Dialogue and Culture (Dialogue Studies)

Dialogue and Culture

Dialogue Studies (DS) Dialogue Studies takes the notion of dialogicity as central; it encompasses every type of language use, workaday, institutional and literary. By covering the whole range of language use, the growing field of dialogue studies comes close to pragmatics and studies in discourse or conversation. The concept of dialogicity, however, provides a clear methodological profile. The series aims to cross disciplinary boundaries and considers a genuinely inter-disciplinary approach necessary for addressing the complex phenomenon of dialogic language use. This peer reviewed series will include monographs, thematic collections of articles, and textbooks in the relevant areas.

Editor Edda Weigand

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Editorial Advisory Board Adelino Cattani

Marion Grein

Kenneth N. Cissna

Fritjof Haft

Světla Čmejrková

John E. Joseph

François Cooren

Werner Kallmeyer

Robert T. Craig

Catherine KerbratOrecchioni

Università di Padova University of South Florida Czech Language Institute Université de Montréal University of Colorado at Boulder

Marcelo Dascal

Tel Aviv University

Valeri Demiankov

Russian Academy of Sciences

University of Mainz University of Tübingen University of Edinburgh University of Mannheim

Université Lyon 2

Geoffrey Sampson University of Sussex

Masayoshi Shibatani Rice University

Volume 1 Dialogue and Culture Edited by Marion Grein and Edda Weigand

Anne-Marie Söderberg Copenhagen Business School

Talbot J. Taylor

College of William and Mary

Wolfgang Teubert

University of Birmingham

Linda R. Waugh

University of Arizona

Elda Weizman

Bar Ilan University

Yorick Wilks

University of Sheffield

Dialogue and Culture

Edited by

Marion Grein Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz

Edda Weigand Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dialogue and culture / edited by Marion Grein, Edda Weigand. p. cm. (Dialogue Studies, issn 1875-1792 ; v. 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Language and culture. 2. Biolinguistics. 3. Dialogue analysis. 4. Intercultural communication. 5. Speech acts (Linguistics) I. Grein, Marion, 1966- II. Weigand, Edda. P35.D46    2007 306.44--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 1018 0 (Hb; alk. paper)

2007041393

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Preface to the Series Dialogue Studies is an interdisciplinary series that takes the notion of dialogicity as central to the understanding of language; it starts from the classical view of ‘language as dialogically directed’ and encompasses every type of language use, workaday, institutional and literary. By covering the whole range of language use, the growing field of dialogue studies comes close to pragmatics and studies in discourse or conversation. The concept of dialogicity, however, provides a clear methodological profile and allows us to structure the pragmatic ‘perspective’ and the ‘pan-discipline’ of discourse. It focuses on methodological premises such as: action and reaction; the integration of the human abilities of speaking, thinking and perceiving; dialogic interaction as the intentional effort to pursue definable goals and interests. The series aims to cross disciplinary boundaries and considers a genuinely interdisciplinary approach necessary in order to address the complex phenomenon of dialogic language use. All disciplines that deal with the human ability of dialogic interaction from different perspectives, in everyday interaction as well as in institutional contexts, are addressed: linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, rhetoric, anthropology, applied linguistics, culture sciences, the media sciences, economics, jurisprudence. The current state of research in science in general is characterized by a turning point from closed rule-governed models to open models of probability. In this sense, Dialogue Studies aims to support new ways of theorizing and opens up innovative cross-disciplinary advances in the complex. The series will be of interest to existing theoretical approaches to competence as well as empirical approaches to performance and bridges the gap between competence and performance by focusing on human beings and their competence-in-performance. Contributions to this peer reviewed series are invited for monographs, thematic collections of articles, reference books and introductory textbooks in the relevant areas.

Münster, August 2007

Edda Weigand

Table of Contents Introduction

IX

PART I Language, Biology and Culture: The crucial debate Minds in Uniform How generative linguistics regiments culture and why it shouldn’t Geoffrey Sampson The Sociobiology of Language Edda Weigand

3

27

PART II Theoretical Positions Some General Thoughts about Linguistic Typology and Dialogue Linguistics Walter Bisang

53

Intercultural Dialogue and Academic Discourse Svĕtla Čmejrková

73

The Speech Act of Refusals within the Minimal Action Game A comparative study of German and Japanese Marion Grein

95

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American English Dialogues Caroline E. Nash

115

Quantity Scales Towards culture-specific profiles of discourse norms Elda Weizman

141

VIII Table of Contents

PART III Empirically Oriented Studies of the ‘Mixed Game’ Specific action games, politeness and selected verbal means of communication Dialogue Interpreting as Intercultural Mediation An analysis in healthcare multicultural settings Claudio Baraldi & Laura Gavioli

155

Cultural Differences in the Speech Act of Greeting Sebastian Feller

177

Refusals and Politeness in Directive Action Games Cultural differences between Korean and German Yongkil Cho

191

How Diplomatic Can a Language Be? The unwritten rules in a language: An analysis of spoken Sinhala Neelakshi Chandrasena Premawardhena

213

Cultural Values and their Hierarchies in Everyday Discourse Ksenia M. Shilikhina

227

Cultural and Contextual Constraints in Communication Michael Walrod

239

General Index

257

List of Contributors

261

Introduction The core of this volume is made up of a strict selection of contributions to an IADA workshop on “Dialogue and Culture”, organized in September 2006 by Walter Bisang and Marion Grein at the University of Mainz. The selection of the papers is guided by a unified conception pursuing a double goal, namely to cover the issue in general as represented in the research discussion and to focus in particular on one group of approaches which starts from the interaction of different components in what might be called ‘the mixed game’. In order to present such a concept it was advisable to invite some contributors who did not participate in the workshop. There are today approximately 6900 languages spoken in our world. Dialogue across the boundaries of languages, countries and cultures has become an unavoidable necessity of our life in the 21st century. Cross-disciplinary research is called upon to tackle the big questions of how human beings come to grips with the complex challenge of various types of dialogic interaction in ever-changing surroundings. Looking at the state of the art in the field of ‘dialogue and culture’ we might be baffled by the multiple and in part extreme and controversial positions taken. At the centre we are faced with what has been called the ‘language-instinct debate’, a debate between two extreme positions, the nativist and the empiricist, concerning the issue of what determines language. This debate is dealt with in the first part of this volume by Sampson’s radical position, on the one hand, and Weigand’s mediating position of sociobiology, on the other hand. These two contributions set the framework of the discussion about ‘dialogue and culture’. In Part II the focus is on different theoretical positions, and some more empirically oriented studies are presented in Part III. All of these papers, theoretical as well as empirical, belong, to some extent, to an approach which focuses on the interaction of components in the mixed game. The ‘theoretical positions’ in Part II include the following: Bisang weaves language typology into the study of intercultural dialogue. Čmejrková investigates the relationship between culture and academic discourse by providing an intercultural perspective on writer/reader dialogical communication. She maps the situation in Slavic languages, Czech and Russian, and compares it with English. Grein applies the so-called minimal action game, an enhancement of Searle’s speech act theory, and demonstrates differences between the speech act of refusal among German and Japanese speaker. Nash incorporates nonverbal components into her research and reveals interesting facts about the relationship between language and culture. She limits her scope to certain hand and head gestures and

X Marion Grein & Edda Weigand some gaze behaviour patterns among French, Japanese and Americans. Weizman re-interprets culture-dependent discourse norms and examines them in terms of Grice’s maxim of quantity. She refers to discourse in American and Australian English, Canadian French, Israeli Hebrew and Japanese. Part III presents empirical studies of the ‘mixed game’ which focus on specific action games, on the action component of politeness and on selected verbal means of communication. Baraldi & Gavioli carry out research on institutional talk in naturally-occurring encounters in Italian healthcare settings involving speakers of different languages and an interpreter providing translation service. The study is based on the analysis of 110 encounters, 60 involving English and Italian and 50 involving Arabic and Italian. The institutional representatives are Italian, the patients are from North and Central Africa or from the Middle-East countries. Feller compares, using a number of different examples, the verbal greeting behaviour of members of the Peruvian, the Californian and the German cultures, applying the approach of the minimal action game. Further empirical studies are merged under the headings of ‘politeness’ and ‘selected verbal means of communication’. Cho presents an empirical study on the speech act of rejection among Germans and Koreans and focuses on the category of honorifics and different functions of politeness. Premawardhena shows how politeness and cultural values are reflected in Sinhala, the major language spoken in Sri Lanka, taking examples from existing corpora. She also demonstrates how these linguistic values are transferred to Sri Lankan English. Shilikhina illuminates communicative mistakes in dialogues between English and Russian speakers and separates them into pragmatic and cultural mistakes. It would, for instance, be a pragmatic mistake to interpret the Russian use of imperative constructions in a situation of a request as straightforward while in English the conventional form requires the question form of asking a favour. On the other hand, it would be a cultural mistake to show negative emotions in public. Drawing on data from Ga’dang, Walrod illustrates how diverse the external linguistic forms employed in the action game can be. Walrod claims that the design principles of the overall environment in which human communication takes place need also be considered when seeking to explain similarities among languages. The contributions thus shed light on how human beings as cultural beings act and behave in the mixed game of dialogic interaction. They contribute to a view of dialogue as culturally based interaction which comes about not by the addition of parts but by the interaction of components in the mixed game. The concept of culture emerges as an internal concept inherent to human beings in general as well as being individually shaped, and as an external concept evident in habits and cultural conventions. Finally, there remains the pleasant duty to thank all those who helped to make the workshop and the publication of the papers possible. We would like to name the University of Mainz for providing the facilities required for the organization

Introduction XI

of the workshop, Anke de Looper and the John Benjamins Publishing Company for accompanying the publication process with useful advice and encouragement, Oliver Richter, Bérénice Walther and Sonja Lux for helping to facilitate the formatting process. Mainz & Münster, August 2007

Marion Grein & Edda Weigand

PART I Language, Biology and Culture The crucial debate

Minds in Uniform How generative linguistics regiments culture, and why it shouldn’t Geoffrey Sampson University of Sussex

Linguistic theory is often seen as ethically neutral. But it provides apparent justification for a fashionable model of cognition which threatens the flourishing of the human spirit. According to Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky, language evidence shows that genetics constrains the structure and contents of thought as rigidly as the shape and functioning of the body. This idea harmonizes with recent legal and political developments, under which distinctive cultural norms evolved by independent societies are being swept aside in favour of enforcement of aprioristic systems. The Pinker/Chomsky model of cognition is baseless. It rests chiefly not on empirical observation but on surmises about language behaviour; now that corpus data are allowing us to check these surmises, they turn out to be wildly wrong. If our genes do not constrain our ideas, we cannot assume that the belief-system of Western societies anno 2007 is the last word in human intellectual development.

1. Trivializing cultural differences Practitioners of theoretical linguistics often think of their subject as exempt from the ethical implications which loom large in most branches of social studies. Publications in linguistic theory tend to share the abstract formal quality of mathematical writing, so people imagine that linguistics is as ethically neutral as maths. They are wrong. One of the most significant functions of modern generative linguistic theory is to create a spurious intellectual justification for a poisonous aspect of modern life which has become widespread for nonintellectual reasons: the trivialization of cultural differences between separate human groups. People nowadays do not merely see the cultures that exist today as fairly similar to one another (which, because of modern technology, they often are), but they fail to recognize even the possibility of deep cultural differences. They do not conceive of how alien to us, mentally as well as physically, the life of our predecessors was a few centuries ago, and the life of our successors in time to come may be. Most people with this short-sighted outlook hold it out of simple ignorance. But generative linguistics is creating reasons for saying that it is the correct outlook. Cultures really are not and cannot be all that diverse, if we believe the

4 Geoffrey Sampson

message of Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct”, and of the linguists such as Noam Chomsky from whom Pinker draws his ideas. 2. An earlier consensus It is ironic that the linguistics of recent decades has encouraged this point of view, because when synchronic linguistics got started, about the beginning of the 20th century, and for long afterwards, its main function was – and was seen as – helping to demonstrate how large the cultural differences are between different human groups. The pioneer of synchronic linguistics in North America was the anthropologist Franz Boas (1932:258), who was explicit about the fact that cultural differences often go deeper than laymen at the time tended to appreciate: … forms of thought and action which we are inclined to consider as based on human nature are not generally valid, but characteristic of our specific culture. If this were not so, we could not understand why certain aspects of mental life that are characteristic of the Old World should be entirely or almost entirely absent in aboriginal America. An example is the contrast between the fundamental idea of judicial procedure in Africa and America; the emphasis on oath and ordeal as parts of judicial procedure in the Old World, their absence in the New World.

It is indicative that, in Britain, the first chair of linguistics to be established was located at the School of Oriental and African Studies, an institution which had been founded to encourage study of the diverse cultures of the non-Western world. Standard undergraduate textbooks of linguistics emphasized the significance of structural diversity among languages as a mirror of intellectual diversity among cultures. For instance, H.A. Gleason (1969:7-8) wrote: In learning a second language … [y]ou will have to make … changes in habits of thought and of description of situations in many … instances. … In some languages, situations are not analyzed, as they are in English, in terms of an actor and an action. Instead the fundamental cleavage runs in a different direction and cannot be easily stated in English.

And this idea that human cultural differences can run deep was widely accepted as uncontroversial by educated people whose special expertise had nothing particularly to do with anthropology or with linguistics. To take an example at random from my recent reading, when the historian W.L. Warren discussed the 12th-century Anglo-Norman king Henry II’s dealings with the neighbouring Celtic nations of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, he found it important to begin by explaining fundamental conceptual differences between Celtic and postCarolingian-European world-views. Institutions (such as kingship) which look at first sight familiar were in fact differently put together and informed by different traditions and habits. We are so accustomed to seeing social institutions closely integrated with political institutions … that it is difficult to comprehend the development of a far from primitive and reasonably stable society in which political institutions were of comparatively minor importance. … [In England and

Minds in Uniform 5

Continental Europe] Political order was … made the groundwork of social stability and progress. But this pattern was not inevitable. The Celtic world found an alternative to political peace as the basis for an ordered social life (Warren 1973:151-152).

At the turn of the millennium, we all know that there are many ways in which our modern circumstances make it difficult for people to understand the possibilities of cultural diversity. Because of technology, people increasingly live clustered together in towns – I believe the majority of human beings in the world are now urban- rather than rural-dwellers, for the first time in human history – and modern media are tending to link the populations of the world together into a single ‘global village’. Youngsters in different countries, whose parents or grandparents might have had scarcely any cultural reference points in common, nowadays often spend much of their time listening to the same pop songs and watching the same films. In the past, the chief way in which educated Europeans encountered the details of civilizations radically different from their own was through intensive study of the classics; you cannot spend years learning about ancient Greece or Rome and still suppose that modern Europe or the USA represent the only possible models for successful societies, even if you happen to prefer the modern models. But in recent decades the number of schoolchildren getting more than (at most) a brief exposure to Latin or Greek has shrunk to a vanishingly small minority in Britain, and I suspect elsewhere also. Perhaps most important of all, the internet and the World Wide Web have brought about a sudden foreshortening of people’s mental time horizons. While the usual way for a student to get information was through a library, it was about as easy for him to look at a fifty- or hundred-year-old book as a two- or threeyear-old one. Now that everyone uses the Web, the pre-Web world is becoming relegated to a shadowy existence. Everyone knows it was there, any adult remembers chunks of it, but in practice it just is not accessible in detail in the way that the world of the last few years is. And when Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1993, urbanization and globalization had already happened. So, nowadays, it really is hard for rising generations to get their minds round the idea that the way we live now is not the only possible way for human beings to live. If this is hard, then so much the more reason for academics to put effort into helping people grasp the potential diversity of human cultures. After all, even someone who is thoroughly glad to have been born in our time, and who feels no wistfulness about any features of past or remote present-day societies, surely hopes that life for future generations will be better still. I do not meet many people who find life at the beginning of the 21st century so wonderful in all respects that improvement is inconceivable. But how can we hope to chart positive ways forward into the future, if we have no sense that there is a wide range of alternatives to our current reality? If external circumstances nowadays happen to be making it difficult for people to understand that cultures can differ widely, then explaining and demonstrating this becomes a specially urgent task for the academic profession.

6 Geoffrey Sampson

3. Generative linguistics as a theory of human nature Unfortunately, generative linguistics is doing just the opposite of this. Linguists like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky have been giving us spurious, pseudointellectual reasons to believe that human monoculture really is inevitable. And although, scientifically speaking, their arguments are junk, our modern external circumstances have caused them to receive far more credence than they deserve. For a full justification of my statement that the generative linguistic theory of human nature is junk, I must refer readers to my book “The Language Instinct Debate”. Pinker and other generative linguists deploy a wide range of arguments to make their point of view seem convincing; in “The Language Instinct Debate” I go through these argument systematically and analyse the logical fallacies and false premisses which in each case destroy their force – but I have no space to recapitulate all that here (though I shall discuss some particularly interesting material below). What is more important here is to explain how the generative linguists’ account of human nature relates to the question of cultural diversity. On the face of it one might not see much link between a technical theory about structural universals of language, and ideas about the nonexistence of genuine cultural diversity with respect to vital areas such as law or government. A typical finding of generative linguistics is that grammatical rules in all languages are what is called “structure-dependent” (cf. Chomsky 1968:51). So for instance, a language might have a grammar rule which turns statements into questions by shifting the main verb to the beginning, as many European languages have: the German statement Der Mann, den du eingeladen hast, bleibt in der Küche (“The man you invited will remain in the kitchen”) becomes the question Bleibt der Mann, den du eingeladen hast, in der Küche? (“Does the man you invited remain in the kitchen”) – where the concept ‘main verb’, which picks out the word bleibt (“remains”) in this case, is a concept that depends on the grammatical structure of the whole sentence. But (the claim is) no human language has – or could have – a rule that forms questions by moving the first verb of the statement, so that instead of asking Bleibt der Mann, den du eingeladen hast, in der Küche? (“Does the man you invited remain in the kitchen”) you would ask Hast der Mann, den du eingeladen, bleibt in der Küche? (“Has the man you invited remain in the kitchen”). From an abstract, computational point of view, identifying the first verb is a much simpler operation to define than identifying the main verb, so you might think it should be a commoner kind of rule to find among the languages of the world. But identifying the first verb in a sentence is an operation which is independent of the grammatical structure into which the individual words are grouped; so, instead of being a common type of rule, according to generative linguistics it never occurs at all. Many people can accept this idea that there are universal constraints on the diversity of grammatical rules, as an interesting and possibly true finding of technical linguistic theory, without feeling that it threatens (or even relates in any

Minds in Uniform 7

way to) humanly-significant aspects of cultural diversity. Grammar in our languages is like plumbing in our houses: it needs to be there, but most people really are not interested in thinking about the details. The humanly significant things that happen in houses are things that happen in the dining room, the drawing room, and undoubtedly in the bedrooms, but not in the pipes behind the walls. Many generative linguists undoubtedly see themselves as cultivating a subject that is as self-contained as plumbing is: they themselves are professionally interested in language structure and only in language structure. But the leaders of the profession do not see things that way at all. For Pinker, and for Chomsky, language structure is interesting because it is seen as a specially clear kind of evidence about human cognition in a far broader sense. The fact that grammar is a rather exact field makes it relatively easy to formalize and test theories about grammatical universals. Other aspects of culture, which may have greater human significance, often have a somewhat woolly quality that makes it harder to pin them down mathematically or scientifically. But the value of generative linguistics, for the leaders of the field, lies in the light it sheds on these broader areas of cognition and culture. So, for instance, Chomsky used linguistics to argue that the range of humanly-possible art forms is fixed by our biology: if a lot of modern art seems rubbishy and silly, that may be because we have already exhausted the biologically-available possibilities, leaving no way for contemporary artists to innovate other than by “Mockery of conventions that are, ultimately, grounded in human cognitive capacity”, as he wrote in (1976:125). And similarly, Chomsky felt, the general human enterprise of scientific discovery is limited to trying out a fixed range of theories which our biology makes available to us, and which can by no means be expected to include the truth about various topics – he wrote “Thinking of humans as biological organisms … it is only a lucky accident if their cognitive capacity happens to be well matched to scientific truth in some area” (Chomsky 1976:25). Likewise, although the bulk of Pinker’s book “The Language Instinct” is obviously about language, what it leads up to is a final chapter, ‘Mind Design’, which uses what has gone before as the basis for a far more wide-ranging account of the fixity of human cognition and culture. Pinker refers at length to a book by the social anthropologist Donald Brown (1991) “Human Universals”, in order to argue that alongside Chomsky’s ‘UG’ or Universal Grammar we need to recognize a ‘UP’, or Universal People – behind the apparent diversity of human cultures described by anthropologists lie hundreds of cultural universals, which Pinker specifies via a list of headings that stretches over several pages. In an important sense, human beings don’t really have different cultures – in the picture Pinker presents, human beings share one culture, but with superficial local variations (just as, from Chomsky’s point of view, we do not really speak different languages – for Chomsky it would be more accurate to say that we all speak essentially one language, though with superficial local differences, cf.

8 Geoffrey Sampson

Chomsky 1991:26). And having established his reputation with “The Language Instinct”, Pinker in his most important subsequent books, “How the Mind Works” (1997) and “The Blank Slate” (2002), moves well beyond language to develop in a much more general way this idea that human cognitive life is as biologically determined as human anatomy. Furthermore, it is clear that it is these broader implications which have allowed generative linguistics to make the impact it has achieved on the intellectual scene generally. We often hear findings that, by this or that measure, Noam Chomsky is the world’s most influential living intellectual (most recently, for instance, an international survey published in October 2005 by the magazine “Prospect” www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/intellectuals/results). No-one could conceivably attain that status merely via analysis of grammatical structure, no matter how original. In Chomsky’s case, of course, his status derives in large part from his interventions in concrete political affairs, which are arguably a rather separate matter from his theoretical positions. But Steven Pinker himself attained a very respectable 26th position in the same “Prospect” poll, and Pinker is not known for political activities. So far as the general public is concerned, the importance of generative linguistics has to do with much more than just language. 4. Cognitive constraints and cultural universalism Once one grants the idea that biology makes only a limited range of cultural possibilities available to us, it is a short step to saying that a unique set of optimal social arrangements can be identified which in principle are valid for all humans everywhere. We can’t expect that primitive, economically-backward human groups will have found their way to that optimal ideal, because their circumstances are not conducive to exploring the alternatives that do exist. But the picture which Chomsky (1976:124-125) offers, when he discusses biological limits to the ranges of possible scientific theories or genres of art, is that once society grows rich enough to allow people to escape the social and material conditions that prevent free intellectual development … Then, science, mathematics, and art would flourish, pressing on towards the limits of cognitive capacity.

And he suggests that we in the West seem now to have reached those limits. Third World tribes might live in ways which fail fully to implement the universally ideal human culture, but we Westerners are in a position to be able to identify the right way for humans to live – the way that is right for ourselves, and right for Third World tribes people too, though they don’t know it yet. Certainly, the idea that there is no unique optimal way of life, and that humans ought to be permanently free to experiment with novel cultural arrangements in the expection that societies will always discover new ways to progress, has historically been associated with the belief that the contents of

Minds in Uniform 9

human cognition are not given in advance. The founder of the liberal approach in politics, which holds that the State ought to limit its interference with individual subjects as narrowly as possible in order to leave them free to experiment, was John Locke; and, classically, Locke (1960:II, §1.6) argued that: He that attentively considers the state of a child, at his first coming into the world, will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas, that are to be the matter of his future knowledge. It is by degrees he comes to be furnished with them.

Logically it makes sense for those who believe in biologically-fixed innate ideas to place a low value on the possibilities of cultural diversity and innovation. The trouble is, in reality there are no biological constraints imposing specific, detailed structure on human cognitive life. And someone who believes in cognitive universals, in a situation where none exist, is almost bound to end up mistaking the accidental features of his own culture, or of the dominant culture in his world, for cultural universals. 5. ‘Universal grammar’ means European grammar In the case of linguistics this mistake is very clear. From the early years of generative grammar onwards, sceptics repeatedly objected that generative linguists were merely formalizing structural features of English, or features shared by most Indo-European languages, and assuming that they had identified universals of language structure. Generative linguists often denied this, and argued that the initial over-emphasis on English was just a temporary consequence of the theory having been born in an English-speaking country. But, even though by now a far wider range of languages are regularly discussed in the generative literature, the sceptics’ charge remains true. Exotic languages are observed through English-speaking spectacles. Sometimes this emerges from the very terminology of the field. Consider how generative linguists discuss the incidence of subject pronouns. In North-west European languages, such as English, German, and French, it is roughly true that every finite verb has an explicit subject – even when the identity of the subject would be obvious from the context alone, a pronoun has to appear. But we don’t need to go beyond the Indo-European language family to find languages where that is not so: in (Classical or Modern) Greek, for instance, the verb inflexion shows the person and number of the subject, and it is fairly unusual to include a subject pronoun as well. Generative linguists call languages like Greek ‘pro-drop languages’. The implication of ‘pro-drop’ is transparent: in ‘Universal Grammar’ (or in other words, in English) verbs have subject pronouns, so a language like Greek which often lacks them must be a language in which the pronouns that are universally present at an underlying level are ‘dropped’ at the surface. In the case of Greek and other European pro-drop languages, this Anglocentric view of the situation is at least consistent, in the sense that normally these

10 Geoffrey Sampson

languages do contain features showing what the subject pronoun would be, if it were present. But if we go beyond Europe, we find languages where even that is not true. In Classical Chinese, verbs commonly lack subjects; and there is no question of inferring the identity of missing subjects from verb inflexions, because Chinese is not an inflecting language. A European who hears this might guess that the difference between Classical Chinese and European languages is that our languages use formal features to identify subjects explicitly, while Chinese identifies them implicitly by mentioning situational features from which verb subjects can be inferred. But that is not true either: often in Classical Chinese the subject of a verb cannot be inferred. A standard puzzle for Europeans who encounter Classical Chinese poetry is ambiguity about whether a poet is describing events in his own life, or actions of some third party. Because our own languages are the way they are, we feel that there must be an answer to this question; when a Chinese poet writes a verb, let’s say the word for see, surely in his own mind he must either have been thinking I see or thinking he sees? But that just forces our own categories of thought onto a language where they do not apply. To the Chinese themselves, asking whether the poet meant I see or he sees is asking a non-question (cf. Liu 1962:40-41). In English we can say He saw her without specifying whether he was wearing glasses or saw her with his naked eye. In Classical Chinese one could, and often did, say saw her without specifying I saw or he saw. How can the implications of the term pro-drop be appropriate, if there are languages whose speakers not only frequently do not use pronouns but frequently do not even have corresponding concepts in their mind? Pro-drop is only one example of the way that generative linguistics mistakes features that happen to apply to the well-known languages spoken in our particular time and part of the world for features that are imposed on all human languages by human biology. But the point is far more general. David Gil (2001:102-132) discusses a local dialect of the Malay or Indonesian language, spoken on the Indonesian island of Riau. 1 When native speakers of this dialect are talking casually and naturally, their grammar has features that make it difficult to map on to the alleged structural universals discussed by generative linguistics. But when the speakers are challenged to think consciously about their language, for instance by translating from English into Malay, they switch to a formal version of Malay which looks much more like the kind of language which textbooks of theoretical linguistics discuss. One might imagine that this formal Malay reflects speakers’ true underlying linguistic competence, while the colloquial dialect is a kind of reduced, distorted languagevariety relevant only to studies of performance (On the concepts of linguistic ‘competence’ versus ‘performance’, see Chomsky 1965:4). But according to Gil it is the other way round. The colloquial language-variety represents the speakers’ 1

Note that ‘Malay’ and ‘Indonesian’ (or ‘Bahasa Indonesia’) are alternative names for the same language, spoken in Malaysia and in Indonesia; I shall refer to it here as Malay.

Minds in Uniform 11

real linguistic heritage. Formal Malay is a more or less artificial construct, created in response to the impact of Western culture, and containing features designed to mirror the logical structure of European languages. So, naturally, formal Malay looks relatively ‘normal’ to Western linguists, but it is no real evidence in favour of universals of grammar – whereas colloquial Riau dialect is good evidence against linguistic universals. Speakers use the formal variety when thinking consciously about their language, because politically it is the high-prestige variety; but it is not their most natural language. I believe analogous situations occur with many Third World languages, and that generative linguists tend systematically to study artificial languages created under Western cultural influence under the mistaken impression that they are finding evidence that alien cultures are much the same as ours. 6. Honest and dishonest imperialism What generative linguistics is doing here is describing the diverse languages of the world as if they were all variations on a pattern defined by the dominant language or language-group – but at the same time pretending that this does not amount to Anglocentrism or Eurocentrism, because the fixed common pattern is defined not by a particular language or language-family, but by a hypothetical innate cognitive structure shared by all human beings. In a similar way, 21stcentury internationalists are doing at least as much as 18th- and 19th-century imperialists did to impose their particular preferred cultural norms on people to whom those norms are alien; but the modern internationalists pretend that this does not count as cultural imperialism, because the favoured norms are presented not as arbitrary preferences, but as principles allegedly valid for all peoples at all times (even though many of them were thought up only quite recently). The empire-builders of the 19th century did not think or speak in those terms. They were well aware that different peoples had genuinely different and sometimes incompatible cultural norms, and that there were real conflicts to be resolved between the principle that indigenous cultures should be respected, and the principle that government should guarantee to alien subjects the same rights that it guaranteed to members of the governing nation. The well-known example is suttee, the Hindu practice of burning a dead man’s widow on his funeral pyre. When the British took control of India, they tried to avoid interfering with most native customs, but as an exception they banned suttee. On one famous occasion a group of (male) Hindus protested about this to Sir Charles James Napier (1782– 1853), who is reported to have replied: You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

12 Geoffrey Sampson

Notice that there was no suggestion here of suttee violating some universal code of human rights, which the Hindus could in principle have known about before the British arrived. It wasn’t that at all: Napier saw Hindu and British moral universes as incommensurable. Within the Hindu moral universe, burning widows was the right thing to do. Within the British moral universe, burning anyone alive was a wrong thing to do. The British had acquired power over the Hindus, so now the Hindus were going to be forced to play by British rules whether they agreed with them or not. We can reasonably debate and disagree about where the right balance lies between respecting alien cultures, and seeking to modify those cultures when they involve systematic oppression or cruelty. But to my mind the bare minimum we owe to other cultures is at least to acknowledge that they are indeed different. If powerful outsiders tell me that aspects of the culture I grew up in are unacceptable to them, so they are going to change these whether I like it or not, then I shall probably resent that and try to resist. But I believe I should be humiliated far worse, if the outsiders tell me and my fellows that we had not got a genuinely separate culture in the first place – the patterns they are imposing on us are the universal cultural patterns appropriate to all human beings, and if our traditional way of life deviated in some respects that was just because we were a bit muddled and ignorant. That is the attitude which present-day internationalism implies and generative linguistics supports. Of course, there is no doubt that Noam Chomsky in particular would indignantly deny that. He is frequently eloquent in denouncing imperialism. But his comments on specific political issues, and the logical consequences of his abstract theorizing, are two very different things. What is really poisonous about the ideology that emerges from generative linguistics is that it creates a rationale for powerful groups to transform the ways of life of powerless groups while pretending that they are imposing no real changes – they are merely freeing the affected groups to realize the same innate cultural possibilities which are as natural to them as they are to everyone else, because we human beings all inherit the same biologically-fixed cultural foundations. 7. Vocabulary and culture It seems obvious that the institutions a society evolves for itself, and the kinds of fulfilment its members seek, will have a great deal to do with the structure of concepts encoded in its language. Consider for instance the central role of the concept of ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ in European life. The history of European political thought, from the classical Greeks to today, has been very largely about how best to interpret the ideal of freedom and how to maximize the incidence of freedom. When Europeans assess the quality of their individual lives, they tend to do so in significant part by assessing how much freedom they enjoy. Europeans were able to assign this central role to the concept of freedom, because they spoke

Minds in Uniform 13

languages which encoded the concept from a very early period. Latin liber, and Greek ἐλεύθερος, both derive from the same Indo-European root, which originally meant ‘people’ (as the German cognate Leute does today). The semantic transition from ‘belonging to the people’ to ‘free’ originally came about because those born into an ethnic group were free men while those brought in as captives from elsewhere were slaves. The fact that this same transition shows up in both the Italic and the Greek branches of Indo-European implies that the ‘freedom’ concept dates back before the historical period, most of the way to Proto-Indo-European. 2 Because the concept of ‘freedom’ corresponded to a common word familiar to any speaker, no doubt originally in a relatively downto-earth, unsophisticated sense, it was available for thinkers from Greeks in the Classical world through to Dante, Locke, and many others in recent centuries to invest with the much greater weight of significance and emotional importance that we associate with it today. We can see how culturally conditioned this development was, if we compare Europe with China. Chinese civilization is older than ours, and for most of the last 3000 years, until the Industrial Revolution, I believe any neutral observer would have had to judge Chinese civilization as more complex and sophisticated than that of Europe. But, as it happens, the large battery of concepts which the Chinese language made available to its speakers included no root at all comparable to our word free. When Chinese intellectuals began to examine and translate Western thought in the 19th century, they had to adapt a compound term used in a distantly-related sense, tzu yu 自 由, to stand for the European concept (cf. Huang 1972:69); and I believe that Chinese readers had difficulty in grasping that Europeans saw this idea as positive – for the Chinese a good society was one in which individuals subordinated themselves to the collectivity. Philosophy in traditional China was predominantly political philosophy, but Chinese political thought was not concerned with individual freedom, and individual Chinese who assessed the quality of their lives did not use that measure. Arguably, this contrast remains highly relevant for understanding the differences between China and the West today. This interdependence between vocabulary and social institutions seems a familiar, uncontroversial idea. But generative linguistics has no room for it. The generative view of vocabulary is explained in Pinker’s “Language Instinct” by reference to Jerry Fodor’s (1975) theory of a ‘language of thought’. According to Fodor, we understand utterances in an ordinary spoken language by translating them into an internal ‘language of thought’ which is fixed by human genetics; and because the language of thought is inherited biologically rather than evolved 2 English free and German frei, together with Welsh rhydd, represent a similar semantic transition in a different Indo-European root, and again the fact that the transition is reflected both in Germanic and in Celtic suggests that the ‘freedom’ sense is old – though in this case there is apparently an argument that one subfamily may have borrowed it from the other after Germanic and Celtic had separated.

