Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  Evidentiality domain: The syntactic domain in a sentence that expresses the evidentiality component of the pragmatically structured proposition.

  The PED in Pirahã is limited to the lexical frame of the verb—the verb and its arguments (more technically, the phrasal nuclei of the predicate and its arguments in Van Valin’s role and reference grammar [RRG] terminology)7. Let’s assume that the IEP is one of the reasons that Pirahã has evidentiality markers and that it dramatically strengthens their effect by narrowing their scope to the PED just mentioned.

  The PED then rules out syntactic recursion in Pirahã. As stated, the PED clearly depends on the main verb as the core of the speech act. The PED will include only nuclei (semantic-syntactic heads, not heads in the X-bar sense) directly licensed by the predicate (its semantic frame). No nuclei are allowed outside the PED of a containing sentence.

  By the PED, there are no embedded possessors, no embedded predicates—only arguments licensed by the main predicate. For example, in a noun phrase like John’s house, house is the nucleus—the semantic core, what this phrase is about. John is the possessor, a type of modifier of the nucleus house—the possessor tells us which house we are talking about. On the other hand, in a larger noun phrase such as John’s brother’s house, house and brother are each a nucleus of a separate containing phrase. House is the nucleus of the phrase brother’s house, and brother is the nucleus of the phrase John’s brother. John is not a nucleus of any phrase. This means that John, not being the possessor of an argument of the main verb (it is a nucleus of John’s brother, but brother is not a nucleus of the verb) is unwarranted in the PED and the sentence is disallowed. An embedded predicate would contain arguments not licensed by main predicate. Therefore, there can be no phrases within phrases and no sentences within sentences in Pirahã. There can also be no productive compounding in the morphology. Such apparent compounds as are found are in fact synchronic or diachronic phrases. This is exemplified in fig. 6.2, in a theory-neutral representation.

  Figure 6.2

  This example is allowed because each Nucleus is found in the semantic frame of the verb, represented along the lines of the following lexical representation: [BECOME know (son, language)]. This is a very strict evidentiality requirement. It predicts that the number of arguments in a sentence cannot exceed the number allowed by a standard (e.g., RRG) verbal frame. It rules out all embedding and all syntactic recursion.

  The lexical representation of an “accomplishment verb”—for example, learn ([BECOME know] indicates the change of state of knowledge) projects three nuclei to the syntax: the verb learn, and the nominal nuclei/arguments son and language. Each of the nominal nuclei is possessed by a non-nuclear nominal. So the requirements of the PED are met. However, in the example below, there are two non-warranted nuclei—appearing in the PED without being found in the lexical representation shown in fig. 6.3.

  This sentence would therefore be ungrammatical in Pirahã, though it is fine in English. My analysis claims that the existence of evidentials, their scope, and the consequent lack of recursion are all reflexes of the cultural value IEP in Pirahã grammar.

  Figure 6.3

  Although the PED (forced by the IEP) rules out recursion in Pirahã, my analysis does not require that any another language, e.g. Riau, necessarily derives the absence of recursion in the same way. Recursion serves several purposes (D. Everett 2012b) and thus there is more than a single reason why a language might use or not use recursion in its sentential syntax. For example, Riau might simply rank a value of slower information rate above a value favoring recursive sentences in its language. Many oral traditions use repetition and slower information rate as aids to communication in the noisy environments of human speech. So this is a cultural explanation of some very complex syntactic facts that affect the Pirahã language as a whole.

  Methodology for Studying the Culture-Grammar Interface

  Before ending this discussion, I would like to present a set of methodological suggestions for studying the connection between grammar and culture, building on suggestions by Saville-Troike (1982, 108ff). The beginning steps for the ethnography of communication are to: (i) identify recurrent events; (ii) analyze these events, examining their function, form, and relationships between different constituents; and (iii) examine the relationship between these events to other speech events and to the society and culture in which they occur.

  As an example, let’s consider the use of whistle speech as it is found on the Canary Islands. One variety, Silbo Gomero, is used in and around La Gomera. In relation to (i), each use of whistle speech is thus an event. Some questions that might be asked about these events, (ii), (iii), and so on, are: When is it used? Who uses it? What are the constraints on its intelligibility? (E.g., can two people understand Silbo under any circumstances, or does a topic of conversation need to be established first to provide context?) How many other channels of discourse are there among speakers who use Silbo? Are there contents or types of discourse in which the people prefer to use Silbo? Are there contents or types of discourse in which the people prefer not to use Silbo? What are the phonetic details of Silbo, and how is whistle speech possible in this language (since the language it is based on is not tonal, does it use inherent segmental frequencies as a basis, intonation, etc.)? How does it relate to the consonant-and-vowel channel (i.e., normal speech)?

  Beyond these suggestions, there are further methodological preliminaries for investigating the culture-language connection. These preliminaries include at least the following:

  1. Are there irregularities that have no obvious structural explanation?

  2. Are there examples of “free variation”—that is, where there are choices between two structures which are not constrained by the structures or the grammar, insofar as can be determined?

