Silverstein - The Culture of Language in Chinookan Narrative Texts Or, On Saying That ... in Chinook

6
The culture of language in Chinookan narrative texts; or, On saying that ... in Chinook

MICHAEL S IL VERSTEIN

As. a preface to the more specific discussion to follow, let me point out (without elaborate bibliographical apparatus) several semiotic functional terms that may need prior clarification, at least in the sense in which I use them. (See Silverstein 1976b, 1977, 1979, 1984 for systematic development; and citation of sources.] : . '

Function I , or purposive lise of language, is characterization from the perspective of what speakers think or believe they are doing with their. language as communicators using a goal directed interpersonal medium. Questioning, declaring, giving an order (directive), naming someone, etc., are all purposive functions.,

A distinct analytic perspective is constituted by [unction., or indexical meaning of language, a relationship of linguistic signal to its context of use that. has. bee~ called ei~her pragm~tic (indexical) presupposition or pragmatu: (indexical) entailment. Bnefly put, these relationships are as follows. Pragmatic presupposition means that as sender or receiver, one mu~t know s~methingabout the context of use of a linguistic signal in order to l~terpre~ It as an instance of a particular type; interpretability of a particular. signal thus presupposes their knowledge of some aspect(s) of its co-occurring context. Pragmatic entailment means that as sender or receiver, once one knows that a linguistic signal of a certain type has occurred, o?e automatically knows something about (and can then presuppose the existence of) c~rtain entailed aspect(s) of the speech situation, as Co?s~quences of t~e ~ahd occurrence of the linguistic signal. For example, delct~c reference IS, In .general, highly presupposing of the linguistic or ph~slcal. copresen.ce of ItS r~ferent, as compared with a deference index, which, In occurnng, estabhshes a consequential social relationship by entailment.

The term pragmatics in the usual linguistic usage generally confounds the . perspectives of function. and function., This situation is understandabie in part because there is an intimate dialectic interaction between them in ~ctual ?~goi~g communicative events (see Silverstein 1979), as for example In explicit primary performativity (Austin 1962: 69-73), and in part because

The culture of language in Chinookan narrative texts

133

so-called functional perspectives of linguists still rest, in general, on unexamined and implicit folk notions - our own 'culture of language' - of a psychologistic or similar reductionist sort, emerging rather unsystemati-

cally only after descriptions of language form. .

A metalanguage is a language used for describing or characterizing an

object language, i.e., a language treated as the object of reference and . predication. From a non-technical point of view, a metalinguistic use of a natural language is a use of the very same basic code (or grammar), perhaps with some functionally specialized lexical items and/or conventional extensions, to describe or characterize certain aspects: of itself Metalinguistic usage is thus a particular function I or purposive use of any

W1Jl","""",'" in which this is possible. .

If we take pragmatics to be the phenomenon of signal usage in communicative situations, then metapragmatics is the metalinguistics that

such pragmatics. Not surprisingly, metapragmatic usage in a .Janguage frequently centers on seeming functional, descriptors of what people use the language for, constituting a lexical set of verbs of saying or (verba dicendi). These can, for example, range from verbs that can take locutionary complements (He went, through those that can take finite, propositional that-clauses argued that the earth is flat) or infinitive complements (He asked [[for]

me] to leave) to those that can exhaustively describe an event, usually in

'illocutionary' - or even 'perlocutionary' - terms (He protested too much).

Such metapragmatic descriptors as take quotational complements form a '. syntactic set in this respect, but one with an internal conceptual organization that must itself be explored by linguistic means. In this paper, a naturally-occurring and textually-situated metapragmatics is elucidated for Lower Chinook, an American Indian language formerly spoken about

mouth of the Columbia River. The conditions on occurrence of A;f'fo~.o~' quotation-framing verbs of saying (metapragmatic descriptors) seen to categorize them into two major sets that are not syntactic in the sense, but basically discourse pragmatic in that choice of frame interacts with a complex pattern of textual cohesive

.. The overall organization of narrative language, then, is a repre-

. sen~ation of discrete episodes and interactive events which are signalled by choice of metapragmatic verb. Hence the textual pragmatics of the syntactic and lexical set ~f metapragmatic verbs is a system for representing the CONTEXTUAL pragmatics of the sequence of narrated social interactions.

·'Shutup,' he explained.

this one~~iner ~rom Ring Lardner, we have a humorous play upon the speech Itself IS to be represented in texts. The humorous effect comes course, from the fact that in English there is an integral linkage between

134

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

what linguistic forms can occur within the quotation marks, as it were, and what predicate can frame the quotation in the syntactic matrix clause. In syntactic analysis, we would say that explain, with or without personal indirect object, requires a complement quotation that is at least reconstructible as part of an assertible propositional form, for example, '''It's too warm for overcoats in here," he explained,' or' "[I] painted it red," he explained.' When I say the verb requires some particular configuration, I intend to indicate that this quotative formula, explain' ... ', is understood to report (or describe) a valid instance of this particular function, or purposive use of language, just in case the quoted material is reconstructible as part of a propositional form, that is, an instance of referring-andpredicating propositional usage of language (even if only a portion_of full form). There are, of course, further conditions on the use of the formula, but we should note the general point that the formula represents or characterizes a particular function] or use of language from among a large number of such as understood by the users. Such formulae seek to describe language use in particular social contexts, that is, to describe the pragmatics of language. They take language use, or pragmatics, as the object of description and representation, and hence are metapragmatic formulae.

A pragmatic or functional view of linguistic communication as a social activity is in principle to be sharply differentiated from a semantic or logical view of language as a coding mechanism of the so-called rational faculty, Pragmatics as a field is the study of the way indexical features of forms as used presuppose and create the very parameters of the event of communication, which is itself intersubjectively validated as purposive interlocutor activity through a socially shared system of meanings. We include here not simply the transformation of rational and conscious knowledge states of interlocutors, but also and especially the maintenance and transformation of identities and statuses, of group solidarities and boundaries, of social relations generally - most of which is even beyond monitoring by virtue of its sociocentric locus - through the mechanisrri or means of speaking (and its equivalents). Semantics, by contrast, has been constituted as the study of the way sentence forms are related, through proposition-like schemata, ultimately to truth-functional conditions on referring-and-predicating with those forms. Sometimes this study takes into account logical presupposition and entailment as well, and certain quasi-logical notions such as 'implicature' (Grice 1975) - all of this sometimes called pragmatics (see Levinson 1983), though of an essentially semantic character. Pragmatics as we term it and semantics interlock and interpenetrate in a number of interesting ways, so that 'grammar' is incomprehensible when viewed from either one alone. I want to focus here on one such interaction, the metapragmatic representation of speech in syntactic constructions that characterize the very activity of using language.


135

If we take the prototypical speech situation, as intuited by Buhler (1934), Jakobson (1953, 1956, 1960), and others to consist of the 'etic' framework of the speech event and its interacting components, metapragmatic constructions of the sort we find in English and other languages describe the interaction of the components of the speech situation from a certain privileged perspective. In particular, they describe this interaction as though consisting of. ~ kind of purposive activity engaged in by the participants, the speaker, hearer, audience, etc., that of using messages as signals. That is, metapragmatic constructions represent communication in functional, terms all the while coding important aspects of the functions, of speech.

..... As . shown in Figure I, an approximation of a cross-culturally valid schema, metapragmatic constructions of natural languages code in particularsyntactic elements information about certain of the factors functionally,

CODE

1

REFERENT( S )

1

[Topical NP in Complement]

»->: MESSAGE _

~ ! -._,

// ,

/ ,

r ,

/' [Quoted Complement(s)] -,

/ ,

/ ,

/ ,

I \

/ CHANNEL \

I \

I ~

SPEAKER/SENDER 1 HEARER/RECEIVER

1 [Instrument/Locative] 1

[(Indirect) Object/Dative Noun Phrase]

AUDIENCE/ MONITOR

1

[ (various) ]

TIME

1

[(Physical) Deictics]

[Tense]

Common representations of speech-event components by syntactic elements

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN


137

presupposed and functionally, entailed by particular message forms. Communication-as-action is represented by many different mctapragmatic usages, and there is clearly no one to one mapping universal for natural languages. But in one very widespread schema, grammatical forms of a matrix (independent; superordinate) clause indirectly represent the functional, level with a functional, descriptor, and an embedded (dependent; subordinate) quotation form codes the message along a scale of 'form' - 'content.'

In this dominant syntactic form of metapragmatic formula, SENDER is coded in an Agent-like propositional role in the matrix clause, most neutrally expressed in a Subject-like surface noun phrase. RECEIVER is coded in a Patient-like propositional role in the matrix clause (or a 'promoted' Dative-like one in a wide variety of languages, conditioned by noun and verb lexical classes), neutrally expressed by some Object-like surface noun phrase. MESSAGE is coded by the quotation-form sentence complement in the most straightforward case, with language-specific possibilities for a range of overt syntactic shapes. The speech event REFERENTS emerge in various propositional roles in the complement clause, and we must understand this to mean 'the referent(s) as propositionally presented' rather than in some absolute sense, thus subsuming particular modes of nominal presentation and verbal predication. The CHANNEL (and/or MEDIUM, if distinct) are distinctly coded, in general, by an Instrumental (English, by telephone) or Locative (English, over the airwaves) of some type. The CODE - that is, for language, the presupposedly shared norms for referential-and-predicational representation - is distinctly coded in some adverbial (including 'adverbial accusative') or equivalently phrasal constituent. The TIME of the speech event emerges, generally, in the tense coding (or the pragmatically equivalent combination of categories) at least of the matrix clause. And the LOCUS, i.e., spatial and spatialized configuration of sender, receiver, audience, referents, etc., emerges in the particular use of deictics and demonstratives especially in the quoted message form. Of course, such metapragmatic constructions predicate a speech event as the interaction of factors, representing them in such-and-such fashion; their use has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of any messages in the original speech event represented, nor indeed with the factuality of there ever having actually been such a represented speech event.

Various forms of less explicit, syntactically localized representations of each functional, factor are, of course, possible, about which two points are especially important.

First, in various languages, there is a differentiation between an 'indirect' and a 'direct' quotation, expressing a message as a grammatically codable proposition-about-referentts). For example, in English, as seen in

example (I), we have the indirect formula demonstrated in (ra). Here, so-called indirect discourse represents the message as a particular grammatically-expressed embedded propositional form, rather than directly reproducing the exact message as it purportedly occurred in the original speech event being described, the form of report shown in (rb),

(I) a. He said that Coyote had already given Salmon his bow.

b. He said, 'Coyote has already given Salmon his bow.'

The indirect forms show- degrees of cohesive and assimilative devices of . subordinate clause syntax, as for example deixis and tense relativized to the framework of the matrix clause in many languages, non-finite clause reductions in others, etc.