14 Geoffrey Sampson

culturally, it is universal. The languages of different societies do not truly differ in their vocabularies: they all encode the same innate set of concepts. If European languages all have a word for ‘free’ and Chinese traditionally had no such word, Fodor might explain that by saying that the European languages happen to use a single word for a compound of universal concepts which traditional Chinese would have needed to spell out via a paraphrase – rather as German has a single word Geschwister for a concept which English has to spell out as a three-word phrase, ‘brothers and sisters’. Here I am putting words into Fodor’s mouth: Fodor does not actually discuss specific cases of vocabulary difference, which is perhaps quite wise of him. Pinker (1995:82) does, though. Indeed, he gives the specific example of ‘freedom’ as an instance of a concept which all human beings possess, whether or not it is encoded in their language. But if one insists that members of a major world civilization, which over millennia neither used a word for a particular concept nor adopted institutions which reflected that concept, nevertheless had the concept in their minds, then surely we have left science behind and entered the realm of quasi-religious dogma. If Fodor and Pinker are right, vocabulary differences would be superficial things. They would not amount to reasons for societies to equip themselves with significantly different institutions, or for their members to pursue significantly different goals. Incidentally, even if we did accept Fodor’s and Pinker’s idea that vocabulary is innate, it would not follow that it is universal. It might seem more plausible that vocabulary should vary with individuals’ ancestry. Chinese might not only lack some concepts that European languages contain, and vice versa, but yellow men, or black men, would be unable to learn some white words even when exposed to them, and white men would be unable to learn some yellow words or black words. After all, it is clear that the human brain did not cease to evolve biologically after the time when our species began to diverge into distinct races, and indeed we know now that it has continued to evolve in recent times (cf. Lahn et al. 2005); so why would the brain modules responsible for the ‘language of thought’ be exempt from biological evolution? I have seen no hint of this concept of racially-bound vocabulary in the writings of generative linguists, but the most plausible reason for that is merely that they fear the personal consequences of taking their ideas to this logical conclusion. The generative linguists want to be influential; they want to dominate their corner of the academic map, so that the research grants and attractive jobs keep coming. You do not achieve that by raising the possibility that coloured people might be genetically incapable of fully understanding English. 8. Universalist politics If all human minds shared the same biologically-fixed stock of concepts, then it might make sense to say that there is one system of social ideals which can be deduced by studying our innate cognitive mechanisms, and which is valid for all

Minds in Uniform 15

human beings everywhere and at all times, whether they realize it or not. Increasingly, we find that politics these days is operated as if that idea were true (on this development cf. Phillips 2006:63-78). For instance, very recently we in the European Union narrowly avoided adopting a Constitution whose text laid down a mass of detailed rules covering aspects of life (for instance, labour relations, housing policy, the treatment of the disabled, etc.), which traditionally would have found no place in a constitution. A normal State constitution confines itself to specifying basic rules about how the organs of the State interrelate, what the limits of their respective powers are, how their members are chosen and dismissed, and so forth. Detailed rules about relationships between private employers and employees, say, would evolve over time through the continuing argy-bargy of political activity within the unchanging framework of the basic law. But, if human culture is built on the basis of a limited range of concepts that are biologically fixed and common to all human beings, then perhaps it should be possible to work out an ideal set of rules for society in much more detail, in the expectation that they will remain ideal in the 22nd and 23rd centuries – after all, human biology is not likely to change much over a few hundred years. We escaped the European constitution, thanks to the voters of France and the Netherlands – though the mighty ones of the European project seem still to believe that the constitution was a good idea, and seem to be quietly attempting to revive it. But there are plenty of other examples where laws are being changed in the name of hypothetical universal principles, although the laws in question have worked unproblematically for long periods and the populations affected have no desire for change. Thus, consider what has been done over the last few years to the island of Sark, which is a constitutionally-separate dependency of the British Crown a few miles off the northern coast of France. Sark is one of the world’s smallest States, with a population of about 600, and politically it has been up to now a remarkable feudal survival, with a constitution that must have been on the old-fashioned side even when the island was settled in the 16th century. Two or three years ago Sark was forced by European Union pressure to remove the provisions in its laws which prescribed the death penalty for treason, although the Serquois population protested loudly that they believed treason should remain punishable by death. And now a couple of rich newcomers have found that the laws of Sark do not suit them, so they are using the European Convention on Human Rights to get the constitution overturned and transformed into a standard modern democratic system. Until a few decades ago, we in Britain had the death penalty for more crimes than just treason, and debate continues about whether we were wise to give it up. The USA retains the death penalty today. Surely it is obvious that this is the kind of issue on which we can expect different cultures to differ, not one that can be settled in terms of hypothetical universal principles? It is understandable that the

16 Geoffrey Sampson

Serquois take a more serious view of treason than we English do: they had the experience within living memory of being invaded and occupied by enemy forces, something which England has happily been spared for almost a thousand years. Of course, if one believes in detailed universal principles underlying human culture, then local accidents of history may be neither here nor there. But, for those of us who disbelieve in a detailed biologically-fixed substratum for culture, it is expected that differences of historical experience of this kind will lead to differences in present-day cultural frameworks, and it is right and proper that they should be allowed to do so. As for the constitution: the fact that the Serquois would prefer to keep it does not matter. The fact that in a face-to-face society of 600 men, women, and children there are better ways available to individuals to register their opinions than marking a cross on a slip of paper once every few years doesn’t matter. The culture of Sark is going to be changed over the heads of the Serquois; but instead of being presented as a case of two powerful people selfishly forcing 600 powerless people to change their ways, which is the truth of it, we are asked to see it as a case of the Serquois finally achieving rights which have been unjustly withheld from them for centuries. I could give other examples from more distant areas of the world which are much more serious (though perhaps not quite as absurd) as the defeudalization of Sark. 3 The general point is that we are moving at present from a world in which everyone recognizes that cultures are different, though powerful cultures sometimes impose their will on weaker ones and modify them, to a world where that still happens but the powerful nations or groups pretend that the basic principles of culture are everywhere alike, so that if they interfere with alien cultures they are not essentially changing them – merely allowing them to be what they were trying to be anyway, although in some cases they didn’t realize it. Politicians do not often state their assumptions at this level of philosophical abstraction, but our outgoing Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has recently made explicit remarks on the topic, in a valedictory essay on the lessons of his ten years as premier. Justifying his foreign policy, he wrote: 3

Consider for instance the way in which Britain has recently been eliminating the residual dependence of ex-colonial West Indian jurisdictions on the English legal system, and setting them up with fully-independent legal frameworks of their own, but in doing so has been careful to provide the newly-independent legal systems with entrenched rules against outlawing homosexual activity. It is clear that cultures are very diverse in their attitudes to homosexuality, which was a serious criminal offence in Britain itself not many decades ago. We have changed our views on this, but many African-descended cultures seem to have a specially strong horror of homosexuality. If we are serious about giving other peoples their independence, we have to accept that their cultures will embody some different choices from ours on issues like this. But instead, the new internationalists announce that alien nations are required to conform culturally to a set of principles which are alleged to be universally valid – and which, just by coincidence, happen to match the principles embraced at the moment by the world’s most powerful nations. Setting people free, but requiring them to use their freedom in approved ways, is not setting them free.

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There is nothing more ridiculous than the attempt to portray ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ as somehow ‘Western’ concepts which, mistakenly, we try to apply to nations or peoples to whom they are alien. There may well be governments to whom they are alien. But not peoples. ... These values are universal (Blair 2007:30).

The Prime Minister is in error. The concepts of democracy and freedom are specific cultural creations, in the same way that the game of chess or the Apple Macintosh operating system are. They may be excellent ideas, but they are not ‘universal’ ideas. If the political leaders of the English-speaking world are taking it for granted now that only tyrannical governments stand in the way of culturallyremote populations realizing essentially the same structure of political ideals as ours, because that structure is innate in everyone, this may explain a great deal about recent overseas interventions and their unhappy outcomes. I have dealt with the non-universality of the freedom concept in the previous section. In the case of democracy, one might have thought that a general awareness of European intellectual history would have been enough to show how culture-specific the concept is. There is a clear parallel between this new imperialism of universal rights, and the generative-linguistics concept of universal cognitive structure. Obviously, I do not suggest that the sort of people who decide to impose adult suffrage on the island of Sark are doing so because they have been reading Noam Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” and got a bit over-excited. Probably they have never heard of Noam Chomsky or Steven Pinker. But the link is that intellectuals such as Chomsky and Pinker are creating a philosophical climate within which the new imperialism of the 21st century becomes justifiable. Without that philosophical climate, the new imperialism is just a product of ignorance. Because people these days learn so little about cultures that are distant from our own, they genuinely fail to appreciate that human cultures can be extremely different; and consequently, when they spot something somewhere far away from Western metropolises which looks out of line, they take it to indicate a pathological deviation that needs to be normalized. That attitude could be cured by better education. But, if most of the principles of human culture are determined by the shared genetic inheritance of our species, then where there are cultural differences it becomes reasonable to infer that one of the cultures really is pathological in the relevant respect. And, since it is difficult for any member of an established, successful culture to believe that his own familiar way of life is diseased, the alien culture is assumed to need curing – for its own good. 9. Abandoning the touchstone of empiricism The ideology which is emerging from generative linguistics does not only involve new and surprising ideas about the biological determination of cognition. It also embodies new and surprising ideas about how we decide what is true.

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If a set of popular ideas are factually mistaken, traditionally we expect that sooner or later they will be given up, because people see that the evidence refutes them. In the case of generative linguistics, though, this routine safety-mechanism of scientific advance is not working, because one component of the generative approach is an explicit claim that empirical evidence is not relevant. Because linguistics is about things happening in speakers’ minds (the generativists argue), if you want to find out how the grammar of your language works, what you should do is look into your mind – consult your intuitions as a speaker, rather than listening to how other people speak in practice. How people actually speak is linguistic ‘performance’, which the generativists see as an imperfect, distorted reflection of the true linguistic ‘competence’ within speakers’ minds. Besides, a linguist’s intuition gives him access to information about the precise construction he happens to be interested in at the time – even if this is in fact a good grammatical construction, one might have to listen out for a very long time before one was lucky enough to hear a speaker use it in real life. Most of us corpus linguists know about the famous occasion when the generativist Robert Lees responded with amazement to the news that Nelson Francis had got a grant to produce the Brown Corpus, the world’s first electronic language corpus: That is a complete waste of your time and the government’s money. You are a native speaker of English; in ten minutes you can produce more illustrations of any point in English grammar than you will find in many millions of words of random text (Biber & Finnegan 1991:204).

We have been here before. In the Middle Ages, people used intuition to decide all sorts of scientific questions: for instance, they knew that the planets moved in circular orbits, because the circle is the only shape perfect enough to suit a celestial object – and when empirical counter-evidence began coming in, they piled epicycles on epicycles in order to reconcile their intuitive certainty about circles with the awkward observations. Since Galileo, most of us have understood that intuitive evidence is no use: it misleads you. The planets in reality travel in ellipses. And even though language is an aspect of our own behaviour rather than a distant external reality, intuitive evidence is no more reliable in linguistics than it is in astronomy. Some of the mistakes that generative linguists have made by relying on intuitive evidence have been breathtakingly large. Let me go back to the issue I discussed earlier about the ‘structure-dependence’ of the rule for forming questions in English or German. This is actually a crucial case for the generative theory of innate cognitive structure, because it is the standard example they use in order to argue that children get the grammar of their mother-tongue right without exposure to relevant evidence from their elders’ speech. German and British children grow up using structure-dependent forms of question rule, because they are born knowing that grammar rules are always structure-dependent. The generativists claim that they must be born knowing this, because few children will ever hear examples which show that it is correct to ask Bleibt der Mann, den du

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eingeladen hast, in der Küche?, and incorrect to ask Hast der Mann, den du eingeladen, bleibt in der Küche? Noam Chomsky has been outspoken about the impossibility that children could learn this kind of thing from experience. He said in 1975 that examples of this kind “rarely arise … you can go over a vast amount of data of experience without ever finding such a case”; “A person might go through much or all of his life without ever having been exposed to relevant evidence” (cf. PiattelliPalmarini 1980:40 and 114-115). These are large claims, for which Chomsky quotes no evidence at all; but they are easy claims to test. To be fair to Chomsky, thirty years ago they were less easy to test – if we are discussing how people speak in casual, natural conversation, then recording quantities of that kind of material, transcribing it, and putting it into a form that researchers can conveniently study is a demanding task. In 1975 it had not really been done yet. Perhaps Chomsky did not anticipate how soon it would be done. In Britain we have had the British National Corpus available for more than ten years now, and its 4.2 million words of ‘demographically-sampled’ speech makes it easy to check a claim like Chomsky’s. 4 If we translate Chomsky’s “much or all of a person’s life” as a period of fifty years, my calculation based on the British National Corpus is that, just for one particular subtype of relevant evidence, the average Briton would hear on the order of 1700 examples in that time – one every week or two (cf. Sampson 2005:81). 1700 is a lot more than zero. So what happens to the generative argument that children must be born knowing about structure-dependence? If you allow science to rely on individual scientists’ intuitions rather than on interpersonally-observable data, you have a problem when different scientists report conflicting intuitions about the same facts – how to resolve the conflict, if the neutral test of empirical observation has been abandoned? Perhaps the only way to do it is to treat certain individuals as having a special privileged status, so that their intuitions prevail in cases of conflict. William Labov has documented in detail how Chomsky uses just this strategy. When Chomsky finds that his own judgments about the grammatical status of some sequence of English words disagree with those of another linguist, he describes his own judgments as ‘data’ or ‘facts’, which a theory about English grammar is required to capture; the conflicting judgments he calls ‘interpretations of facts’, or ‘factual claims’, which Chomsky will ignore if they cannot be fitted into his theory (cf. Labov 1975:99-101). It is difficult to see what alternative strategy intuition-based linguistics has to this personal approach to evidence testing, but it means returning to a form of the mediaeval ‘argument from authority’: the guarantee of truth is, not correspondence with observation, but the name on the cover of the book.

4

For the British National Corpus, see www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk

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10. Intuition-based politics Now let’s turn away from linguistics and back again to human culture in the wider sense. Again and again in the contemporary world we find political decisions which crucially affect people’s ways of life being made on a basis of intuition, when empirical evidence is available but is ignored. A good example is foreign aid. To many people in the present-day West it ranks as an unquestionable axiom that the best way to help African and other Third-World societies out of grinding poverty is to step up the level of aid payments which our governments hand over to their governments. In reality, there has been abundant argument based on hard evidence, from economists like the late Lord (Peter) Bauer in England and William Easterly in the USA, that foreign aid doesn’t work (cf. Bauer 1981, Easterly 2006). It is a good way of politicizing recipient societies and diverting the efforts of their populations away from developing successful independent and productive ways of life towards striving to become unproductive government clients; and it is a good way of turning Third World governments in turn into clients of Western governments, so that the direct control of the age of empires is replaced by a looser, less public form of imperialism. But as a method of making the average African less poor: forget it. We know what would genuinely improve the lot of the average African: free trade, which would allow individual Africans to build up businesses producing the agricultural goods which their economies are ready to produce, and selling them to Western markets free of tariff barriers such as the scandalous European Common Agricultural Policy, which at present actively prevents Third World residents from making a living in the only ways that are realistically open to many of them. Free trade is not enough – poor countries also need decent government – but it is a necessary condition. Free trade would permit the growth of genuinely independent societies in the Third World, shaped through the inhabitants’ own initiatives and choices. But that is not going to happen, because we in the West intuitively know that foreign aid is the answer. It hasn’t achieved much over the last fifty years, and the economic logic suggests that it never could – but who cares about empirical evidence and argument, when the thought of our tax money going in foreign aid gives us a warm, virtuous glow inside ourselves, and that is what counts? Commercial trading relationships feel intuitively like a cold-hearted area of life, not something that we ought to be imposing on people as poor and powerless as the residents of sub-Saharan Africa. The current Doha Round of international trade negotiations was intended among other things to give Third World countries freer access for exports to the EU and the USA; but as I put this paper together in the summer of 2006, the Doha Round is collapsing with little achieved, and how many in the West have even noticed? Few, I think.

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Foreign aid is one area where public policy is nowadays based on intuition rather than on empirical evidence, to an extent that I believe would not have happened fifty or a hundred years ago. Let me give one more, smaller-scale example: the recent fate of foxhunting in England. For hundreds of years, riding horses to follow dogs hunting foxes has been a central component of the culture of various rural parts of England. Not only does it provide glorious exercise for all ages and both sexes in winter, when other outdoor possibilities are few, but the organizations created to manage local hunts have also been the focus of much other social activity in remote areas; the dances where the girls have the best opportunity to dress up and show themselves off are typically the Hunt Balls. In 2004, in the face of passionate objections by members of hunting communities, foxhunting was made illegal, with no compensation for the thousands of hunt servants and others whose livelihoods were abolished at a stroke, by Members of Parliament most of whom are town-dwellers and scarcely know one end of a horse from the other. The true motive for this legislation was that hunting is associated with features of rural society that our current governing party instinctively dislikes – a local Master of Fox Hounds will often (though by no means always) be an aristocrat living in a large old house. But that sort of thing could not be openly stated as a reason for legal interference with people’s longstanding way of life, so instead it was argued that hunting is unnecessarily cruel. This is a testable claim. Foxes in a farming area are pests whose numbers have to be controlled somehow, and it is an open question whether hunting with hounds is a specially cruel way to do it. The Government set up an enquiry under Lord Burns to answer the question; rather to Government’s surprise, I think, the Burns Report published in 2000 found that banning foxhunting would have no clear positive effect on the incidence of cruelty (it might even increase cruelty), and it would have other consequences which everyone agrees to be adverse. 5 So the empirical evidence was there: how much influence did it have on the parliamentary process which led to the ban? None at all. The people who made the decisions were not interested in empirical evidence. Foxes look like sweet, cuddly, furry creatures, and parliamentarians intuitively knew that hunting them was wrong. Many country folk had the opposite intuition, but how seriously could one take them? Faced with a choice between a peasant type in cheap clothes and a rural accent, versus a well-spoken Member of Parliament in an expensive dark suit, it is obvious which one has authoritative intuitions and which one has mere personal opinions. Likewise, if we in the West with our comfortable houses and air-conditioned cars know intuitively that foreign aid is the way to rescue Africans from poverty, isn’t it clear to everyone that our intuitions are more authoritative than those of

5

www.huntinginquiry.gov.uk/. In July 2006 a survey on the practical effects of the Hunting Act appeared to show that its consequences for fox welfare have indeed been negative, with many foxes now wounded by shotguns rather than cleanly killed (Daily Telegraph 28 Jul 2006, p. 13).

22 Geoffrey Sampson

some African living in a thatched hut and wearing a grubby singlet, who might prefer the chance to find wider markets for his cash crops? Well, to me it isn’t clear. But then I am one of those eccentrics who still believes in empirical evidence. I have offered two examples of the way in which decisions that crucially impact on people’s ways of life are these days being made in terms of intuition and arguments from authority, rather than in terms of hard, reliable evidence. Obviously I am not suggesting that this is happening because of generative linguistics. Most people who are influential in decisions about foreign aid, foxhunting, or many other current-affairs issues that I could have used as illustrations, will be people who have never given a thought to generative linguistics or to the picture of human cognition which is derived from it. But what that theory does is to provide an intellectual rationale for these political developments. While people in political life were moving purely as a matter of fashion away from reliance on empirical evidence toward reliance on intuition and argument from authority, one could point out how irrational this fashion is. Even those who were caught up in the tide of fashion, if they understood what they were doing, might with luck be persuaded to turn back to the firm ground of empirical evidence; they would have found no explicit arguments to justify the fashionable trend. What generative linguistics has been doing is supplying those missing arguments. It has begun to create a climate of intellectual opinion in which people can openly say in so many words, “Yes, we are basing decisions on intuition rather than on evidence, and we are right to do so. Empirical argument is outdated 20th-century thinking – we are progressing beyond that.” But moving from reliance on empirical science to reliance on intuition and arguments from authority is not progress. It is a reversion to the preEnlightenment Middle Ages. That is why it is so important to explode the false claims of generative linguistics. 11. New evidence for language diversity Happily, if we treat generative linguistics as a scientific theory rather than a matter of blind faith, then it is easily exploded. I have said that I cannot rehearse all the detailed arguments in my 2005 book – if I had done that here, there would have been no space for the proper topic of this paper. But a few of the most recent findings by non-generative linguists are so very destructive for generative theory that the older and more technical debates become almost beside the point. Until recently, the consensus among linguists of all theoretical persuasions was that known human languages seem to be roughly comparable in the expressive power of their grammars. Languages can differ in the nature of the verbal constructions they use in order to express some logical relationship, but we did not find fundamental logical structures that certain extant languages were just incapable of expressing. And that is crucial for the generative theory of human

Minds in Uniform 23

cognition. If our cognitive structures are biologically fixed, then all our languages should be equally capable of clothing those structures in words. A sceptic might respond that there is another possible explanation: all the languages we know about have emerged from a very long prehistoric period of cultural evolution, so there has been ample time for them to develop all the constructions they might need – simpler, structurally more primitive languages must once have existed, but that would have been long before the invention of writing. Still, the generative camp might have seen this as a rather weak answer. It began to look a lot stronger, with the publication in 2000 of Guy Deutscher’s “Syntactic Change in Akkadian”. Akkadian was one of the earliest written languages in the world, and Deutscher shows that we can see it developing in the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1500 BC), under the pressure of new communicative needs, from a state in which it contained no subordinate complement clauses into a later state where that construction had come into being. If the general grammatical architecture of human languages were determined by human biology, it is hard to see how a logical resource as fundamental as the complement clause could possibly be a historical development. It ought to be one of the universal features common to all human languages at all periods. Then, in 2005, Daniel Everett published a description of the Pirahã language of the southern Amazon basin. Pirahã seems in a number of respects to be quite astonishingly primitive, lacking not only all types of subordinate clause and indeed grammatical embedding of any kind, but also having no quantifier terms such as ‘all’ or ‘most’, no words for even low numbers, and many other remarkable features. If the structural features of language were truly determined by human biology, then one might have to conclude that the speakers of Pirahã are a separate species from Homo sapiens. But that would be quite absurd – in reality the Pirahã are closely related ethnically to a neighbouring South American group which is largely assimilated to the Portuguese-speaking majority culture. In face of findings like Deutscher’s and Everett’s, it seems indisputable that early-20th-century scholars such as Franz Boas or H.A. Gleason, whom I quoted at the beginning, were right about language diversity, and scholars like Pinker or Chomsky are just wrong. 12. Conclusion The truth is that languages are cultural developments, which human groups create freely, unconstrained except in trivial ways by their biology, just as they create games, or dances, or legal systems. I do not believe that the game of cricket is encoded in an Englishman’s genes, and nor is the English language. Linguistics gives us no serious grounds for believing in a model of human cognition according to which we are limited culturally to realizing one or other of a fixed range of possibilities. We are free to invent new cultural forms in the future, just as we have so abundantly done in the past.

24 Geoffrey Sampson

We owe it to ourselves, to our descendants, and perhaps above all to our Third World neighbours to reject any ideology that claims to set boundaries to this process of ever-new blossoming of the human spirit. Just as our lives have risen above the limitations which constrained our ancestors, so we must leave those who come after us free to rise above the limitations which restrict us. References Bauer, Peter T. 1981. Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Biber, Douglas & Edward Finnegan. 1991. “On the Exploitation of Computerized Corpora in Variation Studies”. English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in honour of Jan Svartvik ed. by Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, 204-220. London: Longman. Blair, Tony. 2007. “What I’ve Learned”. The Economist 2 Jun 2007. Boas, Franz. 1940 [1886]. “The Aims of Anthropological Eesearch”. Race, Language and Culture ed. by Franz Boas. New York: McMillan. Brown, Donald E. 1991. Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1968. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Chomsky, Noam. 1976. Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon Books. Chomsky, Noam. 1991. “Linguistics and Cognitive Science: Problems and mysteries”. The Chomskyan Turn ed. by Asa Kasher, 26-53. Cambridge: Blackwell. Deutscher, Guy. 2000. Syntactic Change in Akkadian: The evolution of sentential complementation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Easterly, William. 2006. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. New York: Penguin Books. Everett, Daniel L. 2005. “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã. Another look at the design features of human language”. Current Anthropology 46:4.621-46. Fodor, Jerry A. 1975. The Language of Thought. New York: Crowell. Fung, Yu-lan 1960. Short History of Chinese Philosophy. New York: Macmillan. Gil, David. 2001. “Escaping Eurocentrism Fieldwork as a Process of Unlearning”. Linguistic Fieldwork ed. by Paul Newmann and Martha Ratliff, 102-132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gleason, Henry Allan. 19693. Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Huang, Philip. C. 1972. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism. London: University of Washington Press. Karlgren, Bernhard. 1957. Grammata Serica Recensa. Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. Labov, William. 1975. “Empirical Foundations of Linguistic Theory”. The Scope of American Linguistics ed. by Robert Austerlitz, 77-113. Lisse: Peter de Ridder. Locke, John. 1694/1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Liu, James J.Y. 1962. The Art of Chinese Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lahn, Bruce et al. 2005. „Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a brain size determinant in Homo sapiens”. Science 9:309.5741.1720-1722. Phillips, Melanie. 2006. Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State within. London: Gibson Square Books. Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo, ed. 1980. Language and Learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Pinker, Stephen. 1995. The Language Instinct: The new science of language and mind. London: Penguin Books.

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Pinker, Stephen. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton. Pinker, Stephen. 2002. The Blank Slate. The modern denial of human nature. New York: Viking Penguin. Sampson, Geoffrey. 2005. The ‘Language Instinct Debate’. Rev. Edition. London & New York: Continuum International. Warren, Wilfred L. 1973. Henry II. London: Eyre Methuen.

The Sociobiology of Language Edda Weigand University of Münster

The issue of what determines language and dialogue, nature or culture, has been repeatedly discussed over the last decades. It is the core issue of the so-called ‘language instinct debate’ which is a debate between two extreme positions, nativism and empiricism. The paper reviews the arguments involved and takes a mediating position that considers human competence-in-performance to be determined by the interaction of biology and culture. The Mixed Game Model is proposed as an open holistic model which aims to describe human competence-in-performance by means of Principles of Probability. Examples are given to demonstrate how human nature and culture interact and shape human behaviour and action.

1. The puzzle Looking at the field of research on language and culture, we are on the one hand confronted with a puzzle of different positions, among them extreme and controversial ones single-mindedly presented and pushed forward. The counter-position is often simply ignored, not mentioned at all. On the other hand, looking at science in general we can fortunately notice a burgeoning tendency to promote the integration of diverse disciplines which are investigating the same complex object by starting from different points of view (Fischer et al. 2007). Neuroscience has eventually confirmed by experiments what our common sense already told us if we were not burdened by methodologically restricted theories. The period of the black box at least seems to some degree to belong to the past now that hidden processes in the brain and body are becoming visible. The outcome, after all, human beings’ amazing capacity to perform in ever-changing surroundings should not be surprising. It can now at least in part be explained by the interaction of human abilities (e.g., Damasio 2000). Language does not function as a rational, disembodied system. It is not sufficient to declare that the sign system of language is somehow influenced by but detached from language use. Nor does language use or dialogue function as a rational, disembodied system. The sign system of language or rational systems in general are artificial systems which have nothing to do with performance. When scientists recognize that it is worthwhile to leave the ivory tower and to face real-life settings, the central reference point for any discipline in the humanities will be human beings and their complex ability of

28 Edda Weigand competence-in-performance in tackling the challenge of life. What science needs is a new way of theorizing, a way pursued long ago in other disciplines, e.g., physics, but not yet fully accepted in the humanities. Backed by neuroscience we can finally feel strong enough to address the complex by starting from the complex, i.e. take up the adventure in the complex not only of the universe beyond our planet but also of the universe of meanings in our minds. The positions presented in the humanities demonstrate a striking feature: they are mostly named by combining two disciplines each of which has a different scientific interest and different methodology: ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and now even biolinguistics. The position I am going to advocate seems to be of the same type: the sociobiology of language. I would however like to emphasise a decisive difference: it is the object ‘language’ which is complex and needs to be addressed by the interaction of sociological and biological methods. On the other hand, we have a term for a discipline, e.g. psycholinguistics, that is the result of bringing together two disciplines in some sort of ‘cross-discipline’. How this is to be achieved, what ‘cross-discipline’ really means, however remains in the dark. To my mind, we can draw two conclusions from such a puzzle-like situation: first, we should make sure we do not change what is a weakness into an apparent advantage. The puzzle disturbs and confuses and does not open up a fascinating perspective at all. The puzzle needs to be reshaped into a mosaic. The question is where do we think we can find the mosaic. The mosaic can only come about as a mosaic of a complex object, not as a mosaic of different disciplines or theories. It is the complexity of the object ‘language’ that needs to be investigated by the joint effort of different disciplines, i.e. by crossing disciplinary boundaries. Different disciplines may deal with the same object language; they are different as disciplines because they pursue different points of view, different questions. Their scientific interest has first to be elucidated. Contributing from different disciplinary points of view to the same complex object makes up genuine interdisciplinary work. This does not mean that we need to become pan-scientists. Speaking for myself, I will always remain a linguist, having a linguistic interest which in any case will be directed towards the object ‘language’. As this object turns out to be a complex object, I will inevitably have to address it by going beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries and by taking account of the complex interplay between components that, in isolation, may be assigned to another discipline. In this sense, language, dialogue and culture are intrinsically connected. Culture shapes any human behaviour and action. The second conclusion which is important for me relates to my view of scientific progress. Genuine progress is not achieved by ignoring counterpositions but by the power of arguments. Genuine progress aims at achieving a position which is more than an airy hypothesis or a methodological claim. We need to justify our assumptions and to face an open debate between diverging views. It is

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a debate on claims to truth about an issue not a matter of claims to power for scientific circles. 2. Diverging views The open debate has to deal with the positions put forward in the so-called ‘language instinct debate’ which is marked by two extreme positions: the biological and the cultural or empiricist one. Both positions address the issue: What determines language? Human genes or the environment, biology or learning in cultural surroundings? Fortunately, there has always been the common sense position that human beings’ abilities are influenced by nature as well as culture (e.g., Fuller 1954, Ridley 2004). Pinker (2002), one of the leading figures in the debate, in the meantime also favours a coevolutionary approach but has to beg the crucial question of ‘how the mix works’. Beside there seems to be a revival of so-called ‘culture studies’ which deal with aspects of culture more or less separated from language. I therefore will not dwell on them but concentrate on the crucial debate.

2.1 The biolinguistic position: language determined by human nature Recently an article appeared by Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) which demonstrates that the old Chomskyan hypotheses are still alive as if we never had the pragmatic turning point. The question is the central linguistic question: “The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” The article repeats the position Chomsky took five decades ago: language is a recursive system. This position is presented as if it were now backed by developments in neuroscience. However closely considered, the arguments are not experimentally proven but simple speculative hypotheses which are even explicitly marked as such, e.g., by we hypothesize, this hypothesis suggests, obviously in the hope of evoking scientific rigour by uncompromisingly calling it by name. We are thrown back into the beginnings of generative syntax (p.1571, italics EW): We assume, putting aside the precise mechanisms, that a key component of FLN [the faculty of language in the narrow sense] is a computational system (narrow syntax) that generates internal representations and maps them into the sensory-motor interface by the phonological system, and into the conceptual-intentional interface by the (formal) semantic system; …

The only difference is the fact that now terms such as ‘intentional’ are added to give the impression that pragmatics has been taken account of. ‘Language in the narrow sense’ is considered to be “the abstract linguistic computational system alone, independent of the other systems with which it interacts and interfaces”. With respect to ‘language in the broad sense’, i.e. to language as a communicative system, interaction in this sense between otherwise independent systems is the

30 Edda Weigand

only concession the Chomskyan line is prepared to make. The core of the computational system of ‘language in the narrow sense’ is – as it was five decades ago – recursion or the “potential infiniteness” of the system. This strong hypothesis is not supported by any substantial argument only by authoritative arguments such as “all approaches agree that a core property of FLN is recursion” or “has been explicitly recognized by Galileo, Descartes, …”. By the way, what Galileo and Descartes recognized had nothing to do with the form of grammar Chomsky seeks to promote. One of the points that long ago caused a sensation among linguists was certainly Chomsky’s explanation of the ‘potential infiniteness’ of the system by his type of a ‘recursive rule’ which makes possible the infinite use of a finite set of elements. As was the case with the concept of the sign system we took his recursive rules as a fact. We were not able to question his way of presentation, which impressed us as being an elegant theory, but which was nothing other than a set of hypotheses. Meanwhile after decades of rethinking what theorizing about real-life phenomena – and the use of language is such a real-life phenomena – could mean, we begin to doubt that the open-endedness of language use is rooted in such a simple rule of syntactic recursion. The argument that it is a rule of language competence can no longer convince us because Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) try to relate FLN to FLB, the faculty of language in the broad sense, i.e. language as a communicative system. No one would accept the clumsy style of speaking which arises out of recursion. Human beings’ exciting capacity to tackle the open-endedness of dialogue can in no way be explained by the continual addition of new embedded sentences. On the contrary, it is based on the infiniteness and open-endedness of the universe of meanings human beings have in their minds and which they try to negotiate with other human beings. What however interests us more with respect to the relationship of dialogue and culture is not so much generative grammar as a recursive system but how it is backed up by other hypotheses referring to its innateness. We are told that this recursive form is in the end innate, based on human nature. In its general abstract form, which is not restricted to grammar, it might indeed be conceived of as an innate cognitive technique because it ultimately means that repetition might be endlessly continued or that a rule can be endlessly repeated. This is nothing other than what underlies our mathematical system of numbers which always allows addition of one more item up to infinity. In its concrete form, however, namely as the thesis that we are born with genes that determine a rather precise universal grammar of the recursive type, it is nothing other than an unlikely thesis. Again the argumentation is completely based on speculation (p.1572, italics are mine): Given the definitions of the faculty of language, together with the comparative framework, we can distinguish several plausible hypotheses about the evolution of its various components. Here, we suggest two hypotheses that span the diversity of opinion among current scholars, plus a third of our own.