  3. Are there unusual facts about the cultural events, values, or explanations that involve principles or phenomena that at any level look similar to principles operative in the grammar?

  As to the methodology that follows from such questions, Enfield (2002, 14ff) offers some cogent and very important considerations and suggestions for the study of ethnogrammar. First, he recommends that the fieldworker “examine specific morphosyntactic structures and/or resources and make explicit hypotheses as to their meaning.” Second, following development of this and related methodological considerations, he raises the crucial issue of “linkage”—namely, how can we establish a causal connection between facts of culture and facts of grammar? I turn to this directly. Before doing this, however, I want to point out what seems to be the biggest lacuna in the study of ethnogrammar, whether in the studies in Enfield (2002) or elsewhere. This is the effect of values, especially cultural taboos like the IEP above, in restricting both culture and grammar. That is, previous studies, like those in Enfield (2002), while reasonably focusing on meaning—which is, after all, a principal contribution of culture (i.e., guiding its members in imputing meaning to the world)—fail to consider cultural prohibitions or injunctions, however deeply or shallowly embedded in the community system of values. The Pirahã example of this section is evidence that such values should also be considered in ethnophonological as well as ethnosyntactic studies—hence “ethnogrammar.” However, before we can draw any conclusions at all about ethnogrammar in a given language, we need to consider the vital issue that Enfield refers to as “linkage”—the establishment of a causal connection between culture and language. That is, how can we convince someone (or, at least, effectively argue) that property p of culture C causally determines feature f of grammar G? As Enfield (2002, 18ff) summarizes, there are four prerequisites to establishing linkage between culture and language:

  1. Empirical grounding: Are the phenomena clear and well established?

  2. Structure independence: Are the cultural and grammatical structures or principles independently needed in the grammar?

  3. Theoretical coherence: Does the analysis follow from a clear theory?

  4
. Noncircularity: Has the analysis used independently justified values to explain independently justified structures?

  An example of a circular argument in ethnogrammatical studies might be to claim that a particular linguistic feature is determined by an aspect of culture and to simultaneously use it as evidence for that very aspect of culture. So, it is circular to claim that a language has evidentials because the culture values empirically based reasoning, and then to further claim that we know that the culture values empirically valued reasoning because it has evidentials. The way to avoid this is first to establish, using nonlinguistic evidence, particular values or meanings in a certain culture, such as the IEP. Next, using noncultural evidence, establish the meaning and structure of the relevant linguistic examples (examples would include standard arguments for constituency, displaced constituents, etc.). Finally, show how linking the two provides a conceptually and empirically (in terms of predictions, where possible, or explaining independent domains such as historical change) superior account of the facts that leave them unconnected. This is what I have attempted to do here.

  Ethnogrammatical studies thus range from showing that, say, a language has honorifics because of a severe social structure, or a particular set of kinship terms because of its restrictions on marriage, to showing global, architectonic cultural constraints on grammar; for example, from taboos like the IEP.

  Another issue is whether the researcher can successfully get the semantics right. The so-called translation fallacy is well known, but field linguists in particular must be ever-vigilant not to be confused by it. We must be on guard against the mistake of concluding that language X shares a category with language Y if the categories overlap in function. As Gordon (2004) argues, much of Pirahã is largely incommensurate with English, and so translation is simply a poor approximation of Pirahã intentions and meaning.

  Cultural learning is discussed in a multitude of studies (e.g., the entire fields of cultural psychology [Heine 2011] and neuroanthropology [Lende and Downey 2012]). But perhaps the two most important mechanisms are (i) what D. Everett (2012a), going back to Aristotle, refers to as “the social instinct,” and (ii) general cognition. Another way of referring to the social instinct is as the “interactional instinct” (Lee et al. 2009; Levinson 2006; Joaquim and Schumann 2013). By general cognition I refer in particular to the general ability of the human brain to generalize and recognize patterns.

  What might be the evolutionary utility of an interactional instinct? This instinct (however it is ultimately characterized) is the presumably unlearned need for humans to communicate, to interact with one another. Levinson (2006) makes a convincing case for the independence of interaction from language. The need to interact and the ability to interact are prior to language. The appeal of such an instinct is that it is a simple reflex that requires no learning curve (such as is required for the so-called language instinct, for example). The instinct is not the final product, of course, but it triggers movement in that direction and is arguably what distinguishes humans from other species that lack this social or interactional instinct. The social instinct is the “initiator” in that it provides the problem, while language and society provide the solutions. In this sense, language is the principal tool for building social cohesion through interaction. There might be ways around the need for an instinct like the “interactional instinct.” But I appeal to it here as but one way to understand why humans have an unique need to communicate with their conspecifics. We could also call it a “social desire” or an “interactional need,” based on human emotions and their intersection with human intelligence.