The second point to be made is that, in the matrix clause as well, .'~"E>'~~I~~U have metapragmatic repertoires that perforce represent some of the schema of Figure I directly, and some only ipdirectly, particularly as regards the metapragmatic predicates. Note that even in our English one-liner quoted above, '''Shutup,'' he explained,' the verb stem exouun codes something of the interrelations of message, code, referent(s) the reported speech event, and even that the reported speech situation

. itself presented an implicit or explicit demand for propositional information. So the representation of these interacting components AS individual components is hardly transparent and one to one in the constituency of the syntactic surface structure of the pragmatic metalanguage. We just do not know how metalinguistic usage presenting the functions, of communicating . varies typologically from language to language in the directness of coding the functional, interactions of the various speech-event components, we know that it does.

given a basic schema of the two-clause sentence for the representaOf a communicative event in which somebody signals ' ... ' to someelse, grammatically we have a range of possibilities along several Ul111vll."lU.1I".· [ a] types and degree of syntactic linkage and boundary nPT'''' .... ·n matrix (frame) and complement (quotation) clause; [b] degree of assimilation in complement clause and thence, non-finite trans-

of reported message; [c] degree of independent syntactic phrasal of functional, components with grammaticalized repre-

O;:Pl1lr<>r" .. n of their interactions vs. degree of lexicalized representation of interactions, particularly in the metapragmatic predicate frame. Some of these situations are more amenable than others to normal methods of grammatical analysis. This is especially so where there is '. syntactically regular complementation of matrix by subordinate clause, assimilated to propositional form with considerable marking of crossClause government, and highly distinct coding of functional, components. The case we discuss here, by contrast, is particularly recalcitrant to

138

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

syntactic analysis in the narrowest sense for determining the classification of types of metapragmatic verbs, since [a] clause linkage is very loose, so that frame and quoted material do not interact much as clauses; [b] quoted material is always 'direct'; [cJ metapragmatic frames do not allow separate phrasal representation of most presupposed discourse-contextual conditions, but rather incorporate certain complex situations in the representation of different apparently lexicalized types of functional! 'saying.'

In such a case, it is clear, we must look to the pragmatics of metapragmalic usage for insight on the way communication is being coded in a language. That is, first we must look to syntax in the normal sense for definition of the metapragmatic construction types and the parameters relevant to their own discourse distribution, and second, we must give an analysis of discourse distribution that demonstrates systematic implementation of the metapragmatic constructions along these syntactic parameters, as these can be interpreted pragmatically (indexically). Obviously, one of the most straightforward such distributional realms is textual, where a text is a developmental structure that has a complex internal pragmatics or 'texture' (Halliday and Hasan 1976: zf}, frequently with a high degree of autonomy from other pragmatic modalities of its linguistic forms.

I am particularly concerned with the metapragmatic usages of different languages, because I believe that in this functional, 2 mode we will find an empirical entree into the conceptual understanding of language that each society of speakers brings to bear on the activity of actually using it, and hence, on its constituted norm. In other words, there is a necessary relationship between the way in which metapragmatic constructions. of languages code the pragmatics of speaking, and the ideological and cognitive strategies that speakers employ in culturally-conceptualized situations of speaking, i.e., their explicit functionalization, of language.

The data discussed here come from a very privileged metapragmatic use of language, narrative text, in which there unfolds a sequential description of interactions that are accomplished usually by speaking itself. That is, the narrative is to a large extent a description of a sequence of events of verbal interaction. By studying the textual qualities that accrue to such narrations of verbal interaction, I hope to be able to demonstrate something about two important areas: [I J the way in which presupposed and entailed (created) culturally-salient parameters of the reported speech situations are coded by the very metapragmatic predicates (verbs) chosen for the narrative at any point in the sequence; and [2] the way in which the very event structure of narrative textuality is built up out of such metapragmatic codings interacting with pragmatic (i.e., discourse-indexical) codings of textuality inherent in the asymmetric sequential nature of language use.

The first point, resting on our analysis of metapragmatics as representation of pragmatics, speaks to the issue of how empirically to study the


139

pragmatics of speech situations cross-linguistically. This in turn partly rests on how phenomena of indexicality are understood and coded by the speakers of a language in a particular culture. It is well known that the privileged verbal constructions called explicit primary performatives in the philosophical and linguistic literature since J. L. Austin's dubbing of them as such, give a native speaker the capability of describing language use in terms of certain overall understood effects conventionally to be understood for the interactions in which the performatives themselves are used, for

example, promising, swearing, affirming, etc.

But this is a particularly gross view of the event of speaking; it does not analyze the functions, of speech thus named performatively by a systematic

functional, treatment of the foci of indexical relations in the speech situation, for example pragmatic focus upon the role of speaker (and the attributes thereof), hearer (and the sociological attributes etc. But since, as we saw in the example of the English verb

. there is no one to one relationship between indexical foci, the

components of the speech situation, and lexical forms of metapragmatic obviously we must study certain privileged functions, of speech . their grammatical and other distributional patterns in order, to gain insight into the cultural presuppositions and entailments of speaking in certain kinds of situations. Hence the privileged claim of narrations of . sequential verbal interaction to constitute data, once we know how to - study the grammatical properties of such narrative as coding its own discourse pragmatics.

Figuring out the text-internal pragmatics allows such narrative to a set of aligned polarized lenses: text-internal cohesiveness is the discourse pragmatics that, in representational narrative, is oriented parallel fashion to, and overlaid upon, the pragmatics of the original, speech situations, the indexical relationships of which illuminate our understanding of the culture of language, the assimilation of function, conceptualization by function.,

The second point speaks to the nature of textuality, or the cohesive , quality of discourse in the narrative and other modes. Language serves as . part of its own context, and hence co-occurrence relationships among linguistic categories (that is, among tokens of linguistic categories as they .occur in an unfolding text) are no less fundamentally pragmatic or

indexical as covariations of linguistic features and non-linguistic aspects of

. context. A view of language that is purely semantic, and hence sentenceand-proposition bound, will find textuality puzzling, requiring some postulated higher-level structure of semantic units, conceptualized by analogy to sentences, or some underlying non "patent grammar of narrative sequen-

..• tiality, the relationship of which to language is never clear. Both of these approaches abound in the linguistic,psychoiinguistic, and AI literature,

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

under such catchwords as the paragraph structures of tagmemics, text grammar, story grammar, and scripts. I suggest that rather, textuality is the apparent (epiphenomenal) global result in developmental structural terms of locally functioning pragmatic linguistic categories and devices, when stretches of discourse happen to occur larger than the (propositionally interpreted) single sentence. It is rather the single sentence that is the oddity, the occurrence of a stretch of discourse in which the full pragmatic function of various linguistic devices is just never to be made patent; the single sentence thus lends itself to an attempt at a purely semantic analysis, or to a pragmatic analysis with no empirical basis in textual cohesiveness, for example finding 'topics' in single sentences.

Only in the last several years have discoveries of the functional unity and partial formal syncretism of sentence categories (proposition ally interpretable units of clause scope) and discourse categories (pragmatically interpretable units of utterance segment scope) clarified anew the error of a semanticized view of textuality (and of the cognitive processes that support it). To be sure, this is not the context in which to review these discoveries; I merely point out here that in Chinook the relative distribution of certain verba dicendi (verbs of saying) in metapragmatic constructions with respect to various well-known cohesive devices, demonstrates the pervasive char- . acter of discourse function, in relation to lexicalization and the pragmatic- . semantic overlap. In this case, the very lexical items chosen to frame and represent events of speaking in narrative sequence constitute what Trubetzkoy (1939: 255) would call positive and negative boundary signals of the narrative episodes, each consisting of speech interactions with certain understood (coded) social parameters.

Philologists have long understood that textual distribution of linguistic forms is not unrelated tothe meaning of the forms, as expressible through the grammar that generates them. Above and beyond the usual linguist's level of single-sentence, single-clause 'texts,' in the realm of actual discourse, it turns out that the so-called semantic categories of the grammar of clauses and sentences are implemented in the pragmatic modes of discourse referring-and-predicating, and other kinds of speech functions., Those of us concerned with providing a functional, .• alternative to grammar-as-usual, of real relevance to the use of language as studied in anthropological and psychological accounts, are gradually discovering that the textual (or discourse) distribution of linguistic forms can serve as a measure of the pragmatic vs. semantic meaningfulness of information coded in referring-and-predicating language. The more that the discourse (or text) distribution of forms is a direct and regular function of - a predictable consequence of - the other textual forms copresent, as ?~posed to a function of the forms with which they make up propositionally interpreted clauses, the more are we dealing with a pragmatic category or


14J

. categories coded in the forms in question; the less are we dealing with clause-level semantics as usual, even though this too may be a component in a full account of any given form.

Of course, what is remarkable about language is the integration, of these two planes of meaningfulness, so that one-proposition long - i.e., sentence-length - 'texts' become possible, just as texts made up of. ~any propositions (sentences) are. This integration. depends. on the jointly pragmatic and semantic meaningfulness of certam categones of langua~e.

A classic example in the Americanist literature is the grammatical nroru-rtv schematized in general form in (2). It is called switch reference 1967) in its most straightforward manifestation: in a sequence of

two clauses, a single marker, generally an affix or clitic element in the precrcate of one (selected either by subordination or order) marks the fact the subjects or agents have 'same' (unmarked) or 'different/switch~d' referents. Note that this. opposition codes jointly the relative

discourse reference of two noun phrases, as well as the relative sentence syntactic status of the two noun phrases within their clauses, being limited

such positions. . .

More generally, as shown in (2), discourse reference maintenance IS linked to other, semantic variables by widely occurring types of inter-

p ( •.• ai ... ); I ~

s'[ ... NPxi ... ];

p ( .•. bi ... )

l ~

sJ .. NPyi ... ]

sequence of clauses S, and Sl is shown with some specifiably close relationship that includes relevant NPs in their respective in case-forms x -and y, with referential indices i and j. This .. ;.: ... : .. '''.'.;., ...... "tlt"'·llr:lTlCm codes respective propositional roles a (for index i) and b (for

j) in a sequence of propositional forms PI and P2. In such situations, either fix the relationship of cohesion between S, .and S2' somenmes focusing on the possibilities for cases x and y, so that a single ,",,<U'"'J;'UHLU marker can indicate whether or not i "" j. (This is the simplest case for so-called switch reference.) Or, some other interaction of these factors ~ some pragmatic, some semantic - can be indicated (see, for Silverstein 1976a), the restrictive specification of which is a major

'. concern of many current attempts at formal grammar. For example, we can have an 'ergative'-like cross-clause identification of cases x and y (derived 'intransitive subject' case nominatives and 'transitive object' ~ase nominatives/absolutives count similarly in reckoning x and y), vanous criteria of closeness for referential indexes i and j (with vs. without consideration of set inclusiveness, etc.) being indistinguishable, various types of linkage of clauses S, and S, as the domains of applicability, etc.

142

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

To the extent, in fact, that we can show how a narrative text is built up of such irreducibly pragmatic categories such as switch-reference or refer-

. ence-rnaintaining devices more generally, plus the pragmatic mode implementation of otherwise semantic categories, we have given an account of textuality. That is, we have shown that the structure of texts, in particular of narrative texts in which description of events seems to be the overriding function, of forms, emerges from the artful arrangement of perfectly ordinary language. Thus the notion of narrative textuality is integrally linked to the conceptual ability so to arrange perfectly ordinary language into cohesive discourse, an ability which has surely not been reduced to any other postulated cognitive ability, such as a separate competence for so-called stories or scripts in some distinct way. The poetics of narrative text is exactly that in this view: as Jakobson (1960) has indicated, the use of narrative devices in artful ('poetic') recurrences of measured, rhythmic syntagmatic arrangements.

Here, several things ought to be clarified, both about the nature of narrative poetics and about the resulting discourse-pragmatic analysis of its organizing devices.

First, a narrative, unlike a short poem (in one of the European poetries, for example), does not have an internal organization based on any overall hierarchical pattern, such as the phonological demarcation of several orders of units, rhythmically recurring. Nor does it have an overall grammatical pattern of symmetries and movement of categories as tropes (Jakobson and Waugh 1979: 224-9), or of strict syntactic and semantic parallelism (e.g. Bricker 1974). Rather, its organization as verbal art depends partly, of course, on performance, and partly on the factors central to our study, the locally-framed rhythmic density of organization of. particular formal features, for example recurrent use of particular stylistic devices (see Ohmann 1964) over a stretch of discourse measured by these recurrences and specifiable by co-occurring features. The 'meaning' of the devices at any given point, or even overall, must be understood from the comparison of such cases with their usual distributions and effects.