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Neither the starting definition of language as a recursive system is justified by any substantial argument nor can the conclusion of its innateness be convincing. The innateness of a recursive system in the form of universal grammar however makes up the core of the biolinguistic position. The same speculative and artificial view of language was defended by Pinker (1994:455) in his early years when he discussed what he called ‘the language instinct’, i.e. the innate Universal Grammar: Though languages are mutually unintelligible, beneath this superficial variation lies the single computational design of Universal Grammar, with its nouns and verbs, phrase structures and word structures, cases and auxiliaries, and so on.

Culture for him meant one universal culture with superficial local variations in different languages. In the meantime however this radical picture has been moderated. In “The Blank Slate” (2002) he starts from the common sense view that human behaviour is based on nature and culture or on nature and nurture and argues quite reasonably for a mix (2002:vii): It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with this issue.

However, when confronted with the issue “What might the mix be?” he takes a position that does not correspond to recent insights from neurology at all (see below): We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.

2.2 The socio-empiricist position: Language determined by culture The ‘language instinct’ thesis has been transformed into a ‘debate’ by Sampson (1997), who puts forth the opposite position, namely that language is not determined by biology but by culture. One might understand Sampson’s harsh criticism as a reaction to “The Language Instinct”; but even in the second edition of 2005, which appeared after “The Blank Slate”, his radical position has hardly been moderated. He can now support his empiricist position with corpus linguistic research and recent empirical findings. His contribution to this volume, which I am going to take as my reference point, once again presents his view. Sampson’s position can be summarized by his thesis (p.3): “Our genes do not constrain our ideas”. Why is it necessary to counter Chomsky’s radical nature position by taking the other extreme position? Why should our ‘cognitive life’ not be rooted to some extent in our biology? Sampson, in contrast, asserts (p.9): “there are no biological constraints imposing specific, detailed structure on human cognitive life”. Everything depends on what ‘specific’ and ‘detailed’ is intended to mean precisely. Sampson’s position indeed seems to be what Pinker (2002:xi) called “the modern denial of human nature” or “the taboo against human nature”.

32 Edda Weigand What uncharged intuition can tell us, has eventually been proven by neurology: there are no separate areas, cognition versus empirical observation, nature versus learning; human behaviour is the result of the interaction between heredity and environment. How we fashion our ideas, how we perceive and recognize the world depends on our abilities and, in the end, on the way our genes allow us to think. We cannot deny that there are different ways of thinking in different cultures. Rationality cannot be taken as a cognitive human universal. Everybody who has experienced in real-life situations how cultural differences of thinking are firmly rooted in our minds, will arguably doubt whether they have been completely acquired by living in certain environments. They might be thought of as some sort of imprint. If they are learned as we usually learn, it should also be possible to abandon them. Efforts to change cultural identity, however, will only be superficially successful. The idea of a “culturgen, the basic unit of inheritance in cultural evolution” seems to prove well-founded (Lumsden & Wilson 2005:Ixvi). To my mind, the crux of Sampson’s argumentation lies in his concept of language. He does not precisely distinguish between expressions and meanings. Obviously, biology does not determine expressions. Missing words are not yet proof of missing concepts. Biology, however, determines human needs, which are the driving force for human action and behaviour. Basic meaning concepts thus ultimately derive from our biology. We might be free to invent new expressions but not totally free to invent new meanings and functions. Thinking about what might be the origin of culture I am strongly inclined to attach most importance to the human ability of evaluation. From the very outset we evaluate what we perceive. From the very outset we try to give sense to our life. Evaluation and sense-giving can be considered a human universal in general which is nonetheless individually shaped. Human beings are social individuals, everyone lives in his/her own world which however is at the same time part of the common world. From different evaluations different cultures emerge. Thus culture derives from nature, or as Pinker (2002:viii) puts it: Culture is crucial, but culture could not exist without mental faculties that allow humans to create and learn culture to begin with.

And so the continuous process of interaction between nature and culture is started. Not only Sampson’s concept of language but also his concept of culture seems to concentrate on forms downgrading their meaning. We are free to invent new cultural forms as Sampson proclaims in his conclusion: We are free to invent new cultural forms in the future, just as we have so abundantly done in the past.

These cultural forms are forms for meanings and social functions and have to become conventionalized to a certain degree. Insofar as social functions are dependent on temporary ideologies, they can be changed. Nonetheless, they are

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based on social needs that ultimately derive from human nature and circumscribe the range of variation and change. In Sampson’s view forms, words, vocabulary play a special role. The existence of a concept presupposes the existence of a word, i.e., the concept has to be encoded in language. He thus argues that the Chinese have a different or no concept of freedom because the Chinese language does not have a word for ‘free’. In principle, the same view is taken by Levinson (2006a:43): for thinking we need language, “a developed vocabulary helps us to think” (see below). Before entering this debate on language and thought, we need to rethink the notions of language and thought. In our post-cartesian times, there is no longer an independent object language, no longer an independent object thought. It is too simple to conclude that a rich vocabulary helps thinking. Vocabulary is a verbal means, and the generativists are therefore right in calling vocabulary differences ‘superficial things’. Before arguing for the “interdependence between vocabulary and social institutions” and speaking about “racially-bound vocabulary” (Sampson in this vol. p.13f.), we have to clarify the role of lexical semantics. In pragmatics, the lexical unit is no longer the single word but the phrase (Weigand 1998a). Everett (2005:643), who takes a decisive empiricist position (see below), is also more cautious in this respect: “Thought need not be reflected directly in language.” Piaget (1980:167), like Chomsky, turns the argument round: “language is a product of intelligence rather than intelligence being a product of language”. There is another point in Sampson’s paper which is not quite convincing, namely his remarks on ‘intuitive versus empirical evidence’ (p.18). Before declaring “intuitive evidence is no use”, one should have dwelled on the notion ‘evidence’. There is no evidence as such. ‘Empirical’ evidence means justifying ‘intuitive’ assumptions, possible regularities and principles by what can be observed or measured. Everett (2005), who Sampson refers to, presents an empirical study on Pirahã which seems to demonstrate that culture constrains grammatical structures. Members of the Pirahã culture avoid talking about knowledge that ranges beyond immediate experience. Conclusions as to whether their thought might be correspondingly restricted are however to be taken very cautiously. To my mind, Everett’s concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘language’ (p.622) do not really measure up to the complexity of the phenomenon since he seems to consider language to be “the form of communication” and culture “the ways of meaning” without fully taking into account the complexity of these notions and their interrelationship. Enfield (2002:3) also aims to demonstrate that “grammar is thick with cultural meaning”. It is however very problematic to restrict the analysis of grammatical categories, e.g., the category of honorifics, to semantics. Obviously, pragmatic studies which go beyond the limits of semantics can achieve impressive new results (e.g., Premawardhena in this vol., Cho 2005 and in this vol.). What counts is semantics of use or pragmatics.

34 Edda Weigand 2.3 Variants mediating between the extremes There are a few studies which recognize that life is not a matter of extremes but of a complex interplay of heredity and culture. Among them, Levinson (2006a) takes a primary role. On the one hand, he calls Chomsky’s position “simple nativism” and prefers to advocate some sort of coevolution of language and mind. On the other hand, his notion of coevolution is not precisely equivalent with Wilson’s concept of sociobiology or of coevolution of genes and culture (1975). Levinson does not really focus on genes and culture and their part in determining language; the role of culture is only marginally touched upon. Levinson’s focus is on changing the direction. Instead of considering language to be determined by our genes as is maintained by nativists, he argues that we should take the direction from language to thought. In this respect he takes a position similar to Sampson: it is vocabulary and the structure of language that determines the way we think. Again words are the reference point. In arguing against biolinguistics he states (Levinson 2006a:26): There is no biological mechanism that could be responsible for providing us with all the meanings of all possible words in all possible languages – there are only 30,000 genes after all (about the number of the most basic words in just one language), and brain tissue is not functionally specific at remotely that kind of level.

and summarizes his position in the conclusion (p.37) That, yes, the ways we speak – the kinds of concepts lexically or grammatically encoded in a specific language – are bound to have an effect on the ways we think.

It is however not only the direction from words to thought which is questionable. The other critical point in Levinson’s position is the same as in many other approaches: language is taken as an autonomous separate object. Thus the starting point of argumentation is already wrong. Language as a separate system in which concepts are “lexically or grammatically encoded” does not exist: it is an artificial construct. There is no level of ‘ways of speaking’ and another level of ‘ways of thinking’. There is the human ability of speaking which is always used integratively with other human abilities, those of thinking and perceiving. Nonetheless, Levinson’s position is a position on the right track insofar as he accepts “two distinct types of information transfer across generations, genetic and cultural, with systematic interactions between them” (p.26). His “alternative coevolutionary account” however is again severely hampered insofar as he considers “the biological endowment for language” as “a learning mechanism” which, in the end, means that only a general faculty of learning is biologically determined (p.27). Levinson thus arrives at conclusions such as (p.41ff.): − −

Languages vary in their semantics just as they do in their form. Semantic differences are bound to engender cognitive differences.

The Sociobiology of Language 35

At first glance, such conclusions are trivial. At second glance, they are based on orthodox distinctions: there are no ‘languages’ as such nor ‘semantics’ as such nor a level of ‘cognitive differences’. ‘Language forms’ are verbal means used by speakers in interaction with other means, perceptual and cognitive ones. Levinson’s final statement (p.43): “Linguistically motivated concepts are food for thought.” might therefore have some effect as a metaphor but as a claim to truth it is misleading. He is right that “simple nativism ought to be as dead as a dodo” (p.42). His arguments against it can, however, also be used against his own position. It is ‘Descartes’ error’ which still runs through large parts of present research. Language and mind are still dealt with as if they were separate entities. The studies in Gentner and Goldin-Meadow’s book on “Language in Mind” (2003) unsurprisingly therefore do not give us any straightforward guidelines on this issue. There is no yes-or-no answer, the editors have to summarize the result (p.12). Levinson’s direction from language to thought is, for instance, contradicted by Tomasello (2003:56): “Language does not affect cognition; it is one form that cognition can take.” From my point of view the partly contradictory results of Gentner and Goldin-Meadow might be interpreted as resulting from and thus confirming the interaction of complex subsystems. Gentner and GoldinMeadow are on the right track when they presume in their introduction “Whither Whorf” that the answer depends “on how we define language and how we define thought” (p.12). Whereas Levinson (2006a) deals with the relationship between language and mind, Levinson (2006b) focuses on the ‘evolution of culture’. His characterization of his goal as “to deal frontally, and speculatively” (p.1) with the “big questions” about the evolution of human culture sounds rather strange since what we expect from science can hardly be speculation. The big question in the end is for him “how to construct an explanatory framework for the origin of culture” (p.2). He is well aware of what is called the ‘new synthesis’ but does not acknowledge experimental results at all, ignoring, for instance, those achieved by Lumsden and Wilson (2005). He rather derogatorily refers to the “twin-track” theories of geneculture evolution as “various brands on the market” and reviews them by dealing with a “number of immediate challenges to this picture” (p.4). ‘This picture’ is simplified since he considers that cultural evolution relies “simply on ideational innovations” (p.4). The environment does not seem to play a role. He suggests that ‘cooperation’ and ‘mind reading’ are the crucial ingredients for culture (p.35, with reference to Tomasello 1999). What such an assumption in the context of ‘altruism’ is intended to mean remains – at least for me – in the dark, apart from the fact that no reference is made to dialogic interaction. Moreover, he totally underestimates animal capabilities when he asserts that “cooperation and trust of this order are rare or non-existant in nonhuman animal behaviour”. It is therefore not surprising that his final remarks fade away on a completely vague and substantially empty level (p.36): “cognitive complexity may have been driven

36 Edda Weigand both by the cooperation that underlies culture and the need to protect it”. No examples are provided. The coevolutionary view of genes and culture is also the basis of some other approaches, a few of which I can only briefly mention, first of all Piaget (e.g., 1980) in his classical debate with Chomsky, i.e. the debate between Piaget’s constructivism and Chomsky’s innatism (cf. Piattelli-Palmarini 1980, Mehler 1980). Even if Piaget’s program is anti-empiricist from thought to language, it nonetheless has a strong affinity to processes of language acquisition and learning. His position of ‘constructionism’ and ‘coordination’ could be interpreted in Wilson’s coevolutionary sense. The ‘connectionist perspective’ pursued by Elman et al. (1998) in “Rethinking innateness” also emphasizes the interaction of genes and learning. The same is true of Jackendoff who in his early publication of “Patterns in the Mind” (1994) as well as in his recent publication on “Foundations of Language” (2002) takes an interactionist view, however with some bias towards the biological basis. He emphasises “the sense of global integration” (2002:429) and consideres “the ability to speak and understand a language” as “a complex combination of nature and nurture” (1994:7). To some degree, Cosmides et al. (1992) might also be considered as being on the right track in tending towards coevolution and adaptation, however again with a strong bias towards Pinker and Chomsky’s view. To sum up: The complex issue of language, mind and culture is addressed by different and in part controversial approaches. Common to all of them is the acceptance of some relationship between these concepts. The views however differ in the issue of how to design this relationship. Any direction seems possible: − − − −

from mind to language (e.g., Pinker) from language to mind (e.g., Levinson) from culture to language (e.g., Sampson) from a mix of mind and culture to language (e.g., Piaget)

The critical points of the debate are, to my mind, the following: − − −

The extreme positions focusing either on biology or culture are problematic and extremely unlikely. So-called explanations represent simple hypotheses or explicit speculations. It is not at all clear what culture is and where it comes from.

Such a picture is highly surprising as there are experimental results which cannot be ignored. These results favour the interaction of the genes and the environment in the evolution of language and dialogic interaction. Learning by imprint is included in this interactive process:

The Sociobiology of Language 37

language as dialogue

biology

culture

Figure 1: Interaction of biology and culture

The issue is no longer ‘nature-versus-nurture’, but ‘nature-via-nurture’ as Ridley (2004) puts it. “Genes are designed to take their cues from nurture” (p.4). “They are both cause and consequence of our actions” (p.6). The interaction between biology and culture takes place in human beings and is individually shaped by evaluation. Consequently, even if some progress has been achieved by introducing a concept of coevolution, the starting point of the approaches mentioned above needs to be changed. It is not the mind or culture or language as such but human beings and their behaviour which has to be the starting point. It can be observed as behaviour that combines thinking, speaking and perceiving and includes an evaluative component. In order to describe it, Wilson’s general concept of sociobiology (1975) is elucidating and can be developed further into a concept of ‘sociobiology of language’. 3. Sociobiology of language or language in the mixed game The challenge we are confronted with requires us to transform the puzzle of pieces and facets investigated in the literature into a mosaic, i.e., to redesign in theory what human beings do in practice. Any part has to be put into its proper place in the complex whole. Several decades ago Simon (1962), in his general model of “the architecture of complexity”, defined the whole as a complex hierarchy with complex subsystems in interaction with each other. The complex whole is more than the sum of all the interactions of the subsystems. The Theory of Dialogic Action Games or the Mixed Game Model (MGM) which I developed in recent years claims to be a holistic model capable of dealing with the complexity of dialogic interaction. Not least thanks to neurology, we now have a rough idea about how the mix works. I am going to focus on some essential points (for more details cf., e.g., Weigand 2000a, 2006a, b). The model starts with premises about the complex object which aim to circumscribe the whole and indicate the key to opening it up. Among them, the following are of primary importance: −

Human beings live IN the world. There are no separate objects ‘world’ or ‘language’. There is the human ability to speak which is always integratively used with other abilities such as thinking and perceiving. Speaking, thinking, perceiving belong to the complex subsystems which in their interactions contribute to the whole.

38 Edda Weigand − −

The ultimate reference point for any theory is human beings, since the world is perceived and recognized through the eye of the observer. There is no system, no theory, no truth, independent of human beings and their abilities. Human beings are social individuals. Due to their double nature their abilities and interests are dialogically orientated. The minimal autonomous unit for the description of human communicative action is the unit in which dialogue comes about, that is the unit which comprehends all the variables that influence ‘how the mix works’. I called this unit the dialogic action game or the mixed game.

Using premises of this type we can comprehend our complex object which is neither rational competence nor ever-changing empirical chaos but human beings’ ability to cope with the complex by their competence-in-performance. The first step of a holistic theory means grasping the complex object without damaging it by methodological exigencies. Methodology has to be derived from the natural object in a second step. In the literature there seems to be some feeling that it is no longer sufficient to be left with empirical details. In recent approaches terms such as ‘ensemble’ or ‘genre’ have become fashionable since these are intended to establish some order in performance. As they are vague they do not impose strict conditions on theoretical consistency and are therefore a temptation for some researchers to use them. On the other hand, as they are vague, they are of little analytic value.

Language in the mixed game means ‘language as dialogue’, i.e., a concept of language for which dialogic use is an inherent feature (Weigand 2003). It is an open concept that copes with ever-changing empirical performance as well as with rules and conventions. Human beings first try to structure complexity by regularities but are able to go beyond them when regularities come to an end. Having circumscribed the complex whole, we have to find a key to opening it up. The key cannot simply be defined arbitrarily but has to be justified. Genuine justification of human behaviour has to be compatible with evolution. It will therefore in the end be evolutionary criteria that can justify the theory. The key to human behaviour will arguably be a dominant feature and will depend on the view we have of the individual human being. To my mind, human beings are purposive beings. The key to their action and behaviour is basic universal needs from which goals and purposes derive. From the very outset, purposes are dependent on individual perception and evaluation of the environment. The methodology underlying our competence-in-performance must make it possible for human beings to cope with conditions of uncertainty in ever-changing environments. Consequently it will consist of Principles of Probability and not of eternal rules. Also rules and conventions are applied provided that the individual wants to apply them, i.e., their scope is conditioned by probability.

The Sociobiology of Language 39

To my mind, we can distinguish between three types of principles: constitutive, regulative and executive ones. Dialogic interaction comes about by the constitutive principles of action, dialogue and coherence. In order to describe human action, Searle (1969) paved the ground by introducing the formula F (p) which tells us that in every speech act we have a purpose F that is related to the world p. In this way, dialogue and world are connected from the very beginning. The formula however needs to be complemented in order to cope with performance. Human beings do not only act at the level of purposes. They have specific interests, mostly concealed behind openly expressed purposes. I therefore complemented Searle’s formula by introducing the basic force of interests (Weigand 2006a): interest [F (p)] Figure 2: Functional basis of action

We thus achieve a representation of the basic meaning structure of human beings’ action which contains different types of meaning: interests, purposes, and the propositional types of referring and predicating. Meaning in my view constitutes the primary step in analysing human action insofar as it is meaning which selects the means. It is the correlation of meaning and communicative means that constitutes action: interest [F (p)]

communicative means

Figure 3: Action Principle AP

The Action Principle AP inherently contains a dialogic component insofar as there is no single act that is communicatively, and i.e. dialogically, autonomous. Every speech act is dialogically related, be it forwards as initiative speech act or backwards as reactive speech act. ‘Initiative’ and ‘reactive’ are functional qualities that change the type of action. Initiative speech acts make a claim, reactive speech acts fulfil this precise claim. The minimal dialogically autonomous unit thus consists of action and reaction. The correlation between them is created by the Dialogic Principle proper DP, i.e. a principle based on expectation. The speaker having issued a certain initiative speech act can, with a certain probability, expect a specific reactive speech act: action making a claim

reaction fulfilling this very claim

Figure 4: Dialogic Principle proper DP

40 Edda Weigand Based on human beings’ nature, communicative means rely on different human abilities which are integratively used. We can therefore no longer look for coherence exclusively in the verbal text. We have to integrate cognitive and perceptual means. Addition is not yet integration. In the end, coherence is established by the interlocutors in their minds (Weigand 2000b): interest [F (p)]

communicative means verbal, perceptual, and cognitive means in interaction

Figure 5: Coherence Principle CohP

On the basis of these Constitutive Principles, Regulative Principles RP mediate between different human abilities and interests, e.g., between reason and emotions and between self-interest and social orientation. Regulation depends on the view specific cultures have of the individual human being. In a broad sense, culturespecific principles of emotion and politeness can be considered as rhetorical principles insofar as they influence the effectiveness of dialogic action. Beside Constitutive and Regulative Principles human beings use specific Executive Principles EP which can also be counted among rhetorical principles. They mainly represent deliberate cognitive strategies. Strategies, in my view, are techniques which are considered to be efficient in achieving one’s purposes and interests such as, e.g., the techniques of insisting on or repeating one’s claim or the techniques of ‘hiding the real purpose’, ‘evading an explicit response’ or ‘surprising the opponent’. We can also use ‘presequences’ in order to make our interlocutor feel more favourable towards our dialogic claim. Dialogue on the basis of principles goes beyond the view of codes, definitions and patterns and allows indeterminacy of meaning and different understandings of the interlocutors. It is based on negotiation of meaning and understanding in a game that is best characterized as a ‘mixed game’. To sum up: Language as dialogue is not an independent object but an ability of human beings which interacts with other abilities, among them the ability of thought, and is influenced by various parameters, among them culture. Dialogic interaction on the basis of competence-in-performance with language as a crucial component is thus determined by biology as well as culture:

The Sociobiology of Language 41

competence-in-performance

biology interaction of abilities: speaking, thinking, perceiving evaluating emotions, reason purposive beings, interests and strategies regulation of human beings’ double nature self-interest social concerns

culture shapes general biologic preconditions resulting in different abilities: language, perception, thinking, evaluation resulting in different conventions and habits

Figure 6: Competence-in-performance as determined by biology and culture

All these features of biology and culture are reflected in the various Principles of Probability: The AP deals with purposes and interests and with the different abilities used as communicative means. The DP is related to the double nature of human beings, the CohP addresses the interaction of the communicative means. RP mediate between different abilities such as reason and emotion or different interests, and EP set up guidelines for strategic behaviour. Culture shapes everything, from internal abilities to different value systems and ideologies and different external habits or legalised conventions such as in law. Human beings are dialogic beings. By their very nature, they have emotions, reason and other abilities which are all differently shaped by culture. We mostly become aware of cultural influences in cases where different cultures meet. The pending question of the origin of culture finds an answer in the fact that evaluation as well as the desire to give sense to life are inherent parts of human beings’ nature from the very outset. It is in the end evaluation where culture starts, evaluation which depends on the individual and the specific environment. In this way, the image of the individual human being and his/her relationship to the community is differently shaped insofar as specific parameters, e.g. age, are differently evaluated. Culture therefore mainly influences regulative principles of politeness and rhetoric and executive principles of power insofar as living together is biased either towards striving for harmony or towards strategies of confrontation. Culture selects the arguments which back our positions, and not only the way how we express them. It tells us how to deal with our emotions, whether to expose them or to hide them. Evaluations become visible in habits and actions such as customs of marriage and other festivities. The puzzle of pieces and aspects thus changes into a mosaic. There are no separate systems or codes. If they seem to exist, they are established by human beings and their application is dependent on human decisions. There is no need for speculation. All the features attributed to biology in figure 6 are experimen-

42 Edda Weigand tally proven by neurology (Damasio 2000, Lumsden & Wilson 2005, Weigand 2002). Already the mirror neuron, the seeming simple, reveals itself as complex as it is not only a biological entity but from the very outset an entity that functions, that unites biology, mind and social orientation. Bickerton (1990:4) from a quite different point of view already suspected: “Indeed, it is questionable whether there is or ever can be such a thing as a ‘spare’ neuron (that is, a neuron that is not, initially at least, committed to any specific function).” On the other hand, all the features attributed to culture can be empirically observed in their consequences for action. 4. How culture shapes action Let me now illustrate with a few examples how human action is influenced by the interaction of biology and culture. In the MGM, culture is not a separate component but a variable that influences human action at any time and any place. The unit of the action game is already a cultural unit, and acting and reacting human beings are cultural beings. Culture thus has an external and an internal meaning as it influences human action from the outside and inside of the individual. Beside the mechanisms of physical evolution expounded by Darwin there are mechanisms of mental evolution or some sort of cultural genes. Human competence-in-performance intrinsically includes an element of evaluation, the source of cultural differences. Consequently, every principle of the mixed game should turn out to be influenced by culture. The Action Principle correlates communicative purposes and interests with communicative means. It is self-evident that the means vary from culture to culture. We not only encounter different languages or verbal means and different gestures or perceptual means but also different expectations that shape cognitive means. It is mainly different values that lie at the heart of our associations and expectations and determine different meanings. In the Italian culture, e.g., the utterance (1)

La mia famiglia mi aspetta. “My family is waiting for me.”

is meant and understood as a very strong indirect speech act ‘I have to visit them’ which can almost be considered to be a conventional direct speech act. Crosscultural conversations may result in problems of understanding as, e.g., for someone belonging to Northern European cultures the utterance simply means what it says, maybe with a faint indirect meaning ‘perhaps I should visit them’. What is positive and what is negative is not yet fixed but depends on culturespecific evaluation (e.g., Rapaille 2007). This will be massively clear, e.g., with speech acts of compliments. To give a few examples (cf. Grein forthc.):

The Sociobiology of Language 43

(2)

Germany: Du hast abgenommen! Steht dir gut! “You’ve lost weight! It suits you.” China:

Du bist aber dick geworden! “You gained weight!”

Ruanda:

Dein Gang gleicht dem einer Kuh. “You walk like a cow.”

Kamerun: Sie sind ein alter Kochtopf. “You are an old cooking pot.”

You have to know the culture-specific value system and the conventions of the utterance form if you want to make a compliment. In the same way, the Dialogic Principle is inherently influenced by culture. The way we react strongly depends on the balance of self-interest and social concerns. Thus not only the way compliments are expressed but also how they have to be reacted to is culturally shaped. There seem to be cultures, e.g. the Samoan, which, according to Holmes (1988:448), request that the object of the compliment has to be given to the person who makes the compliment (cf. also Grein forthc.): (3)

Was für eine außergewöhnliche Kette. Sie ist wunderschön. – Bitte nehmen Sie sie! “What an unusual necklace. It s beautiful. – Please take it!”

There are also differences as a result of individual attitudes in reacting to a compliment. Some people tend to reject compliments or play them down whereas others accept them with joy. Even the basic principle of a positive versus negative reply, which we considered to be universally valid, seems to depend on culture. In times when we still constructed models restricted to rationality, we considered it to be a logical fact that an initiative speech act is followed either by a positive or negative reply or by a speech act of postponing the decision: positive reply initiative speech act

negative reply postponing the decision

Figure 7: Basic types of reaction

However, living in Italy I was baffled by problems of understanding when I got the reply ne parliamo or ne parleremo in conversations such as:

44 Edda Weigand (4)

Dovremmo cooperare per risolvere questo problema. Sei dei nostri? – Ne parleremo. “We should cooperate to solve this problem. Are you on our side? – We are going to talk about this.”

First I took the response as I would take it in German, namely in its literal meaning, and tried to clarify this point by insisting: (5)

Ne parleremo. – Quando? “We’ll talk about it later. – When?” Ne parleremo. – Ma dimmi quando? “We’ll talk about it later. – But tell me when?” Ne parleremo. “We’ll talk about it later.”

Receiving the same answer several times, I became to some degree frustrated. In German or English we also sometimes say wir reden noch darüber, we’ll talk about it later, which however will be made more definite if the interlocutor insists on his/her claim: (6)

Wann fahren wir also? – Wir reden noch darüber. “When are we leaving then? – We’ll talk about it later.”

(7)

Wir haben nicht mehr viel Zeit. Wann reden wir? – Morgen, in der Pause. “We haven’t got much time. When will we talk about it? – Tomorrow, in the break.”

Finally I recognized that in Italian ne parleremo means something else, obviously a reaction which Germans have difficulty in understanding, namely the refusal to decide or the wish to leave the issue open, in the air. The universal figure 7 therefore has to be modified: positive reply initiative speech act

negative reply postponing the decision leaving it in the air

Figure 8: Culturally modified types of reaction

I think there are still many cultural differences which are hidden, even very important ones, which are waiting to be discovered by an analysis of crosscultural problems. It is not problems related to non-understanding, but problems to do with unease which are not so easily detected and analysed.

