I

A PARASESSION ON

LINGUISTIC UNITS AND LEVELS

April 20-21, 1979

Including

Papers from the Conference on

NON-SLAVIC LANGUAGES OF THE USSR

April 18, 1979

EDITED BY

PAUL R. CLYNEWILLIAM F. HANKS

CAROL L. HOFBAUER

CHICAGO LINGUISTIC SOCIETYUNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

1050 E. 59TH STREETCHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60637

192

In conclusion, it is stressed that the notion "universalrule" should not be accepted a priori, before assessing theextent of its contribution, if at all, to the theory of syntax.Specifically, linguists must try to assess the explanatory valueof a substantive constraint in terms of a "universal inventoryof rules", as opposed to a formal one, and try to devise empiricaltests for validating the notion "universal rule".

REFERENCES

Bach, E. (1965) "On Some Recurrent Types of Transformations"Georgetown University Monograph Series on Languages andLinguistics, Vol. 18, ed. by C. Kreidler, Washington, D.C.

Bach, E. (1971) "Questions" Linguistic Inquiry. Vol. 2, 153-66.Bach, E. (1974) "On the VSO Hypothesis" Linguistic Inquiry. Vol. 5,

1-37.Chomsky, ~ . (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,

Mass.: M.I.T. Press.Chung, S. (1975) "On the Subject of Two Passives in Indonesian".

Subject and Topic, ed. by Charles N. Li. Academic Press.Johnson, D. (1974) Toward a Theory of Relationally-Based Grammar.

University of Illinois Dissertation.Keenan, E. (1975) "Some Universals of Passive in Relational

Grammar". Papers from the Eleventh Regional Meeting of theChicago Linguistic Society.

Keenan, E. and B. Comrie (1977) "Noun Phrase Accessibility andUniversal Grammar". Linguistic Inquiry. Vol. 8, 53-100.

Peters, S. (1970) "Why There Are Many Universal Bases". Papersin Linguistics. Vol. 2, 27-43.

Sheintuch, G. (1977) Same Rule in a Transformational Theory ofSyntax. University of Illinois Dissertation.

Sinha, A.K. (1978) "Another Look at the Universal Characterizationof Passive Voice". Papers from the Fourteenth RegionalMeeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

Stockwell, R., P. Schachter and B. Partee (1973) The MajorSyntactic Structures of English. New York: Holt, Rineholt,and Winston, Inc.

193

*language Structure and Linguistic Ideology

Michael SilversteinThe University of Chicago

Cases are rare in which a people have begun tospeculate about linguistic categories, and thesespeculations are alroost always so clearly affectedby the faulty reasoning that has led to secondaryexplanations, that they are readily recognized assuch...

---Franz Boas (1911: 71)Were I to begin by observing that "Webster's dictionary

defines ideology as ... ," you would have an example of a very camonAmerican linguistic ideology in action. l It would be the rhetoricalappeal to the published dictionary as the codified authority onwhat words really mean. Even the whimsical force of such rhetoricrests on a large set of rationali7..ations about the nature of thedictionary's authority in such matters. Part of our educationalestablishment--and especially the publishers--encourage it asllRlch as possible. Or again, I might start by pointing out that theword canes fran the Greek root for 'idea,' illustrating anothercamon ideological proposition about the "true" or even centralmeanings of words lying in their etynDlogical origins, knowledgeof which sarehow allows us to use words correctly. In the worksof ideologues such as Edwin Newnan (1974, 1976), these confusionsof etynnlogy and sanantics at the phrasal level become the basisfor declarations of pet likes and dislikes about contenporaryusage; "clear," or "literal (and correct)" usage is generally so byhistorical priority, as in the usual Malinowskian charter myth.

But I do not address myself only to articulated beliefs thatare incorrect or contanptible. I should clarify that ideologiesabout language, or linguistic ideologies, are any sets of beliefsabout language articulated by the users as a rationalization orjustification of perceived language structure and use. If we~are such ideologies with what goes under the name of "scientific"statEments2 about language, we might find that in certain areasthe ideological beliefs do in fact match the scientific ones, thoughthe two will, in general, be part of divergent larger systans ofdiscourse and enterprise. We need have no conceit one way or theother, however, that autanatically privileges so-called "scientific"description, or autanatically condanns native ideological rational­ization.