But second, it is not possible to approach pragmatics - as opposed to semantics - in the manner of seeing certain usages as 'possible' and certain others as 'impossible'; it is not a matter of assigning asterisks to would-be pragmatically incoherent forms. This is because pragmatics studies usage, including textual usage, and must proceed from the fact that there are normal, 'appropriate,' presupposed contexts for use of particular forms - unmarked usage, as one would transfer the term to a non-semantic realmand highly marked contexts, unexpected for the occurrence of such forms, though occur they do with a 'foregrounded' (Havranek 1964:9-12),highly entailing or creative effect. Inasmuch as this effect depends on the pragmatic meaning of the unmarked cases to derive its interpretability,

The culture of language in Chinookan narrative texts ·1

i

there is something akin to a metapragmatic operation involved: in such pragmatic foregrounding, which can be characterized in 'perlocutionary'

functional, terms. .

-. Hence, th~rdly: the .met?o.d of 'r~sidual form.s' (Bloomfiel~ 1931: 35~-2, 357-60 for historical lIngUIStICs) as m comparative grammar IS appropriate to such studies of text as pragmatic organization of discourse. Ore must discern the basic usages of particular forms as appropriate to' certain discourse contexts, and formulate an hypothesis about pragrnaticltindexical} meaning in text as a representation of something. Only then can we examine the residue of forms otherwise distributed in order to bribg them in as more marked versions of those in the first, more 'automatized' set.

And so forth, iteratively. i

Fourth, then, it should be noted: we deal with pragmatic factors so complex that of course the data we work with - actual records of language in use - are numerical data of occurrences, as in any behavioral situation based on multifactorial norms (cf. sociolinguistic variability data, fariable and quantitative for the same reason). But such data as gathered by coding and counting of occurrences as tokens of some cross-classified grid of data cells are nevertheless ultimately evidence for a fun4tionalt.2

explanation that is itself not numerical but categorical. '

We have now laid before us two seemingly distinct problems. The first is the problem of how metapragmatic formulae represent communication as pragmatic social action in direct or indirect ways, forming a cJlturallyspecific representation of communication. The second is the prdblem of how narrative textuality is, to an extent we do not yet know, ireally a product of the poeti,c use, of garden-variety discourse pragmatics, i.e., frameworks internal to the text. For Chinookan nanlative in

I

and for this type of narrative in general, the two problems

in the same data. This point of view should be contrasted with others focused on one or another of these problems.

Consider the first problem. From the point of view of grammar-as-usual, . the problem of metapragmatics is merely a residual problem of lexicography and whatever cross-clause (but intra-sentence) syntax might be special to such framing matrix - framed complement constructions when . seen as complex sentences. Similarly, ethnoscientific or similarly agrammaticaJ approaches to metapragmatics involve attempts at semantic taxonomizing of the lexical items that function as the predicates of the framing (matrix) clauses; there is no examination of their actual grammar and functions, (indexically significant distributions in discourse context). Or, . grammatical lexical decomposition approaches to an account might seek to characterize the framing predicates with local, transformationally-induced abstract representations as putative equivalences of metapragmatic predicates. In all of these, I would suggest, the essentially cultural content of the

143

144

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN


145

various metapragmatic formulae is not addressed in anthropologically acceptable terms, that is, how these constructions relate in use to meaningful communicative action.

For the second problem, if we look at textuality as treated from the viewpoint of so-called anthropological poetics, the methods here rarely start from the actual forms in text considered as artful language. The starting point is almost always large-scale CONTENT schemata - compare Proppian 'functions' - defining 'hypothesis,' 'setting,' 'resolution,' and so forth of the represented story line, even if certain forms sometimes can be correlated to this articulation afterward. In terms of such content data, certain straightforward or 'metaphorical' referential meanings of small stretches of lexicalized text structure can be analyzed, whether as a system of (non-narrative) structural organization (the newer, structuralist mythology, for example), or as a set of metaphoric equivalences (as in the older mythological interpretations), etc. To be sure, these questions must ultimately be addressed. But, I argue, the pragmatic and semantic substrate organized into narrative forms seems only falsely remote from such culturally-motivated studies of texts. Approached as a poetic organization of representational codes, narrative is seen first as arrangement, and second, as a vehicle for 'content,' exactly like any other 'code.'

nature of the metapragmatic coding of speech emerges in the appropriateness of the various metapragmatic formulae to constitute the; level of textuality of the narrative.

That is, Chinookan narratives provide a window to understand the cultural concepts underlying speech usage, since they seem to consist, to a high degree, of descriptions of speech interactions (and equivalent) which constitute the very textuality, the cohesion and framework, of the narrative art. These texts seem to consist of highlighted or focused descriptions of interactions, including especially speech quotation as framed by metapragmatic verbs of saying, with interstitial or backgrounded setting of the scene by description of place, or lapse of time, or descriptions of persons. Thus, it would be important for the thesis here to show how this intuitively episodic event structure of the content corresponded to some formal criteria of sequential textuality, showing how aspects of the cultural conceptions underlying effective speech usage emerge through the double .functional.j window of narrative.

Let us first inventory the metapragmatic verb forms of Lower Chinook, given in the tabulations I have made from the first 87 pages (approx·.imately a third) of Boas' Chinook texts (1894; cited by page.line, e.g. As will be seen in the examples, Chinookan (including Lower verb forms can be summarized in a chart of morpheme order Classes (indexed with subscript numbers) as given in (3). This shows the full pate. ntial set of possibilities for syntactically important inflectional possi-

. bilit ies, I

I

(Aspect, -) Ergative, - Absolutive, - Dative4 - Postpositionals -

Indirect Object Sequence

------------------------_

Inflectional Pronominal Prefixes

{AntiPassive} ~ 'R (C' , ) (M' R )

0' ti I - v oot, - ontmuative, - . onon oots > tree rona 6

(Aspectoidalj, -) (Voice.j)

The Chinookan myth narratives, of which the illustrations here come only from the Lower Chinook (or 'Chinook proper'), form four collections in dialectally-distinct languages of what Melville Jacobs (1959:7) rightly saw as dramaturgical pieces. As he noted,

Folklorists have tended to treat oral literatures of non-Western peoples as if their subject matter were analogous to novels, short stories, or poetry. I believe that stress upon Chinookan literature as a kind of theater does better justice to its content, designs, and functions ... The absence of psychological interpretation and notation of feelings in the narrative lines, the terse summarization of action, and the indications which we have that narrators gave dramatic renditions warrant the deduction that recitals of stories resembled plays more closely than other forms of Western literature.

If this is the case, then narrative characters, myth 'actors,' are represented as engaging in interactions one with another, in particular in linguistic interactions (and others) for which the narrative becomes a large metapragmatic text, consisting most transparently of descriptions of ways of using language, framing the messages - the lines spoken by the actorsused in interaction,

But if there is a textuality to this dramatic narrative, then there would seem necessarily to be non-random distribution of metapragmatic material at the textual (as opposed to the clausal) level, Here, I would claim, the

Chinookan languages are cross-referencing in their inflectional technique, so that each verb stem, consisting minimally of a directional., morpheme or proximad) plus root7, can take some combination of up to three (2,3.4) of inflectional pronominals cross-referencing noun

phrases, according to the particular inflectional class of the lexical verb, Thus, full direct transitives are, in basic form, inflected for Ergative, 'transitive subject' and Absolutive, 'transitive object.' These verbs can take an optional Dative-Postpositional, sequence coding some peripheral adverbial relationship to a third referent. Regular 'intransitives' differ in .. requiring only an Absolutive, 'intransitive subject.' 'Inverse transitives' are

I

146

MICHAEL SILVERSTE]N

verb stems consisting of a fixed, lexicalized combination of some particular Postpositionals plus Directionalg-Rootj- (and perhaps further derivational suffixation in classes 9. 10, i r), inflected with at least two pronominal elements, an 'object' Absolutive, and an 'experiencer' Dative.,

Various derived forms of basic stems, with explicit transformational markers, as one used to say, duplicate the inflectional schemes of the basic kinds of verbs. For example, the antipassive voice, the structural equivalent of an English passive, is a derivative with Antipassive -k'i6- replacing the Directional, morpheme and inflection as a minimal intransitive, the Absolutive, cross-referencing the logical 'agent.' A kind of direct or indirect mediopassive-reflexive derivative is also formed from transitives, focusing, respectively, on non-externality of Absolutive, or Dative, from the sphere of the 'agent.' Here, the morpheme --T- occurs right after the cross-referencing pronominal representing 'agent = patient' or 'agent = benefactee dative,' the pronominal occurring in the order class for the second named, Absolutive, for the first, Dative, for the second. So the direct mediopassive is inflected like an 'intransitive' ( ... -Absolutive.ir... ) and the indirect mediopassive is inflected like an 'inverse transitive' ( ... -AbsolutiveJ-Dative4-.r-Postpositions-· .. ).

Finally, in this summary sketch, we should note that certain verbs include particular 'frozen' or lexicalized pronominals, sometimes with lexicalized Postpositional, as well, as part of their stem form. Hence, such pronominal positions are not available for syntactically significant crossreferencing. For example, verbs of "large-scale weather phenomena, or truly involuntary changes of personal state, have constant -c2- Ergative. '[unmarked] third person singular masculine' pronominal, with the affected thing or person cross-referenced by Absolutive3 pronominal position. Verbs for phenomena taking place in a definite locus on the ground have a fixed -i4- Dative '[umarked] third person singular masculine' pronominal as well as some specific Postpositional, and a final clitic -ix (see Silverstein (1978) on such forms). Verbs denoting uses of paired body parts, for example 'jump' [with the feet], have constant, non-cross-referencing -s] S3- Absolutive 'third person dual.' Such fixed elements in inflectional combinations give many lexical verb stems the grammatical status akin at the morphological level to English complex, phrasal idioms at the syntactic level, with particles from the prepositional repertoire (run through), non-referential pronouns (whoop it up), or pronouns of non-anaphoric though clearly allusive quality (sock it to).

Each one of the seven attested quotation-framing verb forms, to be described below, displays some particular configuration from among the Chinookan range of types. These verbs can serve as clauses all by -themselves, it should be noted, when the cross-referencing becomes anaphoric or involves only first and second person pronominals. Each form


]47

can be glossed with a standard gloss out of the metapragmatic vocabulary of English, at least as a mnemonic device.

Such a gloss suggests _;J.t least part of the 'meaning' of each form, to be sure, but two things should be stressed. First, there is no commonalty of morphology or clause-level inflectional syntax in the set of forms. Of course, the unity of the set as framing devices for quotation depends on the cross-clause syntax, all of them taking quotations as loose complements. But note that transitives, intransitives, direct and indirect mediopassivereflexives are all represented among the inflectional types. Second, to

differentiate among the various forms, even the level of cross-clause syntax is insufficient. As we shall see, it is only at the level of discourse textuality that the fuller 'meaning' of the forms can be specified, useful for the episodic structure of narrative as a Chinookan representation of the .. presupposed parameters of the sequence of speech events.

For each metapragrnatic framing verb, we give the basic lexical schema in accordance with the order-class chart (3). The freely-inflectable pro. nominal positions are indicated by subscripted empty brackets. The ..... subscripting is carried over as referential indexation to both the Chinookan exemplification and the English glosses of them.

The form -[kk + kim in (4), to begin, can be glossed 'say'.