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Culture also influences the third constitutive principle, the Coherence Principle. The Coherence Principle means that we interactively use different abilities and cannot do anything else even if we wanted to. We speak and perceive and think simultaneously. Coherence is therefore in the end not established in the text but created in the mind. Evaluations, the core and root of cultural differences, are included in the cognitive means. They enter the meaning of words. What, for instance, punctual means is different in different cultures. They shape our preferences and habits of life and determine conventions of language use. To take one example: What we consider our private sphere in Northern European cultures, i.e. what we do not share with strangers, is freely displayed and opened up in other cultures, for instance, in the United States. For instance, while walking in a park in New Orleans, we passed a man sitting on a bench phoning. Hi, he addressed us, I am talking with my brother, and then followed the whole private story of his brother. Such behaviour is quite unusual to people from Northern Europe who would never start a conversation with complete strangers by telling private stories except perhaps in a pub after a few glasses of beer. What ‘private’ means seems to be completely different. In general, what is explicitly said and what remains implicit, varies from culture to culture and strongly influences the indirect ways in which we speak (see above example 1). Also the perceptual means greatly differ as we all know when comparing, e.g., gestures in different cultures (see Nash in this vol.). There are cultures which use few gestures, mostly conventional ones with clear meanings such as nodding or shaking the head, and other cultures which make use of multiple gestures and love using them, such as in Italian or French language use. One might characterize cultures with few gestures as closed or introverted and cultures exhibiting various gestures as open, extroverted cultures and thus relate visible signs to so-called ‘culturgens’ (Lumsden & Wilson 2005:Ixvi). It is self-evident that the way we think influences the way we expound our thought in texts. In doing this our ‘rational’ capacities certainly play an important role. Being rational has been considered a universal salient and distinctive feature of human nature (Bickerton 1990:255, also Simon 1987:vii). However everybody who has to collaborate with fellow beings from remote cultures will face difficulties if they presuppose a common ability of rationality. What we consider to be ‘rationality’, turns out to be a western feature. It would be highly interesting to find out what ‘rationality’ means in cultures of the Far East. Let us now address the Regulative and Executive Principles. Regulative Principles of politeness and emotion are by their very nature highly sensitive to cultural differences as they depend on how the role of the individual in the community is evaluated. Human beings as social individuals have to mediate between their individual self-interest and social concerns. How they will proceed, where they will put the emphasis, depends on how the relationship between the individual and the community is assessed in their culture (see, e.g., Prema-

46 Edda Weigand

wardhena and Shilikina in this vol., also Grein 2007). In general, internal regulative principles are externally shaped as rhetorical principles. Western cultures proclaim individual freedom, cultures of the Far East stress the value of the invididual for the community. The balance between self-interest and respect for other human beings defines what politeness means and shapes the way dialogic claims are expressed in initiative and reactive speech acts (see above example 3). In recent times, cultures of the Far East seem to be moving closer to western goals and benchmarks. It is not only pronouns of politeness in western languages that have lost their meaning, specific categories in far eastern languages such as honorifica also seem to be losing significance (cf. Cho in this vol.). Politeness in western cultures can be totally formalised in routines which are used to push the speaker’s own interests. Describing politeness in terms of ‘face redress’ (Brown & Levinson 1987:91ff.) only accounts for part of the phenomenon and not even the essential part. Should we think of the human species as an aggressive species always in fear of their ‘face’? Politeness is not a negative phenomenon to be dealt with primarily in terms of ‘avoiding face-threatening acts’. At its core, it is a positive value, that of respecting the other human being. That is precisely the essential part: respecting the other human being is a dialogic feature that goes beyond the “highly abstract notion of ‘face’”. The ‘positive’ as well as ‘negative face’ of Brown and Levinson (p.13) are both defined monologically, i.e. self-reflexively towards the speaker, as the “desire (in some respects) to be approved of” and the “desire to be unimpeded in one’s actions” and are not conceived of dialogically with reference to the interlocutor as the desire to respect the other human being. The dialogic balance between respect and self-interest has to do with the use of power. Power appears in many different guises, it might be the positive power of encouragement and support or the negative power of suppression and force. Germans are considered – whether rightly or wrongly – to be people who push their own interests, whereas we are told that other cultures, among them cultures from the Far East, believe that to argue in one’s own interest is impolite. Regulative Principles not only shape the balance between self-interest and social concerns but also refer to the way we rhetorically deal with our emotions. Emotion and reason can no longer be considered separate faculties. Emotion influences reason, and reason tries to control emotions. There are rhetorical Principles of Emotion (Weigand 1998b), based on cultural habits and conventions, which tell us how to deal with emotions in dialogic interaction, whether they are to be freely demonstrated or to be hidden in public. A striking example, e.g., is the way mourning is demonstrated openly by wailers in southern cultures. The third category of Principles of Probability, Executive Principles, depends also on basic evaluations or cultural ideologies. Culture, as emerging from evaluation, is, in the end, based on some form of ideology. Executive Principles represent rhetorical principles since they are deliberately used by the interacting people. The interlocutors may follow ideological conventions or decide on their

The Sociobiology of Language 47

individual evaluation. Humanity may represent a value for them or it may be individually ignored. They may use cooperative practices or prefer competition and confrontation, even suppression. But we are not totally free in our decisions. We live in modern societies and feel obliged to take account of their conventions and practices, for instance, of competition, if we want to be successful in our society. 5. Concluding remarks I think it has become obvious that human actions and behaviour are the result of both our biology and the environment we live in. Extreme positions such as the nativist versus the empiricist position can help in profiling the issue but are, in principle, not capable of settling it. It is the interaction of language, genes and culture or the sociobiology of language that determines how human beings interact in different cultures. The world is perceived differently in different cultures. As the Mixed Game Model is based on a view of human beings as social individuals, the question arises how far cultures can be circumscribed in general, in a conventional way, i.e., how far we can speak of cultural identities. To my mind, accepting individuality does not mean ignoring cultural conventions. In any case, dialogue presupposes some common ground. Cultural identities can be based on history, on values proclaimed in the past. However, societies develop, new alliances are created. We might feel we are Europeans and profess certain values which have played a role in Europe’s past. Reflecting on the past however cannot be everything. Sometimes cultural identity has to be consciously constructed and requires us to take account of possible future developments. References Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language & Species. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cho, Yongkil. 2005. Grammatik und Höflichkeit im Sprachvergleich. Direktive Handlungsspiele des Bittens, Aufforderns und Anweisens im Deutschen und Koreanischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Cosmides, Leda, John Tooby & Jerome H. Barkow. 1992. “Introduction: Evolutionary psychology and conceptual integration”. The Adapted Mind. Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture ed. by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, 3-15. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens. Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage. Elman, Jeffrey L., Elizabeth Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi & Kim Plunkett. 1998. Rethinking Innateness. A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

48 Edda Weigand

Enfield, Nick J. 2002. “Ethnosyntax: Introduction”. Ethnosyntax. Explorations in grammar and culture ed. by Nick J. Enfield, 3-30. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Everett, Daniel L. 2005. “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã. Another look at the design features of human language”. Current Anthropology 46:4.621-646. Fischer, Kurt W., David B. Daniel, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Elsbeth Stern, Antonio Battro & Hideaki Koizumi. 2007. “Why Mind, Brain, and Education? Why now?” Mind, Brain, and Education 1:1.1-2. Fuller, John L. 1954. Nature and Nurture. A modern synthesis. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company. Gentner, Dedre & Susan Goldin-Meadow, eds. 2003. Language in Mind. Advances in the study of language and thought. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Grein, Marion. 2007. Kommunikative Grammatik im Sprachvergleich. Die Sprechaktsequenz Direktiv und Ablehnung im Deutschen und Japanischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Grein, Marion (forthc.) “Der Sprechakt des Kompliments im interkulturellen Vergleich”. Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky & W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. “The Faculty of Language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” Science 298.1569-1579. Holmes, Janet. 1988. “Paying Compliments: A sex-preferential politeness strategy”. Journal of Pragmatics 12.445-456. Jackendoff, Ray. 1994. Patterns in the Mind. Language and human nature. New York: BasicBooks. Jackendoff, Ray. 2002. Foundations of Language. Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 2006a. “Language and Mind: Let’s get the issues straight!” Language in Mind. Advances in the study of language and thought ed. by Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow, 25-46. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 2006b. “Introduction: The evolution of culture in a microcosm”. Evolution and Culture. A Fyssen Foundation Symposium ed. by Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre Jaisson, 1-41. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Lumsden, Charles J. & Edward O. Wilson. 2005. Genes, Mind, and Culture: The coevolutionary process. 25th anniversary edition. New Jersey: World Scientific. Mehler, Jacques. 1980. “Psychology and Psycholinguistics: The impact of Chomsky and Piaget”. Language and Learning. The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky ed. by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, 341-353. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Piaget, Jean. 1980. “Schemes of Action and Language Learning”. Language and Learning. The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky ed. by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, 163167. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo, ed. 1980. Language and Learning. The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. The new science of language and mind. London: Penguin Books. Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate. The modern denial of human nature. London: Penguin Books. Rapaille, Clotaire. 2007. The Culture Code. An ingenious way to understand why people around the world buy and live as they do. New York: Broadway Books. Ridley, Matt. 2004. The Agile Gene. How nature turns on nurture. Genes, experience and what makes us human. London: Harper Perennial. Sampson, Geoffrey. 1997. Educating Eve. The ‘language instinct’ debate. London & New York: Cassell. Sampson, Geoffrey. 2005. The ‘Language Instinct’ Debate. Rev. ed. London & New York: Continuum. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: At the University Press.

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Simon, Herbert A. 1962. “The Architecture of Complexity: Hierarchic systems”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106.467-482. Simon, Herbert A. 1987. Models of Man. Social and rational. Mathematical essays on rational human behaviour in a social setting. New York & London: Garland Publishing. Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2003. “The Key is Social Cognition”. Language in Mind. Advances in the study of language and thought ed. by Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow, 47-58. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Weigand, Edda. 1998a. “Contrastive Lexical Semantics”. Contrastive Lexical Semantics ed. by Edda Weigand, 25-44. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Weigand, Edda. 1998b. “Emotions in Dialogue”. Dialoganalyse VI. Referate der 6. Arbeitstagung, Prag 1996. Teil 1 ed. by Svĕtla Čmejrková, Jana Hoffmannová, Olga Müllerová & Jindra Svĕtlá, 35-48. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Weigand, Edda. 2000a. “The Dialogic Action Game”. Dialogue Analysis VII. Working with dialogue ed. by Malcolm Coulthard, Janett Cotterill & Francis Rock, 1-18. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Weigand, Edda. 2000b. “Coherence in Discourse − a never-ending problem“. Sprachspiel und Bedeutung. Festschrift für Franz Hundsnurscher zum 65. Geburtstag ed. by Sabine Beckmann, Peter-Paul König & Georg Wolf, 267-274. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Weigand, Edda. 2002. “Constitutive Features of Human Dialogic Interaction: Mirror neurons and what they tell us about human abilities”. Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language ed. by Maxim Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese, 229-248. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Weigand, Edda. 2003. Sprache als Dialog. Sprechakttaxonomie und kommunikative Grammatik. 2nd rev. ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Weigand, Edda. 2006a. “Argumentation: The mixed game”. Argumentation 20:1.59-87. Weigand, Edda. 2006b. “Principles of Dialogue. With a special focus on business dialogues”. Cooperation and Conflict in Ingroup and Intergroup Communication. Selected papers from the Xth biennial congress of the IADA, Bucharest 2005 ed. by Liliana Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, in collaboration with Liliana Hoinărescu, 35-51. Bucharest: Bucharest University Press. Wilson, Edward O. 1975. Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

PART II Theoretical Positions

Some General Thoughts about Linguistic Typology and Dialogue Linguistics Walter Bisang University of Mainz

Functional linguistic typology deals with universal patterns of cross-linguistic variation and looks at grammatical structures with their fixed meaning. Dialogue linguistics is based on the assumption that the concrete meaning of an utterance is indeterminate and depends on a number of factors within concrete speech situations. Given the rather divergent focuses of these two disciplines, one may wonder where there is any common ground and in what way they may profit from each other. The present paper is written from the perspective of a typologist and thus concentrates on the question of what typologists can learn from dialogue linguistics and how dialogue linguistics matters for typology.

1. Introduction The present paper is written from the perspective of a typologist and thus concentrates on the question of what typologists can learn from dialogue linguistics and how dialogue linguistics matters for typology. For dealing with these questions, I will structure my paper as follows: in chapter 2, I will introduce some basic issues about linguistic typology, its methods or strategies (2.1), its findings in terms of language universals (2.2) and its functional explanations for these universals (2.3). In the last chapter (2.4), I will show that functionalists must account for the indeterminacy of meaning if they want to understand how individual speakers use language and how they integrate capacities such as the epistemic, the logical, the perceptual and the social capacities (Dik 1997). Given the importance of language use, I will concentrate on pragmatics in chapter 3. I will briefly sketch the question of universals in pragmatics and Levinson’s (2000) distinction between the universals-based layer of utterancemeaning and the situation-based layer of speaker-meaning. While there is no question that dialogue linguistics significantly contributes to the understanding of speaker-meaning, I will argue that its applicability to cross-linguistic and crosscultural comparison may help understanding where universal pragmatics ends and non-universal culture-specific pragmatics begins.

54 Walter Bisang

In chapter 4, I will illustrate the tension between the rigid rules of grammar and the speaker’s needs in specific situations. I will argue that rigid grammatical rules can either lead to exceptions within the grammatical system or reduce the usefulness of a marker for certain intentions of the speaker. In both cases, dialogue linguistics is at the very roots of grammar. The existence of exceptions will be illustrated by the phenomenon of finiteness (4.1). Obligatory categories that mark finiteness such as tense or person can force the speaker to make a commitment to the contents of that category which is incompatible with what she wants to say in a certain speech situation. This leads to the development of specific constructions that can be used like independent clauses but do not refer to the grammatical category associated with finiteness. The case of reduced usefulness of a grammatical system will be illustrated by the example of politeness marking in Japanese (4.2). Due to its obligatoriness, the Japanese politeness system is no longer available to the speaker for explicit polite behaviour. The language has developed other more expressive means for polite linguistic behaviour that are at least as important for a successful communication as grammaticalized politeness. In the fifth and last chapter, I will try to provide a more systematic account of how dialogue linguistics matters for typology. For that purpose, dialogic linguistics will be looked at from three perspectives: − − −

integrative functionalism (Croft 1995, 2000) grammaticalization and inference and the concept of a tertium comparationis.

2. Language typology and cognitive/functional explanations 2.1 The typological strategies for discovering structural patterns – an example Language typology deals with structural variety across languages. It tries to find out to what extent languages show structural variation and where they have to follow universal patterns. For that purpose, typologists start from a certain semantic (or pragmatic) concept and look at how this concept is expressed morphologically and syntactically in the world’s languages. Croft (2003) describes the typological method of exploring linguistic universals in terms of the following three strategies: Croft’s three research strategies (Croft 2003:14; this quotation omits the bold prints of the original, WB): − −

Determine the particular semantic(-pragmatic) structure or situation type that one is interested in studying. Examine the morphosyntactic construction(s) or strategies used to encode that situation type.

Typology and Dialogue Linguistics 55

−

Search for dependencies between the construction(s) used for that situation and other linguistic factors: other structural features, other external functions expressed by the construction in question, or both.

2.2 Some universal patterns To illustrate how universal patterns become visible from the application of these strategies, I will briefly look at the two cognitive domains of possession and clausal modification. Possession can be roughly defined as a relation between a possessor and a thing possessed. Morphosyntactically, the possessor is realized as a genitive (Gen), the thing possessed as a head noun (N) (cf. Croft 2003:31-48 for a more detailed account). The morphosyntactic encoding of possession involves a lot of different criteria. For the sake of brevity, I will only look at word order, i.e. at the two possible sequences of [possessor-possessed] (GenN) and [possessedpossessor] (NGen). As we can see from the examples below, both orders are possible in English (NGen/GenN), while Japanese only has GenN and Yoruba only has NGen: (1)

English: NGen: the car of my father GenN: my father’s car Yoruba: NGen: mợtò car

bàbá mi father I

Japanese: GenN: titi no father GEN

kuruma car

If we look at clausal modification as reflected by relative constructions (the most detailed typological study of relative clauses still is Lehmann 1984) from the perspective of word order we find the two possible word-order patterns of [clausal modifier-head noun] (RelN) and [head noun-clausal modifier] (NRel). (2)

English: NRel: the car [I bought] Yoruba: NRel: mợtò car

tí REL

mo I

rà buy

Japanese: RelN: [watasi ga kat-ta] I NOM buy-PST

kuruma car

56 Walter Bisang

Each of the above cognitive domains provides a parameter consisting of two values or types (NGen/GenN and NRel/RelN). If one combines both parameters with their types into a tetrachronic table and tries to see empirically which combinations of types are attested, one gets a very interesting correlation illustrated in Figure 1 (the plus sign means that this combination is attested, the minus sign that it is not attested): The combination of a postnominal genitive plus a prenominal relative clause (NGen & RelN) does not seem to occur in any language. Table 1: Tetrachronic table

NRel RelN

NGen GenN + + +

Since the above pattern is parallel to implications in propositional logic and since it holds universally in the world’s languages, it is called an implicational universal. The first who introduced implicational universals was Greenberg with his seminal paper of 1966. In the formulation of Hawkins (1983, also cf. 1994), the universal reflected by Table 1 is described as follows (G = genitive): Universal (IX‘): NG  NRel If in a language the genitive follows the noun, then the relative clause follows likewise.

Other parameters of word order within the noun phrase are the position of numerals (Num), demonstratives (Dem) and adjectives (Adj) relative to the head noun. If these parameters are related to the parameter of prepositional/ postpositional, we get an even more complex universal pattern called Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy (PrNMH, Hawkins 1983, 1994, 2004): Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy (PrNMH): If a language is prepositional, then if RelN then GenN, if GenN then AdjN, and if AdjN then Dem N/Num N. Prep  ((NDem / NNum  NA) & (NA  NG) & (NG  NRel))

Universal patterns of this type are not arbitrary. As will be shown in the next chapter, they can be accounted for by a number of explanations. 2.3 Functional explanations Typologists understand language as an instrument of communication in a broad sense which also covers the whole situation (speaker, hearer, third), the information that is activated in the speaker and the hearer and the intentions of

Typology and Dialogue Linguistics 57

speaker and hearer. Thus language is embedded into more general cognitive processes such as reasoning and conceptualization and into cognitive systems such as perception and knowledge. From such a communication-based perspective, universal patterns are not the product of an innate Universal Grammar (UG), they are motivated by the following factors: − −

Cognitive motivations: parsing, iconicity, economy Motivations from the speech situation: discourse, pragmatics.

The cognitive motivations will be briefly discussed in this chapter. Pragmatics will be the topic of the next chapter. Hawkins (1983, 1994, 2004) explains the Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy presented above in terms of parsing, i.e. as a product of the properties of the human parser. One important property of the parser is that it prefers shorter processing domains to longer ones in combinatorial and/or dependency relations. A very straightforward example from English is the following from performance: (3)

a. The man VP[waited PP1[for his son] PP2[in the cold but not unpleasant wind]].

1

2 3 4

5

b. The man VP[waited PP2[in the cold but not unpleasant wind] PP1[for his son]]

1

2 3 4

5 6

7

8

9

The domain that is needed to recognize the overall constituent structure of the VP in (3) with its elements V PP1 and PP2 is much shorter in (3a) than in (3b). The relevant domain represented by the curved bracket consists of five words in (3a) and of nine words in (3b). Given the preference of shorter processing domains, utterances of the type in (3a) are more frequent in English. This is due to the more general principle of Minimize Domains (Hawkins 2004: 31): The human processor prefers to minimize the connected sequences of linguistic forms and their conventionally associated syntactic and semantic properties in which relations of combination and/or dependency are processed. The degree of this preference is proportional to the number of relations whose domains can be minimized in competing sequences or structures, and to the extent of the minimization difference in each domain.

Minimize Domains also applies to the Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy. This can be illustrated by comparing structure (a) with structure (b):

58 Walter Bisang

(a)

PP

P

(b)

NP X

PP

P N

NP N

X

Figure 1: Minimize Domains and Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy

Category X represents a Numeral (Num), a demonstrative (Dem), an adjective (Adj), a possessor (Gen) or a relative clause (Rel). Relative clauses tend to be longer and often more complex than possessive phrases, possessive phrases tend to be longer than adjective phrases and adjective phrases tend to be longer than demonstratives and numerals. If the constituents represented by X follow their head noun as in (b), the processing domain for the recognition of the overall structure of the PP is always minimally short. Thus, structures following (b) are very suitable to the parser. If X is preposed to its head noun as in (a), the length and the complexity of the processing domain increases from Num/Dem to Adj to Gen to Rel and parsing becomes more and more expensive. This increase of effort for the parser is exactly reflected by the Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy. The two other cognitive motivations to be discussed briefly are iconicity and economy. Iconicity is based on the assumption that there is a certain similarity of the sign with the concept it denotes. Thus, iconicity implies an isomorphism between a concept and the way in which it is expressed – language structure reflects structures of experience (cf. Haiman 1978, 1980, 1983, 1985). In language, iconicity is based on conceptual distance. Haiman (1983:782) differentiates: − − −

The linguistic distance between expressions corresponds to the conceptual distance between them. The linguistic separateness of an expression corresponds to the conceptual independence of the object or event which it represents. The social distance between interlocutors corresponds to the length of the message, referential content being equal.

A good example is again possession. This time, it is the distinction between alienable and inalienable possession. If we look at utterances such as my head and my computer, there does not seem to be much of a difference since the same construction is used in both cases. In spite of this, there is a considerable semantic difference with respect to the tightness of the relation between the possessor and the thing possessed. In the case of head, we are dealing with a possession which cannot be undone, i.e., the possessor cannot take her/his head and pass it on to somebody else. Of course, this is different with computer. Some people may not

Typology and Dialogue Linguistics 59

like giving their computer away to somebody else – nevertheless, it does not belong to them in the same way as their head. The case of my computer reflects alienable possession, the case of my head stands for inalienable possession. There is a number of languages across the world which use different grammatical structures for the expression of alienable vs. inalienable possession (cf. e.g., Chappell & McGregor 1996). In Yabêm, an Austronesian language spoken in Papua New Guinea, there are two different sets of markers for alienable vs. inalienable possession. The singular forms are given in (4) and illustrated by (5): (4)

Yabêm (Dempwolff 1939): Inalienable possession: suffixes: -c ‘1.SG’, -m ‘2.SG’, -ø ‘3.SG’ Alienable possession: free pronouns: ngoc ‘1.SG’, nêm ‘2.SG’, nê ‘3.SG’

(5)

Yabêm Inalienable possession: ôli-c “my body”, ôli-m “your body”, ôli-ø “his body” Alienable possession: ngoc àndu “my house”, nêm àndu “your house”, nê àndu “her/his house”

A cross-linguistic analysis reveals that there is a parallelism between the cognitive experience of the tightness of the relation between possessor and possessed and its formal expression. This correlation can be expressed as follows: The conceptually more distant alienable relation is more marked or equally marked as the conceptually closer inalienable possession.

Economy is the last cognitive motivation to be described. It reflects the desire of speakers and hearers to perform ‘the least effort’ or ‘to do things in the simplest way’ to express a certain concept (cf. Haiman 1983). Economy of expression is linked to familiarity. More familiar concepts are expressed with less morphosyntactic effort: Loss of marking, and consequent formal reduction, is not so much an icon of lesser complexity [sic], but an economically motivated index of familiarity, which is culturally determined and variable, rather than intrinsic and absolute. Whether the motivation for reduction in such cases is essentially iconic or economic is perhaps less significant than the fact that the end result of reduction in all of the examples discussed is an increase of opacity, and a loss of motivation, or of iconicity (Haiman 1985:3-4).

A good example of economy is the use of reflexive marking with introverted and extroverted verbs in English (Haiman 1983, König & Vezzosi 2004). Verbs whose lexical meaning generally implies that the agent performs an action on her/his self are called introverted, an action performed towards others is called extroverted. With introverted actions in their reflexive use, the reflexive pronoun

60 Walter Bisang can be omitted (Max washed [himself]). This is not possible with extroverted verbs (Max kicked himself but *Max kicked). The two motivations of iconicity and economy lead to mutually opposing results. While iconicity supports maximal distinction of different cognitive domains and subdomains, economy maximally reduces these distinctions. In terms of Optimality Theory (cf. e.g., Kager 1999), one can also say that iconicity leads to faithfulness constraints, while economy enhances markedness constraints (use unmarked candidates!). Many typologically universal patterns are the result of the two competing motivations of iconicity and economy. 2.4 The aim of functional approaches – some problems Since it is impossible to describe the considerable number of different functional approaches, I will concentrate on Functional Grammar (Dik 1997) as a prototypical example. The basic interest of this approach can be summarized by the following questions: How does a natural language user (NLU) ‘work’? How do speakers and addressees succeed in communicating with each other through the use of linguistic expressions? (Dik 1997:1).

Natural language users are not simply ‘linguistic animals’, they have a number of capacities which contribute to linguistic communication and which need to be adequately integrated into a functional approach (Dik 1997:1-2): − − − − −

linguistic capacity: correct production and interpretation of linguistic expressions epistemic capacity: derivation of knowledge from linguistic expressions logical capacity: derivation of knowledge from rules of reasoning monitored by deductive and probabilistic logic perceptual capacity: use of perceptually acquired knowledge in producing/ interpreting linguistic expressions social capacity: knowledge of how to communicate depending on the situation and the partners involved.

Natural language users deploy their capacities in actual situations of communication, i.e. in verbal interaction (Dik 1997:8-10). Verbal interaction is based on an enormous amount of pragmatic information of what the speaker assumes to be present in the addressee and vice versa. This pragmatic information forms the point of departure for dealing with semantics and with syntax: [P]ragmatics is seen as the all-encompassing framework within which semantics and syntax must be studied. Semantics is regarded as instrumental with respect to pragmatics, and syntax as instrumental with respect to semantics. In this view, there is no room for something like an ‘autonomous’ syntax (Dik 1997:8).

Typology and Dialogue Linguistics 61

Similar to other functional approaches, Dik’s (1997) generalizations about language are based exclusively on linguistic structures as means for the expression of a certain function within a certain pragmatic and sociolinguistic context. The problem with such an approach is that linguistic structures certainly do have their semantic and pragmatic properties but these properties can never fully determine the concrete meaning of these structures in a concrete situation with the social status of the participants and the information activated in them. Of course, the capacities listed above are based on the properties of linguistic structures but capacities like the epistemic, logical, perceptual and social capacities interact with these properties and produce specific, context-induced interpretations that are not predictable from them. If a functional approach wants to understand these processes, it must integrate findings from other fields. In the next chapter, I’ll try to look at pragmatics and the role of dialogue linguistics within it. 3. The limits of universals in pragmatics and the role of dialogue linguistics The last chapter (2.4) ended with the statement that linguistic structures and their properties (almost) never fully express the meaning they have in a concrete speech situation. The reason for this is related to what Levinson (2000:6, 27-30) calls the ‘articulatory bottleneck’. Human speech encoding is by far the slowest part of speech production and comprehension-processes like prearticulation, parsing and comprehension run at a much higher speed. This bottleneck situation leads to an asymmetry between inference and articulation which accounts for why linguistic structures and their properties are subject to context-induced enrichment: “[I]nference is cheap, articulation expensive, and thus the design requirements are for a system that maximizes inference” (Levinson 2000:29). In standard theories of communication, the bottleneck problem usually leads to the division of two layers: A level of sentence-meaning as reflected by a theory of grammar that includes linguistic structures and their properties and a level of speaker-meaning that is explicated by pragmatics. However, this bipartite division is not sufficient if one wants to ask the question of universals in pragmatics “because it underestimates the regularity, recurrence, and systematicity of many kinds of pragmatic inferences” (Levinson 2000:22). For that reason, Levinson (2000) introduces a third layer which he calls ‘utterance meaning’ or ‘statementmeaning’. This level is situated between the other two levels and is characterized by Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs), while speaker-meaning is characterized by Particularized Conversational Implicatures (PCIs) (on the introduction of GCIs and PCIs cf. Grice 1975:56-67). The three layers of meaning according to Levinson (2000:21-24) are: − − −

Sentence-meaning: grammar in a broad sense Utterance-meaning/statement-meaning: Generalized Conversational Implicatures Speaker-meaning: Particularized Conversational Implicatures.

62 Walter Bisang

Thus, Levinson (2000) distinguishes two pragmatic levels, a universal one (utterance-meaning/statement-meaning) and a particularized one (speakermeaning). The two types of implicatures associated with these two levels can roughly be defined as follows (Levinson 2000:16): − −

An implicature i from utterance U is particularized if U implicates i only by virtue of specific contextual assumptions that would not invariably or even normally obtain. An implicature i is generalized if U implicates i unless there are unusual specific contextual assumptions that defeat it.

An example like (6) triggers the GCI that ‘not all of the guests are already leaving’. (6)

Some of the guests are already leaving. (Levinson 2000:16)

This inference is universal and does not depend on any specific context. In contrast to GCIs, PCIs are derived from concrete contexts. Thus, (6) may mean It must be late if it is an answer to the question What time is it?. It could also mean Perhaps John has already left in a context in which a speaker wants to know where John is. Levinson’s (2000) theory is exclusively about Generalized Conversational Implicatures. It is thus possible to understand his approach as a contribution to what can be seen as systematic and universal knowledge in pragmatics. If this is the case, two out of the three layers of meaning are amenable to descriptions in terms of systematic knowledge, i.e. the layer of sentence-meaning and the layer of utterance-meaning: − − −

Sentence-meaning: Grammar: Typological Universals Utterance-meaning: Universal principles of inference (GCIs) Speaker-meaning: No systematic principles

Levinson’s (2000) approach has been criticized by Sperber and Wilson (1986), who claim that implicatures are a side effect of relevance, a mental automatism that derives maximal inferences from an utterance with minimal psychic effort. Since the inferences looked at by Sperber and Wilson (1986) belong to the type of nonce or once-off inferences that are characteristic of Particularized Conversational Implicatures, Levinson (2000:12) rightly argues that theories of this type “simply cannot handle the phenomena that are focal to a theory of GCIs”. From a typological perspective that looks for universal properties of language, it is necessary to look for those fields of pragmatics that follow such principles and Levinson (2000) has certainly presented the most thorough theory of universal principles in pragmatics. Thus, the stipulation of his third level of utterance-meaning is sufficiently justified even though the general question of how much of pragmatics can actually be covered by a universal approach is still unclear. Levinson’s (2000) claim of the universal validity of his approach is often

Typology and Dialogue Linguistics 63

criticized in the literature as being culturally biased. If that turns out to be true the relevance of universals and the relevance of the utterance-level in pragmatics may be even smaller than assumed by Levinson himself, whose GCI theory “attempts to account for one relatively small area of pragmatic inference” (Levinson 2000:22). The above discussion concentrated on pragmatics and its universal and nonuniversal aspects as reflected by utterance-meaning and speaker-meaning, respectively. To conclude this chapter, let’s briefly look at the role that dialogue linguistics may play in that context. Dialogue linguistics does away with the language myth (Harris 1981, Weigand 2002), i.e. with the idea of fixed codes and fixed meanings. In each utterance, there is always a certain indeterminacy of meaning depending on the individual user and the probability with which she may apply certain rules and conventions. This is illustrated by the following example: (7)

When will you clean the toilet?

Depending on the context and the speaker’s intentions within that context, (7) may either be understood as a real question asking for the time when the hearer will clean the toilet or as a request to the hearer to clean the toilet. The meaning of an utterance must always be evaluated in the context of a dialogue and the processes of negotiating that take place within it. In that context, Weigand (2003) developed the dialogic action game as a minimal communicative unit (Weigand 2003) which always consists of two sequences whose meanings are mutually dependent: an action by a speaker A and a reaction by a speaker B. The initial action (speaker A) is characterized as an act of making a specific claim which determines the expected specific reaction as fulfilling that claim (speaker B). Depending on the property of the claim and on the question of whether a separate reaction is necessary, Weigand (2003) distinguishes different categories of speech act types (REPRESENTATIVE, DECLARATIVE, EXPLORATIVE, DIRECTIVE; cf. chapter 5 for some more details). The probability with which certain linguistic means will be used depends on the speech-act types and on the socio-cultural properties of the speech situation. The above example (7) may be interpreted as an EXPLORATIVE or as a DIRECTIVE speech-act type. From what has been said so far, dialogue linguistics can certainly contribute to the understanding of speaker-meaning. It explicitly understands meaning as the product of the probability with which an individual speaker selects certain linguistic means and it provides a framework consisting of speech-act types and properties of the speech situation which determine that probability. Since the same framework can be applied to different languages and cultures (cf. e.g., Cho 2005 on politeness in Korean and German, Grein 2007 on politeness in Japanese and German), dialogue linguistics can also be used for cross-linguistic and crosscultural comparison. From such a perspective, one may think of using the dialogic method for finding out to what extent Levinson’s (2000) universal approach to

64 Walter Bisang

utterance meaning is culturally biased. I thus see a considerable potential of dialogue linguistics to contribute to the question of where to draw the borderline between universal and non-universal pragmatics. 4. Grammar and the speaker’s needs in specific situations – two examples 4.1 Finiteness As can be seen from a recent volume edited by Nikolaeva (2007), the universal status of finiteness and its definition is a matter of controversial discussions. In spite of this, there are languages in which the distinction between dependent and independent clauses is formally expressed. Such languages make use of certain grammatical markers as indicators of sentencehood, i.e., as markers of clauses that can be uttered independently. In my own work (Bisang 2007), I looked at grammatical markers of tense, person, illocutionary force and politeness. As soon as these markers become obligatory, the categories they mark have to be present in independent clauses and we get a markedness asymmetry between finite and non-finite clauses. In languages like English or Japanese, the category that crucially distinguishes between finite and non-finite clauses is tense. In (8), the finite verb is in the past, while the gerundial or converbial form of the verb in -ing is not marked for tense. Similarly, the finite verb in Japanese (9) is tense-marked, while the converb in -te has no tense marking. The non-finite clause in -te takes its past-tense interpretation from the finite clause. (8)

Smok-ing a cigarette, he read the newspaper.

(9)

Tabako o sut-te, sinbun cigarette ACC smoke-CONV newspaper “Smoking a cigarette, he read the newspaper.”

o ACC

yon-da. read-PST

A category is obligatory if a speaker has to select an overt marker that represents a value of that category (for a similar definition cf. Lehmann 1995:139). Thus, a speaker has to select one of the tense markers from the set of markers expressing tense in a language like Japanese or English. The obligatoriness of a finitenessrelated category creates a reliable indicator of finiteness that is crucial for the human parser to recognize the independent status of a clause. This is an advantage for the parser but it may turn out to be a problem for the language user if she wants to utter an independent clausal structure without committing herself to the semantic value expressed by the finiteness-related marker. What can happen in such a case will be illustrated in the rest of this chapter with examples from German. In German, finiteness is associated with tense and agreement with the nominative NP. The function of finiteness can be described in terms of Klein’s (1994, 1998) semantic definition:

Typology and Dialogue Linguistics 65

Assertion of the validity of a state of affairs p for some topic time (whereby topic time is the time span for which the speaker makes a claim). Assertion functions to link the state of affairs or entity denoted by the predicate of the utterance to its topic.

Even though finiteness is an obligatory category in German, Lasser (2002:775) shows that some 3% of independent sentences with a verb uttered by German adults in her corpus are not marked for finiteness. What we find in these cases are root infinitives and finite complementizer clauses (also cf. Evans 2007 on insubordination): (10) Ich mit dem ins Kino geh-en? I with that.one to:DEF cinema go-INF “Me go to cinema with that guy?” (11) Aufpass-en, dass du take.care-INF COMPL you “Take care that you don’t lose it!”

es it

nicht NEG

verlierst! lose:PRS:2.SG

(12) Dass du noch 100 Jahre that you yet 100 years “May you become 100 years old!”

alt old

werdest! become:CONJ:2.SG

What is typical of these examples is that they are uttered in situations in which the speaker cannot or does not want to assert the validity of the state of affairs she is referring to. The contexts in which we find root infinitives and finite complementizer clauses are strictly determined – we find them with hortatives, rhetorical questions, counterfactuals, anecdote registers (Lasser 2002). Thus, finite marking is as highly grammaticalized in German as the use of nonfinite forms in certain independent clauses. The speaker is not free to abandon the assertion of the validity of an independent clause whenever she may feel like it but there are certain constructions with their specific meaning that can be used in certain situations. At this point, dialogue linguistics is coming in. Synchronically, it provides the tool for exactly describing the situations in which root infinitives and finite complementizer clauses can be used. Diachronically, it may help to develop plausible scenarios for the development of constructions like root infinitives or finite complementizer clauses.

66 Walter Bisang

4.2 Politeness in Japanese The grammatical system of politeness in Japanese combines two different axes in the speech situation, the speaker-hearer axis and the speaker-third person axis (Shibatani 1990). Speaker-hearer politeness refers to the social status of the hearer in comparison to the speaker. It is called teineigo in Japanese and is formally expressed by the suffix -mas-u (POL-PRS)/-masi-ta (POL-PST) and by the copula forms des-u (COP:POL-PRS)/desi-ta (COP:POL-PST). Thus, the suffix -masi- in the following example roughly indicates that the hearer is of higher status than the speaker: (13) Japanese: Speaker-hearer politeness (Shibatani 1990): Taroo ga ki-masi-ta. Taroo NOM come-POL-PST “Taroo has come/came.”

Speaker-third person politeness is based on the social status of third person participants relative to the speaker. This type of politeness is divided into two separate categories depending on the grammatical status of the third-person participant (Shibatani 1990). The subject-honorific form (in Japanese: sonkeigo “form of respect”) is used if the third-person participant is in the subject position. If it is in the object position, the object-honorific form (in Japanese: kenjoogo “form of modesty”) is selected. In example (14), the subject is sensei “teacher”, a participant whose status is higher than that of the speaker. Thus, the verb is in the subject-honorific form (in bold print): (14) Japanese: Subject-honorific form (Shibatani 1990): Sensei ga o-warai-ni nat-ta. teacher NOM HON-laugh-POL-PST “The teacher laughed.”

