Living Language. Laura M. Ahearn

16 pa- locative meanings: close to something 17 ku- indefinite locative or directive meaning 18 mu-, m- locative meanings: inside something

      Source: Adapted from Wilson (1970:240) and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class, accessed February 19, 2020. Ø means no prefix. Some classes are homonymous (esp. 9 and 10). The Proto-Bantu class 12 disappeared in Swahili, class 13 merged with 7, and 14 with 11.

Other categories across various languages also differ dramatically from those of English. Verb tenses and aspects vary enormously, as do the number and type of case markings. In some languages, it is obligatory to indicate whether an assertion is made as a result of direct or indirect knowledge – whether you know something from firsthand knowledge, in other words, or from hearsay. This form of grammatical marking is known as evidentiality. In Eastern Pomo, a Native American language spoken in California, for example, there are four suffixes from which speakers must choose when reporting an event, depending on whether the person (1) has direct (probably visual) knowledge; (2) has direct nonvisual sensory knowledge (such as feeling or hearing something); (3) is reporting what others say; or (4) is inferring from circumstantial evidence what must have happened. While it is certainly possible to indicate the source and reliability of the information one reports in English, in languages such as Eastern Pomo in which evidentiality is expressed obligatorily through grammatical categories speakers do not have a choice about doing so (Aikhenvald 2004).

      Languages, in other words, are extremely variable and “force quite different sets of conceptual distinctions in almost every sentence: some languages express aspect, others don’t; some have seven tenses, some have none; some force marking of visibility or honorific status of each noun phrase in a sentence, others don’t; and so on and so forth” (Levinson 2003a:29). And yet, as Roman Jakobson noted, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” (cited in Deutscher 2010:151).

      We will examine in much greater detail linguistic diversity and its potential relationship to thought and culture in chapter 5. For the purposes of this introductory chapter, it is helpful to note that just as there is enormous diversity found across the languages of the world, there is a similar multiplicity of subjects chosen by linguistic anthropologists to research.

      Examples of Diversity in Research Topics in Linguistic Anthropology

While linguistic anthropologists hold in common the view that language is a form of social action, there is nevertheless great variety in topic choice and research methods within the field. Chapter 3 will examine many of the research methods used by linguistic anthropologists, so what I present here are some examples of classic ethnographies written by linguistic anthropologists and an explanation of how the topics they chose for their research have contributed to our understanding of language as a form of social action. We will explore many more examples of both classic and contemporary research throughout the book. These studies illustrate, but by no means exhaust, the wide-ranging diversity of contemporary linguistic anthropology.

      Keith Basso

      Keith Basso’s (1996) ethnography, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, explores “place-making” as a linguistic and cultural activity. This book was written after Ronnie Lupe, chairman of the White Mountain Apache tribe, asked Basso to help make some maps: “Not whitemen’s maps, we’ve got plenty of them, but Apache maps with Apache places and names. We could use them. Find out something about how we know our country. You should have done this before” (Basso 1996:xv). When Basso took up this suggestion and traveled with Apache horsemen to hundreds of locations in the region, he began to notice how place names were used in everyday Apache conversations in ways that were very new to him. He also spoke with consultants, asking about the stories associated with various places. Through entertaining vignettes and engrossing storytelling, Basso explains how the richly descriptive Western Apache uses of language and place names (such as “Whiteness Spreads Out Descending to Water,” “She Carries Her Brother on her Back,” and “Shades of Shit”) help reinforce important Apache cultural values. For example, Western Apache speakers invoke these place names in conversations to allude indirectly to cautionary tales from recent or ancient history that may be relevant to the current speakers’ dilemmas. This practice, called “speaking with names,” is a verbal routine that “allows those who engage in it to register claims about their own moral worth, about aspects of their social relationships with other people on hand, and about a particular way of attending to the local landscape that is avowed to produce a beneficial form of heightened self-awareness” (Basso 1996:81). In this book, then, Basso shows how the physical environment is filtered through language to solidify social relations and strengthen Western Apache notions of wisdom and morality.

      Marjorie Harness Goodwin

In her book, He-Said-She-Said: Talk As Social Organization Among Black Children, Marjorie Harness Goodwin (1990) chooses a very different focus: that of a mixed-age and mixed-gender neighborhood group of peers in a Philadelphia neighborhood. By analyzing “situated activities” such as arguments, storytelling, and gossip, Goodwin shows how the children’s relationships and values are reflected in and shaped by their conversations. Her meticulously transcribed conversations (over 200 hours of tape recordings) provide evidence for the complexity of children’s social worlds. They also demonstrate the necessity of situating any analysis of language and gender (or any other social dimension of difference) in actual contexts, for when this sort of study is undertaken, Goodwin notes, stereotypes about so-called “female” speech patterns fall apart (Goodwin 1990:9). Boys and girls do not use language in two completely different ways, Goodwin discovered, but rather interact in same-sex and mixed-sex groups using complex, overlapping sets of linguistic practices. In studying phenomena such as gender differences, therefore, Goodwin argues, it is essential to look closely at actual conversations, for “talk itself is a form of social action, so that any rigorous account of human interaction must pay close attention to the detailed structure of talk that occurs within it” (Goodwin 1990:2).

      Bonnie Urciuoli

The focus of Bonnie Urciuoli’s (1996) ethnography, Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class, is “language prejudice” – the ways in which Puerto Ricans in New York City’s Lower East Side experience, accept, or resist the judgments that they and others make about what constitutes “good” and “bad” language, whether Spanish, English, or a mixture. There is a “political economy” of language, Urciuoli argues, the workings of which she explains as follows: “[T]he ways in which people formulate, value, and use words, sounds, phrases, and codes are constituted through power relations: bureaucratic, economic, racial, and any combination thereof” (1996:4). The boundaries between Spanish and English can be clearly demarcated or fuzzy, depending on the context. When the socioeconomic class of the speakers is similar, as when Lower East Side Puerto Rican men are playing basketball with their English-speaking African American neighbors, shifting between Spanish and English (“code-switching”) occurs more fluidly and comfortably, for example, though the ways in which this happens differs according to gender, Urciuoli finds. In contrast, when there is a stark difference in socioeconomic class, race, or ethnicity between speakers, Urciuoli notes, the boundaries between Spanish and English are strictly enforced, so little if any code-switching occurs, for example, in interactions between Puerto Ricans and white social workers, even when those social workers may speak some Spanish. Language use is therefore an important part of unequal social and economic relations, Urciuoli maintains, as it both reflects and sometimes reinforces differences in status.

      Alessandro