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Although the subject matter might seem at first blush to be frivolous, even inconsequential to the average reader, I know of no achievement in the field of linguistics that can match this. What we learn beyond doubt from Marianne Mithun's magnum opus is that Native American minds matter. In this fascinating survey of the Languages of Native North America, the prepared and careful reader is guided to stunning vistas from which to peer into the cognition and communication of conquered worlds. Mithun takes us on a quest to share a glimpse into these possible worlds, worlds which are all too frequently vanishing forever, never to be recovered.
I can imagine no greater contrast in Academe than that between Mithun's work and the generative tradition of mainstream syntax. Between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Santa Barbara, California lies a continent of linguistic diversity. Minimalism and its many variants have little to offer for someone interested in what linguistic diversity presupposes and what it entails. Chomsky's orthodox position maintains that all languages, in order to be learnable, must be at some purely formal level of analysis essentially identical. Minimalist axioms adhere to ideas that there are no construction specific rules and no language specific constructions. Minimalism proceeds from these axioms without proving them, which is why they are axioms. Unfortunately, by assuming what needs to be demonstrated, the generative tradition (especially in syntax and semantics) dismisses the very real and highly endangered patterns of grammatical diversity as either a complex realization of the same underlying grammatical patterns found everywhere (what I call UEH, the underlyingly English hypothesis), or else these apparent anomalies are written off as data that is somehow bad, lacking in objectively valued intuitions. I believe it is tragic that linguistics should in this way repeat the mistakes of their structuralist forbears, disregarding as ineffable or somehow erroneous the wealth of information salvaged, preserved, or at least made known by the Americanist tradition. Today is the worst possible time to turn our back on a continent which has developed worldviews and economies of expression that are perhaps unique to this planet and to human history.
Mithun is not blind to the resistance she might face by taking a qualified relativist and rhetorical/pragmatic approach to Native American worldviews and economies of expression. Her great work is filled with examples that make it abundantly clear that there is a strong case for reviving what anthropologists call the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. But Mithun takes this position in a new direction. Not locked in any absurd romanticism, she justifies her respect for the variation found in the hundreds of languages she surveys by appealing to the facts themselves. There can be no denying that what generativists take to be primitives--the finite number of elements or categories which can yield an infinite number of possible sentences--are neither universal nor foundational to language. The epistemic cornerstone of syntax which is the sentence, for example, does not seem to be definable the same way in every language. Some languages primarily use lexical and functional categories as parts of words, so that a word with multiple parts can function as a complete and complex sentence. Some languages have ways of referring to the continuity or change of a topic, requiring a syntactic structure beyond the atomic sentence (by atomic I mean what we would translate as a single sentence in English). Some languages convert states or events into nouns as the only means of subordinating a 'clause' in a sentence. All in all, languages vary in terms of whether they use more or fewer clauses that can be identified in English as a coherent thought.
What is true of functional categories like projecting I's or T's or Agr's is just as true for lexical categories like N and V. Some languages are famously notorious for not making a marked distinction between nouns and verbs. Hence a verb might show number, not as agreement (e.g. HE singS), but as a semantic accidence (e.g. I ran-plural meaning the running is plural (run a lot, run over and over); or they ran-singular meaning the running was singular (run as a group)). Conversely, a noun might take tense (my wife-pastTense as my former wife; my wife-futureTense as my betrothed). Again, this is a problem for generative syntax. If syntactic phrase markers do not share the same logical boundaries, nor do they share the same categories or elements, in what sense can there be said to be universal primitives forming the basis for universal grammar. Mithun wisely does not take this to be her problem.