In fact, I want to develop here SCIre aspects of the subjectthat will, I hope,show the relationship between ideology and structurein the realm of language to be llRlch the same as in any other realmof social life, a phenarenon of no little significance for the prac­tice of linguistics.

'lb develop this thEme, I will first indulge in a sketchy his­toriography of one of the lines of development of American linguisticanthropology, tracing the definition of the problem by one of theIIDst misunderstood writers of the century, Benjamin Lee Whorf. Itwas Whorf, I will claim, who clarified one aspect of the problem, asit was posed by his academic grandfather Franz Boas. For Whorf

194

proposed that the users' native ideology of reference, of howlanguage serves as a system for segmenting, classifying, and thencespeaking about the universe of experience "out there," is systemat­ically related to, and at least in part systematically derivesfrom, the gramnatical structure of the language.

More particularly, Wharf saw regularities in the distortingrelationship between native awareness of language as a referentialsystan and referential structure itself. Wharf's scientificperspective (not, it should be noted, any anti-ccmparative nihilism)led him to fonnulate a principle of "linguistic relativity" thatmight, he concluded, stand in the way of pure positivisticscience (no little concern for the MIT graduates to whom headdressed a number of popular, and subsequently misconstrued,articles in 1940-41). The analytic lesson here for linguisticsI will term a linguistic uncertainty principle in keeping withWlx>rf's original (and, in Ietxospect, unfortunate) rretaphor: thosewho would think that native linguists can directly penetrate tothe linguistic coding of referential "reality out thp.rp." by examiningtheir own propositional systelll--no matter heM "deeply"--or by examiningothers I with crude approximation-translations of propositional content,unrecognizably distort the object of investigation in ~ proces~.

This point leads us into the second area of questlOns, deal1ngwith ideology vs. structure for other areas of language use, other"functions" of language than the referential, as we now say. Fromthe writings of the philosophers Wittgenstein and Austin and theirinterpreters fran the work of Dell Hyrres and his students thathas carved o~t a field called the "ethnography of speaking," fromthe development of whole areasof research called sociolinguisticsand ethnomethodology, it has becorre clearer that peo~le not onlyspeak about, or refer to,the world "out there"--outslde of lan­guage--they also presuppose (or reflect) and create (or fashion)a good deal of social reality by the very activity of using language.We should ask, in particular, how the seaningly reflective andcreative or "performative" functions of language (or, rather, oflanguage use) relate to native IDVareness and native ideology. Canwe generalize Whorf' s penetrating insights from the plane ofreference to the whole of language function? I think we can discernthe same disjunction between ideology and structure, one, m::Jreover,which assimilates function to reference and thereby affects thestrategy of language use. .

Answering these questions in this way, we come, as ln anysocial science to the problan of accounting for history. I willbriefly expl~ how various generalizations about historical changeof linguistic structure, at both the referential and m::Jre broadlyfunctional levels of analysis, sean to be the outcome of a structure­ideology dialectical process. This contrasts with views of changeas autonarous internal evolution of rule structures, from sometendency to analogy, or fran sorre systemic striving for. psychologicaleconany of rule-ordering relationships, or from some gomg-to­ccmpletion of otherwise variable rules. The "dynamic synchrony"that many have seen as the basic condition of human languag~,

following Jakobson and the Prague Circle, is, by our recko~lng,

precisely the tension between linguistic structure and varlOUS

195

institutionalized and non-institutionalized ideological under­standings of that structure. Thus the necessary conditions forthe formation of ideologies, and the sufficient conditions fortheir institutionalization, ought really to be the heart ofhistorical explanation, for this illustrates on a large scalewhat we are, for better or worse, constantly doing to languagein microcosm whenever we think about it.