,

-fkk + kim '[ L say' (Absolutive, inflection for speaker) 64.15-16:

Taka n-a-k + kim Uk'unu., '0' nawitka ta';" iuirna ami?alkal.' 'Then she3-said Crow., "Oh, indeed lo!, supernatural-spirit yousaw-it." ,

etymologically this form may be complex, from an older root

Vk(i)7- and continuative-iterative *-m8, synchronically we can identify it as a stem, of uncertain root structure, which takes pronominal necnon only for intransitive subject in the Absolutive, order class. The pronominal cross-references the speaker in the reported speech event. Observe that there is explicit reference to just the speaker in this frame for report, though in the narratives, generally, an addressee and/or audience have been introduced in a situation described immediately prior to the . reported speech. But this framing verb does not merely demonstrate some

kind of zero anaphora to, or gapping of, a noun phrase referring to the hearer. In fact -k + kim can never be inflected for more than reference to speaker.

Note the following textual example from 64. 15-16, where Crow seems to

be addressing her grandnephew, Salmon's son, who is demonstrating his supernatural powers for her. The text says:

Then he said to his great aunt, 'Well, come outside.' Then Crow went out. He shot his arrow inland, which caught fire. He shot his arrow on to the [coastal] grassland, which caught fire.

148

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

Then Crow speaks, as the example shows, the quoted material containing an explicit second person (-nlz- Ergative, subject) descriptive verb form (note perfective aspect aJ- prefix), part of an exclamation of wonder. Note that the evidence here for which Crow is constituted an audience - watching her grandnephew shoot the power-laden arrow - causes her to remark that he had indeed found the sought-after shamanistic powers she had earlier instructed him to pursue. So we might consider what manner of 'saying,' what kind of speech situation, is being represented by the excerpted example, true address, or amazement expressed as an audience of a performance.

By contrast to the intransitive inflection of (4), the form of (5), [k[ ku- »/lxam 'tell (to): is a regular transitive verb coding speaker with the Ergative, subject pronominal inflection and hearer with the Absolutive, object pronominal.

(5) -[L-[ku6- Ylxam7 '[]z tell (to) []3' Il, say to []3' (Ergative, inflection for speaker; Absolutive, inflection for hearer) 76.9-10:

'Mxalack,' aJ-g2-i3-u6- Vlxam.; 'rnxalack Qadaqa agmupsulit?'

"'Get up," she.-said-to-him., "get up Why [did] she-hide-

you?'"

With its canonical transitive pronominal constituents, the verb stem includes directional morpheme -U6- 'distad' (contrasting with -t(,- 'proximad'), and a root -v/lxam., The textual example from 76.g-10 occurs ata point just after the speaker, elder of two sisters, has been searching the younger sister's belongings:

She searched through her younger sister's bed. She found a man lying [in itJ. "Get up," she said to him ...

Note the establishment of speaker and hearer in the speech event is made very clear as to role relationship, confrontational in fact. The material framed by -u- Ylxam presumes upon the discovery of the interloper in what is a household dominated by the elder sister, the imperative 'Get up!' being thematically linked to this authority.

Frequently in the narratives only the hearer has been established by specific reference in prior discourse. This same framing verb occurs under such circumstances inflected with 'impersonal agent' subject q2- (Ergative.), a definite but non-specific 'they' form referring to the generalized personal others in the particular milieu, village people accompanying main characters, kinspeople, etc. The frame -u- Ylxam is not cast into passive, or equivalent, voice, in these narrative contexts. Nor is it substituted for by a stem for 'hear,' focused on the perspective of receiving a message. Thus, example 60.6-7 reproduced in (6) describes Snail as the addressee in a speech situation at a gathering of all forms of beings called


149

together for a contest to win the daughter of a chief by snapping magical antlers.

(6) 60·6--T Taka aJ-q2-[ a3]-u6- Vlxam Uc'amuikxan., 'Maniwa C';;I~ f;;l~a!'

'Then they [impers. ].-told-her) Snail., "You-first break (do-) it!'"

The (morphophonemically absorbed) pronominal -[a3J- cross-references Snail, who is being directed to compete first by whoever from among the crowd or the Chief's spokesmen is directing the contest.

In (7) the framing verb structure is basically -[ kr(a)-[kls- YkwJi7- 'tell; recount/which exemplifies the idiomatic lexical combination of several fixed morpheme classes. It is shown in both inceptive (-ckJo) and continuative (-/[ ails) forms.

(7) -[k..r(a)-[]4-lj-Ykwli7-jcklO!l(al)8] '[h tell [J4; []~ recount something to []4' (Absolutive-reftexfve inflection for speaker; Dative, for hearer) 64.9-10: Iulqti asxilait, ka wixt nI-a3-);(a-i4-15-Ygufi7-

cklO, 'Gu It'alapas aqusgam uyapx'iki [mimama.' .

'A-lang-time they[du.]-lived, and again she -began-to-tell-him , "T C h [. J . hi 3 4

o oyote t ey impers. -took-it Is-bow your-father."

The inflection of the form in question is quite complex. It shows a direct mediopassive-reftexive speaker inflection (Absolutive -..r(aH, and a -Dative4-lj-. indirect object sequence (-/5- = 'to, towards') for the

addressee.

The form clearly emphasizes the inherently durational aspect of the speech event, regardless of either the aspectual suffix or the length of any ~r~med u~terancequoted with it - compare German erziihlen - being an .idiom denved from root - Yk""li7- 'stretch, as of a line between two points.' Note the postpositional morpheme -15- indicates it is directed 'to' or 'toward' whoever is coded as Dative, referent, so there is inherent orientation of the perspective from speaker to hearer. The kind of seeming metaphor involved here is not, however, like that of the English spin (out) a yarn; one can never report myth-telling or equivalent narration with this frame. Rather, it is -a metaphor of interpersonal 'extending' of the speaker's self through language, as its distributional profile will confirm.

Thus the textual example of 64.9-10 shown in (7) occurs after an interstitial scene-setting:

The two of them, [Salmon's son and] his great aunt, lived on [there]. They stayed

on for a long time and again n-a -xa-i -/ - Vk"'U -ck ' ,

3· 45 7 10····

The frame describes the event of initiating a focused-upon verbal encounter, the great aunt's recounting of the motivation for her addressee to avenge his father's death and property theft, for which she will train him.

ISO

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN


The speaker, his great aunt, is coded by the pronominal -a3-, while the hearer, her grandnephew, is coded by the pronominal -i4-.

Next, the verb root - v'1"("")7' by itself or in continuative form with

. suffixation (- v';~"'7-iI8)' is a basic transitive form meaning 'make; do.' With mediopassive-reflexive inflection (-Absolutive1-4-) it is most easily translated 'become; be' or 'go' [in idiomatic sense]. This is the auxiliary formation par excellence, occurring in transitive and intransitive predicate phrasal construction with a wide variety of nouns (both absolute and inalienably possessed) and particles, the combination then being predicating forms. As a verbum dicendi, it accepts quotations as apparent complements, though the delocutionary (Benveniste 1966) nature of the combinations ought to be stressed, making them akin to -v'.r'"- plus noun/particle constructions. Two forms occur as in (8).

(8) -[ 12-[ h- } a -v' X(IV) -(il) 'l h (be) say(ing) to [h'

-[]r.r- 6 . 7 a '[]3 say/"go'"

(Ergative- inflection for speaker, Absolutive, inflection for hearer; or, Absolutive.-reflexive inflection for speaker) 49.3,5: 'Uhul' nl-ir:((-a6- v''f.7' "Uhu: l" he--went.' 77 .2: 'A, imsakikal, ixatgumam, c2-mSra6- v'Jf-.U7-i1g "msuixa 1'" '''Ah, yourjplurj-husband, he-iscome-back, (hej-) telling-youjplur], 'youjplurj-go-down-to-thebeach!''' ,

imperative (formally indistinguishable from a kind of future inflection) as the reported speech. The entire example at 77.2 is itself a quotation, so that the metapragmatic formula used here is, technically, .a framed quotation within an unframed one. A certain person, ordered, to go up from the beach to find the wives of a returning man, goes up, and tells them they are wanted down there.

Observe further that the addressees of the whole unframed quotation (particular second persons plural, as in possessor of 'yourjplurj-husband') are referentially the same as the addressees of the reported speech as framed, 'you[plurk(will-)go-down-to-the-beach.' But from an English point of view the metapragmatic formula cmsaxri! 'mSuf:.ra!' is probably so-called indirect discourse, since the directional morpheme -U6- 'in msuixa is 'distad l= away from deictic origin of speaker],' as indeed the wives would have to move from the inland place at which they are being UU'UH_'''''L.,U. In fact, in these narratives, the framing verb -v'.r(""k seems to the one of ~hoice for narrating indirect reports, as the framed1utterance at75.12-13, discussed under (9), clearly shows.

As a representation of apparently internal speech, the framing verb "[ k-r- v' :lu(l).:ra-(itlt) 'think; have" ... " occur as thought to' also accepts

as complements, as is indicated in (9). .

One of these forms occurs with intransitive, rnediopassive-reflexive inflection, the other with full transitive. There is a characteristic difference of what kinds of complements they occur with.

Noises, for example, being an onomatopoeic particle class, occur characteristically framed by the intransitivized (mediopassive-reflexive} form of the root, as shown in the example from 49.3,5 in (8). Note the utterer of this noise is Loon, cross-referenced in the verb by -i3- Absolutive., 'third person singular masculine,' when, as the previous narrative sentence tells us, 'Loon got hit [by an arrow].' No addressee is specified or obvious from the context. (In this form, the unmarked directional morpheme -U6- appears phonetically as -a6-, conditioned by following uvular consonant -.r- of the root; this is true also of the transitive. form from 77.2.)

Linguistic complements, by contrast, occur characteristically with the full transitive frame, though there are examples with the other. The mediopassive-reflexive example from 49.3,5 in (8) frames an exclamation of no internal linguistic structure. By contrast, the example at 77.2 shows the transitive construction, where the framing verb is inflected with Ergative, c2- 'third person singular masculine' for speaker, and Absolutive, pronominal -ms3- 'second person plural' for hearer. It frames a polite

-[ h-.r- v'iu(l).ra-(itll) '[h think' (Absolutive.-reflexive for thinker) 75.12-13: Taka n-a3.I-Jf-.-v'lul):(a-itlI uguxk'un.j, 'Qada alqi n-a3.2 -kig- v',-" ka nikst ikta ':"ap a-gu-aY3-a6- v'Jf-., a3.2-):(-a6- v\w7-ils. 'Then she). [-thought herj-elder-sisterj, , "How for-a-while [has-] she3.2-been, (and) not anything find shez.z-did(-it3), she3.2-keepsgoing." [Then "her, elder-sister, thought, 'What's she; been up to the while, all the time saying; she, hasn't found a thing?']

I

I

I

I

thinker, it is seen, is referred to by an Absolutive.-reflexive pronomi-

in a formally mediopassive-reflexive construction. The quotation codes as inner speech. Like many such constructions in various languages, thought when so formulated is reported as an achieved state of apprenension of sensations and feelings; hence the frequent occurrence of the suffix -itll 'stative-resultative' with this framing verb.

In the example from 75.12-13, the younger sister in the narrative has just claimed, upon questioning, 'I returned quickly [from a foraging expedidon] as I did not find anything.' The quoted thought then comes to her elder sister, to whom she claimed this, coded by -a3.I- 'third person singular feminine' pronominal in the framing verb n[-a].I-.r-v'lul.:fa-itll. The thought, in turn, itself includes a metapragmatic formula reporting the claim of the second character, the younger sister, which the elder sister is mulling over.