What is her problem, however, is the surveying and cataloging of the surprisingly diverse and phenomenally fecund legacies of these hundreds of languages, languages belonging to what the US Supreme Court has called 'conquered nations.' No two of these languages are the same, so it is important not to reduce Mithun's findings to some kind of stereotype of American Indian thought. Two native languages might be as different from each other as either would be in comparison to English. Yet although there is a great deal of diversity here, there are nevertheless signs--in the last instance reassuring--that we are all Homo sapiens. Thus you find in some native languages nominal classifiers. Classifiers form an elaborate gender-like system where all nouns are classified not just as male and female but also by shape, consistence, purpose, etc. Some Bantu languages like Swahili and some East Asian languages like Thai or Mandarin demonstrate the same kinds of rule patterns for distinguishing objects into classifications. These languages can't all be related historically or ethnically, so their sameness must stem from historical contingencies interacting with an identical and universal human intelligence.
And the linguistic world of expression is not just divided up into things, events, and states. The social and communicative aspect of language is just as prominently codified in the grammars of many native languages. So for example, all languages make use of epistemic modalities, but they differ in terms of how the world of information is mapped onto specific grammatical forms. As a result, some languages will force the speaker to make a grammatical distinction between some person, object, or event observed firsthand as opposed to something heard about through hearsay. Grammars might also force speakers to make distinctions between what is judged to be real (past events, objects in view) and what is apparently not real (wishes, future events, negated propositions). Grammars might require a distinction between alienable (my house, my dog) and inalienable (my arm, my kin) possession. Grammars may also divide the world of space and time in ways very different from our own standard average European ways. There might be a half dozen tenses (instead of our past, present, future) which might distinguish the remote from the recent past, or might contrast the moment of speaking to something that just occurred a moment ago. Space might be divided through demonstratives into near, far, very far, in sight, out of sight, or something too big to be seen in one glance.
The list of interesting distinctions made (or not made) by individual languages would be a poor substitute for Mithun's commanding analyses. I would like to take up just one example that hopefully shows how logic and syntax interface with pragmatics and semantics to yield a kind of rhetorical/rational system. This system appears to be entirely foreign to an English speaker's world. It is just as foreign to the possible worlds of the generative syntax. One such system is called Obviation. Obviation is taken by some to be a form of passive voice system, but it is very different from passive voice as Mithun points out. Languages with obviation in fact have a distinct and separate passive voice system that is optional. Obviation is mandatory, in that all speakers must in each sentence follow strict rules for marking the sentence by following the relative salience of participants of an event as described in a clause. In languages with obviation, the person distinctions we all are familiar with (1st=speaker (I, me), 2nd=hearer (you), 3rd=other (he/she))are supplemented by what is sometimes called the 4th person. The 4th person (also called obviate) is like the third person (in this case called proximate) except that the noun or pronoun marked as 4th person is farther from the speech event than the noun marked as 3rd person. "Farther" can reference real or metaphorical distance. In general, the 3rd person nominal is the participant from whose perspective the narrative unfolds, or else is the character that receives the most empathy. In an obviativiative language such as Ojibwa, there is a hierarchy of nouns participating in the sentence such that the direction of the action follows a strict rule. I am oversimplifying a great deal, but here is an example. The 3rd person is always the doer of the action, the 4th person is the undergoer of the action. If the narrative demands that the 4th person be the agent or doer of the clause, an inverse voice is used that marks the direction of action to be the opposite to what is expected. This inverse would then swap the semantic roles of the core participants (Subject and Object). If the narrative is about a man(3) and he sees a stranger(4), then a direct sentence marking is required. If in the same narrative context the stranger(4) sees the man(3), an inverse construction is obligatory.
This brings home how important discourse salience is to an understanding of grammar. Constructions like obviation demonstrate how crucial rhetoric and information flow are to any appreciation of how human grammars work. More important, pragmatic considerations help to explain why grammars do the seemingly odd things that they do. Whereas generativist syntacticians are just beginning to appreciate the pivotal role of pragmatics in identifying discourse roles like Topic and Focus, Americanists are far in the lead with their insights on how alternative word or morpheme orders augment the saying as well as the said. Mithun also briefly covers topics like grammaticalization (where for example today's mandatory grammatical distinctions were yesterday's free variants) as well as what could be called the folk domain of rhetoric. She also appreciates the less digital and discreet methodologies of discourse functionalism, backing up with data what mainstream syntacticians might attempt to tear down, demonstrating to all their cloudy lack of consciousness about their own language ideologies.