But in the beginning was Boas. Whether or not Boas hadintellectual contact with his great sociological contanporariesin France and Germany, I am not certain. By the 18805, he washard at work translating the lessons he learned in psychophysicsabout what we must call ethnoclassification into an emergingdiscourse about "ethnological" or cultural form and its history(see Stocking 1968: 133-60, 195-233). And the cardinal problanhere, as I see it, was to differentiate between "primary"cultural classification (as shown in la)--the segmentation andordering of the supposedly shared social universe of experience,which m::Jved along on its own historical plane independent of thepersonal will of individuals--and what Boas called "secondaryexplanation" or rationalization (as shown in lb)--the edifice ofideological beliefs about the system of categorizations implicitin institutionalized social action.

1. (a) "Primary"ethnological phenomena ("fundamental ethnic ideas")

1Cultural Pattern I organizing> "range of personal experience"

e.g., system of religious ritual activity; (referential) language.(b) "Secondary" explanation (secondary reinterpretation)

Ration~lizations (exp~icit about>ICultural patternor avallable to consclousness) .

Language, or rather, the social activity of using language,plays an eXaJPlary role in Boasian theory, precisely because, itis claimed, the "primary" cultural categorizations of usinglanguage, described by a gramnar, m::Jve along in history m::Jreindependently of secondary overlays than any other phenanenonof social life. 'Thus, as Boas wrote in his 11 Introduction" tothe Handbook of American Indian Languages, published in 1911,

if we adopt this point of view, language seans to be one ofthe m::Jst instructive fields of inquiry in an investigation I,of the formation of the fundamental ethnic ideas. The greatadvantage that linguistics offer in this respect is thefact that, on the whole, the categories which are forrredalways remain unconscious, and that for this reason theprocesses which lead to their formation can be followedwithout the misleading and disturbing factors of secondaryexplanations, which are so caIlIDn in ethnology, so much sothat they generally obscure the real history of thedevelopnent of ideas entirely (1911: 70-71).

196 197

granmar

Here, our discussion turns to Whorf. For, as I noted, hedeveloped the sharpest tools for describing the granmaticalcategories of propositional language we have yet seen, of whichthe anergence of transfonnational-generative granmar is merely anotational refinement. And Wharf then used these analytic toolsto specify in detail an answer to the Boasian question, whichparts of language emerge in "secondary rationalization" and

associated in European linguistic ideology and the technical gram­matical tradition that grew out of it with a kind of directrepresentational relationship with the things "out there"--hence, as Boas notes, they are considered to be "the partsexpressing the material contents of sentences," as shown infigure 2. In saying that granmatical study, study of all

2. European ethnocentric view (i.e., secondary explanation)[c!. Ib].

categorizations inplicit in the activity of using language, subsumesand logically precedes the study of lexicon, Boas discoveredthe structuralist principle that his contemporary Saussure wasenunciating in his Geneva lectures at approximately the very sametoo. And if the lexical elanents of language, the roots andstans of words, are continuous with the other elanents of language,previously thought to be in the separate realm of granmar, thecategories inplicit in lexical elanents are the very SaJOO inkind as those implicit in so-called granmar. If you want tostudy the lOOanings of words, that is, the way words categorizethe universe of eXPerience they reflect, study granmar, becauseyou cannot in principle directly study the roots and stans ofwords as vehicles of categorial meaning. 'Ibis is schematized infigure 3. But how to study granmar?

3. Boasian (structuralist) view [ef. la]

granmar

ldescribeS

"nodifying relations"

lexicon: unpredictable [includingminimal] surface-segmentablefonns.

granmar: all structural relations;

lexicography

ldescribes

"material contents"[

lcategorizes"range of personaleXPerience' ,

lexicon

J~t~;i~s

"range of personal eXPerience"

If, as Boas tells us, "the fundamental concepts illustrated byhuman languages are not distinct in kind fran ethnological .phenarena" (1911; 73), but distinct only in degree along the dimen­sions of the structure/ideology dichotany, what parts of lan­guage are relatively lIOre subject to "secondary explanations"than the rest? Though Boas himself gives sane interesting examples,characteristically, he never formulates a positive approach tothis problem. Indeed, it was only in the 19308, after an academicgeneration had passed during which Sapir and Blocmfield hadmatured that Whorf was able to take advantage of the progressin stru~tural analysis and re-address the issue. 3