152

MICHAEL S.lLVERSTEIN


153

This internal metapragmatic formula, ka nikst ikta X'ap agayax, axaxril 'and not anything find she-did-it, she-keeps-saying,' is a clear example of what we can term indirect discourse in a framed quotation. The framing verb here is a].2-r-a6-v'r"'7-ilg [cf. (8) above], with the a3.2- referring to the younger sister, whose characteristic prevarication is being quoted to the effect that she did not find any food on her gathering foray along the beach. That utterance, if 'directly' repeated from its speaker, would of course be in the first person singular, nikst ikta X'ap anayax (or aniur) 'I did not find anything,' rather than in the third person singular feminine form ". al-g2.Z-aY3-a6- v'r [-ay- for -i3- under stress before vowel] in which it occurs here, assimilated to the deictic basis of the person set up in the frame axasr'il 'shep-is-saying.'

There are, finally, two similar types of frame that occur a few times. The first is represented in the texts by the form given in (10), -adkr+is-' v' qam(x)7 'shout', an etymological denominative construction.

(10) -ad ]4-r+ls- v' qam(x)7 '[]4 shout' (Dative, inflection for speaker; constant, non-crass-referencing -a}-)

47.19-20: 'Laxka ?is?is,' nl-arid,+als-v'qamx7Iguiilxamk4' "'That-one [is] Bluejay!" it4-shouted a-person..'

Here, the fixed or 'frozen' Absolutive, order-class pronominal -a3- is etymologically from the number-gender classification of the noun on which the verb is based. The noun stem forms the root of the verb, from which an indirect mediopassive-reflexive in -r+ls- [based on -qls 'out of'] is derived. The free, or referential, inflectional position is the. fourth, or Dative, class. The verb root in this example is related to the Wasco-Wishram (easternmost Chinookan dialect) noun wa-qmx 'whistle'; it is seen that the dummy Absolutive, -a3- of this verb indeed matches the number-gender prefix of the noun stem (feminine singular).

Similar in structure is the second form, -s3-[kr+1- v' qi(I)/r 'cry; sob, bawl,' which occurs very sporadically as a framing verb. As shown in (r r), again here we find a nonreferential Absolutive., this time third person dual -S3-' in an indirect mediopassive-reflexive construction with the Dative,. order class being the freely cross-referencing one for the speaker.

(II) -s3-[kr+ls-v'qi(-I-)/r '[]4 cry; sob, bawl' (Dative, inflection for. speaker; constant, non-cross-referencing -s)-)

72.6-7: Tab ar-s3-V~:+ 15- v' qildx, 'Tax' iaxka, tak' iaxka, igwanat iaxa ixansilularnit.'

'Then he4-was-crying, "La him, 10 him, Salmon deceived-us-by-appearances!" ,

Such verbs are explicitly INVERSE constructions, with the speaker in surface Dative, case-marking order class, as though the cry (-s3-) or shout

(-a3-) or other expostulation bursts forth from (-q1s-) the referent cross-

referenced in the Dative, inflectional position. :

The example in (10), from 47.19-20, occurs as a crowd awaits the visual results of a diving contest; suddenly a form is seen floating by, atid some person in the crowd realizes first who it seems to be, Bluejay. Theframing verb is inflected for -/4- Dative, cross-reference to the 'person'· (neuter

. noun I-gulilxmk) who shouts out the identity of the floating form as a spontaneous, non-directed act. In (II), the example at 72.6-7 occurs when

I

the youngest of five Wolves is going about alone, hunting, when suddenly

'His bow snapped in two.' Then, immediately on his way hurrying home, he bawls the conclusion he reached from this omen, as quoted, to np one in

particular as addressee. -, .

. To reiterate, then, the various metapragmatic formulae span airpost the range of inflectional types available, full transitive, basic intransitive, and indirect mediopassive-reflexive intransitive, including stative

inverse denominative (with fixed non-crass-referencing intransitive . The frames glossed as 'think' in (9), 'shout' in (10), and 'cry' in are differentiated from the others notionally by the type ofcorn""·,,t'l"" action represented, evident from the glosses. But certainly

is little even at the level of syntax to differentiate among these as the remaining frames in (4) through (8) in a systematic interpretfor example as part of the underlying representations or with well-defined surface empirical consequences for sentence

I think, rather, that these metapragmatic formulae fit into a discourseorganization of text, in terms of which they can be systematically into types. On the basis of this narrative role,: already suzgesreu in the examples above, we will be able to discern-a pattern of

the frames code presuppositions about the structure of the socialsituation they presumably describe at that point in the narrative Our strategy of analysis, then, must begin with the discoursecharacterization of the distribution of the tokens of these forms. We show that the occurrences of the various metapragmatic formulae are

. of the known textual-cohesive contexts of relevance to episodic

U"".Ul'v. We can use the pragmatic criteria internal to the text, in that the or highly presupposing exemplification ought to be preponand the marked or relatively entailing tokens of occurrence ought lobe connected to special, though consistent, episodic effects.

Let us turn to the pragmatic examination of attestations of the metapragmatic frames in Chinook texts, distributional and interpretative.

For the distributional analysis, let us consider that the problem is to ····examine the relationship between tokens of metapragmatic framing de-

154

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN


ISS

vices, as so-called dependent variables, and particular contexts of occurrence, with different possible values of cohesiveness, as so-called independent variables. (It is not the case, of course, that these variables are inherently 'independent' or 'dependent'; it is just that this is the form of data organization logically required to test hypotheses about the role of such framing devices in narrative cohesion.)

To operationalize cohesion as a measure of text pragmatics, we must approach the text in advance as though it had only a second-order approximation to macrosyntactic surface order as text. That is, we must consider sentences of the text, including the ones with metapragmatic frames, as syntactic forms with potential contextual dependencies each on the preceding one, taken pairwise. To attribute any further structure at this point - particularly of an interpreted sort, for example a rich overall: episodic structure, a story line or plot, an overall poetic organization, etc.~ would be counter to the discovery of such relationships we seek empirically in the text. Narrative then being made up in this view of a sequence of sentence tokens - represented pairwise as ... Si-Si+[ ... - presupposing indexical relationships (the kind we first seek by distributional analysis) can occur between a form in some metapragmatic frame in Si+1 and its narrative context in the pairwise view of text, S, Given sequentiality constraints, forms of S;+I can always presuppose those in S; of course.

One of the possible relationships of interest is between metapragmatic frame in S;+I and prior metapragmatic frame in S;; others include propositional relations and reference maintenance across clauses. Hence, we want to look at a comparable, finite (inflected) predicational clause in all potential contexts. So the actual data examined here include all framing tokens in sequences S,-Si+" where Si+[ is the sentence with rnetaprag-. matic frame and S, contains a finite verb or inflected stative predicate (based grammatically on particle plus finite auxiliary). After this winnowing, the data points number 249 metapragmatic framing tokens.

We consider three areas of cohesive relationships in sentence sequences, known from previous work (Halliday and Hasan 1976; Silverstein 1 976a , 19BI) to constitute indexical relationships across ... S;-Sj+1 ... potentially of consequence to internal sentence syntax: [a] discourse reference maintenance; [b] respective semantic intrac1ause roles of coreferents; [c] repetition of verb class and lexical items. Each of these factors has important formal consequences in at least one of the sentences of the pairwise domain, for sufficiently cohesive text, and their interaction produces a readily visible though partial measure of cohesiveness at the surface syntactic level.

Variable [a] differentiates less cohesive sentence sequences, with no continuity of referents, 'from more cohesive ones, in which at least one of the referents is maintained as 'the same' as previously referred to. For the

latter situation, variable [b] differentiates what I term preferred coreference relationships in a language - the more cohesive - from the other coreferencetypes - the less cohesive. Preferred coreference is defined across two propositional forms for the sequence of respective propositional roles of coreferent noun phrases. It is that type of coreference that enters into

I

pivot-controller, 'Equi'-deleted (zero anaphoric), non-'switch' referencing,

etc. noun phrase relationships across clauses in sufficiently tight linkages within complex sentences, where also any subordinate clauses in surface form are in maximally non-finite derived shape for that linkage.

In Chinookan, only clauses of habitual agency ('who always VPs') have this kind of non-finite structure, formed only from coreferential 'transitive' Agent or 'intransitive' Subject, or derived equivalents. Hence the S/ A (read'S or A') case relation for coreferents is the preferred one for tightest clause linkage' in complex sentences, a measure we extend here to the cohesiveness of an otherwise equal sequence of sentences,

Finally, variable [c] is of use in defining degrees of cohesiveness in that a with two metapragmatic framing verbs is more lexically cohesive than a sequence with some other initial predicate class in Si.

Thus, having inventoried and excerpted the total set of tokens of forms in the textual corpus, I focus upon just those that frame quotations, i.e., that actually occur in complex sentences quotational complement. Considered as Si+[ of some sequence of these occurrences are scored by variables [aJ, [b]' and [c], to which metapragmatic framing form occurs. This is a purgross research instrument, for we must see how much can be with brute-force, purely formal empirical techniques of surface before constructing more elaborate interpretative hypotheses.

more that we can discover in this rather simplistic fashion, the more ... vuu'"""",,,, we have that even subtler techniques can validate any pragstructures that emerge.

... Table 1 gives the results of this coding. The seven metapragrnatic .'VUllUJalv in the corpus (as enumerated in (4) through (II) above) label the [a] through [g], while 33 distinct combinations of values of the

contextual variables of cohesion label the rows I through 33. The of each row takes into account the relevant coded characteristics the sentence sequence Sj-S;+I in each case. Rows 1-5 are those contexts. where there is no coreference relationship between referents of S; and those of S;+" the latter being the sentence with the metapragmatic framing verb which we tabulate in the appropriate column. This set of . non-coreferential contexts is further subdivided by the type of verb in Sj, with.five possibilities: not a verbum dicendi; or one of four kinds of verbum ·dicendi, -k+ kim, -u- v'lxam - the two preponderant examples - or another verbum dicendi of, respectively, one-place inflection or two-place inflection

<fl
c::
.9 +
.... ,ft
<1:$ .S
-
0)
.... ~
0) '"
>- .,
• v_; .~
">:!
0) <:!
.J:; ..<:l
0 ...
o ~
,
....
:><:
II)
....
tU
til
. ~
....
'ca
0..
.... .S
~ 00
tU
.0 E
<1:$
~ <1:$
..!:i
.~
.....
<1:$
E
0()
<1:$
....
0..
<1:$
....
tU
E
.!o<:
0
0
c
.....
0
....
tU
~
0
...:I -sdk~+J- yqi(l)iJi: <'I
-adJ4-lj:+I- Yqam(x) 8
-[ h-lj:- Ytu(l)lj:a( -it) '"
{-[h-[ h }-a- Ylj:(W_il) -.0
-[Ir:): '" -[Jrx-[kl- YkWH_{Ck }

. leal)

.D

-[ h-[ Jru- Vlxarn

'"