  Many researchers (e.g., Tomasello [1999]) have made a case for qualitative differences between the interactions and social organizations of humans vs. other species. Clearly, though, since humans have bigger brains, an interactive instinct, and a transmitted linguistic history (passing along to subsequent generations both the content and the form; i.e., grammar), these differences will be both quantitatively and qualitatively different from nonhuman animals in communication. The idea of general learning (including such things as memory, motivation, emotion, heuristics, categorization, perception, and reasoning), heavily dependent as this is on the keen human ability to make tacit statistical generalizations, as a key to language differences between humans and other creatures has been defended many times in the literature. Kurzweil (2012) makes this case to a popular audience. But many researchers in Bayesian approaches to learning (e.g., Goldsmith 2015; Pearl 2013; Perfors et al. 2012; MacWhinney 2005) present much more technical and nuanced evidence, backed by extensive experimentation. Such claims in fact go far back, with a form of the argument to be found, at least implicitly, in Benedict (1934).

  The effects of culture on the lexicon take on a greater significance these days when many linguists deny a strong bifurcation between syntax or grammar and the lexicon. In fact, if constructions (see Goldberg 1995) are lexical items that produce families of syntactic constructions, then the culture can affect the syntax of constructions, just as all linguists now agree it can affect the lexical items of any language. Our discussion here is not intended as a list of noncontroversial results. It is intended to provide evidence that culture profoundly affects grammar, and that understanding and studying this relationship between culture and grammar is not beyond our grasp.

  Finally, the considerations above lead to the proposal of a simple formula for the development of grammar in our species:

  COGNITION, CULTURE, AND COMMUNICATION→GRAMMAR

  In other words, given human cognitive abilities, cultural/community shared experiences, and the social/interactional instinct, grammar emerges as a solution to the latter problem, facilitated by the first two abilities.

  Summary

  In this chapter we looked at the evolution of linguistic theory in North America away from the starting point that so distinguished it—the idea that language is a manifestation of culture and that culture exercises an architectonic effect throughout language—in syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics. We then turned to consider in depth the analysis of Pirahã grammar; we concluded that only by recognizing the role of culture as a constraint and shaper of grammar as well as all other components of language, could we begin to understand languages, either as theoretical objects of study or as living partnerships between members of a speech community. From this perspective, we saw that Pirahã shows evidence for cultural effects in the syntax (lack of recursion) and in the phonology (the interaction between channels of discourse, prosody, and phonemic processes). Thus we concluded that culture exercises an architectonic effect on the grammar of the language and that in this sense language emerges from culture, society, functional constraints on linguistic form.

  7

  Gestures, Culture, and Homesigns

  In the great open-air theater that is Rome, the characters talk with their hands as much as their mouths.

  RACHEL DONADIO, “When Italians Chat, Hands and Fingers Do the Talking”

  Just as dark matter affects grammar, so it is causually implicated in the components of grammar—words, gestures, phonology, syntax and so on. However, for many linguists and anthropologists, gestures are often omitted from discussions of grammar, being seen as somehow “paralinguistic” accouterments of speech. Certainly they tend to be overlooked in discussions of language and culture. It seems that many researchers see gestures as a separate, independent facet of human behavior. However, gesture researchers, from various theoretical perspectives, have developed research that shows the intimate connections between gestures, grammar, cognition, and culture. These connections are underwritten by dark matter. Thus a study of the manifestations of dark matter cannot be complete without a detailed analysis of the symbiosis between gestures and grammar.

  Moreover, in recent publications, some researchers have argued that gestures show us something more—namely, that the dark matter behind gestures includes striking, highly language-specific components of gestures. This resea
rch, pioneered in the work of Susan Goldin-Meadow, examines the “spontaneous emergence” of gestures in children who have otherwise no access to linguistic input, as in the deaf children of hearing, non-signing parents. She calls these gestures “homesigns,” and the gestural systems she studies might indeed crucial to our quest to tease apart native vs. cultural or a priori vs. a posteriori perspectives on the origins of (some) dark matter.

  This chapter therefore looks in detail at the historical and evolving research into gestures and human language, from the ancients through the current and very important research of contemporary scientists such as David McNeill and his colleagues, as well as some of his critics and others (borrowing heavily from the work of Kendon [2004]). The chapter argues that without understanding gestures, we cannot understand grammar, the evolution of language, or the use of language. Gestures are vital for a fuller understanding of dark matter, its origins, and its broader role in human language, communication, and cognition.

  Language Is Large

  Language is holistic. Whatever grammar there is, language engages the whole person—intellect, emotions, hands, mouth, tongue, brain. And it likewise requires access to cultural information and dark matter. What I want to do in this chapter is twofold. First, I want to provide an overview and review of what I consider to be the most interesting research on gestures (some may disagree with my selection). We see through this that gestures are extremely complex. But second, I want to argue that this is all learnable and provides yet another case for the superiority of the dark matter concept we are pursuing here, as opposed to a priori, unlearned, innate dark matter.