In example (15), the noun sensei “teacher” is in the object position and the verb is marked by the object-honorific form (in bold print): (15) Japanese: Object-honorific form (Shibatani 1990): Taroo ga sensei o o-tasuke-si-ta. Taroo NOM teacher ACC HON-help-HON-PST “Taroo helped the teacher.”

In the next example, speaker-hearer politeness and subject-honorific form are combined. This implies that the social status of the speaker is lower than that of the hearer as well as lower than that of the participant expressed in the subject position:

Typology and Dialogue Linguistics 67

(16) Japanese: speaker-hearer politeness plus subject-honorific form (Shibatani 1990): Sensei ga o-warai-ni nari-masi-ta. teacher NOM HON-laugh-HON-POL-PST “The teacher laughed.”

The use of this system is obligatory. It is pervasive and its command is a precondition for making career in Japan. In spite of this, a look at how it is used in dialogic action games reveals that its function in an actual dialogue is relatively small. The fact that the speaker has to use highly grammaticalized markers like the Japanese politeness forms in a given situation makes them rather inexpressive. This shows up very nicely in Grein’s (2007) work on the speech act type of DIRECTIVE – REFUSAL in Japanese. For the purpose of the present paper, I just mention one example in which a director asks one of his employees to work for him over the weekend (action by speaker A). The answer of his employee (reaction by speaker B) looks as follows: (17) Japanese (Grein 2007:331): Zannen nagara, yotei ga hait-te ori-mas-u. I.regret appointment NOM have-CONV AUX:HON-POL-PRS “I regret, I have an appointment.”

In the above example, the politeness system of Japanese is fully deployed. The suffix -mas- stands for speaker-hearer politeness and the auxiliary or- stands for the form of respect (kenjoogo). But these forms hardly contribute to the speaker’s intention of appropriately rejecting a request of his superior. What is much more important are hedges, tag-questions, idiomatic forms, explanations, markers of modality, etc. Two of these additional tools for socially appropriate and polite linguistic behaviour are attested in (17): the idiomatic form zannen nagara “I regret” and the explanation (“I have an appointment”). If a learner of Japanese only learns the grammaticalized forms for polite linguistic behaviour she will fail to communicate successfully. Of course, command of the grammatical politeness system is mandatory but what really makes an utterance suitable to a given social constellation are the additional markers mentioned above. And these markers can be discovered within the framework of dialogic action games. Dialogic action games cannot only be used to make evident linguistic tools relevant for appropriate linguistic behaviour, they also provide a framework for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. It is well-known that Brown and Levinson’s (1987) concept of politeness in terms of positive and negative face was criticized for its cultural bias. Matsumoto (1988, 1989, 1993) for instance argues that negative politeness is irrelevant in a group-oriented society because the recognition of a human relationship is more important than the reduction of the imposition of doing a face-threatening act. It is not the purpose of my paper to evaluate the adequacy of the face concept developed by Brown and Levinson (1987). What I would like to point out is that the dialogic action game can reveal

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cross-cultural differences on an empirical basis. Thus, one of Grein’s (2007, cf. this vol.) findings in her comparison of DIRECTIVES and REFUSALS in Japanese and German shows that in refusals the elaborateness of the explanation varies between the two cultures. In Germany, the most indirect rejection with a maximally elaborate explanation is used for the director. In Japan, the most elaborate explanation is addressed to acquaintances and friends. While elaborateness increases with social distance in Germany, it decreases with social distance in Japan. This fact can also be observed in example (17) in which the speaker only offers a standard explanation to her/his director. The reason for this is that members of the same inner group (the uti “inside”) need more careful treatment than people belonging to the outer sphere (Grein 2007:408). First of all, one would not expect a directive one would not be willing to do from a member of the inner sphere because such a member is supposed to have an intuitive feeling of what can be asked for. If such a directive is articulated at all it calls for an elaborated rejection. 5. Conclusion: How does dialogue linguistics matter for linguistic typology? After a short description of linguistic typology (chapter 2), I have tried to situate dialogue linguistics in the debate about universals in pragmatics (chapter 3) and I have shown what happens if speakers with their specific needs in specific situations have to cope with rigid grammatical rules (chapter 4). At a relatively early stage in this paper, I have also shown that a functional approach which wants to understand how a natural language user works must be interested in dialogue linguistics (2.4). With this background, it is now time to show more coherently in what way dialogue linguistics matters for typology. For that purpose, I would like to look at dialogue linguistics from the following three perspectives: − − −

Integrative functionalism Grammaticalization tertium comparationis

As Croft (1995) points out, existing linguistic theories can be divided into three types: formal linguistics, external functionalism and integrative functionalism: −

Formal Linguistics:

−

External Functionalism:

−

Integrative Functionalism:

existence of an innate syntax-oriented language capacity (Universal Grammar, UG) non-existence of an innate UG, but syntax and other aspects of grammar are self-contained syntax and other aspects of grammar are not self-contained, they are open to language external factors

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Formal linguists assume the existence of an innate purely syntax-oriented language faculty, i.e. Universal Grammar (UG). This syntactic system is selfcontained. External functionalists deny innateness and they have a broader concept of grammar which goes beyond syntax. What they share with formal linguists is the assumption that grammar is in some way self-contained. Elements that belong to that self-contained system are properties of the human parser or principles of iconicity or economy (2.3). Integrative functionalists don’t share the assumption of self-containedness with formal linguistics and external functionalism. They start out from the existence of language-internal variation for expressing one and the same content and assume that individual speakers select the variant they are going to use in a given situation according to sociolinguistic criteria, i.e. according to grammar-external criteria. Croft’s integrative functionalism is ultimately situated in an evolutionary context (Croft 2000, also cf. Bisang 2004, 2006) in which sociolinguistic factors are responsible for the outcome of language change. If this is true, grammatical structures as we find them in a language are not only the result of cognitive properties of the human brain (parsing, iconicity, economy), they are also due to social factors. A look at dialogue linguistics shows that the selection of linguistic forms does not only depend on social criteria but on specific intentions of the speaker (e.g., claim to truth, claim to volition in terms of Weigand’s 2003 model). Thus, the findings of dialogue linguistics fit very well into the approach of integrative functionalism. The development of constructions beyond finiteness in the German language community (4.1) and of additional, more expressive markers of politeness in Japanese can both be seen in the light of the selection and the successful diffusion of innovations. Since the selection of appropriate linguistic structures to achieve a certain communicative aim also depends on cultural factors and since these cultural factors are covered by dialogic approaches, dialogue linguistics may pave the way for a new discussion of how culture takes influence on language structure. Research on grammaticalization roughly describes the development from lexical words to grammatical markers and the further development of these markers from one grammatical function to another one. Thus, diachronic processes of grammaticalization play an important role for the grammatical structures as they are observed synchronically and as they are integrated into typological studies. In that sense, dialogue linguistics matters for typology if it can contribute to the understanding of processes of grammaticalization. Since the beginning of these processes is characterized by pragmatic inference for many researchers (Hopper & Traugott 1993, Bybee et al. 1994), there can be no doubt about the relevance of dialogue linguistics as described in chapter 3 on pragmatics. In fact, its detailed analysis of speech situations and communicative purposes has the potential to unearth a vast number of initial stages that trigger processes of grammaticalization. Also at a later stage when a grammatical system is fully developed as in the case of politeness marking in Japanese (4.2), it

70 Walter Bisang

contributes to the finding of specific situation-dependent inferences which lead to the use of more expressive markers that may in turn develop into more systematic grammatical markers at a later stage. As was shown at the beginning of this paper (chapter 2.1), the discovery of cross-linguistic patterns is based on a tertium comparationis. A dialogic approach such as the one presented by Weigand (2002, 2003) offers such a tertium comparationis, too. As was pointed out in chapter 3, her dialogically oriented speech-act types are based on the principle of action and reaction. Her main speech-act types are then classified according to the following criteria: − − −

Is a separate reaction necessary? If so, does the speaker want to make a claim to truth or a claim to volition? If the speaker makes a claim to volition, is this claim directed to knowledge or not?

On the basis of these criteria, we get the following speech act types (the first type corresponds to the action, the second to the reaction): REPRESENTATIVE

ACCEPTANCE

[+separate reaction necessary] [+claim to truth] DIRECTIVE

CONSENT

[+separate reaction necessary] [+claim to volition] [-knowledge directed] EXPLORATIVE

RESPONSE

[+separate reaction necessary] [+claim to volition] [+knowledge directed] DECLARATIVE

CONFIRM

[-separate reaction necessary] Figure 2: Dialogic speech act typology

Whether such a tertium comparationis will reveal typological patterns needs to be seen. It certainly is a good basis for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison of speech behaviour and of the use of grammatical markers in dialogue. References Bisang, Walter. 2004. “Dialectology and Typology – An integrative perspective”. Dialectology Meets Typology. Dialect grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective ed. by Bernd Kortmann, 11-45. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bisang, Walter. 2006. “Contact-Induced Convergence: Typology and areality.” Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 3 ed. by Keith Brown, 88-101. Oxford: Elsevier. Bisang, Walter. 2007. “Categories that Make Finiteness: Discreteness from a functional perspective and some of its repercussions”. Finiteness. Theoretical and empirical foundations ed. by Irina Nikolaeva, 115-137. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some universals in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar. Tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Chappell, Hilary & William McGregor, eds. 1996. The Grammar of Inalienability: A typological perspective on body part terms and the partwhole relation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cho, Yongkil. 2005. Grammatik und Höflichkeit im Sprachvergleich. Direktive Handlungsspiele des Bittens, Aufforderns und Anweisens im Deutschen und Koreanischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Croft, William A. 1995. “Autonomy and Functionalist Linguistics”. Language 71.490-532. Croft, William A. 2000. Explaining Language Change. An evolutionary approach. Essex: Pearson Education. Croft, William A. 2003. Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dempwolff, Otto. 1939. Grammatik der Jabêm-Sprache auf Neuguinea. Hamburg: Friedrichsen, de Gruyter & Co. Dik, Simon. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar. Part 1: The structure of the clause ed. by Kess Hengeveld. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Evans, Nicholas. 2007. “Insubordination and its Uses”. Finiteness. Theoretical and empirical foundations ed. by Irina Nikolaeva, 366-431. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. “Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements”. Universals of Language ed. by Joseph H. Greenberg, 73-113. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Grein, Marion. 2007. Kommunikative Grammatik im Sprachvergleich. Die Sprechaktsequenz Direktiv und Ablehnung im Deutschen und Japanischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Grice, Paul H. 1975. “Logic and Conversation”. Speech Acts ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press. Haiman, John. 1978. “Conditionals are Topics”. Language 54.564-589. Haiman, John. 1980. “The Iconicity of Grammar: Isomorphism and motivation. Language 56.515540. Haiman, John. 1983. “Iconic and Economic Motivation”. Language 59.781-819. Haiman, John. 1985. Iconicity in Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harris, Roy. 1981. The Language Myth. London: Duckworth. Hawkins, John A. 1983. Word Order Universals. New York: Academic Press. Hawkins, John A. 1994. A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, John A. 2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kager, René. 1999. Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, Wolfgang. 1994. Time in Language. London: Routledge. Klein, Wolfgang. 1998. “Assertion and Finiteness”. Issues in the Theory of Language Acquisition: Essays in honor of Jürgen Weissenborn ed. by Norbert Dittmar and Zvi Penner, 225-245. Bern: Lang. König, Ekkehard & Letizia Vezzosi. 2004. “The Role of Predicate Meaning in the Development of Reflexivity”. What Makes Grammaticalization? A look from its fringes and components ed. by Walter Bisang, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann & Björn Wiemer, 213-244. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lasser, Ingeborg. 2002. “The Roots of Root Infinitives: Remarks on infinitival main clauses in adult and child language”. Linguistics 40.767-796. Lehmann, Christian. 1984. Der Relativsatz: Typologie seiner Strukturen, Theorie seiner Funktionen, Kompendium seiner Grammatik. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Munich: Lincom Europa.

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Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. The theory of generalized conversational implicatures. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 1988. “Reexamination of the Universality of Face: Politeness phenomena in Japanese”. Journal of Pragmatics 12.403-426. Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 1989. “Politeness and Conversational Universals – Observations from Japanese”. Multilingua 8.207-222. Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 1993. “Linguistic Politeness and Cultural Style: Observations from Japanese”. Japanese/Korean Linguistics. Vol. 2 ed. by Patricia M. Clancy, 55-67. Stanford, Calif.: Center for Study of Language Information. Nikolaeva, Irina, ed. 2007. Finiteness. Theoretical and empirical foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1990. The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance. Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Weigand, Edda. 2002. “The Language Myth and Linguistics Humanised”. The Language Myth in Western Culture ed. by Roy Harris, 55-83. Richmond: Curzon Press. Weigand, Edda. 2003. Sprache als Dialog. Sprechakttaxonomie und kommunikative Grammatik. 2nd rev. ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Glossary 1 2 3 ACC Adj AUX COMPL CONJ CONV COP DEF Dem Gen HON INF N NEG Nom Num POL PRS PST Rel SG

first person second person third person accusative adjective auxiliary complemetizer conjunctive converb copula definite demonstrative genitive honorific infinitive noun negation nominative numeral polite present tense past tense relative clause singular

Intercultural Dialogue and Academic Discourse

Světla Čmejrková Czech Language Institute, Academy of Sciences, Prague

In this article, I examine the relationship between culture and academic discourse by providing an intercultural perspective on writer – reader interaction in academic texts. In the introductory section, I will briefly outline the question of the relationship between culture and academic discourse; in the second part I will focus on the assumption that cultures orient their discourse in different ways, as far as the relationship between the author and the reader is concerned; in the third part I will map the situation in Slavic languages, Czech and Russian, and compare it with English; in the concluding sections I will discuss the fact that communication across languages and cultures poses extra objectives on this relationship.

1. Introduction The interest in the cultural variation of academic discourse has developed in contrast to the belief that the rhetorical structure of scientific text is universal. Widdowson (1979:110), in his “Explorations in Applied Linguistics”, offered a strong form of a universalistic hypothesis, claiming that scientific discourse represents a way of conceptualizing reality and a manner of communication which must, if it is to remain scientific, be independent from languages and cultures. He assumes that the concepts and procedures of scientific inquiry constitute a secondary cultural system independent of the primary cultural systems associated with different societies. So although, for example, the Japanese and the French have different ways of life, beliefs, preoccupations, preconceptions, and so on deriving from the primary cultures of the societies of which they are members, as scientists they have a common culture. In the same way, he assumes that the discourse conventions which are used to communicate this common culture are independent of the particular linguistic means used to realize them (1979:51-52). Scientific exposition is structured according to certain patterns of rhetorical organization which, with some tolerance for individual stylistic variation, imposes a conformity on members of a scientific community no matter what language they happen to use (Widdowson 1979:61).

74 Svĕtla Čmejrková

1.1 Linguistic turn In the climate of the linguistic turn, the assumed universality of scientific text has been challenged: – –

The language of science is no longer seen as a transparent vehicle of knowledge; it is ascribed an important role in giving meaning to the phenomena of reality and in the construction of reality. A growing awareness of the role of language, communication and rhetoric in constructing discourse communities has appeared. Scientific discourse is interpreted as a dialogical negotiation between the writer and the discourse community he/she addresses (Duszak 1997).

The shift in the interpretation of academic discourse becomes evident when we compare the treatment of the so-called scientific style in traditional stylistics, e.g., in that of the Prague Functional-Structural School on the one hand, and the sociofunctional treatment of academic discourse in recent functional theories on the other. Czech structuralist and functionalist stylistics treated the so-called scientific (scholarly or expository) functional style in its opposition to the other four language styles (common, institutional, journalistic, and artistic), ascribing the following constituent distinctive features to it: regarding the parameters of spoken vs. written, scholarly discourse is conceived of as primarily written, and as regards the distinction between monologue and dialogue, it is attributed with the features of the monologue. Scientific style is defined as a public style, and opposed to those that have a close or well-known addressee. Public design should not be understood as the comprehensive intelligibility of a scientific text, since scholarly discourse, due to its exacting and demanding nature, is not intended to address everyone. Aimed at an unknown and distant addressee, public design is to be understood as a type of formal design. In addition, scientific style is opposed to journalistic style from the point of view of persuasiveness, which is ascribed to the latter but not to the former. The macrostructure of a scientific exposition is considered to follow from the nature of the matter under analysis, from the ‘the internal needs of the topic development’, i.e. not from external factors, such as situation or reader (Mistrík 1974). In later functional treatments (Halliday 1978, 1985), scientific discourse is ascribed social characteristics and interpersonal features. The parameters of text organization are reinterpreted in interactional terms and correlated with underlying social values. The author’s discursive strategies are described in terms of his or her involvement and detachment, employment of power and solidarity, face, politeness, modesty, firmness, shyness, boldness or willingness to negotiate (Duszak 1994, 1997, Vassileva 1995, 1997, Ventola 1994, 1997).

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1.2 From social view to cross-cultural studies of academic writing Academic writing viewed in communicative terms made it possible to also view it in a cross-cultural perspective. Contrastive cross-linguistic studies have begun to map differences in academic texts written by scholars from different speech communities. The first stimuli came from the writing pedagogy and Kaplan’s works were followed by other intercultural studies (Connor 1996, Clyne 1987, Čmejrková 1994, 1996, Čmejrková & Daneš 1997, Daneš & Čmejrková 1997, Duszak 1994, 1997, Mauranen 1993a, 1993b, Vassileva 1995, 1997, 2000, Ventola 1992, 1994, 1998, Ventola & Mauranen 1996, Yakhontova 1997, 2002 and others). These studies show that cultures develop writing styles appropriate to their own histories and the needs and values of their own societies with many cultural variables and that there may be various intellectual styles that combine with specific patterns of discourse organization and discourse expectations (cf. Duszak 1994:291). Rhetorical variation is to be expected not only between languages and cultures, but also between disciplinary cultures, and just as importantly, among individual scholars. Academic writing is not homogeneous and it is difficult to talk about norms of academic writing in general, dissociated from specific research areas, particularly from the distinction between the natural and social sciences. Even if we admit that individual writers have different habits and even if we do not lose sight of genre variation, differences between languages and cultures are perceived. The sensitivity to the way scientific knowledge is formulated by the members of other national scientific communities surprisingly exists even among scholars. An American reviewer of a European volume states in his review: “Though the writer writes in the manner of an Austrian academic, this is a readable volume” (quoted from Kretzenbacher 1995). Intercultural studies of academic discourse have a specific motivation – the growth of academic English. There is no doubt that English has become the world’s predominant language of research and scholarship, and an increasing number of scholars – who are aware of the cultural variation of academic discourse – are confronted with the question: what should the non-native English writer adopt and what should he/she abandon in order to make himself/herself understood and to meet the international community’s expectations? Or should the scholars preserve their native language writing habits? Wolfgang Raible claims in the handbook “Writing and its Use” that scientific writing fosters national traditions: French scientists knew and know that they write in a way different from their German colleagues, comprehensible scientific writing has a different standing in anglophone science and in the corresponding German-speaking tradition (Raible 1994: 9).

As early as in the 1980s, Johan Galtung (1981:820) outlined differences between the Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Gallic, and Nipponic academic communities, their

76 Svĕtla Čmejrková scientific goals and norms. The Anglo-Saxon style appears to Galtung as being very strong in the description of reality. There are clear rules for establishing what constitutes a valid fact and what does not; faiths and beliefs enter into data collection to a lesser extent than into other intellectual activities: one can be for or against a theory, but not for or against data – “theories divide, but data unite”. Scholars are against “sweeping generalizations” and produce rather “a set of small pyramids gathered in the landscape with no super-pyramid overreaching them”. The opposite is true of the Teutonic and Gallic intellectual settings, which are very strong in theory formation and weak in reality description, as Galtung states. The differences between Anglo-American and German academic discourse have been mapped in many contrastive works, e.g., by Michael Clyne. As Clyne (1987:238) argues, texts written by Germans are less designed to be easy to read. Their emphasis is on providing readers with knowledge, theory, and stimulus for thought and it is the readers who have to make an extra effort to understand the texts. In English-speaking countries, most of the onus falls on writers to make their texts readable, and as a result, English academic texts are closer to nonacademic ones. In a similar way, reader-responsible languages are contrasted to writer-responsible English in Hinds’ (1987) works. The intrinsic difference between predominantly cooperative, writer-responsible and reader-oriented English and reader-responsible and writer-oriented German writing style is often discussed and assessed in cross-cultural studies. The former has been shown to be text-constructive and to incorporate dialogue, whereas the latter is shown to be dominated by the primary function of Wissensdarstellung (“presentation of knowledge”) and establishing of authority in the discipline. At the same time, intercultural studies suggest that the features characteristic of German writing culture can also be identified in other European academic settings and writing cultures, including Slavic ones. Johanna Nichols (1988) states that whereas English academic texts are based on a dialogical contract between the writer and the reader, in Russian academic setting, the scientific discourse is textualized as a depersonalized and highly objectivized claim of truth. How should we understand the notion of a dialogical contract between the writer and the reader? The manifestations of such a contract are undoubtedly numerous in both the macrostructure and microstructure of a scientific text. If the production of a research text is viewed as being controlled by the writing ego that makes choices with regard to the reader’s expectations, allusions to the common background knowledge and invitations to cooperate in the construction of new knowledge can be traced. Interpersonal elements imply the relationship between the author and the readership, they can express the author’s attitudes and the degree of certainty and signal attitudes towards persons involved in the discourse.

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2. The authorial self-presentation in scientific text Academic discourse, viewed as an instance of social interaction between authors and their audiences, poses the question of how academic writers present themselves to the readership in order to create a particular impression of themselves as well as to indicate the target audience and to control the communicative situation according to their goals. They have at their disposal, in addition to a number of other devices such as modals and various (meta)textual means of expressing attitudes, such transparent tools as forms of self-reference, forms of address, and their combinations. These forms are often conventionalized in individual languages and their respective cultures. Their active constructive role in written texts has been explored mainly in literary narratives, especially in those written in the 1st person singular and based on the interplay between the writer and the narrator of the story, and, occasionally, also on addressing and positioning a fictitious reader. For scientific texts, the Latin rhetorical tradition recommended the so-called pluralis modestiae or pluralis auctoris as an appropriate linguistic means of selfpresentation of the writer, conveying his modest and non-imposing approach to the reader. The authorial presence in a scientific text ranges nowadays from his/her full invisibility to his/her marked prominence. Whereas e.g., academic writers of Slavic cultural background still adhere to the we textual self, in the English academic setting this habit has been abandoned – in many instances – in favour of the more responsible I presentation (as shown in Duszak 1997, Cecchetto-Stroinska 1997, Vassileva 2000, Yakhontova 1997, 2002 and others). 1 The English preference for the I involvement can be perceived as a direct impact of English manuals for academic writing: …we reject the idea that academic writing is objective and impersonal… Taking responsibility for your ideas commits you to truthfulness. The I makes you write your ideas, thoughts and convictions (Ivanič & Simpson 1992:144).

As can be seen, – –

1

it is universal, and devoid of human characteristics, since facts speak for themselves, it is culture-specific, and speaker-marked, since it is the speaker who constructs the communicated facts.

However, even in the Anglo-American setting the I presentation is a novum in the development of scientific discourse. Kretzenbacher (1995:27) quotes an interesting comment on the usage of the I perspective: Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the founder of fractal geometry, “wurde von amerikanischen Naturwissenschaftlern zwar als fachlich brilliant anerkannt, wegen des häufigen Vorkommens der ersten Person Singular in seinen Schriften aber als besonders arrogant angesehen” (“was considered a brilliant specialist by American natural scientists, but, due to his frequent usage of the first singular personal pronoun, was considered especially arrogant”).

78 Svĕtla Čmejrková Both assumptions go back to the Greek rhetorical tradition: Aristotle’s rhetoric was conceived as the art of “giving effectiveness to truth”, in contrast to Sophistic rhetoric, which developed as an art of “giving effectiveness to the speaker” (Baldwin 1928:3). In order to reconcile the two contradictory assumptions, and to meet Aristotle’s claim to ethos, the organizing role of the writing scholar is to be given “an appropriate interpretation”, as in Latour and Woolgar (1979) and in Hunston’s (1994) formulation (cf. also Livnat 2006): The result of the construction of a fact is that it appears unconstructed by anyone; the result of rhetorical persuasion in the agnostic field is that participants are convinced that they have not been convinced (Latour and Woolgar 1979:240). In other words, to be convincing, what is persuasion must appear to be only reportage (Hunston 1994:193).

The chief linguistic means of an objective report are verbs that locate agency in the 3rd person (data show) as well as various impersonal, passive and reflexive constructions, modals, generic forms (one, man), etc. which indicate the human subject only indirectly. Some scholars manage to eliminate everything that may be considered subjective, above all any reference to themselves and to their epistemic and deontic doings, i.e., “the locus at which the subject of enunciation organizes its own performance, foresees obstacles, and passes tests” (Greimas 1990:30). These authors shift themselves to the background, seemingly “giving effectiveness to truth” (their indirect presence in a text is discussed in Cecchetto & Stroińska 1997). Other scholars refer to themselves either as members of a scientific community (employing the we perspective in presenting facts), or refer directly to themselves (employing the I perspective). 3. Material and methods In order to reconstruct possible motivations for the authors’ choices, I have analyzed: – –

linguistic articles written by 18 Czech linguists, both male and female, published in a Czech linguistic journal, “Slovo a slovesnost”, in 1996-2002 (a total of 314 pp). linguistic articles written by 18 Russian linguists, both male and female, published in a Russian linguistic journal, “Вопросы языкознания”, in 1998 (a total of 304 pp).

My statistical findings confirm the preliminary hypothesis that both Czech and Russian linguists generally prefer the we perspective in their scientific writing. Czech authors, at least some of those who have contributed to the journal analyzed, employ the I perspective more often than Russian authors; in fact, the I perspective appeared in only two of the Russian articles.

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Table 1: Occurrences and percentage of I/WE perspective in the Czech and Russian articles Czech I (já, я) 174 21% WE (my, мы) 635 79% Number of occurrences 809

Russian 36 5% 610 95% 646

I confined the corpus of Czech and Russian texts to approximately 300 pages in order to produce data comparable to those provided by Vassileva (2000) for five languages: English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian. Her corpus consisted of research articles also written in the field of linguistics (300 pages for each of the respective languages), cf. Table 2 (Vassileva 2000:55). Table 2: Percentage and overall number of occurrences of either the I or the we perspective I We Occurrences

English German French Bulgarian Russian 69% 47% 40% 6% 0,5% 31% 53% 60% 94% 99,5% 526 227 153 203 300

As for Russian texts, my findings are in harmony with Vassileva’s, despite the fact that the overall number of the I and we statements in her material is different from mine. The higher number of I statements in my Russian material results from the fact that one of the two Russian authors in whose articles the I pronoun appeared used it repeatedly (32 occurrences as opposed to 4 occurrences in the other article). The projection of the Czech data onto the Table 2 shows that they are closer to the Slavic pole of Table 2, but, equally far from Russian as from French. The fact that the I perspective clearly dominates in English and is very rare in Russian corresponds to the general intuition that whereas Western culture tends toward individualism, Eastern culture tends toward collectivism (cf. Connor 1996). The English writers’ preference for the 1st person singular formulations of their scientific claims has been described in several contrastive studies of academic writing (Cecchetto & Stroińska 1997, Čmejrková & Daneš 1997, Yakhontova 2002 and others). There may be various reasons why Russian authors prefer the we perspective: this habit is either a part of their own writing awareness or may be required by the norms of the editorial board of the journal, recommended by the reviewers, etc. In any case, the we practice is very typical of the Russian writing norms. In Czech and Russian, like in other Slavic languages, the I and we verb forms are marked by the inflectional endings of finite verbs, e.g., myslím, я думаю (“I think”) vs. myslíme, мы думаем (“we think”). The difference between Czech and Russian consists in the absence vs. presence of the surface subject: whereas Czech is a pro-drop language and the surface subject is non-obligatory, in Russian, indicative verb forms are accompanied by a pronoun (мы отметим) and these

80 Svĕtla Čmejrková forms prevail over the forms отметим, допустим, characteristic of imperative and conjunctive. Observing the occurrences of the 1st person pronouns, we perceive that the writers use singular or plural forms exclusively, or they combine these two perspectives in different sections of texts and/or with different performances and goals pursued throughout. The exclusive use of the I perspective is very rare. There was no Czech article in my material which used the I perspective exclusively, however, six articles used the we perspective exclusively; preference was given to the mixed form of presentation, which appeared in 12 Czech articles. For Russian authors, the I perspective was peripheral and appeared only in two articles while all the 18 authors used the we perspective systematically throughout their texts. Table 3: Czech and Russian articles in which only I or WE is used and in which both are used I WE mixed (both I and WE) Total

Czech articles Russian articles 0 0 6 16 12 2 18 18

3.1 The we acts in Czech and Russian research articles The discursive practice of writing on behalf of the collective we (pluralis communis) has several motivations. The we acts in scientific texts may perform – in terms of functional linguistics (Halliday 1971:332) ideational, interactional or textual functions. 3.1.1 Ideational functions Some of the we statements found in scientific texts perform ideational (representational) functions. The collective we relates the issue under study to the shared, common theoretical or practical knowledge. In linguistic texts, and mostly in those which tend toward philosophical considerations, the collective we refers to the members of a group under consideration, be it human beings, language users, communication partners, speakers of a given language, etc. The linguist presents himself/herself as a member of this group. As such, he/she perceives himself/herself as a part of the community under consideration, as an object of his/her introspection, etc. We is used in statements about the nature of human language and its relation to thought, i.e. in general linguistic considerations: (1)

Эта особенность нашего мышления (грубо говоря, непременная его предпосылка типа „мир есть лишь постольку, поскольку в нем есть тот, кто о нем размышляет и говорит“), очевидно, и обусловливает те бесконечные „напоминания“ о говорящем и его акте речи-мысли, то есть тот

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субъективный компонент, который входит в содержание всего, что мы говорим и о чем думаем. (Гуревич) “This specific nature of our thinking (or more simply put, the requisite assumption of the type “the world exists only insofar as someone who thinks and speaks about it exists“), undoubtedly also conditions numerous ‘allusions’ to the speaker and his act of thinking-speaking, i.e. the subjective component which is a part of everything we say and think about.” (Гуревич) (2)

Když myslíme věc jako věc, vždy ji nějak pojmenováváme, ba mohli bychom říci, že právě oním pojmenováním … se věc věcí stává, že ji pojmenování konstituuje. (Vaňková) “When we mean a thing as a thing, we always name it somehow, we could even say that by that very naming, … a thing becomes a thing, that the naming constitutes it.” (Vaňková)

Quite often, we is used in general remarks about common communication practices, shared by speakers of different languages: (3)

Mluvíme-li za někoho, promlouváme jakoby jeho - cizím - hlasem, ovšem opět s příměsí hlasu vlastního. Mluvíme-li za někoho, vždy se v tom projevuje náš postoj k druhému člověku..., a také samozřejmě naše znalost druhého člověka… (Čmejrková) “If we speak for someone, we speak like his – foreign – voice, of course again with a tinge of our own voice. If we speak for someone, in it there is always the exertion of our position toward the other person…, our knowledge of the other person…” (Čmejrková)

We is used in statements about the structure and semantics of a particular language, synonymously with such statements as “the Russians say” (по-русски говорят, на русском языке имеется конструкция), “the Czechs say” (česky se řekne, v češtině existuje konstrukce): (4)

Мы говорим: посуда стоит на столе ... Мы говорим: обувь стоит под вешалкой... (Рахилина) “We say: the dishes are lying on the table … We say: the shoes are lying under the coat rack…” (Рахилина)

(5)

Zatímco v češtině odpovídáme nejčastěji Nevím nebo Já nevím (s tím, že v běžné mluvě krátíme dlouhé í a vyslovujeme Nevim), v němčině čteme i slyšíme často “Ich weiß es nicht” s anaforickým es (Já to nevím). (Štícha) “While in Czech we most often answer with Nevím – (I) don’t know or Já nevím – I don’t know (and in ordinary speech we shorten the long í, and pronounce it Nevim), in German we often read and even hear ‘Ich weiß es nicht’ with the anaphoric ‘es’ (“I don’t know it/that”).” (Štícha)

82 Svĕtla Čmejrková In other contexts, we is used for remarks about members of a given (ethnic, cultural etc.) discourse community and their shared cultural knowledge, habits, norms: (6)

Na jejich (tj. konotací) obecném sdílení je pak možno předpokládat, že všichni rozumíme i takovým kontextům, v nichž jaro neoznačuje roční období (nebo stav přírody, chceme-li), ale např. vnitřní stav člověka. (Vaňková) “In their common sharing (i.e. through the connotation) it is then possible to assume that we all understand even such contexts as those in which Spring does not denote a season (or a state of nature, if we will), but, for example, the inner state of a person.” (Vaňková)

(7)

При этом в подавляющем большинстве случаев при чтении словарной статъи неоднозначной вокабулы мы интуитивно воспринимаем некую общность, свойственную разным ее значениям... (Перцов) “At the same time, in the most of the cases when reading the dictionary entry of an ambiguous word we intuitively perceive a certain common base belonging to all of its meanings…” (Перцов)

The discourse practice of writing on behalf of the collective we is sometimes imposing or risky, as the author’s assertions may be disputable, when related to the whole, unspecified community, consisting of followers of different methodologies, trends, schools. (8)

Přes velký význam toho, čemu se pak říkalo Chomského revoluce, jsem přesvědčen, že de Saussurův program dosud plníme. (Sgall) “In spite of the great significance of what was then called the Chomskyan Revolution, I am convinced that we continue to fulfil de Saussure’s program even now.” (Sgall)