-[h-k+kim

.--.
0-
-e-
!:!-
'"
c:::'
';0
...
I/')
<"l ....
'"
'" 0-.
'"
C'I
....
~
t-.
....1
~ t<
~
.S
"'
'"
d "'
t<
.g ..,
u E
::;t 0
c u
'" '"
c '"
0 '"
u -5
:; .S
c: -»
0
e: '"
II) <n
0. M
~§ ~
00
, c
'" :s
~
~
f" >.
c:
~ '"
'0 '0
.--. .c
'" .5
'"
.~
'=' .>(
+
'0 "'<
'" ~
.D
s .
<:s
u <:>-
o s
'"
:0 '"
.0 '"
-0 OJ
'" .s
ti -0
II) II)
<C ...
.S 0.
.S!
.la OJ
+ E
00
rJf '"
...
.S 0.
S
'0 <Il
'" E
....
~ <Il
'" .g
....
0 '"
u 00
<Il
!:! e
<Il ._
.<= 0
:;I: v
Zl u
C
l< !:!
~ ....
c :;l
0 u
u
u 0
.9 B
III '"
:;l :::I
-0 -0
-0 -0
B ~
'" '"
<C <C
C .c
. _ _.-..'_
~~~
"'@"QJ";
·0 -a·u
~~!§
.... l< ....
<: (1)< 158

MICHA EL S I L VERS TEl N

- paralleling the inflectional possibilities that distinguish -k+kim from

-u- v'lxam. I code the one-place verbs with S for 'intransitive subject' in

whatever order class it appears in surface inflection, and two-place verbs with A for 'transitive Agent' and 0 for 'transitive Object,' according to a widespread current scheme. Thus, row 3 specifies the non-coreferential S, - S;+l sequence of two-place verbum dicendi -u- »/lxam followed by any one of the seven rnetapragmatic frames. There is one example of -k+kim in this context (column [a [) and one example of -.r+l- v' qamx (column [f]).

For the coreferent sentence sequences, we must specify in addition the type of cross-sentence coreference. We differentiate contexts by verb type in S; again, rows 6-13 being non-verba dicendi preceding the metapragrnatic frame, rows 14-19 being -k+kim, rows 20-25 being u-v/lxam, and rows ~6-33 being other verba dicendi. The formulae labeling these rows specify in addition what coreference relationships hold, by giving the case relations of the referents in the metapragmatic frame S;+t as well as the prior sentence, after the dash representing the sentence boundary. Observe that these may involve one or two of the referents in various case relations in their respective clauses, and may also involve an implied, i.e., mentioned or established but uninflected-for referent, here indicated by parentheses. Thus, row 17 indicates conditions where an implied receiver (0) in a speech event described with metapragmatic -k+kim (which gets only speaker inflection with [L Absolutive.) is the same referent as the 'Object' of a following metapragmatic frame, no other coreference obtaining. Contrast row 19, which labels doubly coreferential conditions, the 'Subject' and implied 'Object' of -k+kim in S, being coreferential with, respectively, the 'Object' (inflected or implied) and the 'Agent' or 'Subject' of the following metapragmatic frame in Si+l' Hence I use a solidus (/) to indicate alternate but equivalent inflectional schemata. There are no examples of any metapragmatic frame occurring under condition 17, but two of -k+kim in condition 19 and seven of -u-v/lxam.

It should be clear that there is a multivariate scale of cohesiveness . implicit in these thirty-three contexts, according to the asymmetries of the three independent variables coded in the rows. To repeat, sentence pairs in which there is coreference are ipso facto more cohesive than those in which there is no coreference. Secondly, for coreferential sentence pairs, certain ones show what we have termed preferred coreference and are more

cohesive than others; [ ... sf A ... 1s, - [ sf A ]s,+, across sentences is

preferred, with accompanying [. " a ]s; - [ a ... ]s;+. making the

linkage even stronger. Thirdly, sentence pairs in which the predicates match, as to general type (verbum dicendi vs. non-verbum dicendi) or as to specific lexical repetition, are more cohesive - with certain qualitative modifications that will emerge below - than those in which predicates do not match. Cohesiveness of sentence pairs, moreover, should be an

I I I

I

I

The culture of language in Chinookan narrative texts 159

expression of underlying episodic structure in narrative, if there is any. Thus the study of the distribution of tokens in the table ought to provide a measure of the role of these metapragmatic formulae in structuring (or expressing) the native understanding of speech interactional episodes.

Let us focus first on columns [a] and [b], contrasting -k+kim and -u- v'lxam, for which two by far the most tokens occur (196 of 249 total). 'Even without statistical test, it is clear that there is a preponderance (49 out of 74, or two-thirds) of the -k+kim forms in non-coreferent contexts, and . an overwhelming preponderance (107 out of 122) of the -u- »/lxam forms in coreferent contexts. Let us accept this as the normal discourse distribution. If we interpret the text-pragmatic effect of the difference between corefer-

. and non-coreference, we can conclude that the -u- v'lxam-framed ,,,,,.ULI'VU~ are, overall, more tightly bound to the referents established in ........ · ... u,'" context, ail other things being equal, than their -k+kim-framed counterparts, the latter being relatively less cohesive in normal discourse An -u- v'lxam frame is thus unmarked for a text pragmatic where its occurrence presupposingly indexes prior text establish-

of at least one of its inflected referents. A -k+kim frame is not such presupposing form.

let us turn to the differentiation of these two forms by the other

just on the coreferential examples of these two forms find that almost half of such coreferential tokens for each verb are preferred coreference kind (12 out of 25 for -k+kim; 63 out of 108 ~u-v'lxam), the kind of inherently greater cohesive value. But there is of the two verbs that emerges when we study the interaction coreference with preceding predicate type, as shown in Table

Table 2

.mteracnon of [S]; predicate type and preferred coreference with

(Sb, frame verb

-k+kim

-u-v/xkm

coreferent ISh - [S]j+1 tokens preferred coreference

Sj non-verbum dicendi

S, verbum dicendi

Sj with non-verbum dicendi Total S; - S;+1 preferred coref. Total S; - Sj+l non-preferred coref.

25 12

II (92%) 1 (8%)

13

Il (85%) 2 (15%)

108 63

47 (75%) 16 (25%)

74

47

27

160

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN


16r

coreference occur after non-verba dicendi, while 47 of the 63 -u- v'lxam tokens do so. Looking now at the figures for preferred vs. non-preferred coreferential occurrences of these two forms after non-verba dicendi, we see that I I of 13 examples of -k-s-kim coreferential with adjuncts of preceding non-verba dicendi are of the preferred type, while only 47 of 74 examples of -u- »/Ixam are. Expressed in percentages, that is, -k+kim tends strongly to occur after non-verba dicendi in preferred coreference relationships, and in preferred coreference relationships after non-verba dicendi, even though the tendency to coreferential occurrence of -k+kim is the lesser, overall. For -u- v'lxam, these interactions are less noticeable: by contrast, -u- »/lxam occurs more frequently after verba dicendi in preferred coreference, and in more various coreference relationships after non-verba dicendi. So where -k+kim is tightly bound to its preceding text by preferred coreference, it is NOT bound to a metapragmatic frame, i.e., not to a form representing speech interaction. The tendency to do so is stronger by far for -u- v'lxam.

In other words, -u- »/lxam seems to frame a DISCOURSE CONTINUING situation, in unmarked usage, to a significantly greater degree than -k+ kim. Further, -u- v'lxam seems to be a frame compatible with a greater variety of prior contexts describing one or more of the participants in the speech event it reports.

At this point, to clarify further we must go beyond the parameters of the tabulation to give an account of the residual tokens that seem to be problematic for this model. Our inferences from the numerical facts of the tables lead to conclusions about the unmarked, or normal, pragmatics of discourse. We must recall, however, that in pragmatics the marked, or 'foregrounded,' tokens of a form are not violations in any sense. To sure, grammarians - particularly those used to working in broadly transformationalist or generativist traditions - see a binary division between 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical,' or, more delicately, n-ary gradient divisions between these poles, for any particular linguistic form. In pragmatics, including discourse pragmatics, this approach is entirely unsuitable (indeed, theoretically meaningless). Rather, in pragmatics, we must ask such foregrounded tokens, what special functional effects can be or are .: achieved by violating the expectations of unmarked contextual distribution, thereby constituting instances of functionally, consistent indexical (pragmatic) entailment, based on the unmarked presupposing function-.

Our hypothesis from the distributional data in the tabulation is that, first, -u- Vlxam is basically text-cohesive while -k+kim is not, and that, -. second, the tighter the cohesion the more is -u- »/lxam an index of CONTINUING metapragmatic report, while the more is -k+kim an index of INITIATING metapragmatic report. But how do the non-characteristic tokens of these two framing verbs pattern?

Beyond the tabulated variables, two kinds of observation are relevant here relating the distribution of -k+kim vs. -u- »/lxam to prior context. First, it turns out that virtually all of the examples of -k+kim frames occurring with preferred coreference after non-verba dicendi follow stative predicates describing a psychological state of the very character who is subsequently the speaker in the speech event framed by -k+kim. By contrast, virtually all of the examples of -u- Vlxam in equivalent context follow active predicates describing some action or establishment of a relationship between the participants of the subsequent speech event framed by -u- »/lxam.

Thus (12), from 22.3-5, occurs in a narrative that has just described the . habitual going-off-to-hunt of the four older brothers of the speaker, leaving him alone and apparently resentful in their house full of meats and grease.

There were five men. Every morning [the four oldest]' left their younger brother. They always went off hunting; they would kill

elks. Their house was full of meats, full of grease. i

22·3-5:

. Tab ayarnxc lax" nJ-h-J):-a6- v'J): [ijlawux; Tab nJ-h-k+ kim: ... 'Then [in] his.-heart lonesome hej-became their-younger-brotherj. Then he--said: ... '

description of the protagonist, 'their younger brother got lonesome in heart,' i.e., he was feeling heartsick, abandoned every day. amid the is followed by a coreferential -k+kim form. This: frames a \}:. ?\.(!yoltatlon (not repeated here) in which the younger brother wishes the

:,.:'.JI1"p ... aun, One would come and eat up the food wealth. $0 the linkage of

......... ',. -, " ..... , .... " quotation frame is to the interior state, the feelings of the

which the quotation ultimately externalizes in the form of a message as sign.

is consistency here with the example from 64.15-16 cited in (4) There, we saw, no coreference exists between metapragmatic frame and preceding context, but Crew's verbalization of (pleasant) . ·mrnl"l<l.p is an expression of emotional reaction at deducing something from :;eVlut:ni;t;: presented to her by her grandnephew. Her 'Ooh'ing-and-Ah'ing, might call it, realizing that he must have a supernatural power to set to the countryside with his arrows, does not necessarily need or have an as such. Like a wish (the example in (12) here), it need have only overhearing audience - in dramaturgical myth text, moreover, two speech-framing contexts, myth internal (the grandnephew, the One) and myth external (the addressees of the myth per-

In (13), by contrast, we can see an example of a preferred coreferential of -u- v'lxam after non-verbum dicendi, from 75.4-5.

162

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN


He2 went ashore. He.2 hauled up his, canoe. He.2 turned his, canoe over. Now he, lay down there right underneath it. Early [next morning] a person. I [i-guhlxomkj] approached on the sand, ex, ex, ex, ex,

"located with his retinue on the beach, to accede to the deal. As detailed in . what follows for the first attempt, Bluejay, acting as go-between, each time runs back and forth between the host chiefly house and the visiting chiefly retinue on the beach.

42.II-I4: Tab n-i3.j"~a+nku iqisqis., rnaini, Taka a-~.l -i3.z-u- Vlxam iiaxak'mana.j, 'Aqauxuwakux umixa, k'a naika wixt uguxa aqauwakux.' Nrekst qada n-i3.rk+ kim iiaxak'mana-, iqisqisj,

'Then he3.1-ran Bluejay-, seaward. Then he2.1-said-to-him3.2 theirchief3.2, "They-demand-her] -in-marriage] your-daughter, and me 'also my-daughter she-is-demandedj-in-marriage]." Not in-any-

way he3.z-spoke their-chief 3.2 Bluej ay[ -and-his-group Us ~'

the Chinook citation, the first sentence describes Bluejay's action of to the site of his chief's encampment, with -ir Absolutive, coding referent, here keyed with additional reference indexj. In the role of he makes the formal offer, in a characteristic formula framed appropriate frame for his statement/request, -u-s/lxam, with

rnT· .. t"TPlnt -c2.e Ergative- for Bluejay and -i3.r Absolutive, for 'the chief. parallelism to examples (5) and (13) cited above, with the role of a confrontational encounter clearly set up non-verbally.) states that the chief's daughter is demanded in marriage, a