I would like to end this already too long piece with a discussion of the non-linguistic aspects of this book. I am not so very old, but I do remember Saturday afternoons taken up with Cowboy movies (which formed a paradigm along with Kong-Fu and Godzilla movies). My early education was no more enlightened. I learned in school for example that Manifest Destiny had some kind of absolute validity that can't be questioned. It seems absurd to me now, but millions are still engrossed in the idea that America, by which most people mean white middle class America, was defined in advance by God. Millions also believe that America has never been imperialist, let alone genocidal. The truth is that throughout its history, America has always been obsessed with a blood lust for empire, and this led to the virtual annihilation of hundreds of 'conquered nations.' If you are uninterested in it or unable to read Mithun's book, I would invite you to nevertheless take a glance at the maps of the pre-Columbian distribution of aboriginal languages. We can follow Benedict Andersen and imagine communities in these places, places which can only seem less familiar once we notice the strange lines marking linguistic territories instead of the lines where state boundaries would be. Coming from a legacy of 'Indian lives don't matter', we can be amazed at the possible worlds lost in the erasure of so many dignified albeit mostly unwritten histories. We can experience in these pages a testimony to linguistic creativity itself. Indeed, these varied tongues were all enriched along their largely forgotten paths of development by a dynamism of human intelligence and spirit. But in the end, these languages do not yield entirely to the cerebral universality of humankind. There is room for creativity. This may be a history that has yet to be taught.
I did not read the catalog. My head was swimming with ideas just from the typological overview. The catalog and bibliographical information should provide a great service to those Native Americans who wish to know more about their 'native' language, a language which they most likely no longer can use like a native.
I also appreciate how Mithun gives credit to informants who provided the data for this significant accomplishment. It is fitting and proper that voices held in contemptible silence for so long can emerge through the interviews which make the real backbone and basis of this work.
My final suspicion, and one which I hope is justified, is that in decades to follow the work of Americanists will be recognized as the true spearhead of the scientific treatment of language. Long after the Chomskyan orthodoxy may have flickered out, the linguists represented in these pages will stand tall as the ones who let languages be themselves: diverse, dynamic, and beautiful.
I can imagine no greater contrast in Academe than that between Mithun's work and the generative tradition of mainstream syntax. Between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Santa Barbara, California lies a continent of linguistic diversity. Minimalism and its many variants have little to offer for someone interested in what linguistic diversity presupposes and what it entails. Chomsky's orthodox position maintains that all languages, in order to be learnable, must be at some purely formal level of analysis essentially identical. Minimalist axioms adhere to ideas that there are no construction specific rules and no language specific constructions. Minimalism proceeds from these axioms without proving them, which is why they are axioms. Unfortunately, by assuming what needs to be demonstrated, the generative tradition (especially in syntax and semantics) dismisses the very real and highly endangered patterns of grammatical diversity as either a complex realization of the same underlying grammatical patterns found everywhere (what I call UEH, the underlyingly English hypothesis), or else these apparent anomalies are written off as data that is somehow bad, lacking in objectively valued intuitions. I believe it is tragic that linguistics should in this way repeat the mistakes of their structuralist forbears, disregarding as ineffable or somehow erroneous the wealth of information salvaged, preserved, or at least made known by the Americanist tradition. Today is the worst possible time to turn our back on a continent which has developed worldviews and economies of expression that are perhaps unique to this planet and to human history.