And what is crucial, the author’s expectations of consent may be false when related to speakers of different languages or members of different social, professional, and ethnic communities. In such instances, the employment of the collective we is a challenge to territorial, cultural, ideological and other variation of the readers’ background knowledge (cf. Daneš & Čmejrková 1997). However, in Slavic languages, it seems important to the writer “to seek the audience’s co-operation in the more abstract, theoretical areas of knowledge and analysis” (Vassileva 2000:79). Similar procedures for displaying the topic by means of relating assertions to the shared and (potentially) generally known facts are typical of Czech and Russian articles in many fields of the social sciences and humanities. The formulations are based not only on verbs in the 1st person plural, but also on the possessive pronoun our (in Czech náš, in Russian наш), e.g., in our country, our history, our language, our consciousness, etc. This manner of expressing group membership and common attitudes (and sometimes stereotypes) has been focused upon only recently. In linguistics texts, the practice of we

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statements is very frequent as they address the audience ‘speaking the same language or sharing basic assumptions about this language’ and acquainted with its structural and semantic features and cultural context. This fact is responsible for the unrestrained usage of the collective we in ideational (representational) speech acts: (9)

A vzpomeňme si tu např. i na jednu známou semaforskou písničku: Naraž si bouřku ještě více do čela/ Aby ti vráska z čela zcela zmizela// Nešťastná láska vrásky vždycky nadělá/ a obarví ti černý vlásky do běla... Význam slova „vráska“, jak ho spolu sdílíme, utvářejí právě takovéto kontexty. (Vaňková) “And let us recall here, for example, a well-known song from the Semafor Theater: Push your derby even further down onto your forehead/So the wrinkles on your forehead disappear entirely//Unrequited love always wreaks havoc/ And colors your black hairs white... The meaning of the word ‘wrinkle’ as we share it, is formed by these very contexts.” (Vaňková)

The last example, namely the address let us recall, leads us to the next function of the we acts. 3.1.2 Interactional functions The we acts perform conspicuous interactional functions in a text. The most frequent authorial intrusion into the speech event in research articles is the explicit invitation of the reader to participate in the process of reading and reasoning: the we perspective unites the author (as a writer) and the reader. Interactional functions are also responsible for the frequent employment of the we acts in English research articles. The pronoun we used in imperative acts is “the less imposing counterpart to the prototypical second person imperative” (Swales 1990:107). This inclusive we together with an interpersonal function, also serves, as we will see, an important textual function, initiating a new topic, beginning an explanation, an argument, etc.: (10) Возьмем пример, уже использовавшийся в литературе. (Перцов) “Let us present an example which has already been used in the literature.” (Перцов) (11) Předveďme si malou ukázku toho, co dokáže v dané souvislosti rozlišit i relativně malý a ne plně reprezentativní počítačový korpus mannheimského Institutu pro německý jazyk. (Štícha) “Let us present a small exhibit of what the relatively small and not fully representative computer corpus of the Mannheim German Language Institute manages to discern in a given context.” (Štícha)

The invitation of the reader often anticipates the introduction of examples. However, it may also initiate acts of reasoning and posing questions:

84 Svĕtla Čmejrková (12) Предположим, ваш знакомый входит к вам в комнату и говорит… (Перцов). “Let us assume that your acquaintance enters your room and says…” (Перцов) (13) Dejme tomu, že při studiu partikulí v textech narazíme na jev jejich kombinatoriky. (Štícha) “Let us suppose that while studying particles in texts, we run into a feature of their combinatorial properties.” (Štícha)

The employment of the we perspective is very frequent in the acts of hypothesizing and argumentation, e.g., expressed in if clauses: (14) Попробуем изменить время глаголов в приведенной цитате ... и мы почувствуем разницу между оригиналом и его модификацией: в первом случае мы как бы присутствуем в соответствующем месте в соответствующее время и непосредственно вместе с автором воспринимаем изображаемый пейзаж … (Перцов). “Let us attempt to change the verb tense in this quotation … and we will sense the difference between the original and its modification: in the first case it is as if we were present in a given place and time and, together with the author, we’re perceiving the landscape depicted at that moment …” (Перцов) (15) Podíváme-li se do běžných jazykovědných příruček, zjistíme, že frazeologie je disciplína zkoumající nepravidelná, ustálená spojení slov. (Klötzerová) “If we take a look into ordinary linguistic handbooks, we learn that phraseology is a discipline which investigates the irregular, stabilized connection of words.” (Klötzerová)

The examples show that the explicit hinting at the reader by means of the acts of invitation as let us present, let us take, let us consider, let us recall, let us pose the question, let us attempt, let us devote attention to, let us assume – uveďme, vezměme, uvažme, připomeňme, položme si otázku, pokusme se, věnujme pozornost, předpokládejme, упомянем, напомним, приведем, скажем несколько слов, остановимся на вопросе, проанализируем, укажем, рассмотрим, обратимся к, обратим внимание, подчеркнем, оговоримся has its close counterpart in the acts addressing the reader only implicitly, by means of we assertions. The author expects the reader to share his/her understanding, interpretation and evaluation of linguistic situations, his/her way of seeing things. Again, the expectation of the readers’ consent may be imposing, particularly when the reader finds the author’s assertions debatable. The we referring to the writer who organizes the text and makes its structure explicit signals topic maintenance and topic shifts and is not explicitly inclusive, though in some contexts, it at least potentially addresses the reader: (16) Zde se už dostáváme k otázkám poměru centra a periférie a další možné strukturovanosti obou těchto jazykových pólů… (Štícha)

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“Here we are approaching the relationship between the center and the periphery and further possible types of structuredness of both of these linguistic poles…” (Štícha)

The inclusive or exclusive reading of the we pronoun depends on whether the verb employed covers the reader’s activity or not: while jak jsme viděli, как мы видели (“as we have seen”) indicates common textual experience of the writer and the reader, jak jsme uvedli, как мы показали (“as we have shown”) rather excludes the possibility of the reader’s direct cooperation. (17) К эвристической природе собственно лингвистических построений мы вернемся в разделе… (Перцов) “We will return to the heuristic character of purely linguistic constructions in section … “ (Перцов) (18) Zatím jsme se zabývali především dvěma hlavními typy konverzačního diskurzu: salónním “krásným hovorem” (nazývaným někdy také ‘party talk’) a běžnou, drobnou konverzací každodenní (‘small talk’)… (Hoffmannová) “Up to now we have dealt primarily with two main types of conversational discourse: ‚salon talk’ (sometimes called ‘party talk’) and ordinary, light, everyday conversation (‘small talk’)…” (Hoffmannová)

The interpersonal function of the above utterances interferes with their textual function. It is this employment of the we that could be called, in my view, the ‘authorial we’ (pluralis auctoris), as the text here is considered to be a shared discursive practice of both the author and the reader. 3.1.3 Textual functions Most often, the we acts perform textual (metatextual, organizational) functions in Russian and Czech research articles. Though some Czech authors employ the I perspective to comment on their text processing, many of them still adhere to the we perspective. When reporting on the organization of their successive steps, Russian authors (with the exception of one author in the corpus analyzed) employed the we perspective exclusively. By means of we statements, the authors formulate their aims, topics, focuses, methods, and use the we perspective in both advance and back organizers, as well as in conclusions: (19) Мы будем рассматривать только время личнъх форм глагола в русском язъке, оставляя в стороне причастия и деепричастия. (Перцов) “We will analyze only a part of certain verb forms in Russian, leaving aside participles.” (Перцов) (20) Zaměříme se přitom na kombinace tří partikulí v bezprostřední posloupnosti, například Já tedy vlastně ani nevím. (Štícha)

86 Svĕtla Čmejrková “At the same time, we focus on the combination of three particles in immediate succession, for example Já tedy vlastně ani nevím („Well I don’t even really know”)”. (Štícha)

This practice corresponds to the Latin rhetoric tradition of the so called pluralis modestiae or pluralis auctoris as an appropriate linguistic means of selfpresentation of the writer. (21) Итак, мы описали исходное состояние семантики, которое будем называть первым уровнем мотивации. (Монич) “We have thus described the initial state of semantics, which we will call the first motivational level.” (Монич) (22) Úroveň výzkumu tedy, shrneme-li, vyžaduje vytvoření explicitní pojmové soustavy, důkladnější a adekvátnější než byly dřív…(Štícha) “The level of research, then, if we summarize, requires the creation of an explicit conceptual scheme, more thorough and adequate than before...” (Štícha)

While in Czech the textual we appears to be gradually yielding to the textual I perspective, especially with younger authors who have been exposed to the English academic discourse and its norms, Russian research articles still teem with the textual we acts performing organizing and cohesive functions and enhancing the reader’s attention: мы претендуем, мы ставим перед собой задачи, мы рассмотрим, мы стремимся, мы хотели бы продемонстрировать, мы имеем дело, мы обозначим, мы находим, мы исходим из, мы не будем коментировать, мы усматриваем, мы имеем в виду, мы не предпринимаем попытки, мы постараемся, мы пытаемся, мы затрагиваем, мы выделяем, мы посчитали целесообразным, мы посвящаем, мы не можем избежать, мы будем оперировать, мы постараемся дать, мы строим здесь свои рассуждения и выводы…, or in a developed form: сразу заметим, попутно отметим, предварительно скажем … Due to the belief that scientific style should be devoid of any subjectivity and individuality, many Czech and Russian writers express their opinions by means of we acts and do not hesitate to use the we perspective with verbs of thinking. The I perspective is a comparatively new development in Czech academic writing and many authors adhere to a more objectivized way of formulating their texts, as they are aware of the established conventions in their communities: (23) Nezastíráme, že u LF přináší značná nesamostatnost a častá polysémie jejich komponentů problémy při určování míry anomálie. Domníváme se však, že je možné tyto obtíže překonat pečlivým srovnáváním jednotlivých tříd derivátů. (Klötzerová) “We do not pretend that with LP and the pointed lack of independence and frequent polysemy of its components do not bring about problems in determining

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the degree of anomaly. We assume, however, that it is possible to overcome these difficulties through the careful comparison of individual classes of derivates.” (Klötzerová) (24) Máme na mysli zvláště rovinu lexikální (ovšem nevylučujeme výskyt frazeologických rysů ani na rovině fonetické). (Klötzerová) “We especially have in mind the lexical level (of course, we do not exclude the possibility of the occurrence of phraseological characteristics, even on the phonetic level).” (Klötzerová)

And again, in Russian linguistic texts, we acts are totally conventionalized: мы полагаем, мы предполагаем, мы отказываемся, мы считаем, мы склонны считать, решение, к которому мы присоединяемся, нам представляется, нам думается, нам видится, нам приходится, нам кажется очевидным, нас интересует, нам импонирует, на наш взгляд, по нашему мнению, по нашему исчислению, предположению, по нашим наблюдениям… (25) Однако, в семантике той лексики… довольно отчетливо, как нам кажется, вырисовываются следующие реалии. (Монич) “However, in the semantics of the this lexical item … the following reality is, as it appears to us, sufficiently clearly projected .” (Монич) (26) Последнее название нас не вполне удовлетворяет, но более удачного придумать не удалось. (Перцов) “The final title does not entirely satisfy us, but it was not possible to find a more appropriate one.” (Перцов)

Though in the above examples the we perspective can be interpreted as a manifestation of the non-imposing authorial we, it paradoxically sometimes resembles the royal we (pluralis majestiae), when used for self-reference in the narrow sense of the word. It is not unusual in a scientific text, particularly with Russian authors, to use the we perspective when reporting on one’s own results and referring to one’s own publications: (27) В качестве материала ... мы выбрали соответствующим образом стилизованные главы из романа ... (Добровольский) “For material … we chose correspondingly stylized chapters from the novel…” (Добровольский) (28) Celkem jsme shromáždili a popsali 1808 lexikálních frazémů ... (Klötzerová) “We collected and described a total of 1808 phrasemes...” (Klötzerová)

The we statements in scientific texts may sometimes refer to the author alone, while in other instances they have more a complicated reference which accommodates a larger number of subjects, among them the author of the text.

88 Svĕtla Čmejrková

4. Discussion In Slavic languages, which are obviously under the impact of international norms of academic communication, the change is in the direction of gradual movement from the more generalizing academic style and the more ambiguous 1st person plural form of exposition to the more transparent form of presentation, framed in the 1st person singular. This is particularly true of the textual operations of the author: When the author guides the reader through the text, or expresses his or her convictions referring to himself through the we perspective (e.g., In our article we use exclusively the term…, we would now like to discuss…, before we begin to describe…, we do not conceal that…, we believe…), it is quite easy to change such a habit and to adopt the I discourse practice, as many Czech examples show. 2 In other contexts, we statements concern the topic. Employed in an ideational (representational) function, the we perspective refers not only to the writer, but embraces the speech or discourse community (we as human beings, members of social and cultural groups, scholars, linguists, speakers of Czech or Russian, readers of Czech or Russian texts etc.), assuming that members of the community understand the significance of an issue similarly. With the I and we perspective, the author presents different contents and beliefs: we acts frame collective truths, while I acts frame an issue that others may see differently (Tracy 2004). The we authors’ conviction that what they formulate as a state of affairs is ‘objective’ seems to dominate their writing. It does not mean, however, that they present themselves as bold and self-assured writers. On the contrary, their we statements are richly hedged through modal verbs and particles and proclivity of conditional mood. Their texts teem with the acts of hypothesising through if and then clauses (Čmejrková & Daneš 1997) and the authors honestly rely on the readers’ cooperation and consent with their epistemic and deontic doings. (29) Budeme-li postupovat tradiční metodou introspekce, můžeme usoudit, že struktury se vztažným co, tranzitivním slovesem a jeho akuzativním objektem jsou elementem syntaktického systému čestiny a jde tedy o struktury gramatické a přijatelné. Pokročíme-li dále, můžeme znejistit: platí totéž o strukturách se vztažným komu a dativním objektem? Jsou tedy struktury typu Komu pomáhal, (to) byly děti gramatické struktury a přijatelné věty? Pokročíme-li ještě dále ke strukturám typu Kam pojedeme letos na dovolenou, (to) bude Řecko můžeme je považovat již za nepřijatelné, a tedy i negramatické. Budeme-li ovšem všechny uvedené příklady pokládat nikoli za specifické struktury derivované z téže obecné relační báze, nýbrž pouze za různá lexikální obsazení totožné struktury, nebudeme se podobnými otázkami trápit; řekneme pak, že věta Kam půjdeme, je do kina. je sice gramatická, ale neobvyklá a stylisticky nevhodná. (Štícha)

2

The I perspective in Czech academic texts is discussed in Čmejrková 2006, in Russian texts in Čmejrková forthcoming.

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“If we proceed using the traditional method of introspection, we can deduce that structures with the relative co (what), a transitive verb and its accusative object are an element of the syntactic system of Czech and are thus grammatical and acceptable structures. If we continue on, we can become unsure: is the same true of the structures with the relative pronoun komu („to whom”) and a dative object? Are structures of the type Komu pomáhal, (to) byly děti (“whom he helped, (it/that) were children”) grammatical structures and acceptable sentences? If we continue on even further to structures of the type Kam pojedeme letos na dovolenou, (to) bude Řecko („Where we’re going on vacation this year, (it/that) will be Greece”), we can consider them unacceptable and thus ungrammatical as well. Of course, if we consider all of the examples presented not as specific structures derived from the same general relational base, but rather, as merely various lexical configurations of the same structure, we shall not bother ourselves with similar questions; we shall say, then, that the sentence Kam půjdeme, je do kina (“Where we’re going, is to the movies”), though grammatical, is unusual and stylistically inappropriate.” (Štícha)

It is this general assumption about academic discourse that triggers the usage of the we perspective, hedged by modals. Using Galtung’s (1981) words, we could say that the we authors believe that not only data, but also their interpretations and theories, unite. The authors whose texts employ the I perspective, on the other hand, use it in order to frame their issue, to restrict the field of investigation and to relate their assertions to the conditions of a speech situation, mentioning the size of their text, the focus of their interest, and decision to use a particular method. Instead of constructing a vast pyramid (here, I refer to Galtung again) visible to the whole community, behind which the textual ego of the writer is nearly invisible, the I writers prefer to build small pyramids, constructing their textual ego consciously. It is as if the we writers were dissolved in their texts, as they are a part of the topic under investigation and try to understand themselves, their own manner of speech behaviour, their own use of language, while the I writers are consciously above their text, not losing themselves in the complexity of language matters. Hence the impression that they are less modest and that they are bold in committing themselves fully to their claims (Duszak 1997). The change from the we to the I perspective is thus also related to the shift in academic genres: the I pronoun is undoubtedly the best solution with case studies and successfully frames the author’s reporting on his or her material, methods and findings drawn from the data: (30) Protože český korpus nebyl k dispozici, uchýlil jsem se k nouzovému způsobu dosavadní lingvistické práce a provedl soustavnou excerpci (trvala mi několik dní na rozdíl od asi tak půlhodinové práce u počítače) sebraných her Václava Havla, knihy Miroslava Horníčka „Dobrý den socho“, románu Josefa Škvoreckého „Prima sezóna“ a povídkové knihy Ivana Klímy „Moje zlatá řemesla“. Ze všech těchto textů, zahrnujících román, povídky, dramata a žánrově nespecifický text

90 Svĕtla Čmejrková Horníčkův, jsem získal 65 odpovědí obsahujících slovo nevím s hovorovou variantou nevim. (Štícha) “Because the Czech corpus was not available, I resorted to an alternative method from previous linguistic work and performed a systematic excerption (this took me several days as opposed to about a half an hour of work at the computer) of the collected plays of Václav Havel, the book “Hello, Statue” by Miroslav Horníček, the novel “The Swell Season” by Josef Škvorecký and a book of short stories by Ivan Klíma “My Golden Trades”. Of all these texts, including a novel, short stories, plays and Horníček’s non-genre-specified texts, I gathered 65 answers containing the word nevím (“I don’t know”) with the colloquial variant nevim (“I dunno”).” (Štícha)

Here, the I perspective refers to the process of data collection and description of the author’s efforts. However, when the same author makes hypotheses, claims and theoretical conclusions in other parts of his article, he invites the reader to participate in these activities by means of the we involvement which highlights the audience and creates solidarity. (31) Dejme tomu, že při studiu partikulí v textech narazíme na jev jejich kombinatoriky. Zaměříme se přitom na kombinace tří partikulí v bezprostřední posloupnosti, například Já tedy vlastně ani nevím. Můžeme přitom postupovat tak, že sestavíme matici všech možných trojkombinací českých partikulí a budeme zjišťovat jejich výskyt v korpusu. Můžeme přitom očekávat, že zjistíme velmi rozdílnou frekvenci těchto trojkombinací a jejich značně nerovnoměrné rozložení v různých typech textů, například rozdíl mezi jazykem psaným a mluveným, ale i mezi krásnou literaturou a publicistikou atd., a tím i rozdílný komunikační status jednotlivých kombinací. Můžeme ale také očekávat, že při jistém množství dokladů zjistíme jejich analýzou ty či ony distribuční podmínky a restrikce výskytu jednotlivých kombinací. (Štícha) “Let us suppose that while studying particles in texts, we come upon a feature of their combinatorial properties. At the same time, we focus on the combination of three particles in immediate succession, for example Já tedy vlastně ani nevím (“Well I don’t even really know”). At the same time, we can proceed in such a manner that we set up a matrix of all possible combinations of three Czech particles and we find their prevalence in the corpus. Meanwhile, we can expect to find a very different frequency of these combinations of three and their considerably uneven distribution in various types of texts, for example the difference between written and spoken language, but also between belles-lettres and journalistic writing, etc., and thus the different communication status of individual combinations. But we can also expect that given a certain number of examples, we discover, through their analysis, these or those distributional conditions and restrictions on the occurrence of individual combinations.” (Štícha)

5. Conclusion: The we perspective in intercultural communication While within his/her own academic community, whose members are expected to understand and evaluate the state of affairs similarly, the author may (to a certain

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extent) rely on ‘sharing knowledge’ and employ procedures based on this belief, an intercultural setting challenges any such belief: at this moment, I would like to quote Widdowson, and this time affirmatively: The negotiation of meaning which is both accessible and acceptable, therefore, involves the reconciliation of two potentially opposing forces: the co-operative imperative which acts in the interests of the effective conveyance of messages, and the territorial imperative which acts in the interests of the affective well-being of self (Widdowson 1990:108-109).

The intercultural setting, which takes a larger range of others as an audience, demands a more explicit argumentative stance, with a conspicuously outlined authorial background and clear position (Tracy 2004:737). Cross-culturally, the author’s assertions may be with a greater probability regarded as contentious, and that’s why a larger range of methodological issues are to be argued as positions and decisions requiring justification. Thus, a more visible and responsible authorial stance is consistent with a valuing of different cultural perspectives. European intellectual discourse was deeply rooted in the Aristotelian tradition of rhetoric, conceived as the art of ‘giving effectiveness to truth’, in contrast to the Sophistic rhetoric developed as an art of ‘giving effectiveness to the speaker’. The Aristotelian tradition could survive till the search for truth was declared as a major goal, and this characteristic often applied to scientific discourse. In Aristotelian tradition of rhetoric, the task of the author was to behave as invisibly as possible. In the epoch of the Linguistic Turn, the idea of transparency of the language of science has been challenged in many ways, beginning with the breaking of Ich-tabu (“I-tabu”) norms and acknowledging the organizing role of the writing scholar. References Baldwin, Charles S. 1928. Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (to 1400). New York: Macmillan. Cecchetto, Vittorina & Magda Stroińska. 1997. “Systems of Reference in Intellectual Discourse: A potential source of intercultural stereotypes”. Intellectual Styles and Cross-Cultural Communication ed. by Anna Duszak, 141-157. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Clyne, Michael. 1987. “Cultural Differences in the Organization of Academic Texts. English and German”. Journal of Pragmatics 11.211-247. Clyne, Michael. 1991a. “Zu kulturellen Unterschieden in der Produktion und Wahrnehmung englischer und deutscher wissenschaftlicher Texte”. Info DaF (Information Deutsch als Fremdsprache) 18.376-383. Clyne, Michael. 1991b. “The Sociocultural Dimension. The dilemma of the German-speaking scholar”. Subject-Oriented Texts: Language for special purposes and text theory ed. by Hartmut Schröder, 49-67. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Čmejrková, Světla. 1994. “Nonnative (Academic) Writing”. Writing vs. Speaking. Language, text, discourse, communication ed. by Světla Čmejrková, František Daneš & Eva Havlová, 303310. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Čmejrková, Světla. 1996. “Academic Writing in Czech and English”. Academic Writing. Intercultural and textual issues ed. by Eija Ventola and Anna Mauranen, 137-153. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game A comparative study of German and Japanese Marion Grein University of Mainz

By means of a comparative analysis of the speech act of refusal within the languages of German and Japanese, it will be elaborated that the dialogic usage of language is understood as sequences of active and reactive speech acts. Basic reference point is the human being who crucially determines the choice of communicative means on his perception of the setting of any communicative action game. The perception itself is affected by culture. Language and culture are integral parts of the dialogic action game. Out of the more or less indefinite choice of utterances, it is the cognition of a human being that opts for a specific communicative form. The analysis reveals that there are identical perceptions concerning interpersonal constellations and thus the choice of communicative means among Germans and Japanese, but also major differences.

1. Introduction Language is the basis for communication and communication can only be successful when the meaning of each utterance can be grasped. The meaning of an utterance, however, is not comprehensible by merely understanding the itemized words or the sentence as a whole. In order to grasp the meaning of an utterance, the listener has to consider the situation, in which the utterance is made, the social distance between the speakers, the previous utterances, nonverbal factors, the cognitive skills of the speakers, and their cultural imprint. The fundamental category of language usage is the speech act (cf. Searle 1969). Weigand (2003) modified Searle’s approach by combining the active and reactive speech act into a dialogic principle, where active and reactive speech act constitute a unity, calling it the minimal action game (Weigand 2000, 2002, 2003, cf. this volume). Integrated into her approach is the cultural imprint of each human being. Perception and cognition are, thus, invariably culturally determined. The objective of my research is the analysis of the minimal action game presented in Figure 1.

96 Marion Grein

active speech act: DIRECTIVES (requests, orders, invitations, proposals)

reactive speech act: refusal

Figure 1: Minimal action game directive – refusal

Here, I lay stress on the reactive speech act, i.e. the refusal. The person uttering the directive and the person, who refuses to act as demanded, negotiate with the means of language about their position. The amount of quasi-equivalent forms of utterances, which realize the specific function (here: refusal) are principally indefinite. The speakers refer to linguistic rules and conventions if they provide a basis for comprehension, and they go beyond those conventions when understanding can only be achieved by the means of particular or individual techniques. The choice of the communicative means is subject to several interactive principles of probability. Each individual chooses his/her communicative means depending on his or her very own perception of the situation, his/her evaluation of the utterance, his/her cognitive rating of the interpersonal constellation (hierarchy and social distance), the previous experiences in similar situations, his/her socialized politeness principles, his/her cultural imprint (cf. Liang 2001:66), and finally the intentions he/she wants to pursue. In other words: based on the verbal and nonverbal knowledge of the persons involved, each utterance is processed and evaluated. The implications of this evaluation-process are on the one hand very individual; on the other hand they are culturally determined and culturally conventionalized (cf. Forgas 1985:2). The objective of any communicative approach is to reveal the principles, or according to Weigand (2003:6) the principles of probability, which guide meaning and understanding of verbal interaction. Linguistics, then, is the science of language and the interacting language user. Language, perception, cognition and sociological assumptions constitute a unity. As mentioned, the objective of this article is to disclose a few results of the contrastive analysis of the reactive speech act of refusal in German and Japanese. The contrastive analysis includes a comparison of indirectness, the paradigm, politeness markers (hedges, tags, routines, impersonalisation, excuses and statements of sympathy) all differentiated with reference to the circumstances and social distance between the speakers. The detailed theoretical and methodological background information is to be found in Grein (2007). In the following chapter, I shall sum up the applied theoretical approaches. Chapter 3 will summarize research assumptions. In chapter 4 various results are listed, among them a look at the illocutionary functions, the paradigms, politeness strategies, the use of excuses and gender differences. The last chapter sums up the results of the data analysis in respect to the theoretical approaches.

The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game 97

2. Theoretical approaches Four theoretical approaches are incorporated: (a) In accordance with Weigand’s (2003) minimal action game, I presume the basic principle of communication and understanding given in Figure 2. socio-cultural imprinting individual imprinting, perceptive and cognitive competency linguistic skills emotions

socio-cultural imprinting individual imprinting, perceptive and cognitive competency linguistic skills emotions

specific interest / aim (intention)

responding to the expressed aim (here: refusal)

negotiation about their positions Figure 2: Minimal action game directive – refusal in cross-cultural communication

Whenever two people are ‘playing’ the minimal action game of directive and refusal, they negotiate about their positions on the basis of their own sociocultural and individual imprint, their cognitive and linguistic skills and their emotions. Within this minimal action game of refusals, both speech acts, the initiative and the reactive, have an illocutionary function (cf. Weigand 2003:28, 57). As a basis for comparison, I disclose the secondary illocutionary function of the reactive speech act. The major functions are DIRECTIVES, EXPLORATIVES and REPRESENTATIVES (for details cf. Weigand 2003). (b) Following research on refusals done in the range of Interactional Pragmatics and Second Language Acquisition, I apply the approach of BlumKulka et al. (1989) and their Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP). By means of a discourse completion test, the CCSARP aims at documenting and comparing various speech acts in numerous languages in invariable situations. Major aim is to elicit the effect of social variables on the realization of speech acts. Within my research, I designed my own discourse completion test with the help of a diary study. Altogether 13 role-play situations were taken out of the diary study and handed to 200 Japanese and 200 German test persons. I thus gained a set of 5200 refusals. In each minimal action game two initiative directives were given:

98 Marion Grein

Example of a minimal action game: You enjoy a cozy dinner with your partner. He/she asks you to accompany him/her to a social event (12 people). At the event, there are going to be two guests you really dislike. You don’t feel like going. How do you refuse? Set H

Set G

Partner: Darling, next week we are gonna Oh, next week we are gonna have the have the party at Mutzers place again. party at Mutzers place again. You got to Won’t you join me, even though Krotzer diarize it! and Wulbik are gonna be there, too? You:

_____________________

You: _______________________

Japanese version: あなたは家族もしくはパートナーとくつろいで夕食の席についています。 彼（彼女）が、あなたがあまり好んでいない二人も参加することになってい る パーティに 同伴 してほしいとお願いして います。あなたならどのように 断りますか? Set H

Set G

パートナー；ねぇ,来週また田中さん宅 でパーティーが あるのだけれど 一緒に 来てくれませんか? ただあの 木村さんと 山田さんも来る のだけれ どね。

パートナー；来週の田中家でのパー ティだけど、木村さんと山田さんが 来る けど、 一緒にきてくれる よね！

あなた: _____________________

あなた: ________________________

Concerning the speech act of refusals, the CCSARP sets up the possible paradigms comprising of excuse, refusal, reasoning/justification and alternative. With the combination of the minimal action game and the gained paradigms of the CCSARP, a more detailed instrument of analysis is established. Next to specifying the paradigm (i.e. , <excuse + reasoning>), a more substantial break down into assertion (ASSERTIVE), information (NUNTIATIVE), ascertainment (CONSTATIVE), announcement of emotions (EXPRESSIVE), counter question expressing a new claim (EXPLORATIVE), counter request (DIRECTIVE) or excuse (DECLARATIVE) is possible. (c) Concerning politeness strategies and the verbalization of politeness, the face-concept oriented politeness approach was chosen. Fukushima (2002:59) outlines the constituents of face as shown in Figure 3:

The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game 99

the desire to conform to social conventions

the desire to be approved by others (positive face) the desire to be unimpeded by others (negative face) Figure 3: Face-concept

The strategies used and taken into account are given in Table 1: Table 1: Politeness strategies positive politeness ƒ statement of sympathy ƒ statement of solidarity ƒ justification ƒ set phrases

assignment to both ƒ hedges ƒ tag-questions

negative politeness ƒ indirectness ƒ impersonalization ƒ excuses

(d) As for the cultural imprinting, some basic cultural concepts – mostly based on face-concepts – are taken into consideration. In Japan, cultural values play a major role and are passed to the young generation from the very beginning of their socialization. Among those interaction principles, the so-called ‘harmony principle’ is – beyond doubt – the most effective principle. Concerning communicative means, German children are taught linguistic techniques to persuade the listener, whereas the harmony principle demands to pass on techniques which avoid any form of disharmony. The applied techniques, however, are dependent on the social distance of the people involved. The interpersonal relationship assigns the communicative behaviour. Intimate friends and close family members are treated with directness and demonstration of emotions (honne and amae), with more distant friends, acquaintances, further relationships and strangers different rules of language behaviour have to be applied (tatemae) (cf. Moosmüller 1997:43ff., Wierzbicka 1997:238-242, Doi 1971:7, Coulmas 1993:35, Clancy 1990). Maynard (1993:263) states: Among in-group members in Japan, a reciprocal amae relationship allows members to express emotion and feelings directly, even sometimes in a manner considered rude by outsiders. In this warm, all forgiving environment Japanese typically use direct discourse with little awareness of the addressee as the “other” opposing one’s self.

When talking to any one except for intimates, neither directness nor the demonstration of emotions is considered appropriate.

100 Marion Grein

In social interaction, Japanese people generally are expected to restrain, if not suppress, the strong or direct expression of emotion. Those who cannot control their emotion are considered to be immature as human beings. Strong expressions (verbal or nonverbal) of such negative emotions as anger, disgust or contempt could embarrass other people (Honna & Hoffer 1989:88f.).

3. Further research assumptions In this article only a few assumptions will be specified. These will include hypothesis concerning social distance and indirectness, and the usage of politeness strategies. Social distance is reliant on frequency of contact, years of acquaintance, level of familiarity, like-mindedness, sympathy, familiarity and social resemblance (cf. Fukushima 2002:82, Spencer-Oatey 1996:7). Following Wolfson’s bulge-theory (1988), the allocation given in Figure 4 was presumed. refusal

indirect

direct intimates

strangers Figure 4: Wolfson’s bulge-theory

Wolfson (1988) put forth her “bulge” theory of social distance and speech behaviour, claiming that we do the most interactional work in the middle of the social distance continuum, that is to say, with friends, acquaintances, colleagues and potential friends (Boxer 2002: 21).

Thus, face-work is of less importance with intimates and strangers. The speaker can easily determine the social distance with intimates and close friends. Thus, face-threatening is minimized, since the interactants know each others face-wants. With strangers, most people do not really care about possible face-wants. Facework is of most importance with acquaintances. Their face-wants are not yet known to the speaker, but might turn out important for any future contacts. These consolidating findings hold true for refusals as well. Holmes (1995:189) notes, that „it is interesting to note that refusals are most elaborate and negotiated with friends and acquaintances, most brief and direct with intimates and strangers”. Concerning Japanese, Mayfield (1999:27) writes: “I found that refusals between married couples occurred often and tended to be brief“ (cf. Beebe, Takahashi & Uliss-Weltz 1990, Boxer 2002:183). Concerning social distance, directness and the usage of politeness strategies, the results given in Figure 5 were expected.

The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game 101

refusal

negative politeness + indirectness

positive politeness + directness intimates social closeness

acquaintance social distance

Figure 5: Social distance, directness and politeness strategies

Socially close persons are refused directly, applying positive politeness strategies, socially distant people are refused indirectly, applying negative politeness strategies. 4. Results of the comparison First, we shall take a look at the illocutionary functions of the reactive speech acts. Secondly, we will compare the applied paradigms. Thirdly, we will contrast the politeness strategies, taking the social distances into account. The cultural value of harmony, dependent on the social distance of the speakers involved, too, will be integrated into the analysis according to Wolfson’s (1988) bulge-theory. Finally, we take a look at the interaction of social distance and the use of excuses, the initiative speech act, the usage of an initial ‘no’, and politeness and gender differences. 4.1 Illocutionary functions The minimal action game features the secondary illocutionary functions offered in Figure 6. In the majority of refusals, the Japanese formulate NUNTIATIVES (31,4%), which inform the requester about the reason for refusing (i.e., I have to keep an appointment with the dentist). When no details are given, they are often softened by means of hedging and the usage of a set phrase like: (1)

ちっと予定が詰まっていて chotto yotei ga tsumatte ite a bit plan SUBJ have:CONV “I have a bit of plans.”