In order to appreciate the brilliance of Whorf's research,which as I noted above, has been incorrectly maligned as vague,circuiar or tautologous by several academic generations,4 youmust un~rstand one :important problem of Boasian linguisticanalysis, especially as Whorf himself sharpened and hon~ theanalytic tools. For the Boasians, language, or the SOClal ac-tivity of using it, is the medium of the universal human facultyof rationality, the ability to manipulate proIJ<?Sitional .kn~ledge.When we convey linguistic IOOssages, we engage ln camnIDlcatwgprOpositions about entities and. their rel~tionships--entities

and relationships "out there," 1.e., outSlde of language, thecultural organization of which is reflected in the categories ofgranmar. This reflectionist point of view, to be sure, is anancient inheritance of our own folk ideology, or "secondaryexplanations" about language, a point we will be able to make'lIOre precisely below. For the nanent, I want just to point outthat by the late nineteenth century, this reflectionist pointof view saw language as consisting of two relatively indePendentorders of phenanena, "granmar" and "lexicon."

Ever true to character, Boas rmstered example after examplefran North Arrerican languages to make the negative point that theEuropean understanding of the relationship between granmar andlexicon was entirely misguided, inaccurate on a universal scale,and anpirically UIl\IDrkable in these languages of profoundlydifferent structure. "In the discussion of language," Boaswrites,

the parts expressing the material contents of sentencesappear to us as the subject-matter of lexi~hy; partsexpressing the nodifying relations, as the subJect-matterof granmar. In lIOdern Indo-European l~es the n~rof ideas which are expressed by subordwate elanents lS,on the woole, limited, and for this reason the dividing­line between granmar and dictionary appears perfectly clearand well drawn. In a wider sense, however, all etYJOOlogicalprocesses and word canpositions must be considE;red as partsof the grallJllaI" and if we include toose, we fwd that, evenin Indo-Europe~ l~guages, the number of classifying ideasis quite large (J911:33-34).

By "etYJOOlogical processes and word canpositions," Boas JOOanS thestructure of what were considered the word stans of languages, always

198

thereby historically affect cultural practice. I will not darnn­strate this in total detail; perfonning the necessary philologyand historical contextualization of Whorf I s oeuvre would take alarge volume. I will just outline Whorf' s approach to the twocentral issues. First, where do ideologies of reference (orrepresentation) cane fran? Second, how, by providing an objectifiedmeUlphysics of "nature" against which social practice (includinglanguage) becanes interpretable by the participants, do refer­ential ideologies relate to historically-particular traditions ofsocial belief and practice, which we call cultures?

Tb begin with, the Whorfian view of language makes a distinc­tion between what we now call "segmentable surface foun"--the recordable, transcribable stuff of speech that we divide upinto words and their explicit parts--and grammatical structure.'Ibis last he presents as an elaborate set of fonnal-semantic cate­gories that deteunine words and parts of words. For every explicitpart of a word, we must give the organization of categoriesmanifested by that part, or of which that part is a manifesta-tion in combination with some other linguistic element. In orderexhaustively to analyze a language in this fashion, carryingthrough the Boasian point of view, Whorf had to postulate dis­tinctions along four general types of categorial dimension asschanatized in figure 4.

4. Whorfian categories of grammar(a) Overt (phenotypic)/covert (cryptotypic)--by ubiquity of

fonnal expression of the category in "segmentable surfacefonrl'; cryptotypes discoverable only by transfonnational(Harris) relationships.

