píai ~ í píai ~ í /íai ~ tí píai, etc. (*tí tíai, * gí gíai, *bí bíai) “me too”
apapaí ~ kapapaí ~ papapaí ~ aaaí ~kakakaí (*tapapaí, *tatataí, *bababaí, *gagagaí) “head”
ísiihoái ~ kísiihoái ~ písiihoái ~ píhiihoái ~kíhiihoái “liquid fuel”3
Pirahã allows for variation among voiceless occlusives, as shown, though not for consonants that are [+continuant] or [+voice]. This variation can be accounted for, but only if we refer to Pirahã’s channels. (The ungrammatical examples above show that the features [continuant] and [voice] may never vary. Only place features may vary.) With no reference to channels, this variation is without explanation. But in light of the channels this follows because [+/–continuant] and [+/–voice] are necessary contrasts for stress placement (D. Everett 1988).
I am not claiming that the absence of variation for different values of [continuant] is predicted by the distinctive features alone. This case in fact demands that we further investigate the connection between [continuant] and [voice]. In other words, I am not proposing that ethnography should replace phonology (or syntax, morphology, etc.). But I am claiming that without the ethnographic study of channels, their role in Pirahã culture, and their place in Pirahãs’ dark matter, then even an understanding of Pirahã’s segmental phonology is impossible. These in turn must be preserved in every discourse channel, or the constraint below (D. Everett 1985) is violated:
Constraint on functional load and necessary contrast:
a. Greater dependence on the channel → Greater contrast required
b. Lesser dependence on the channel → Less contrast required
The lesson for the field researcher and theoretical linguist to be drawn from these examples is just this: first, language and culture should be studied together; second, as a modality-dependent channel, phonology may be subject to constraints that are (i) language specific and (ii) grounded not only in the physical properties of the instantiating modality (the phonetics) but also or alternatively on the culture-specific channels of discourse employed. This is a very important result because it shows that the ‘interface conditions’ of the human computational system (HCL), in Chomsky’s (1995) terms, may range beyond “phonological form” (PF) and “logical form” (LF), if we define an interface system as a system setting bounds on interpretability for HCL. Such examples also show how coherent fieldwork can be useful for theory. Thus not only the fieldworker but also the phonologist must engage the grammar and language as forming a coherent whole with culture. And this in turn entails more culturally informed (ethno)linguistic fieldwork.
Of course, language is a crucial component of cultural transmission. As seen in many of the texts examined above, discourses from a given culture reveal how the culture talks about the world, what it talks about, and how this talk is organized (Silverstein 2003; Sherzer 1991; Quinn 2005, among many others). To reexamine and reinforce this view in the specific context of how grammar emerges, I want to examine two very brief Pirahã texts. Both of these examples were collected by Steven Sheldon, a missionary among the Pirahãs, in the mid-1970s. Sheldon, who speaks Pirahã fluently, did the initial transcriptions and most of the translations. (See Futrell et al. [forthcoming] and Piantadosi et al. [2012] for an analysis of the syntactic implications of these texts, as well as what follows).
Some things worth mentioning about the texts which follow include the fact that there is no special or formulaic language for beginning or ending texts (e.g., “Once upon a time,” “Happily ever after”). This is, I believe, because Pirahã has no phatic language (D. Everett 2005a, 2008). This aspect of the discourses is thus consonant with the larger culture. Another important observation is that both of the texts show thematic recursion. For example, the first text includes three dreams (fat Brazilian woman, papayas, and bananas) as one larger text about dreaming. The second text places sentence-sized questions, answers, asides, and direct address into a single whole.
Another culturally shared assumption of the first text is that dreams and talk about them are worth doing—these are important experiences. The Pirahãs understand dreams as real experiences, though of a different kind from conscious thought. The first text is about a Pirahã man with the Brazilian name Casimiro, recounting to Steve Sheldon the contents of a dream he had.
Casimiro Dreams about Large Brazilian Woman
Told by Kaaboíbagí to Steven N. Sheldon, ca. 1970
1.
Ti
aogií
aipipaábahoagaí.
Gíxai. Hai.
I
Brazilian woman
began to dream
You. Hmm.
I dreamed about Alfredo’s wife [aside to Sheldon, “you probably know her”].
2.
Ti
xaí
Xaogií ai
xaagá.
Xapipaábahoagaí.
I
thus.
Brazilian woman
there
be
began to dream
I was thus. The Brazilian woman was there. I began to dream.
3.
Xao gáxaiaiao.
Xapipaába.
Xao
hi
igía
abaáti.
she spoke
dreamt
Brazilian woman
she
with
remain.
[C
asimiro] dreamt. The Brazilian woman spoke. “Stay with the Brazilian woman.”
4.
Gíxa
you
hi aoabikoí.
him remain.
You will stay with him!
5.
Ti xaigía.
Xao ogígió
ai
hi ahápita.
I be:thus
woman big
well
she went away
I was thus. The big Brazilian woman disappeared.
6.
Xapipaá
kagahaoogí.
Poogíhiai.
dream
papaya.
bananas
I dreamed about papaya. Bananas.
Background for this second text includes the fact that Bigixisitísi was a well-liked and well-respected man in the village. He was also one of the best of Sheldon’s language teachers. Once when Steve and Linda Sheldon were gone from the tribe, Bigixisitísi became very ill and died. His death was caused by some unknown sickness, and the speaker felt that if Linda had been here perhaps Bigixisitísi could have been saved. Several of the details require cultural or implicit contextual knowledge; for example, the fact that “Xioitábi (Linda) was not there.” As an American woman who had lived among the Pirahãs and treated their health for years, it would be known to all Pirahãs who this Linda was and why the fact that she was absent is significant to the story of this man’s death.