102 Marion Grein

Conditional Desiderative Directive Expressive Explorative Declarative Constative Assertive Nuntiative 0

5%

10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35%

Japanese

German

Figure 6: Illocutionary functions

Second most frequent in the Japanese language is the DECLARATIVE (24,6%), in all cases an apology. There is a great variety of excuses, the choice depending on the interactant. Germans favour NUNTIATIVES as well (23,7%). CONSTATIVES are equally frequent in both cultures. CONSTATIVES (i.e., I don’t feel well today, I have a terrible headache) have an advantage over other speech acts in so far that they can hardly be contradicted. ASSERTIVES, however, are frequent with Germans (19,3%), but are avoided (only 8%) by the Japanese. Formulating assertions (i.e., Going to the museum is boring) is a face-threatening act for the Japanese, since the speaker emphasizes a lack of like-mindedness with his communication partner. Furthermore, assertions evoke contradiction, again a speech act that easily entails disharmony. A further difference is the usage of EXPLORATIVES: whereas Germans refuse by means of a counter-question (i.e., why don’t you do it yourself?), Japanese avoid EXPLORATIVES. 4.2 Paradigms In German, the most frequent paradigm is with 27,5%. In Japanese the paradigms <justification> (20,7%) and <excuse + justification> (19,7%) are the basic paradigms of refusal (see Figure 7). In Japanese, however, the content of the justification is highly dependent on the interpersonal constellation. There is no justification with intimates, a comprehensive justification with friends and merely a set phrase with distant acquaintances or superiors. The differences are summarized in Table 2.

The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game 103

EXC + REF + JUST + ALT EXC + JUST + ALT EXC + REF REF + ALT ALT REF + JUST + ALT JUST + ALT EXC + JUST REF JUST REF + JUST 0

5%

Japanese

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

German

Figure 7: Paradigms Table 2: Contents of justification

intimate

German honest justification

friend

mostly honest justification (our notions about a perfect holiday differ) relative mostly white lies, without specific contents child no justification or short justification acquaintance lengthy justifications and alternatives superior

very specific and lengthy justification (mostly family affairs)

colleague

specific justification

stranger

set phrase

Japanese no justification needed, otherwise honest justification unspecific justification (holiday plans have been terminated by now) lengthy justification and alternatives lengthy justification unspecified justification + extended excuses excuse + set phrase justification (circumstances are a little bit unfavorable). unspecific justification (I have another important date) set phrase

Justifications without further adjuncts have the same frequency in both cultures. Mere refusals are infrequent in both languages. As main differences we can resume that Germans verbalize refuses more frequently than the Japanese do, whereas the Japanese tend to use more excuses. The adjuncts of refusal are given in Figure 8.

104 Marion Grein

79,7% 76,2%

80% 70% 60%

36,4%

50% 40% 24,7% 16,2%

30%

20%

20% 10% 0 Justification

Alternative Japanese

Excuse German

Figure 8: Adjuncts of refusal

4.3 Politeness strategies We shall look at negative politeness strategies first. Table 3: Negative politeness strategies

indirectness set phrases impersonalization hedges tags

German 40,9% 10,3% 7,3% 22,7% 3%

Japanese 54,4% 17,1% 86,9% 14,7% 13,7%

Germans are more direct. Yet, the difference is less crucial than expected. Also the usage of set phrases does not differentiate as much as anticipated. The analysis of impersonalisation has turned out to be a questionable criterion since Japanese speakers constantly avoid personal pronouns. In German, hedges are more frequent than in Japanese. Most hedges are, however, used by women. Furthermore, there are differences in both languages depending on the interpersonal constellation. partner friend relative colleague acquaintance superior stranger child

German 23,6% 25,3% 18,6% 28,0% 30,1% 24,6% 9,8% 16,9%

Japanese 15,2% 16,5% 25,6% 12,5% 15,9% 14,2% 2,5% 12,2%

The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game 105

35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0 relative friend acquaintance stranger child partner colleague superior Japanese

German

Figure 9: Use of hedges

acquaintance

superior

friend

child

colleague

relative

friend

partner

Japanese interactants use hedges more often than Germans only when refusing a relative. To refuse a directive uttered by a relative is considered to be a severe face-threatening act in Japanese – as was noted by many test persons. Tags are infrequent in German on the whole; only children are at times confronted with tags. Japanese speakers, most notably women, complete their refusal towards children in the majority of cases with a tag-question.

18,4% 3% 10,7%

2,1% 1% 1,6%

3% 1,5%

78,3% 45,6% 62%

5% 1,6% 3,3%

-

1% 0,5% 0,8%

22,5% 5,5% 14%

Japanese tags women men

women men

22,5% 5,5% 14,0%

28,7% 5,6% 17,2%

4,5% 2,3%

6% 3%

11,2% 18% 2,2% 2% 6,7% 10% German 3,2% 1% 1% 1% 2,1% 1%

106 Marion Grein

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0 child

friend acquaintance relative stranger partner colleague superior Japanese

German

Figure 10: Use of tags

We will now turn to the positive politeness strategies. Since the usage of personal pronouns is a questionable criterion for Japanese, only the usage of declarations of sympathy and solidarity is considered. In German 21,7% declarations of sympathy and/or solidarity (i.e., You are my best friend, yet …) were employed all together. In Japanese, there were only 12% of sympathetic declarations. partner friend child relative colleague acquaintance superior stranger

German 35,8% 23,6% 13,0% 18,8% 20,5% 29,3% 13,4% 4,5%

Japanese 9,5% 12,7% 4,4% 16,6% 20,0% 22,4% 3,2% -

As expected, declarations of sympathy to ones partner are very common in German (35,8%), whereas the Japanese avoid them when talking to their intimates (9,5%).

The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game 107

40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0 acquaintance colleague superior stranger partner friend relative child Japanese

German

Figure 11: Declaration of sympathy

4.4 Social distance and indirectness As expected, most interactional work, as measured by indirectness, is done in the middle of the social distance continuum. Strangers and intimates are refused most directly. Yet, there are some astonishing findings. 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% partner

friend

relative

child

acquaint.

superior

coll.

stranger (d)

stranger (ph)

Germans

32,3%

37,2%

46,5%

46,0%

55,8%

65,9%

33,5%

21,0%

12,0%

Japanese

29,0%

59,0%

38,0%

82,0%

67,0%

69,0%

61,0%

31,0%

26,0%

Figure 12: Social distance and indirectness

Whereas Germans refuse the child’s request predominantly directly (54%), the Japanese are most indirect with their refusal when talking to the child. Obviously, children possess a different status in the Japanese society. Thus, it is not interactional work that evokes indirectness here, but the belief that children have

108 Marion Grein

to acquire communicative virtues (cf. Marui 1996) and that they are most effectively acquired when using most polite and honorific forms of language. In German the superior is refused most indirectly. The partner – in accordance with our hypothesis – obtains mostly direct refusal in Japanese. In both cultures, the refusal is most direct with the salesman on the phone without any face-to-face communication. Yet, in Japan the partner is refused more directly than the door-to-door salesman. 4.5 Social distance and excuses As a yet unobserved negative politeness strategy, we have the utterance of an excuse. Here, the overall excessive usage of excuses in Japanese can be manifested again. Moreover, we can record that the interpersonal assignment is mostly identical in both languages. Again, the most observable difference is to be found in the interaction with the child, which does not receive an excuse in any German minimal action game. As to be seen in Figure 13, the colleague is treated differently, too. Surprisingly, Germans as well as Japanese use few excuses towards their relatives. 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

child

partner

friend

coll.

relative

acquaint.

superior

stranger

Germans

1,0%

3,3%

19,3%

11,5%

22,5%

43,0%

29,5%

12,0%

Japanese

25,5%

12,0%

34,0%

41,5%

38,0%

55,2%

55,0%

24,5%

Figure 13: Social distance and excuses

4.6 Social distance and the initiative speech act Subject to the type of initiative directive (invitation, suggestion and offer), the data given in Figure 14 again show a similar tendency in both languages. Offers are refused with more directness than suggestions, suggestions more directly than invitations. Requests – except for the child’s – show the same distribution of indirectness in both cultures, too (cf. Figure 15).

The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game 109

acquaintance invitation colleague invitation friend suggestion partner suggestion salesman door offer salesman phone offer 0

20%

Trend Jap.

40%

60%

80%

100%

Trend Germ.

Figure 14: Social distance and initiative speech act

Concerning requests, we can observe the same tendencies with Japanese and Germans – with the meanwhile well-established difference towards the child.

child superior acquaintance relative friend partner 0

20%

40%

Japa ne se

60%

80%

100%

German

Figure 15: Social distance and requests

4.7 Social distance and initial ‘no’ A refusal can be opened with a direct ‘no’ (or varieties). As assumed, the Japanese mostly refrain from using an initial ‘no’. Only towards strangers, partners and friends a ‘no’ can be uttered. In German an initial ‘no’ is most

110 Marion Grein

infrequent with acquaintances and superiors and most frequent towards strangers, intimates and colleagues.

25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0 partner acquaintance relative superior stranger friend child colleague Japa nese

German

Figure 16: Social distance and initial ‘no’

These findings correspond to the previous ones, showing again that face-work or interactional work is done in the middle of the German social distance continuum. In Japanese, people refrain from using no in mostly all minimal action games. 4.8 Politeness and gender In Grein (2007) all data were differentiated according to gender. Here, only a few data shall be summarized. First, gender differences between Germans, than between Japanese will be presented. 4.8.1 German and gender Both genders use the same speech act types and favor the paradigm . Men refuse more directly (64%) than women (54,3%). Concerning the adjuncts, both genders use the same amount of justifications. Yet, women offer more alternatives (30%) than men (19,3%). Furthermore, excuses are more frequent with women (22,3%) than with men (15,6%). Hedges are predominantly used by women (35,6% vs. 9,8% men). The sporadic usage of tags is particular female as well (women 5% vs. men 1%). The use of solidarity conveying personal pronouns (we) is more frequent with women (7,8%), too (men 4,3%). 4.8.2 Japanese and gender In Japanese, there are differences concerning the speech act type. Women utter an initial excuse in approx. 30% of their refusals, compared to men with 20%. ASSERTIVES are predominantly used by men (11,8% vs. 4,2% by women). As mentioned, ASSERTIVES are a face-threatening act since they emphasize a lack of like-mindedness and are subject to contradiction.

The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game 111

In Japanese, there are gender differences concerning the paradigm as well. Whereas men favor the paradigms <justification> and , women prefer the paradigm <excuse + justification>. Concerning the adjuncts, both genders use approximately the same amount of justifications. Yet, again, women offer more alternatives (20%) than men (12,2%). Excuses are with out doubt a female device (44,7% vs. men 28,2%). 4.8.3 Summary politeness and gender The so-called ‘theory of two cultures’, where women and men are considered as members of different cultures (cf. Maltz & Borker 1991), can be confirmed. Dialogues between the different sexes can be interpreted as a type of crosscultural communication (cf. García 1992, 1993 with similar results for speakers of Spanish). In fact, the analysis – concerning politeness strategies – features more intracultural than intercultural differences. Gender differences, thus, need to be considered when comparing languages. Table 4: Politeness and gender in German and Japanese

arithmetic mean politeness strategies indirectness hedges tags solidarity personal pronouns declarations of sympathy excuses justifications alternatives set phrases

German women men 28,8% 21,2% 45,7% 36% 35,6% 9,8% 5% 1% 7,8% 4,3% 22% 21,3% 22,3% 15,6% 78,2% 74,4% 30% 19,3% 12,2% 8,8%

Japanese women men 30,9% 23,6% 55,3% 53,5% 21,9% 7,5% 21% 6,3% 1,5% 0,7% 13,3% 10,7% 44,7% 28,2% 81,5% 78% 20% 12,2% 18,8% 15,4%

5. Summary Dialogic usage of language is understood as a sequence of active and reactive speech acts, integrating the individual and cultural imprint of each human being. Basic reference point is, thus, the human being. The choice of communicative means is crucially determined by the interpersonal constellation. Each individual chooses his/her communicative means depending on his/her very own perception and cognition of the situation, i.e. the social distance, familiarity, status relationship, like-mindedness, affection and so forth. He/she wants to achieve his/her very own interests, and is bound to the cultural values and rules of his/her culture. Furthermore, human beings have a need for affiliation and acceptance and are aware that their communication partners are in need of acceptance and affection, too. When a person is confronted with a request (DIRECTIVE), he/she evaluates the situation. The evaluation, then, assigns the verbal and nonverbal reaction to the

112 Marion Grein

request. In most cases, this is merely a routine: the interaction of the particular factors and principles has been acquired during socialization and is basically internalized. The choice of the adequate reaction is difficult in those cases, when social distance, status relationship or other factors are not apparent. Yet, if the principles of language usage are to be disclosed, and, moreover, are to be compared among different languages, the underlying factors of cognition have to be taken into account. In order to discover the underlying factors of perception and cognition, cultural values and the culturally diversified concepts of face have to be taken into consideration. Cultural values and face-concept are interdependent: The face-concept appoints the cultural values, and the cultural values affect the face-concept. To give an example: modesty is, without doubt, a cultural value of the Japanese. This cultural value is, then, a part of the individual Japanese face, since modesty is a more basic face-need than for instance assertiveness. If the individual face calls for modesty, the cultural value modesty will play a major role in the mind of the Japanese culture. The analysis has demonstrated that language and culture are integral parts of the dialogic action game. Out of the more or less indefinite choice of utterances, it is the cognition of a human being that opts for a specific communicative form. Thus, we are not confronted with set rules, but probability principles. The analysis has revealed that there are identical perceptions concerning interpersonal constellations in Germany and Japan, but also major differences: sympathy with intimates is communicated among German interactants, but avoided with Japanese. The so-called ‘our-face concept’ among intimates in Japan makes overt sympathy demonstration redundant or even inappropriate. There are different perceptions of the appropriate manners with relatives. Moreover, children are perceived with extraordinary difference: whereas politeness strategies are annulled in Germany, language use towards children is especially polite (using many honorific forms) in Japan. Any research done in the field of language usage needs to implement the human being as a basis for significant analyses. References Beebe, Leslie M., Tomoko Takahashi & Robin Uliss-Weltz. 1990. “Pragmatic Transfer in ESL Refusals”. Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language ed. by Robin C. Scarcella, Elaine S. Andersen & Stephen D. Krashen, 55-73. New York: Newbury House. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House & Gabriele Kasper. 1989. Cross-Cultural-Pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Boxer, Diana. 2002. Applying Sociolinguistics: Domains and face-to-face interaction. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Clancy, Patricia. 1990. “Acquiring Communicative Style in Japanese”. Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language ed. by Robin C. Scarcella, Elaine S. Andersen & Stephen D. Krashen, 27-34. New York: Newbury House. Coulmas, Florian. 1993. Das Land der rituellen Harmonie. Japan: Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung. Frankfurt/Main: Campus. Doi, Takeo. 1971. The Anatomy of Independence. Tokyo: Kodansha. Forgas, Joseph F., ed. 1985. Language and Social Situation. New York: Springer-Verlag.

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Fukushima, Saeko. 2002. Requests and Culture. Politeness in British English and Japanese. Bern: Peter Lang. García, Carmen. 1992. „Refusing an Invitation: A case study of Peruvian style”. Hispanic Linguistics 5:1-2.207-243. García, Carmen. 1993. “Making a Request and Responding to it: A case study of Peruvian Spanish speakers”. Journal of Pragmatics 19.127-152. Grein, Marion. 2007. Kommunikative Grammatik im Sprachvergleich. Die Sprechaktsequenz Direktiv und Ablehnung im Deutschen und Japanischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Holmes, Janet. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman. Honna, Nobuyoki & Bates Hoffer. 1989. An English Dictionary of Japanese Ways of Thinking. Tokyo: Yuhikaku. Liang, Yong. 1992. “Höflichkeit als interkulturelles Verständigungsproblem. Eine kontrastive Analyse Deutsch/Chinesisch zum kommunikativen Verhalten in Alltag und Wissenschaftsbetrieb”. Jahrbuch DaF 18.65-86. Maltz, Daniel N. & Ruth A. Borker. 1991. “Missverständnisse zwischen Männern und Frauen – kulturell betrachtet”. Von fremden Stimmen ed. by Susanne Günthner and Helga Kothoff, 5274. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Marui, Ichiro. 1996. “Concepts of Communicative Virtues (CCV) in Japanese and German”. Contrastive Sociolinguistics ed. by Marlis Hellinger and Ulrich Ammon, 385-409. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Mayfield, Sally. 1999. The Japanese Speech Act of Refusal. Unpublished Manuscript. (B.A. thesis) Monash University. Maynard, Senko K. 1993. Discourse Modality. Subjectivity, emotion and voice in the Japanese language. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Moosmüller, Alois. 1997. Kulturen in Interaktion. Deutsche und US-amerikanische Firmenentsandte in Japan. Münster: Waxmann. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 1996. “Reconsidering Power and Distance”. Journal of Pragmatics 26.1:124. Weigand, Edda. 2000. “The Dialogic Action Game”. Dialogue Analysis VII: Working with dialogue ed. by Malcolm Coulthard, Janet Cotterill & Frances Rock, 1-18. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Weigand, Edda. 2002. “The Language Myth and Linguistics Humanised”. The Language Myth in Western Culture ed. by Roy Harris, 55-83. Richmond: Curzon Press. Weigand, Edda. 2003. Sprache als Dialog. Sprechakttaxonomie und kommunikative Grammatik. 2nd rev. ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1997. Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words. English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, Anna. 2003. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of human interaction. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wolfson, Nessa. 1988. “The Bulge: A theory of speech behaviour and social distance“. Second Language Discourse. A textbook of current research ed. by Jonathan Fine, 21-38. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American English Dialogues Caroline E. Nash Louisiana State University

Studies in dialogue analysis incorporating the nonverbal component reveal important facts about the relationship between language and culture. We cannot interpret what is actually said without interpreting the gestural activity in conjunction with the verbal utterances since much of our ‘communicative intent’ is revealed through our body language. In English, the ‘nod’ is a regulator used by the addressee to signal to the speaker that s/he is listening, following, and/or is in agreement with the speaker’s opinions, comments, and/or topic. This gesture maintains the conversation flow and conveys ‘positive attitude’. Regulators perform other functions such as convey negative attitude, request or reject further information, control the addressee’s attention and understanding, accept or reject the speaker’s topic and so forth. This paper presents findings on the identification, usage, and functions of regulators in French, Japanese and American English, limiting the scope to certain hand and head gestures and some gaze behavior patterns.

1. Introduction Studies in dialogue analysis incorporating the nonverbal component reveal important facts about the relationship between language and culture. We cannot interpret what is actually said without interpreting the gestural activity in conjunction with the verbal utterances since much of our ‘communicative intent’ is revealed through our body language. Hence, gestures play a crucial role in accounting for those mechanisms that are employed in communicating more than is actually said. The use of gestures in a natural and interactive conversation requires observable contextual phenomenon as well as assumptions or inferences about the speaker’s beliefs and intentions. The well-known studies of nonverbal behavior in linguistics have been in the area of conversation analysis, focusing primarily on negotiating the turn in the talk-interaction. Duncan and Fiske (1977, 1985) identify the ‘speaker gesticulation signal’ performed during the speaker turn to maintain the turn and the ‘speaker state signal’ performed at the beginning of a speaker turn. Lindenfield (1971:231) reveals body movement bridging a syntactic boundary as a means of maintaining speaker turn at a possible turn-transition place (transition relevance place (TRP) as defined by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974)). Iizuka (1993)

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conducted a cross-cultural study in an effort to describe some of the cultural differences between the use of regulators in Japanese and Americans in conversation. In addition to the head nod, he includes gaze and body movement in general. Exhaustive studies have been done on gaze behavior and on the role of ‘gaze’ in its dialogic function in the talk-interaction and the nature of its behavior in the ‘turn’ of turn-taking in American English (Duncan & Fiske 1977, 1985, Goodwin 1981, Kendon 1967, 1990, Scheflen 1964, Schegloff 1984). Certain findings on gaze behavior have been reported such as the notion that the display of addressee aversion of gaze indicates lack of interest or disapproval of speaker topic (Argyle & Cook 1976:121) and that mutual gaze lasts less than one second (Beattie 1978b, 1979:28). In recent years, we have seen a decline in studies in mutual gaze behavior patterns outside the realm of psychology (i.e. interpreting social emotions such as in the work of Adams and Kleck 2003). Although studies on gaze behavior describe observed patterns of predominantly American subjects, studies on culture-specific gaze behavior have been conducted since the early 20th century that reveal distinct cross-cultural differences in certain patterns of gaze behavior between interlocutors engaged in interactive conversation. Most notably, Whiffen (1915:254), who conducted studies on gaze behavior of American Indians, attested that Indians do not look at each other while speaking – neither the speaker at the listener, nor the listener at the speaker. LaFrance and Mayo (1976) and Erickson (1979) also conducted comparative studies in conversational gaze behavior of African-Americans and Anglo-Americans. The reported findings for African-Americans are the reverse of those that have been reported for Anglo-Americans, i.e., African-American speaker-gaze is higher than addressee-gaze. Hence, differences in gaze behavior patterns are attributed not to language, but to cultural differences. Yet, ethnocentric studies still dominate kinesic research and the constructed models and postulated rules for American English gaze behavior patterns are often generalized to apply to the social behavior and organizational structure across languages and cultures. 2. Study, methodology and data This paper presents findings on a study of the identification, usage and functions of regulators in French, Japanese and American English, limiting the scope to certain hand and head gestures and some gaze behavior patterns. I performed a quantitative analysis of gaze direct behavior among these groups of speakers that specifically address the following: − − −

mutual gaze time during the conversation, speaker gaze time during speaker turn and addressee gaze time during speaker turn.

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 117

This study seeks to answer the following questions: − − − − − − − −

How does the speaker signal that he or she is not yet willing to relinquish his or her turn to an active participant? Which gestures are used by a self-selecting speaker? Which gestures are used by the current speaker to yield the floor? Which gestures express ‘negative attitude’ on both the part of the speaker and the listener? How does the listener convey disagreement with the speaker’s opinions, comments or selected conversation topic? How does the speaker or listener convey that he or she no longer wishes to continue the current topic or the conversation? How much do mutual gaze and gaze direct patterns between French and Japanese speakers vary in terms of frequency and duration of mutual gaze display during an interactive conversation? Since we expect culture-specific patterns to emerge, how then do French and Japanese gaze behavior patterns compare to those exhibited by American English interlocutors, and further, how do these different patterns play a role in the negotiation of the turn across cultures?

The data for this study were collected via video recordings of native French speakers residing in various regions throughout France, Japanese native speakers residing in Japan and in California, Japanese Francophones residing in Paris, native Japanese tourists visiting Paris, American English native speakers residing in California, bilingual French-Japanese speakers residing in Paris and both American English-French and American English-Japanese bilinguals residing in California. The subjects are of five different sociolinguistic groups: − − − − −

French speakers 30-65 years of age, Japanese speakers 30-65 years of age, Japanese speakers 20-25 years of age, American English speakers 30-65 years of age and American English speakers 20-25 years of age.

The results on gaze behavior were calculated based on the mean of three randomly extracted 6-minute conversation samples (18 minutes) from each of these five sociolinguistic groups. All participants were taped in mostly dyad pairs while engaged in natural interpersonal and interactive conversations with social acquaintances. The subjects were not at any time aware of the nature of the study and the specific topic of research prior to or during the taping. Only at the conclusion of the filming segments did I inform the participants of the target features of my project.

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3. The hand 3.1 The hand: Turn-holding and silencing the addressee in French A regulator used by the French speaker to signal that it is still his or her turn to speak and that he or she is not yet willing to yield the floor to another participant at a transition relevance place, comprises the index finger vertically placed in between the speaker and the listener with the arm bent at a 45° angle, elbow forward and slightly raised, as shown in Image 1.

Image 1: Turn-holding gesture: finger

In Image 2, example (1), a lady hotel proprietor is telling her friend about how strict control regulations are becoming at the hotel and other establishments, and that restaurants now have to reduce the weight of each ingredient used to prepare a dish. When her husband (initially a bystander hence not pictured in the image) interjects and attempts to take the speaker-turn, she holds up her index finger to silence him and maintain her turn.

(a)

(b) Image 2: Turn-holding gesture: finger

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 119

(1)

S: maintenant, on est imposé sur la quantité que vous donnez à manger. Y a cent... eh... oui, oui, y a 130g. de légumes et cent... 120g. de viande… oui, oui parce que si vous donnez de trop, vous avez un contrôle fiscale. On vous dira [interjection by husband: « Tu exagères » ] (a) on dira... on vous dira: « Mais vous avez servi deux repas. Vous n’en avez déclaré qu’un. Donc, vous volez l’État! » maintaining gesture “Now, we’re prescribed the quantity that we give to eat. There’s 100.. uh… yes, yes, there’s 130 g. of vegetables and 100… 120 g. of meat yes, yes because if you give too much, you’re audited. They’ll tell you [interjection by husband: « You exaggerate… »] (a) they’ll say… they’ll tell you: «But you served two meals. You only declared one. So you’re stealing from the State! »” maintaining gesture Husband interjects: Tu exagères! Peser tous... “You exaggerate! Weigh all Wife (S) (Still holding up index finger):

chaque each…

chaque... each…”

Il y a eu un restaurant… “There was a restaurant…”

The speaker wants to silence her husband and hold the floor in order to provide an example. At the end of her story, she holds up her index finger once again to indicate that she wants to maintain the floor in order to provide another example to illustrate her point (Image 3). The addressee, anticipating the termination, makes a forward move but does not take the turn. S continues:

Image 3: Turn-holding gesture: finger

(2)

Une dame .... (maintaining gesture) “A lady…”

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In Image 4, example (3), the speaker is addressing a participant who is not shown in the frames. The addressee has just finished her speaker turn when the participant on the right begins to speak. The person on the left is a silent participant during this exchange.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d) Image 4: Turn-holding gesture: finger

(3) S: (a) Mais, mais en France, en France, le mot «manga» c’est la bande dessinée (b) [addressee interjects to take the turn] japonaise (c) ET [addressee is silenced] les dessins animés (d) japonais, donc, tout ce qui est dessein japonais c’est devenu «manga» en français. “(a) But, but in France, in France, the word «manga» is comics (b) [addressee interjects to take the turn] Japanese (c) AND [addressee is silenced] cartoons (d) Japanese,, so, everything that’s Japanese cartoons/ comics became manga in French.”

In example 3, the addressee, anticipating a turn transition relevance place following the NP bande dessinée, and unaware that the speaker was going to qualify the noun with the adjective japonais and another NP, interjects to take the turn.

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 121

However, the speaker silences the addressee by displaying the gesture at ET to hold and maintain her turn at talk. These gestures (Duncan & Fiske’s ‘gesticulation signal’) are held across syntactic boundaries i.e. at Sacks’ transition relevance places, supporting the findings reported by Lindenfield suggesting that in order to indicate that the speaker is not willing to yield the floor even though a possible turn-transition place is marked syntactically, the speaker may position his body movement so that it bridges a syntactic boundary. 3.2 The hand: Turn-taking and silencing the speaker in French In the dynamics of talk-interaction among French speakers, the participants typically do not maintain a marked distance from one another. Physical contact is frequently made with the fingers and hands. A self-selecting French speaker taking a turn positions the upper torso forward towards the current speaker, penetrating the speaker’s personal sphere. In the preceding section, the vertical finger is a speaker turn-holding and addressee-silencing marker that does not penetrate the addressee’s personal sphere. This same gesture also functions as a device by the listener to silence the current speaker; however, it does penetrate the speaker’s personal sphere and often touches the addressee as shown in Image 5.

Image 5: Turn-holding gesture: finger

The index finger display always precedes an interjection. The listener is silencing the speaker and self-selecting his or her turn with the intention to address and contribute to that which has just been uttered by the speaker (Duncan & Fiske’s speaker-state signal, though the speaker-state signal is not defined as a silencing gesture). (4)

S1: On parle de Caroline… la synthèse de la femme - justement c’est les cheveux, et puis le regard, effectivement, … S2: les cheveux …

Les cheveux de synthèse, ce sont les cheveux de synthèse…oui, et le regard, une bouche…

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Image 6: Turn-holding gesture: finger

Les cheveux de synthèse, …les cheveux … [S2 (right) lifting index finger up to touch the speaker’s arm] S1: “‘We’re talking about Caroline… the synthesis of the woman - exactly, it’s the hair, and then the look…” S2: “the hair of synthesis, the hair…. it’s the hair of synthesis… yes, and the look, a mouth…”

A variation of the speaker-silencing regulator is the open palm held vertically between the speaker and the listener, the palm facing the speaker. There is, however, a distinction between the two markers. The open palm functions to silence the speaker with no intention on the part of the listener to take the immediately following turn-constructional unit as shown in Image 7.

Image 7: Speaker-silencing gesture: palm

If the self-selecting speaker is the next one to speak, the turn is allocated by both participants after a pause as in Image 8, example (5).

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 123

(5)

S1: Si tu veux être décontractée, il faut fumer le bédo, S2:

tous les deux [palm up and open

S1: et tu seras plus comme ça (gesturing hands trembling motion). S2: gesture ] Après! Après! (after a 3-second pause…) S2: Si tu veux, après… après les examens, si tu veux… mais avant, non. S1: “If you want to distress, you have to smoke the bedo, the two of S2: [palm up and open S1: us together and you won’t be like this (shaking) anymore.” S2: gesture ] “After! After!” (after a 3-second pause) ….. S2: “If you want, after… after my exams, if you want… but before, no.”

Image 8: Turn-taking wish

S1: et tu seras plus comme ça S2: gesture

Speaker 2’s intention was not to take the turn and make a contribution to what speaker 1 had just uttered but merely to silence him. Speaker 1 did not choose to continue the turn and speaker 2 addressed the suggestion after a discernible pause. Members of certain social and/or age groups in the U.S. use this open palm gesture (‘talk to the hand’) preceding the utterance, Whatever! to convey to the speaker that she or he wants the speaker to stop talking, due to the fact that there are irreconcilable differences of opinion. This gesture is performed by a twist of the wrist and circular hand motion, partially extending the arm towards the speaker’s face, positioning the tense open hand between the interlocutors. If the participants are sitting side by side, the gesture inevitably penetrates the speaker’s personal sphere, blocking the speaker’s head or face from view, thus hindering efforts of further communication.

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Image 9: Talk to the hand: whatever

3.3 The hand: Turn-yielding in French The open palm, either palm down or facing inward with the fingers pointing towards the addressee and the arm horizontally extended, is a regulator used by the French speaker to yield the floor and signal a designated participant to take the speaker-turn. The palm up gesture and the pointing index finger gesture are deictic markers of location and person found to be used in many languages. As such, when used as a turn-yielding gesture, the second person pronoun is usually used in conjunction with the gesture, or the gesture yields the floor with an overt linguistic cue such as an imperative to speak.

Image 10: Palm down gesture

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 125

Image 11: Pointing index finger

Image 12: Palm up gesture

Image 13: Pointing index finger

(6)

S: Une question, comment tu as appris de gros mots comme ça? S: “A question, how did you learn bad words like that?”

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(a)

(b) Image 14: Palm up gestures

(7)

(a) Maintenant, parlez de la cuisine japo [open hand palm up] “Now talk about Japanese cuisine!”

(b) naise! (Imperative)

4. The nod 4.1 The nod: Turn-holding in Japanese One regulator with which the Japanese negotiate turn-taking and convey speaker/listener attitude is variations of the ‘nod’. Iizuka (1993:207) describes the nod as an addressee continuation cue. The addressee uses frequent nods – much more frequently than the French or American addressee – to signal that he or she accepts the speaker’s topic, is actively listening and following, and is in agreement with the speaker’s comments. In the back-channeling nod, as shown in Image 15, the head bends forward slightly in short, quick and very frequent movements.

(a)

(b) Image 15: Variations of the head nod

I find that the nod is also used by the Japanese speaker to hold the floor. The characteristics of the turn-maintenance nod are short and tense and occur at syn-

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 127

tactic boundaries (PPs, AdvPs, VPs, clause-finally, etc.). This gesture at critical syntactic points signals to the addressee that the speaker is not yet willing to relinquish his or her turn. (8)

S: Kayoobi kara, zuutto matte te, Orusei mo shimatte iru shi, mushi atsui shi tote[nod] [nod] [nod] [nod] mo

tsukaremasu ne! Pari wa Nihon yori atsui desu ne! [nod] [nod] “Since Tuesday (nod), we’ve been continuously waiting (nod), even Orsay is closed (nod), it’s hot and muggy (nod), it’s so tiring isn’t it (nod)! Paris is hotter than Japan, isn’t it (nod)!”

