Ethnosyntax

Ethnosyntax, Ethnopragmatics, Sign-Functions, and Culture CLIFF GODDARD The main goal of this chapter is conceptual and theoretical: to articulate and discuss the concept of ethnosyntax from the standpoint of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) theory of Anna ...

Kot nou vire tourne nou tand li. Serial Verb Constructions at the Interface between Grammar and Culture: Case-Study Kreol Seselwa (Seychelles Creole)
Dany Adone, Melanie A. Brück, Astrid Gabel

This paper investigates the form and function of Verb Chains and Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Kreol Seselwa (Seychelles Creole, KS), a French-based Creole language spoken in the Indian Ocean. Prior to Bickerton’s seminal paper in 1989, it was widely assumed that Serial Verb Constructions were not part of KS grammar. More recent studies (Adone 2012; Syea 2013a, 2013b; Gabel 2018) have shown that these constructions do exist in Indian Ocean Creoles and in KS. Likewise, in this paper, we will demonstrate that from a typological perspective, prototypical as well as non-prototypical SVCs can be found in KS. In our analysis, we provide evidence that an ethnosyntactic framework can account for certain SVCs in KS. We argue that their form and function can be accounted for by cultural logic hence stressing the link between grammar and culture.

This book is an attempt to give an overview of how language interacts with its environment, or better, how actual linguistic structure is formed, changed and influenced by different aspects of the human environment. The focus is mainly on effects of the extra-linguistic environment on the actual grammatical structure of languages; we will leave influences on other linguistic subsystems such as phonology, the lexicon, and discourse structure to the efforts of other researchers.
The underlying assumption of this entire volume is that linguistic structure is not only shaped by how speakers interact with each other and with the world they live in, but also by external forces that are outside the control of individual speakers or speech communities. One might call it natural selection in grammar, were it not for the fact that it is not entirely clear whether biological and linguistic change operate along the same real-world principles, or whether any correspondences are much more superficial.

We analyse how sociocultural gender can be reflected through grammatical gender and select Hindi (Indo-European) and Pnar (Austroasiatic) as case studies. We demonstrate that these grammatical gender systems share universal tendencies based on human cognition, i.e. associating long, thin, and vertical objects with masculine grammatical gender whereas round, flat, horizontal ones are associated with feminine grammatical gender. We also show that these grammatical gender systems distinguish between sociocultural values of the language speakers. Speakers of Hindi maintain a patrilineal kinship system, and in their language objects of large size are generally assigned to the masculine gender. Pnar kinship is matrilineal and in the language large sized objects tend to be associated with feminine gender. Similar asymmetries are observed with regard to generic gender and gender reversal. These results contribute to the impact of universal cognitive principles and culture on grammatical structures by showing that both tendencies are not necessarily complementary and that they can co-exist in the same language.

This series opens fresh inquiry into the untold ways human beings shape languages and language shapes humanity. Through innovative monographs and collections, scholars explore the intertwining relationships shared between culture and language, asking how such relations might help us better understand what it means to be human. Studies in the series are empirically grounded, conceptually critical and theoretically aware. Language and culture are approached as embodied semiotic modeling processes inclusive of speech, sign and social performance but not limited to observable behavior—thus encompassing social and cognitive dimensions of human experience.

To promote the analysis and interpretation of language in cultural contexts and culture in linguistic constructs, the series welcomes a non-restrictive range of linguistic approaches, using mixed methodologies to treat topics ranging from the embodied human person and evolutionary dimensions of human existence to the vast array of human sociocultural/rhetorical dynamics and speech variation practices. Semiotic, cognitive and multimodal approaches to linguistic anthropology are particularly welcome, as are diachronic, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparisons.

This article presents the results of an interpretive analysis of direct historical accounts, which deal with pronominal placement pronominal placement in General Brazilian Portuguese, according to the concept of Rosa Virgínia Mattos e Silva (2001). The reports are studies on the linguistic characteristics of Brazilian Portuguese, dating from the year 1820 to the year 1945. Currently, these studies are ignored by contemporary linguistics, in addition to being considered questionable from the point of view of a social scientific analysis of its concepts, particularly considering that they present themselves as racist and indifferent to the contemporary contradictions of the concept of “social equality” in the use of pronouns by modern languages. However, the interpretative analysis of these reports, because of a bibliographical and qualitative research, converges with the results obtained in other contemporary linguistic studies, without these reports being considered purely scientific objects. Interpretive analysis indicates that social ideology conditions grammatical rules, and not its real social structure.