""r"",' ... ri ilIocution. In reply, or rather in pointed non-reply, the chief says and this last NON-utterance is described as though it were indirect discourse framed by -k+kim inflected with -i3.2- for the visiting chief.

in (15), taken from 45.14-16, Bluejay, a mythic actor who is ravenous eater, ever the chatterbox, excitedly breaks the silence group of people with whom he has come upon a strangely deserted Upon entering, the group find no one there except one woman. ·'·"ii'".'."V .......... enlv Bluejay interjects his rather inappropriate and childish question

"i'i·C',""""',". brother Robin:

45.14-16: 'Ikta f~ aqilxangiwax'amita, Kasaitj?' 'Henein imilq'ilacxita,' n-i3.2-k+kim Kasait.j, Taka n-i3rk+kim Iqisqisjj, 'tEkai~ [ijncaxak'mana gWanisum "tumm" uyaqxalopckix.' '''What perchance will-they-give-uslpl. incl. [-to-eat, Robinj?" "Don't, quiet!" (he3.2-) said Robin-j. Then he3.!-said Bluejayjj , "Thus-[similarly-] perchance our-chief, always 'tumm!' [goes] hisfire." ,

75-4-5:

Nawi a-43Ti4.rgals-u6- Vpck qaxi qigu n-h.2-ki- V}_{.

Taka a-ig2,Ci3.rU6- Vlxam, 'M3.r~a- YI arck 10 , t~g_',1+2"U6- Vya!' 'Straightway it3.1"went-up-from-water-toward-him4.z, where there he3.2-was. Then it2. csaid-to-him3.2, "(You3,Z)-get-up, let-usjdu.

. I] !'"

me . 3,l+2-g0.

Here, the eventual addressee in the speech event of interest has been sleeping under his overturned canoe on a beach. There are footsteps on the sand in the morning. The following description of the person (a woman, as it turns out) walking right up to the now-wakened man is of exceeding, deictically-based subtlety: we get the neutral description 'a person' [Iguiilx;;Jmk], a neuter gender noun stem, a motion verb 'approach; come' [a-13.1-t6- Yi7], with -t6- 'proximad' prefix for directionality toward the deictic origin of an utterance, and the noise of steps crunching on the shell-strewn lower part of the beach. It is as though, awakened by' the noise, we experience the scene through the senses of the protagonist, ignorant of what kind of person this is, ignorant of everything but his/her approach with crunching steps. For a woman to approach a strange man in this way is an exceedingly forward action, with its own understood social force, in Chinook society. This is followed by preferred coreferential -u- Ylxam framing what she says to him. The woman's approach constitutes, then, a social statement that is merely reiterated, as it were, by the explicit framed verbal message, 'Get up; let's go [sc., back to my house]!'

A second observation on exceptional cases is that virtually every -k+kim-framed quotation that occurs after a verbum dicendi expresses antisocial statements or the negation of the ongoing interpersonal interaction in one of the following ways: a verbalization directed at someone other than the prior speaker, creating an additional interpersonal speech context; or a negative response, either an uttered 'No!' or the metapragmatic term 'nothing' as an indirect report of the absence of response; or parallel verbalization by a second speaker not responding to but competing with that of the prior speaker. This is very seldom true for any of the -u- v'lxam-framed quotations.

Thus, in (14), taken from 42.11-14, Bluejay and a group of people have arrived at another village, desperate for food. Bluejay, standing at the host chiefs house, offers to negotiate a marriage of his, and the visiting chief's, daughters to the local chief in order to get the house and its food wealth opened to his group. Five times he attempts to persuade his chief, who is

might they give us to eat, Robin?' Bluejay pipes up. To which Robin 'Don't! Be quiet!- attempting to close off verbal interaction. Note this utterance of Robin's, the would-be end of the verbal interaction,

is framed by -k+kim, like the conversation-negating quotation in' (14). But

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

Bluejay persists in trying to initiate some kind of interaction, and tries again, making a comment about the noise of the log crackling on the fire. Note that this second attempt by Bluejay at verbal interaction is also framed by -k+kim. From a purely distributional point of view according to Table 1 variables, it would appear that the second -k+kim is following a verbum dicendi (namely, itself), and the first is following a quotation (unframed). From a qualitative point of view, it is seen that the second instance follows an attempt by the interlocutor to close off verbal interaction, and the first frames the command to keep quiet.

A third example of an apparent violation of the basic distributional regularity is the passage in (16), from 73.2-8. Here, in a scene of comic relief, two Ravens alight above the seemingly dead body of Pigeon, drifted ashore after floating away some distance.

(16) 73.2-8: Alta k'ap asikxax [sic] smak=st skwalixwa. N1-i3.I-k+kim qix ixatjj , 'Ixt icaxut, ixt icamlqtan. Kacok kq'up tga?amsuks tksawixa.' N1-i3.rk+kim qix ixat3,2' 'K'e, k'e, k'e, k'e; naika, kanamakrst sgaxust ka ixt icamlqtan, ka kacok kq'up tga?amsuks tksawixa.' 'Imimlaxaqami,' a-~.ri3,ru6-Vlxam, 'Ixt icaxut maikay, ixt icaxut naikaj. Ixt icamilqtan naikaj , ixt icamlqtan maikaj, Kacok Xq' up tga?amsuks.' Kaix a-s3.1+Z-ki- V~ ka naxalack. Nuku, aksitaqi ,

'Now find they[ du ]-did-her two Ravens. He3.rsaid that one3.!> "One (her- )eye, one (her- )cheek. In-the-middle cut her-guts we[du]-will-do-to-her." He3.rsaid the [other] one3.2, "No, no, no; [to-jme, both her-eyes and one (her-)cheek, and in-themiddle cut her-guts wejdul-will-do-to-her." "You-are-mistaken, hez.l-said-to-him3.2, "One (her- )eye [to JYOU.2' one [to-jmej, One (her-)cheek [to-jmej, one (her-) cheek [to-J yOU.2' In-the-middle cut her-guts." As-thus they[du]-were-going (and) she arose. She- flew-off, she-left -them[ du J.'

Each Raven proceeds to announce his intention regarding the disposition of the corpse as food for himself. Thus, the one announces, 'One of her eyes and one of her cheeks (sc., for me); we'll cut her guts down the middle.' The other announces, 'No, no, no, no; I (will get) both her eyes and one of her cheeks, and we'll cut her guts down the middle.' Both of these announcements of intention are framed by -k+kim, emphasizing, it seems, their status as statements made in parallel, rather than in back-andforth interaction.

By contrast, the passage continues with the first speaker now actually addressing the second, engaging him in confrontation. 'You're mistaken,' he says to him, where the specifically interactional aspect of this is unambiguously signalled by the framing verb -u-Vlxam, inflected for

The cult~re of language in Chinookan narrative texts

speaker (-cz.r) and hearer (-i3.2~)' He then continues by reiterating the original division of the parts he stated, but note that in this reiteration, he mentions specifically both the parts to go to himself and those to go to his interlocutor-antagonist, in a pronominal chiasmus that emphasizes the equality of the distribution pointedly communicated: 'One of her eyes to you, one of her eyes to me. One of her cheeks to me, one of her cheeks to you. Her guts cut down the middle.' A more pointed contrast between the

. two framing devices could not be given! '

So we can see that, taking into account the content of the .prior text sentence and the framed quotation, we can understand apparent indexical violations of the distribution of -k+kim and -u- Vixam. These apparently represent specific kinds of speech-event situations at the moment of utterance of the framed quotation. The common variables of the repre-

sented speech event involve whether or not speaker and hearer are .r : presented in an ongoing understood role relationship, both as to prior or and as to subsequent or continuing interaction.

If we take these further observations into account in examining the of the other framing verbs in Table I, we find that, regardless diversity of inflectional morphosyntax . and characteristic

notation. the verbs in the columns seem to be patterned

[cJ -.r(a)- -/- Vkwii- 'tell; recount to' and [f] -a3- -:r+1- V qam(x) have characteristics of distribution, etc. very much lib those of while [dJ - - -a-V:r(W-il) '(be) go(ing)' and - -.r(a)-~"y'.r(w.il) '(be) to' has characteristics very much like those of -u- »/lxam. On the of their sale occurrence in non-coreferent contexts after non-verba atcenat. we should assign [e] ~ --¥-Viu(l)~a(-it) 'think' and [gJ -sr -~+l" 'sob; bawl' to the first division, with -k+kim.

other words, these framing verbs for metapragmatic formulae seem to in two classes, which we can call the -k+kim class and the -u- »/Ixam after their prototypical and most frequently attested members. The '~-" " .'., differentiation of these classes is not, I must emphasize, normal or 'semantic,' content - certainly not as

<:;''''''1:1'''" in any inflectional properties or intra-clause co-occurrences, nor cross-clause syntactic regularities, given the syntactic looseness of complementation. The differentiation is discourse the two classes having rather distinct cohesive functional, at the level of episodic narrative text.

must conclude that in metapragmatic usage, where these verbs are to frame quotations in reports of speech events, the very lexical forms important differences of narrative structure. Summarizing the various · ...... "' ... ~.r.;.o. of the two classes, I would hypothesize that the basic text

of -u-v/lxam class frames is EPISODE-INTERNAL METAPRAGMATIC while the basic text function! of -k+kim class frames is

I66

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN


EPISODE-BOUNDING METAPRAGMATIC PREDICATION (whether initiating or terminating).

There is thus a 'poetic' function, in the use of these framing verbs, marking the rhythmic episodic structure of interactions that constitute the basic dramatic narrative. And, moreover, given the nature of these narratives as dramatic, we must conclude that the episodic structure of text pragmatics must be the METApragmatic representation of some characteristics of the interactions the text reports. Hence, the various different lexical frames must code differences in the characteristics of the interactions, differences in the locally Chinookan conceptualization of the significant parameters of speech events. We have identified dimensions of the pragmatics of these metapragmatic frames; but we must attempt to interpret the pragmatics of the narrated speech events.

Let us return to a consideration of the speech-event schema given in Figure I. We can now better appreciate that the metapragmatic formulae report that a speaker utters a message to a hearer under distinct circum" stances presupposed and! or entailed by the interlocutors in the act of utterance, and hence indexed by the message form. The Chinook meta-· pragmatic formulae, it now emerges, code important differences in the functional meaning of utterances by the distinct class of framing verb used to report the speech event, thereby coding the native understanding of two classes of functions, of speaking as well.

In the one class of functions., reported with -k+kim class frames, speaking accomplishes a verbal self-display, a 'mere utterance' focused upon its locus of origin in and from the speaker. Hence the appropriateness in narrative of reports with -k+kim class frames for the messages at initial point of an interaction, suddenly, or perhaps after a the speaker's inner state.

In indexical terms for the expressed speech event, the presupposed focus at the functional, level is the speaker, and we might characterize the indexical function, as broadly 'expressive.' In those exceptional instances we surveyed where -k+kim class verbs frame quotations following upon speech, we noted that the utterances were attempts to close off interaction, to express interlocutor displeasure with the preceding speech (and with perpetrator), etc., and not to respond appropriately to the interactional force and propositional content of the previous utterance with an interactionally correct linguistic action. Here is an indexical entailment of pure self-expression at the functional, level. It is coded by the same framing verb as codes presupposingly 'expressive' indexicals, and, we might hypothesize, contains an implicit theory about functional, utility of 'self" expression' to speakers in negating or closing off interaction, as though the previous interactional utterance had not occurred. Thus, coding the FRAME of an utterance following upon an utterance with a -k+kim class frame

codes the narrator's understanding of the net effect of such utterances to bring about the end of the previously-entailed social relations between interlocutors. The speaker of such a narrated form has managed to bring off a functional, 'perlocution' with a particular functional, form fore"

. grounded, maximizing its entailing indexical characteristics.

The point in more general terms is that a consistent explanation of the text-pragmatic functional- distribution yields an interpretation of Chinook ethnometapragmatics, or 'culture of language,' for the represented speech-

event functions.j, ~

. In the same way then, in the other class of functions, reported with -u-s/lxam class frames, speaking is viewed as an action continuing or following upon the establishment of specific social relations between speaker and hearer, and hence with constrained functional, effect. Hence