Mithun is not blind to the resistance she might face by taking a qualified relativist and rhetorical/pragmatic approach to Native American worldviews and economies of expression. Her great work is filled with examples that make it abundantly clear that there is a strong case for reviving what anthropologists call the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. But Mithun takes this position in a new direction. Not locked in any absurd romanticism, she justifies her respect for the variation found in the hundreds of languages she surveys by appealing to the facts themselves. There can be no denying that what generativists take to be primitives--the finite number of elements or categories which can yield an infinite number of possible sentences--are neither universal nor foundational to language. The epistemic cornerstone of syntax which is the sentence, for example, does not seem to be definable the same way in every language. Some languages primarily use lexical and functional categories as parts of words, so that a word with multiple parts can function as a complete and complex sentence. Some languages have ways of referring to the continuity or change of a topic, requiring a syntactic structure beyond the atomic sentence (by atomic I mean what we would translate as a single sentence in English). Some languages convert states or events into nouns as the only means of subordinating a 'clause' in a sentence. All in all, languages vary in terms of whether they use more or fewer clauses that can be identified in English as a coherent thought.
What is true of functional categories like projecting I's or T's or Agr's is just as true for lexical categories like N and V. Some languages are famously notorious for not making a marked distinction between nouns and verbs. Hence a verb might show number, not as agreement (e.g. HE singS), but as a semantic accidence (e.g. I ran-plural meaning the running is plural (run a lot, run over and over); or they ran-singular meaning the running was singular (run as a group)). Conversely, a noun might take tense (my wife-pastTense as my former wife; my wife-futureTense as my betrothed). Again, this is a problem for generative syntax. If syntactic phrase markers do not share the same logical boundaries, nor do they share the same categories or elements, in what sense can there be said to be universal primitives forming the basis for universal grammar. Mithun wisely does not take this to be her problem.
What is her problem, however, is the surveying and cataloging of the surprisingly diverse and phenomenally fecund legacies of these hundreds of languages, languages belonging to what the US Supreme Court has called 'conquered nations.' No two of these languages are the same, so it is important not to reduce Mithun's findings to some kind of stereotype of American Indian thought. Two native languages might be as different from each other as either would be in comparison to English. Yet although there is a great deal of diversity here, there are nevertheless signs--in the last instance reassuring--that we are all Homo sapiens. Thus you find in some native languages nominal classifiers. Classifiers form an elaborate gender-like system where all nouns are classified not just as male and female but also by shape, consistence, purpose, etc. Some Bantu languages like Swahili and some East Asian languages like Thai or Mandarin demonstrate the same kinds of rule patterns for distinguishing objects into classifications. These languages can't all be related historically or ethnically, so their sameness must stem from historical contingencies interacting with an identical and universal human intelligence.
And the linguistic world of expression is not just divided up into things, events, and states. The social and communicative aspect of language is just as prominently codified in the grammars of many native languages. So for example, all languages make use of epistemic modalities, but they differ in terms of how the world of information is mapped onto specific grammatical forms. As a result, some languages will force the speaker to make a grammatical distinction between some person, object, or event observed firsthand as opposed to something heard about through hearsay. Grammars might also force speakers to make distinctions between what is judged to be real (past events, objects in view) and what is apparently not real (wishes, future events, negated propositions). Grammars might require a distinction between alienable (my house, my dog) and inalienable (my arm, my kin) possession. Grammars may also divide the world of space and time in ways very different from our own standard average European ways. There might be a half dozen tenses (instead of our past, present, future) which might distinguish the remote from the recent past, or might contrast the moment of speaking to something that just occurred a moment ago. Space might be divided through demonstratives into near, far, very far, in sight, out of sight, or something too big to be seen in one glance.