The nod is gesticulated simultaneously with the utterance of the particle shi. Shi functions to mark clause boundaries when the clauses compose an itemized list. The speaker is linguistically marking the anticipation of the following clause, and in conjunction with the nod gesture, signals that he or she is still holding the floor. There is a clear transition relevance place between ne! (“isn’t it”) and Pari (“Paris”); however, the nod maintains the speaker turn. The use of the exclamation mark instead of the question mark is due to the fact that the tag question in conjunction with the nod does not request confirmation but rather functions solely to hold the speaker turn. 4.2 The nod: Turn-yielding in Japanese The turn-yielding nod which signals that the speaker is relinquishing the turn, is held longer than the turn-maintenance nod (about one to 1½ seconds longer) and is displayed in sentence-final position. 4.3 The nod: Marker of topic change or end of conversation in Japanese A tense nod held 2 to 3 seconds by the addressee, conveys to the speaker that the addressee wants to change the topic or terminate the conversation. Attempts on the part of the speaker to continue the conversation are usually futile. The same gesture performed sentence-finally by the speaker, conveys to the addressee that the speaker wants to change the topic or terminate the conversation. In effect the speaker in Image 16 is saying, I am having the last word on this topic and now it’s the end of the conversation! [nod].

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Image 16: End of conversation

Iizuka (1993:207) reports that the addressee’s nods occur frequently after the speaker’s utterances with the particle ne (“isn’t it?”) “which sounds as if they were soliciting the addressee’s response”. In Japanese, the utterance of confirmation-seeking question words such as deshyo? (“it is, right?/right?”), ne? (“right?”), jyanai? (“it is, is it not?”), does not always convey to the addressee that the speaker is requesting confirmation or expecting a response. The data collected for this study suggest that the nod plays an important role in interpreting the speaker’s intention. In the absence of other response soliciting gestures (such as the upward head tilt), with certain intonation patterns, without the nod, the speaker is in fact, seeking confirmation from the addressee as shown in examples (9) through (11). (9)

S1: Akiko no deshyo? [no nod] “It’s Akiko’s (your turn), right?” S2: Mnnn... ee? soo?? Moo wakannai! (S2 responds) “Uh-huh, huh? It is? I don’t know anymore!”

(10) S1: demo kodomo no hon… “but a child’s book

otona no hon jyanai ne? [no nod] it’s not an adult’s book right?”

S2: non, non, … pour otona, il faut… (S2 responds) “no, no,… for adult, there has to be…” (11) S1: Eigo dattara, doo iimasu ka? “If it was English, how would you say it?” S2: Argot deshyo? [no nod] “It’s argot (slang) right?”

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 129

Addressee (S3) replies: S3: Eigo de“fucking thief” jyanai? [no nod] (S3responds to S2) “In English… it’s “fucking thief”, isn’t it?” Speakers (S1 & S2) reply: S1: Ah! Oui, oui, oui! C’est ça! « Putain de voleur »! (S1responds to S3) “Oh! Yes, yes, yes! That’s it! “Putain de voleur”! …” S2: Oui, oui, oui! … (S2responds to S3) “Yes, yes, yes! …”

On the other hand, in conjunction with the nod, these question words do not seek further information or confirmation. Rather, the question words serve to monitor the addressee’s attention and ensure that the addressee is maintaining a ‘positive attitude’ towards the speaker and the speaker’s topic since the back-channeling nod, in effect, responds to the question nod. (12) S: Mitsuko-san, itsumo kuru deshyo?, dakara futsuu wa, nanka ageru jyanai?,.. [nod] [nod] “Mitsuko always comes, right(?), (nod) so normally, you’d give (her) something, wouldn’t you(?), (nod).” (13) S: pour otona, il faut des des sukebenai toka

ne?, [nod]

de nihon no manga wa

hotondo otona no manga de sukebe no shiin ga ooii

jyanai?, dakara [nod] “for adults, there has to be some … some porno or the like right (?) (nod) and Japanese comics are for the most part adult comics so there are a lot of porno scenes [isn’t that] right (?) (nod), therefore…”

There is no verbal response from the addressee following the tag questions deshyo? and jyana?, in (12) and ne? and jyanai? in (13). The addressee gestures a back-channeling nod accompanied by the utterance mn in both examples. As previously mentioned, the turn-maintenance nod has been observed clause-finally and in other syntactic boundary positions. Therefore, since this nod maintains speaker’s turn, the fact that the question is not seeking a response conforms to the behavior of the turn-negotiating strategy. The addressee may also back-channel with confirmation markers such as soo desuka? (“is that so?”) with or without the nod, and with or without rising intonation, depending upon whether he or she intends the interjected question to be answered by the speaker. In the following examples, soo desu ka? has rising intonation. (Context: 20 years ago, the term for both cartoons and comics was manga. Since then, the term anime was borrowed from ‘animation’ to denote cartoons, while manga was reserved for comics. S1, who hadn’t been back to Japan in 20 years was not aware that a distinction is now made between the two concepts linguistically, while S2,

130 Caroline E. Nash

who did not live in Japan 20 years ago, was not aware that the distinction is relatively new.) (14) S1: anime jyanakute, manga wo mitetano, terebi de. “it wasn’t animation, but cartoons, that we were watching on TV” S2: soo desuka? [nod] “is that so?” S1: Mahootsukai Sari toka soo yuuno...(S1 does not confirm.) “like Mahootsukai Sari and stuff (cartoons) like that...” (S1 does not respond to S2’s yes/no question in conjunction with the nod.) (15) S1: pas 500 balles, ben... 300 francs à peu près. “ not 500 bucks, ... 300 francs about.” S2: soo desuka? [no nod] “is that so?” S1: mnnn... oui. “mnnn... yes.” (S1 confirms in response to S2’s question + absence of nod) 1 (S continues to talk about the problem of trying to return the article of clothing.)

5. The head tilt 5.1 The head tilt: Expressing disagreement and turn-taking in Japanese A side head tilt performed by the addressee conveys to the speaker that the addressee is not in agreement with the speaker’s opinion, comment, or topic. If the speaker yields the floor at the head tilt display, then the addressee has succeeded in taking his turn. Otherwise, the head tilt is held longer and firmer until the addressee is successfully able to take his turn. The initial head tilts may be unaccompanied by verbal utterances, or pre-verbal followed by the utterances, mnn..., saa... (expression of doubt) or demo ..., (“but …”).

Image 17: mnn

Image 18: saa

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 131

5.2 The head tilt: Expressing partial disagreement and justification in French. The French addressee tilts the head to the side to convey partial disagreement. The head tilt in conjunction with expressions such as alors, là (“now that there...”); ben, écoutes... (“oh now, listen....”); pas forcément... (“not necessarily...”); oui, mais... (“yes, but...”), responds to what a speaker has said and precedes an explanation or justification thus the addressee takes the turn. The following images show the head tilt in conjunction with expressions of disagreement.

Image 19: non!

Image 20: mais

Image 21: mmn

Image 22: non

In Image 23, example (16), when S2 asks S1 about the stuffed tomato, It comes from Provençal, no?, S1 gestures the head tilt saying, Not particularly ... but ..., and goes on to explain the preparation of the dish, conveying that in fact, if the stuffed tomato is prepared properly or in a certain way, then it’s the Provençal stuffed tomato. Hence, the head tilt cues a forthcoming specification on the topic. (16) S1: Les tomates farcies -- moi, j'adore la tomate farcie. S2: Ça vient de Provençal, non? S1: [Head tilt] Pas spécialement … mais c'est, c'est donc, la tomate farcie, si on l’a bien préparée, oui.

132 Caroline E. Nash S1: “Stuffed tomatoes – I adore stuffed tomatoes.” S2: “It comes from Provençal, no?” S1: [Head tilt] “Not particularly… but it’s, it’s, so, the stuffed tomato, if it’s wellprepared, yes.”

Image 23: Head-tilt: forthcoming specification

6. Gaze behavior 6.1 Cross-cultural characteristics of gaze direct in French and Japanese I believe that in Western cultures, we accept as fact that the most important facial expression in terms of communication is eye contact. It is known that there are more nerves in the eye than in any other part of the body, rendering the eye the most sensitive communicative stimulator and receptor that humans possess. It is also a fact that during a conversation, eye contact between interlocutors creates anxiety and the tension of the anxiety is broken by averting the gaze at regular but undefined intervals throughout the conversation. Yet, the French seem to deeply ‘engage’ each other with an uninterrupted and intense gaze throughout lengthy segments of discourse. Thus when one speaks of le regard français as intense and an anxiety-inducer to Americans, it is from the recognition that the French do not exhibit the same type of gaze behavior as do speakers of other languages. The gaze is not broken as frequently among the French as it is among Americans, and certainly they break the gaze much less frequently than the Japanese who appear to rarely gaze into each other’s eyes during a conversation. In my observations of Japanese bilinguals engaged in French conversation with French native speakers, those who have acquired French as their second language to the level of native fluency ability but still maintain their dominant Japanese culture, exhibit similar gaze behavior patterns as do native Japanese speakers engaged in Japanese conversation. These Japanese-French bilinguals tend to avoid eye contact during their communicative exchange. According to Lebra (1976:48),

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 133

a culture that emphasizes intuitive communication is unlikely to encourage direct eye-toeye communication. If people are inordinately sensitive receptors of social stimuli, as the Japanese are, the information sent and received by the eyes may be over-whelming.

This apparent discord in the salient features of the language-culture duality would suggest that even though communication is achieved between the Japanese francophone and the native French speaker, albeit hindered, the conflict arises in the pragmatic functions or communicative intent that is in large part manifested in our nonverbal behavior. 6.2 Gaze direct patterns 6.2.1 Mutual gaze An examination of mutual gaze direct behavior reveals significant cultural differences which are not merely differences across language groups but also differences in behavior patterns across cultural sub-groups within one homogeneous group whose members speak the same language. The data reveal dramatic differences in gaze behavior patterns across generations in Japanese speakers. The data also reveal similar patterns among young speakers across languages. The graphs below depict the gaze behavior of our five sociolinguistic groups as follows: − − − − −

French (mixed-sex) speakers 30-65 years of age (middle-aged French); American English (SAE) (mixed-sex) speakers 30-65 years of age (middleaged Americans); American English (SAE) (mixed-sex) speakers 20-25 years of age (young Americans); Japanese (female) speakers 20-25 years of age (young Japanese) and Japanese (mixed-sex) speakers 30-65 years of age (middle-aged/older generation or traditional Japanese).

Figure 1 indicates the percentage of the conversation where mutual gaze is exhibited by each of the five sociolinguistic groups in this study. Figure 2 depicts the duration in seconds of mutual gaze display by the interlocutors of these groups during the conversational exchange.

Percentage of Conversation

134 Caroline E. Nash

100 80 51

60

43

42 40

24

20 0,1 0 MFrench

MSAE

YSAE

YJap

MJap

Figure 1: Mutual gaze during conversation

The results of this study show that the French have, as predicted, relatively high engagement of mutual gaze during the conversation in proportion – 51% of the conversation – as well as in duration – from 2 to 9 seconds, while the traditional Japanese have very low engagement at only 0.1% of the conversation and at less than 1 second in duration. The middle-aged category of American English speakers perform mutual gaze much less than do the French at approximately mid-way between the French and traditional Japanese at 24%. MJap

0,5

YJap

0,5

YSAE

0,5

MSAE

0,5

1 4 4 4

MFrench

9

2 0

2

4

6

8

10

Seconds Average Shortest Duration

Average Longest Duration

Figure 2: Duration of mutual gaze

An interesting finding resulting from this analysis is that the younger generations of both Japanese and American speakers exhibit almost identical mutual gaze behavior at 43% and 42% of the conversation respectively as well as identical length of gaze hold at 0.1 to 4 seconds in duration. What is perhaps more revealing is that the young Japanese exhibit mutual gaze closer to that of the French, though the average threshold is only 4 seconds. The 0.5 to 4 seconds of mutual gaze hold is observed in three of the five speaker groups.

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 135

Percentage of Speaker Turn

6.2.2 Speaker and addressee gaze during the speaker turn Our data show variation across speaker groups in duration of speaker-addressee gaze during the speaker turn. While most speaker groups do conform to previous findings on speaker-addressee gaze, i.e., that the addressee gazes at the speaker more than the speaker gazes at the addressee, two speaker groups clearly do not.

100 80

85 67

64

71

60

66 54

47 50

37 32

40 20 0 MFrench

MSAE

YSAE

Speaker Gaze

YJap

MJap

Addressee Gaze

Figure 3: Speaker and addressee gaze

Figure 3 shows the duration of speaker gaze and addressee gaze during the speaker turn. The display of speaker gaze by young American and Japanese speakers during the speaker turn, 64% and 66% respectively, is as frequent and as steady as that of French speakers which is 67% of the French speaker turn. On the other hand, the duration of addressee gaze during speaker turn is significantly lower for the young Japanese participants at 54% compared to 85% for the French, while young American participants perform addressee gaze closer to that of the French at 71% of the speaker turn. The similar patterns exhibited by young Japanese and American adults suggest that members of this age group share common features in the dynamics of face-to-face interaction that are significant to their social interaction across cultures. A significant finding in this study is the characteristic pattern of all Japanese speakers across generations: the display of speaker gaze is higher than the display of addressee gaze which is contrary to the expected behavior pattern of addressee gaze i.e., addressee gaze is more prevalent in conversation than is speaker gaze. The young Japanese speaker gaze during speaker turn is 66% while their addressee gaze is lower at 54% of the speaker turn. Similarly, the traditional Japanese speaker and addressee gaze is 37% and 32% respectively. Thus in Japanese speaker and addressee gaze behavior patterns, we see a reversal of the current model and contrary findings to those that have been found in previous studies on gaze behavior. With respect to frequency of gaze direct display, the overall findings of speaker and addressee gaze during speaker turn for both French and American

136 Caroline E. Nash

English speakers conform to those that have previously been reported in gaze behavior studies in conversation. The rule posited by Kendon and others, that the addressee gazes at the speaker more than the speaker gazes at the addressee, does apply to the French and American English speakers; however, the rule does not apply to either group of Japanese speakers. 6.2.3 Gaze direct and confirmation-seeking utterances Kendon (1967:40) suggests that the looks of the speaker toward the addressee occur at the ends of phrases, thus functioning to signal a response from the addressee. Although the context in which he observes this specific type of gaze direct is in the sequential organization of the turn-at-talk, this function of gaze direct is found when signalling back-channeling responses that respond to requests for confirmation, verification, or approval from the addressee, such as in conjunction with tag questions and other confirmation-seeking utterances in French, Japanese and American English. In French, as in Japanese and American English, this usage of gaze direct functions to monitor the addressee’s attention on the content of the speaker’s discourse and to seek the addressee’s collaborative attitude. Displays of speaker gaze direct in conjunction with phrase-final utterances such as tu vois? (“you see?”), n’est-ce pas? (“isn’t it?”), pas vrai? (“not true?”), etc., solicit either agreement ‘as fact’ regarding what the speaker is conveying, or some indication from the addressee that they share similar attitudes, philosophies or emotional sentiments. The latter purposes are usually the reasons for displaying gaze direct and confirmation-seeking utterances in a conversational exchange. Often, the addressee does not necessarily agree with the truth value of what the speaker is saying, but tends to have as the principal objective, the desire to convey to the speaker that he or she is making a cooperative effort in maintaining the natural flow of the conversation and as such, is actively and positively following the speaker’s discourse. The addressee responds with oui, oui!, si, si!, tout à fait!, etc., affirming their collaborative attitude and active participation, and only secondarily, confirming the truth of what the speaker has said. In American English, we find the same conditions for the usage of gaze direct in conjunction with phrase-final confirmation-seeking utterances such as you see, you know?, right?, isn’t it? and other tag questions, expressed to monitor the addressee’s attention and to seek the addressee’s collaborative attitude. The addressee responds with phrases such as yeah!, uh-huh!, and right!, to affirm his/her collaborative attitude and his/her active participation, and again, only secondarily, confirming the truth of what the speaker has said. In Japanese, the utterance of confirmation-seeking question words such as the particle ne? (“right?/huh?/isn’t it?”), deshyo? (“it is, right?/right?”), and jyanai? (“it is, is it not?”), performs the same functions as the utterances in French and American English that request confirmation by the speaker and of which the responses affirm collaborative attitude by the addressee. An additional feature

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 137

particular to Japanese participants is that they place high value on group solidarity such that the addressee oftentimes repeats the confirmation-seeking question word to show both confirmation and solidarity with the speaker. In Image 24, the addressee is not only back-channeling with the utterance, ne?!, repeating the speaker’s question word ne?, but she is also repeating the gesture displayed by the speaker to indicate solid agreement with what the speaker has just said. In these back-channeling occurrences, the addressee is affirming the truth value of what the speaker has just said.

Image 24: ne!?!

Gaze direct displayed phrase-finally, functions cross-linguistically to signal a back-channeling response from the addressee. The response which shows approval, confirms, affirms, supports, and/or corroborates, responds to tag questions and other confirmation-seeking utterances in French, Japanese and American English. 6.3 The role of gaze behavior in the turn-taking sequence According to Kendon, in the process of turn-taking, just prior to the termination of speaker turn, the speaker begins to gaze towards the addressee anticipating the termination of the turn and role switch to the addressee. As speaker-turn roles are reversed, there is a gaze shift as the addressee who begins the speaker turn gazes away from the participant who just ended the speaker-turn. This model suggests that gaze direct functions to yield the turn to an addressee, while gaze avert functions to take the turn as new speaker. Goodwin, Schegloff, Scheflen, Duncan and Fiske all find the same distribution pattern in their studies on gaze and its function in organizing the turn-at-talk. While the data from this study reveal results consistent with Kendon’s model for American English speakers, these patterns are not at all universal in that I find very different gaze behavior patterns in the turn-taking sequence in Japanese and French dialogues.

138 Caroline E. Nash

6.3.1 Gaze behavior at the turn: Japanese In Japanese conversation, we find that gaze avert at the beginning of the speaker turn is displayed by some speakers and not by others. Even those speakers, who do avert the gaze at the beginning of their turn, do not do so with consistency. Further, the traditional Japanese subjects tend to maintain steady gaze avert during the role transition from addressee to speaker. We cannot, therefore, identify gaze avert as a turn-beginning regulator. However, both the younger and older generations of Japanese speakers consistently display gaze avert at the end of their speaker turn, completely reversing the stipulated rules in Kendon’s model. This suggests that gaze avert may in fact be for the Japanese, a turnyielding/ending gesture rather than a turn-taking/beginning gesture. 6.3.2 Gaze behavior at the turn: French Since there is high mutual gaze during speaker turn, there is no support in our findings to suggest that French speakers use gaze as a primary strategy in regulating speaker turn in the talk-interaction. The regulators that play a much more significant role in negotiating the turn are hand signals such as pointing or touching, head and upper body movement and eyebrow raising. 7. Conclusion Effecting successful dialogue requires mutually-shared background information of the speaker and addressee, which depends to a great extent on their cultural background and crucially, adherence to the same principles and parameters that govern the display of nonverbal behavior. Speakers and addressees across cultures do not use the same techniques in gaze behavior patterns and other bodily gestures to regulate and maintain the conversational flow. Speaker-addressee gaze behavior relates directly to the speaker-addressee personal sphere as gaze penetrates the personal space of the interlocutor. Personal sphere dimensions vary greatly across speaker groups from a cultural point of view as well as from a linguistic point of view. The boundaries that are set around our bodies are culturally and socially determined; moreover, languages reflect these differences of personal sphere as perceived by speakers of the languages by the grammar of whole-part relations (cf. Nash 2001). What is clear is that there are differences in nonverbal behavior patterns across languages and cultures. What is not yet clear is the nature of these differences and the degree to which cross-cultural patterns differ. The subjects under study have for the most part been predominantly American English speakers and very few cross-cultural analyses have been done. In an attempt to characterize certain language and culture-specific patterns, this study revealed distinct patterns of the use of regulators and gaze behavior among native speakers of three unrelated languages: French, Japanese and American English. The results from this study reveal, moreover, that different sociolinguistic patterns emerge even within a single language and culture.

Gestural Regulators in French, Japanese and American-English Dialogues 139

Expanding the scope of research to account for all nonverbal behavior patterns in all cultures is clearly a daunting if not impossible endeavour. Arguably, the ultimate goal in linguistic studies is to uncover the underlying structures that are universal patterns and as such, account for certain human tendencies that are manifested during face-to-face interaction among speakers of many if not all languages. Speakers and addressees across cultures do not use the same techniques to regulate dialogue; however, the gestural component is crucial, particularly with certain verbal cues. Clearly, this topic of research warrants further investigation in terms of going beyond ethnocentric studies and conducting more cross-cultural and cross-linguistic studies in nonverbal communication. Moreover, if most of our communicative intent is manifested in our nonverbal competence, as it is so claimed, then we need to incorporate this very significant component into models of both talk-interaction and second language acquisition. References Adams, Reginald & Robert E. Kleck. 2003. “Perceived Gaze Direction and the Processing of Facial Displays of Emotion”. Psychological Science 14.644-647. Argyle, Michael & Mark Cook. 1976. Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beattie, Geoffrey W. 1978. “Sequential Temporal Pattern of Speech and Gaze in Dialogue”. Semiotica 23.29-52. Beattie, Geoffrey W. 1979. “Planning Units in Spontaneous Speech: Some evidence from hesitations in speech and speaker gaze direction in conversation”. Linguistics 17.61-78. Duncan, Starkey, Jr. & Donald W. Fiske. 1977. Face-to-Face Interaction: Research, methods and theory. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Duncan, Starkey Jr. & Donald W. Fiske. 1985. Interaction Structure and Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erickson, Frederick. 1979. “Talking Down: Some cultural sources of miscommunication in interracial interviews”. Nonverbal Behavior: Applications and cultural implication ed. by Aron Wolfgang, 99-126. New York: Academic Press. Goodwin, Charles. 1981. Conversational Organization. Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York: Academic Press. Iizuka, Y. 1993. “Regulators in Japanese Conversation”. Psychological Reports 72.203-209. Kendon, Adam. 1967. “Some Functions of Gaze-Direction in Social Interaction”. Acta Psychologica 26.22-63. Kendon, Adam. 1990. Conducting Interaction. Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. [Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, 7]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LaFrance, Marianne & Clara Mayo. 1976. “Racial Differences in Gaze Behavior during Conversation: Two systematic observational studies”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 33.547-552. Lebra, Takie Sugiyama. 1976. Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii. Lindenfield, Jacqueline. 1971. “Verbal and Non-Verbal Elements in Discourse”. Semiotica 8.223233. Nash, Caroline. 2001. Language and Gestures in Conversation: A cross-cultural study of the usage and functions of regulators and illustrators in French, Japanese, and American English.

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(Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Davis). Dissertation Abstracts International 62.07.2404. Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel Schegloff & Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation”. Language 50.696-735. Scheflen, Albert E. 1964. “The Significance of Posture in Communication Systems”. Psychiatry 27.316-331. Schegloff, Emmanuel 1984. “On some Gestures’ Relation to Talk”. Structures of Social Action: Studies in conversation analysis ed. by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 266-296. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whiffen, Thomas. 1915. The North-West Amazons: Notes on some months spent among Cannibal tribes. London: Constable.

Quantity Scales Towards culture-specific profiles of discourse norms Elda Weizman Bar-Ilan University

This paper argues for a reading of cultural variation in terms of degree of informativeness. Based on empirical cross-cultural data, I suggest that each language be located on a quantity scale, indicating its relative informativeness within a set of the languages under study. The quantity scales may serve as a unifying principle of comparison, with the aim of providing an integrated culture-specific profile for each language as compared to other languages. Integrated profiles in terms of quantity scales might also serve as a sound basis for a systematic examination of the universality of Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Based on Gricean notion of quantity I propose an interpretation of two discourse patterns – Requestive Hints in spoken discourse and conveying reservation through the verb claim in the written press – each in a different set of languages. Reported findings indicate that Hebrew is located near the informative end of the scale in both cases.

1. Introduction This paper argues for a reading of cultural variation in terms of degree of informativeness. It is suggested that in cross-cultural studies, for each discourse pattern, the languages explored are to be located on a quantity scale, indicating their relative informativeness vis-à-vis each other. The quantity scales may serve as a unifying principle of comparison, with the aim of providing an integrated culture-specific profile for each language as compared to other specific languages. As is well known, Grice’s Cooperative Principle determines that speakers have a tacit agreement whereby contributions will be made “such as is required, at the stage at which [they] occur, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which [they] are engaged” (1975:45). Speakers are thus committed to maintaining four principles, formulated in the form of four maxims, one of which is the Maxim of Quantity: – –

Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

142 Elda Weizman Grice is mostly concerned with deliberate, blatant floutings of the conversational principle, since his purpose is to account for the generation of conversational implicatures. From his perspective, speakers of a foreign language would not be assigned to deduce intended indirect meanings through the mechanism of conversational implicatures, in as much as they are not expected to share with natives speakers the same intuitive feeling of what counts as ‘cooperation’ and ‘flouting’. It follows then that languages might differ in the implementation of the Conversational Principle and its maxims. The point I would like to make here is that languages differ systematically in the implementation of the Maxim of Quantity. It is further suggested that analyses of cultural variations in terms of degree of informativeness might provide us with a coherent, integrated bird’s-eye view of the specificity of the languages under study. More specifically, it is argued that as far as indirectness is concerned, languages differ in terms of the quantity requirement, such that for each pattern of indirectness, each language is characterized by a preferred level of informativeness as compared to other languages. I understand ‘informativeness’ as ‘informational load’ or ‘quantity of information’ in the Gricean sense. The very notion of quantity is relative; consequently, values such as ‘high’ or ‘low’ are necessarily relational, and can only be determined by comparison. In this respect, the discussion is somewhat related to the study of ‘voids’ (Dagut 1978) in traditional theory of translation. The very assumption that the translation product is at the crossroads of the source language, target language and other relevant translations (Toury 1977, 1980, 1995, Weizman 1986) presupposes a comparison between the languages involved. Thus, Catford’s (1965) linguistic approach to translation makes a distinction between textual equivalence (effectively manifest in a translated text as compared to its source text) and formal correspondence (between categories in the source- and target languages); and Toury’s (1995, 2000) distinction between obligatory and non-obligatory shifts draws on a differentiation between linguistic specificity at the level of language structures (which entails obligatory shifts) versus differences in stylistic, textdependent preferences (which entails non-obligatory ones). This line of thinking gives way to discussions of ‘voids’ (also labeled ‘lacunes’, cf. Vinay & Darbelnet 1958, ‘blank spaces’, cf. Rabin 1958, and ‘gaps’, cf. Ivir 1977, 1987), i.e. entities in a given language which have no equivalences in another. Accepted typologies refer to grammatical voids, including morphological ones (e.g., the lack of definite article in Russian), syntactic (lack of past perfect in Hebrew), lexical or semantic voids caused by differences in the physical environment (Fjord) and cultural worlds (resurrection). Typologies abound, but for our purpose it is sufficient to point out that voids have no independent existence; they are relational by definition, and it is in a similar sense that ‘preferences for high or low quantity’ or for ‘high or low informativeness’ are discussed henceforth: the degree of informativeness of a given discourse pattern in a given language can only be calculated as compared to

Quantity Scales: Towards culture-specific profiles of discourse norms 143

the same patterns in another language, or to another pattern in the same language. Therefore, the analysis of quantity scales requires a horizontal comparison within the same language, and a vertical comparison between languages. Accordingly, in this paper I propose a Gricean interpretation of two discourse patterns – Requestive Hints in spoken discourse and conveying reservation through the verb claim in the written press – each in a different set of languages. Since for both patterns Hebrew is compared with other languages, the analysis may provide us with a partial sense of how a ‘culture-specific profile’ may look like. 2. Requestive Hints 2.1 Introducing hints As noted above, I find it particularly interesting to explore the claim of ‘quantity scales’ in patterns of indirectness, which inherently represent the lower end of informativeness, when compared with directness and conventional indirectness. By ‘patterns of indirectness’ I refer to such pragmatic functions as irony, illocutionary force, challenges, etc., whereby the meaning conveyed by the speaker differs from the utterance meaning: while the latter resides in the semantic value of lexical, morphological and syntactic units complemented by contextual information conventionally activated by indexicals and comparatives, indirect speaker’s meanings are detected through the combined use of textual, extra-textual and meta-textual cues, which highlight the existence of a gap between the computed utterance meaning and available contextual information, and trigger the search for candidate speaker’s meanings (Dascal 1983, Dascal & Weizman 1987, Weizman & Dascal 1991). Requestive Hints are indirect, non-conventional requests, such as I can’t stand closed places when used as a request for H to open the window. If a speaker S wants to ask hearer H to open the window, a number of strategies are available to her, ranging from the most direct to the most indirect. The interpretation of the most direct ones relies on their syntactic form (example 1) or on a performative verb (example 2): (1)

Open the window (please).

(2)

I am asking you to open the window.

The interpretation of conventional indirect requests relies on conventions of means, which determine the semantic value of the utterances used as requests, and conventions of forms, pertaining to their specific wordings (Clark 1979); and although languages differ from each other both in the nature and distribution of request strategies available to the speakers (Blum-Kulka 1989), all conventionally indirect requests have some affinity with the felicity conditions required for their realization (Searle 1969). The conventional requests below, for instance, are

144 Elda Weizman related to the preparatory condition ‘H is able to do A’ (example 3) and to the sincerity condition ‘S wants H to do A’ (example 4): (3)

Could you open the window?

(4)

I’d like you to open the window.

Unlike direct and conventionally indirect requests, the interpretation of hints is secured neither by directness nor by conventionality. For instance, the assertion It is hot in here will be heard as a request for H to open the window only under specific circumstances, and there is little in its form which may indicate its illocutionary force or its propositional content. Requestive Hints are not homogeneous. In my previous work (Weizman 1985, 1989, 1993), I argued that hints represent a heterogeneous category which includes various sub-strategies, and that the nature and use of opacity is better understood if these sub-types are viewed as maintaining scalar relations on two opacity scales: the illocutionary and the propositional. Thus, a hint is considered more or less opaque on the illocutionary scale depending on the contextual information required for the interpretation of its requestive force; and it is considered more or less opaque on the propositional scale depending on the clues exploited for the interpretation of its propositional content. Each hint may thus be defined according to its location on both scales. Empirical findings indicate (Weizman 1989) that when hints are considered more situationally appropriate than direct or conventionally indirect requests, speakers opt for the relative opaque hint sub-strategies. Based on this preference for opacity, as well as on findings indicating that in contrast with claims made by Brown and Levinson (1987) and Leech (1980, 1983), hints are not universally interpreted as facesaving (Blum-Kulka 1987, House 1986). I argued that opacity is not conceived as the lesser of two evils, which should be compensated for. Rather, it is intentionally exploited in order to preserve a high deniability potential, “getting a requested act carried out as a result of the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s requestive intent, while at the same time pretending that no such intent exists” (Weizman 1989:93). Whereas the reported research focused on the functions of hints, in the current discussion I propose to examine hints as a specific case of low informativeness, in the framework of a wider claim on culture-dependent variation. 2.2 Quantity scales As noted above, the strategy of Requestive Hints consists of several substrategies, varying in terms of propositional content and illocutionary force. Whereas I previously considered them in terms of degree of transparency, I now prefer to view them as ranging in degree of informativeness. This modification will enable us to make the generalization necessary for enlarging the paradigm so as to include other discourse patterns.

Quantity Scales: Towards culture-specific profiles of discourse norms 145

Judged by their propositional content, hints include three sub-strategies (the examples below should all be read as requests that H opens the window): – (5)

– (6)

– (7)

Reference to related components: I don’t understand why the window is always closed in here.

Reference to hearer’s involvement: You’ve left the window closed, as usual.

Reference to requested act: I can’t open the window, it is too high for me.

As can be seen, if the utterances in (5)-(7) are read as requests that H opens the window, then the propositional content of (7) is the most informative, since it includes a specification of the requested act (open) and its object (the window). Example (5), on the other hand, is the least informative, since only the object is explicitly referred to, while the requested act can only be inferred. The propositional content of (6) is in mid position in terms of informativeness, as it refers to both the object of the request (window) and to the hearer’s involvement (you’ve left [it] closed), but does not name the requested act. The sub-strategies represented by (5)-(7) thus range from least to most informative. The same goes for the degree of informativeness of the illocutionary force. Here, too, we are presented with three sub-strategies, ranging from the least to the relatively most informative: – (8)

– (9)

–

Stating potential reasons for the request: I feel sick in closed places.

Questioning feasibility of requested act: Is this window too high for you?

Questioning hearer’s commitment:

(10) Are you going to give me a hand?

The sub-strategies represented by examples (8)-(10) correlate, one way or the other, with two felicity conditions required for a successful performance of requests (Searle 1969): the sincerity condition ‘S wants H to do A’ (example 8), and the preparatory conditions ‘H is able to do A’ (in 9) and ‘it is not obvious to S that H will do A in the normal course of events’ (in 10). These connections, however, underlie hints at the level of implied speaker’s intentions, and unlike conventionally indirect requests (can you/could you/would you etc.), they are not embedded in their utterance meanings (i.e. in their wordings and grammatical structures). Consequently, all hints, including the least opaque ones (examples 7, 10), operate at the level of low-informativeness, but there sub-strategies still occupy different places on the quantity scale.

146 Elda Weizman 2.3 Cultural variation Having argued for a re-reading of the use of hints based on the degree of informativeness, let us see how it applies to cultural differences in their realization in Australian English, Canadian French and Israeli Hebrew (Weizman 1985, 1987, 1993), Japanese and English (Rinnert & Kobayashi 1999), and Turkish (Marti, personal communication, following Marti 2006). 1 A comparison between Australian English, Canadian French and Israeli Hebrew, made in the framework of the CCSARP project and based on a discourse-completion test administered to students in eight languages (BlumKulka, House & Kasper 1989), demonstrates a clear-cut preference for the use of the least informative sub-strategy on the illocutionary scale, namely that of potential grounders, i.e. reasons for the request (77.1%, n=64 in Australian English, 35.4%, n=16 in Canadian French, 44.6%, n=33 in Israeli Hebrew) (Weizman 1989:89). Within this general tendency, Fisher’s exact test indicates cultural variation as follows: Hebrew differs significantly from English (p