.the appropriateness of such metapragmatic reports in the middle of ongoing interaction, especially after a previous reported utterance, or even an episode-initial report of some relational activity that brings the

characters involved into some culturally-understood role relationships.

. In indexical terms for the represented speech event, there is a presupposed focus upon an existing role relationship of speaker to hearer at the moment of speaking reported with -u- v'lxam class metapragmatic formulae; we might characterize the indexical function, as broadly 'interand in some significant subset of cases 'conative' (given the

'. 11t"""'V frequent association of -u- »/Ixam class frames complemented by quotations). Consider instances where such metapragmatic report initial utterances after some described interpersonal We may hypothesize that the social identities of the authors are

brought into narrative focus in some specific role relationship. Here .• :):\:,\>i·.· •..... '.Hl<;;.~LU\JIl<:;Jll~t: of the narrative understands that such roles indexically entail normative or appropriate interactional effects in the subsequent event within the episode. It is these mutual interactional expecta-

of the interlocutors in a speech event that are fore grounded in .jH:~r"., framed with -u- »/lxom in speech-event-initial position. Thus, : :.VUUJllll"o the FRAME of an utterance in initial position with an -u- v'Jxam class codes the narrator's understanding of the net effect of such • ...... ~."n_ to play upon the expectations of role relationship as established to that point in the encounter. The speaker of such a narrated form has to bring off a functional, 'perlocution' with a particular UIJI~Ul"JII~17 form foregrounded, maximizing its entailing indexical charac-

This is speaking as social token of a social type, i.e. with contextual identities constituted first in society in the global sense and second in the specific localized narrated action. It focuses the present relevance of the

rights and obligations of speaker and hearer as instances of their social

168

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

types. There are, then, certain conventional 'illocutionary' expectations to which interlocutors subscribe, so that certain characteristic functionally! effective uses of speech emerge in interpersonal action. Against this set of conventional expectations shared also by the 'audience' (i.e., addressees) of the text, the specific speech quoted with -u- Ylxam class frames can be evaluated in the performance. Thus if, as Hymes (1971: 312-16) has suggested, clarifying Jacobs' (1959) dramaturgical interpretation of Chinookan mythology, these literary works are essentially morality plays, didactic pieces that present a dialectic between norms of action for various social identities and the actual conduct of people in empirical situations, the poetics of metapragmatic formulae provides an interesting dimension of how a narrator communicates this thematic structure.

If -k+ kim class frames emphasize expressive foci of interaction in narrated speech events, -u- »/lxam class frames emphasize interpersonal foci, appropriate or not as the case might be to the varying situations in which we find the characters. We have interpreted the framing devices of metapragmatic formulae in narrative as codings of classes of functionally.j-differentiated speech events. This allows us, to be sure, to appreciate the internal episodic presentation of pragmatics in narrative discourse. But it also should allow us to interpret the metapragmatic significance of various non-narrative functions..

For example, we emphasized the durational 'recounting' involved in speech events coded with -.r(a)- -/- v'kwii- (given in (7) above), a metapragmatic frame of the -k+kim class. Myths themselves are never -.r(a)- .. -1- Ykwii-ck-ed, however, for this would be a speech situation of selfexpressive, presumably initial recounting or recitation of events. Rather, . one always - - -a6- Y.r(W-il)s myths (cf. (8) above), to addressees (the 'audience' for myth-telling, in English ethnometapragmatic terms), using a metapragmatic predicate to describe this activity of the -u- »/lxam class. This would indicate that the stylized performance context of myth narration depends upon a complicated social relationship of speaker, as possessor performing a traditional institutionalized type of knowledge, to 'audience,' as ratifiers of the performance. Indeed, we know from observation that in the easternmost Chinookan-speaking groups, myth recitation was a complex dialogic performance requiring constant audience validation by feedback, elaborate 'back channel' signals that give a running commentary. So meta pragmatic denotation of speech events seems to have a pragmatics beyond the narrative-internal consistent with that investigable structure, consistent with the results we found, and illuminated by them.

Again, the metapragmatic dichotomy we inferred for Chinook is between language characterized as expressive modality and language characterized as interpersonal (conative) modality. Both such views of lan-

The culture of language in Chinookan narrative texts '

169

guage are essentially pragmatic; t~ee language events as events of interpersonal social action, building contrasts accordingly. There is no distinct focus here or elsewhere we have looked in Chinookan metapragmatic discourse upon the referential-and-predicational instrumentality of language. This view is paramount in our own ethnotheories of language, and from it derive both the 'semantic' functional- basis for 'our own grammatical analyses of language structure, and the 'semanticized' views of pragmatics which linguistic theorizing (see Levinson 1983) has taken over from linguistic philosophy (e.g, Austin 1962; Grice 1975) ..

This is not to saythat there is no implicit propositionality in Chinookan coding. Indeed, the very fact of 'indirect' discourse, as we saw above, shows that referential-and-predicational identificatidn is rela-

ta both reported and instantiated discourse contexts. What must be out, however, is that there is no explicit metapragmatic concept of retemnz-and-nred .• "u .... o as function! akin to that embodied in our metapragmatic formulae such as 'He asserted that ... ,' 'He stated that ... ' - or even 'He explained that ... ' Noris there any text-pragmatic evidence that a functional, area (e.g. truth-functional, semantic propositionality) is

significance. to the Chinookan conceptualization of language use as a activity.

We can employ our text-derived conclusions to approach a particular etymological problem as well, one that illuminates this Chinookan view of language use. It turns out that the word for 'people' (including Myth Age consists of the 'individuable plural' number-gender prefix [i]t- on a

stem -lxam (cf. the verb form -u- Y lxam), and that the word usually as 'village' consists of the 'masculine singular' number-gender [w]i- on the same stem. It is seen that the first would be more rendered by the Latin cives, the second by Latin civitas. It might <>n."rn.nr;.,t" to conclude then that the view motivating these forms holds to interact properly with language in its functional.j modes to be essence of existence as a social person. This ability bespeaks having place (one's social identity) in the civitas of such an exquisitely role-conscious, stratified society, as we know Chinookan to have been in its heyday.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

am most grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a during 1979 that allowed me to collect and analyze these and other :· ....... UulVVJ~all ethnometapragmatic data. To addressees at The University of Chicago March 1980), The Pennsylvania State University (17 April 1980), SUNY Buffalo April 1980), The University of Kansas (30 April 1980), and the 1980 LSA Institute at The University of New Mexico (31 July 1980), I am grateful

comments and questions resulting in this version.

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

REFERENCES

Austin, John L 1962. How to do Things with Words. New York: Oxford University Press.

Benveniste, Emile. 1966. Les verbes delocutifs. In Problemes de linguistique generate, 277-85. Paris: Gallimard.

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Boas, Franz. 1894. Chinook Texts. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 20.

Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. .

~ Bricker, Victoria R. 1974. The ethnographic context of some traditional Mayan speech genres. In Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . •.

Buhler, Karl. 1934. Sprachtheorie; Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: G.

Fischer Verlag. '

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. 111 Peter Cole and Jerry L Morgan (eds.), Speech Acts. Syntax and Semantics 3, 41-58. New York: Academic Press.

Halliday, Michael A. K. and Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1976. Cohesion in English. London:

Longman Group Ltd. .

Havranek, Bohuslav. 1964. The functional differentiation of the standard language.

In Paul L Garvin (ed.), A Prague School Reader in Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, 3-16. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. ...

Hymes, Dell. 1971. The 'wife' who 'goes out' like a man: reinterpretation of a Clackamas Chinook myth. In Julia Kristeva, Josette Rey-Debove and Jean Umiker (eds.), Essays in Semiotics/ Essais de Semiotique. Approaches Semiotics 4,296-326. The Hague: Mouton and Co.

Jacobs, Melville. 1959. The content and style of an oral literature. Viking Publications in Anthropology 26. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jacobsen. William H., Jr. I967. Switch-reference in Hokan-Coahuiltecan. In Hymes and William S. Bittle, Jr (eds.), Studies in Southwestern tunnounsuistics: Meaning and History in the Languages of the American Southwest, Studies in General Anthropology, 3. The Hague: Mouton and Co.

Jakobson, Roman. 1953. (Chapter 2.) In Claude Levi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, C. F. Voegelin, and Thomas A. Sebeok, Results of the conference anthropologists and linguists. Indiana University Publications in anthropology

and linguistics, Memoir 8. Bloomington. lJAL 19(2), Supplement. -;

1956. Metalanguage as a linguistic problem .: Presidential address, Linguistic Society of America, 27 Decemberroje. Typescript, 16pp. (Printed in R. Jakobson, The Framework of Language, 81-92. Michigan Studies in the Humanities. Ann Arbor: Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, 1980.

1960. Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.),

Style in Language, 350-77. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. .

Jakobson, Roman and Waugh, Linda R. 1979. The Sound Shape of Language.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Ohmann, Richard. 1964. Generative grammars and the concept of literary style.

Word 20, 423-39.

Silverstein, Michael. 1976a. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In R. M. W.

Dixon (ed.), Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, II 2-7 1. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Publications, Linguistic Series, 22. Canberra: AlAS.

1976b. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, Jr (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology, U-55. Albuquer-

que: University of New Mexico Press. ..,

1977. Cultural prerequisites to grammatical analysis. In Munel Saville-Troike (ed.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, 1976, Linguistics and Anthropology, 139-51. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

1978. Deixis and deducibility in a Wasco-Wishram passive of evidence. Berkeley

Linguistics Society, Proceedings 4, 238-53. . .

1979. Language structure and linguistic ideology. In Paul R. Clyne, Wilham F.

Hanks and Carol L. Hofbauer (eds.), The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and bevels, 193-247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic. Society. r98r. Case marking and the nature of language. Australian Journal of Linguistics

. 1,227-44· :

1984. The functional stratification of language and ontogenesis. In James V.

Wertsch (ed.), Culture, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives, 170--99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nikolai S. 1939. Grundzuge der Phonologic. Travaux du Cerc1e .. Linguistique de Prague, 7.

Silverstein - The Culture of Language in Chinookan Narrative Texts Or, On Saying That ... in Chinook

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Silverstein - The Culture of Language in Chinookan Narrative Texts Or, On Saying That ... in Chinook

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

6

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

Silverstein - The Culture of Language in Chinookan Narrative Texts Or, On Saying That ... in Chinook

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Silverstein - The Culture of Language in Chinookan Narrative Texts Or, On Saying That ... in Chinook

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

﻿6

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

6