The list of interesting distinctions made (or not made) by individual languages would be a poor substitute for Mithun's commanding analyses. I would like to take up just one example that hopefully shows how logic and syntax interface with pragmatics and semantics to yield a kind of rhetorical/rational system. This system appears to be entirely foreign to an English speaker's world. It is just as foreign to the possible worlds of the generative syntax. One such system is called Obviation. Obviation is taken by some to be a form of passive voice system, but it is very different from passive voice as Mithun points out. Languages with obviation in fact have a distinct and separate passive voice system that is optional. Obviation is mandatory, in that all speakers must in each sentence follow strict rules for marking the sentence by following the relative salience of participants of an event as described in a clause. In languages with obviation, the person distinctions we all are familiar with (1st=speaker (I, me), 2nd=hearer (you), 3rd=other (he/she))are supplemented by what is sometimes called the 4th person. The 4th person (also called obviate) is like the third person (in this case called proximate) except that the noun or pronoun marked as 4th person is farther from the speech event than the noun marked as 3rd person. "Farther" can reference real or metaphorical distance. In general, the 3rd person nominal is the participant from whose perspective the narrative unfolds, or else is the character that receives the most empathy. In an obviativiative language such as Ojibwa, there is a hierarchy of nouns participating in the sentence such that the direction of the action follows a strict rule. I am oversimplifying a great deal, but here is an example. The 3rd person is always the doer of the action, the 4th person is the undergoer of the action. If the narrative demands that the 4th person be the agent or doer of the clause, an inverse voice is used that marks the direction of action to be the opposite to what is expected. This inverse would then swap the semantic roles of the core participants (Subject and Object). If the narrative is about a man(3) and he sees a stranger(4), then a direct sentence marking is required. If in the same narrative context the stranger(4) sees the man(3), an inverse construction is obligatory.
This brings home how important discourse salience is to an understanding of grammar. Constructions like obviation demonstrate how crucial rhetoric and information flow are to any appreciation of how human grammars work. More important, pragmatic considerations help to explain why grammars do the seemingly odd things that they do. Whereas generativist syntacticians are just beginning to appreciate the pivotal role of pragmatics in identifying discourse roles like Topic and Focus, Americanists are far in the lead with their insights on how alternative word or morpheme orders augment the saying as well as the said. Mithun also briefly covers topics like grammaticalization (where for example today's mandatory grammatical distinctions were yesterday's free variants) as well as what could be called the folk domain of rhetoric. She also appreciates the less digital and discreet methodologies of discourse functionalism, backing up with data what mainstream syntacticians might attempt to tear down, demonstrating to all their cloudy lack of consciousness about their own language ideologies.
I would like to end this already too long piece with a discussion of the non-linguistic aspects of this book. I am not so very old, but I do remember Saturday afternoons taken up with Cowboy movies (which formed a paradigm along with Kong-Fu and Godzilla movies). My early education was no more enlightened. I learned in school for example that Manifest Destiny had some kind of absolute validity that can't be questioned. It seems absurd to me now, but millions are still engrossed in the idea that America, by which most people mean white middle class America, was defined in advance by God. Millions also believe that America has never been imperialist, let alone genocidal. The truth is that throughout its history, America has always been obsessed with a blood lust for empire, and this led to the virtual annihilation of hundreds of 'conquered nations.' If you are uninterested in it or unable to read Mithun's book, I would invite you to nevertheless take a glance at the maps of the pre-Columbian distribution of aboriginal languages. We can follow Benedict Andersen and imagine communities in these places, places which can only seem less familiar once we notice the strange lines marking linguistic territories instead of the lines where state boundaries would be. Coming from a legacy of 'Indian lives don't matter', we can be amazed at the possible worlds lost in the erasure of so many dignified albeit mostly unwritten histories. We can experience in these pages a testimony to linguistic creativity itself. Indeed, these varied tongues were all enriched along their largely forgotten paths of development by a dynamism of human intelligence and spirit. But in the end, these languages do not yield entirely to the cerebral universality of humankind. There is room for creativity. This may be a history that has yet to be taught.
I did not read the catalog. My head was swimming with ideas just from the typological overview. The catalog and bibliographical information should provide a great service to those Native Americans who wish to know more about their 'native' language, a language which they most likely no longer can use like a native.
I also appreciate how Mithun gives credit to informants who provided the data for this significant accomplishment. It is fitting and proper that voices held in contemptible silence for so long can emerge through the interviews which make the real backbone and basis of this work.
My final suspicion, and one which I hope is justified, is that in decades to follow the work of Americanists will be recognized as the true spearhead of the scientific treatment of language. Long after the Chomskyan orthodoxy may have flickered out, the linguists represented in these pages will stand tall as the ones who let languages be themselves: diverse, dynamic, and beautiful.