(b) Selective [semantic] / rrodulus [semantic] --by obligatorinessof mutually-exclusive classifications of lexical forms;

Primary selective category = "lexemic" category(c) Selective [isosemantic]/alternative [isosemantic]Cd) Specific/generic

First, Wharf distinguished between overt (or phenotypic)categories and~ (or cryptotypic) categories, where the criterionof assignment rests on the ubiquity and overt fonnal expression ofthe category in "segmentable surface foun." An overt category

is a category having a fonnal mark which is present (with onlyinfrequent exceptions) in every sentence containing a menberof the category. 'Ibe mark need not be part of the same wordto which the category may be said to be attached in a para­digmatic sense; i.e., it need not be a suffix, prefix,vowel change, or other 'inflection, I but may be a detachedword or a certain patterning of the wooIe sentence. 'Ibus in 5English the plural of nouns is an overt category... ( [1945)1956: 88)

On the other hand, a covert category

is marked, whether morphemically or by sentence pattern, onlyin certain types of sentence and not in every sentence in

I

f

I

It

II

fi

I[I

I[I~

!I

III

II!

I,I

199

which a word or element belonging to the category occurs. 'Ibeclass nenbership of the word is not apparent until there is aquestion of using it or referring to it in one of thesespecial types of sentence, and then we find that this wordbelongs to a class requiring same sort of distinctivetreatment, which may even be the negative treatment ofexcluding that type of sentence.... ln English intransi-tive verbs foun a covert category marked by l~ of thepassive participle and the passive and causative voices ...([194511956: 89)

The presence of covert categorizations in any segrnentable surfacefoun, then, as opposed to overt ones, depends on finding sameother particular construction in the language where a specialpattern of fonnal treatment necessitates postulating class mem­bership for the foun in question. In a technical foun we mightparaphrase Whorf and clarify with current concepts by' sayingthat we have to find a (Harris- )transfonnationally relatedconstruction in which the cryptotypic category is marked byspecial fonnal treatment, or as Whorf calls it a specific"reactance. " For example, we can test a Parti~ular verb stemfor intransitiVity by seeing if it appears in an otherwisepropositionally-constant passive construction (where be- -p.p.constitutes the overt "reactance"). Or we can test aparticularnoun stem for gender Classification by seeing what pronaninalfoun replaces it in anaphoric constructions, e.g., conjoinedsentences of parallel structure (where .!!V~it constitutesthe overt "reactance"). -

. For Whorf, the way in which language was meaningful andratlonal was encapsulated in such facts of configuration or"rapport" between words. And where any distinction of semanticrelevance was to be drawn between overt segmentable surfacefoun and covert categorization, it was the latter kind of categoryaccording to Wharf, wherein lay the true, primary ethnological 'phenanena that Boas had been after. In that same Boasian historicist:rein, Wharf writes that in the emergence of a cryptotype category1n a language, the set of its menbership

bec<m3s increasingly organized around a rationale itattracts semantically suitable words and loses fo~r menbersthat are semantically inappropriate. Logic is now whatholds it together, and its logic becomes a semantic associateof that unity of which the configurative aspect is a bundleof nOOJlX)tor linkages JlX)Qring the whole fleet of words totheir ~n react~c~., Semantically, it has. bec<m3 a deeppersuas10n of a pnnc1ple behind phenomena like the ideas ofinanimation, of "substance," of abstract ~ of abstractperson~lity, of force ~ of causation--not the' overt concept(lexat10n) corresponding to the word causation but the covertidea, the "sensing," or, as it is often called... the"feeling" that there must be a principle of causa-bon.Later this covert idea may be more or less duplicated in aword and a lexical concept invented by a philosopher;

200201

or Qbjectification. This lies at the basis of what he variouslycalls the "world view," the "habitual thought patterns," orthe "natural lQgic" of speakers. It generally constitutes thenatives' ideology of the way their language serves as a propo­sitional systEm representing and talking about what is "outthere. " In his rrost precise essay on the subject "The relationof habitual thought and behavior to language" Ul~41]1956; 134-59),Whorf analyzes the "Standard Average European" projection ofabstract 'quantity,' 'substance,' 'form' (including dimensionalityin 'space'), 'time' as "natural" or metaphysical categories Qfreality. He traces these projectiQns to the primary selectivecategories Qf the maximally-expanded noun phrase. Thus, fran suchan Engli:m noun phrase as~~ scoops of sugar, which isthe partlcular structure that exhibits the cryptotypic selectivecategQries Number, Size, Substanceless FQrm, Formless Substance, inthat order, as shown in schena Sa, speakers easily develop asecondary ratiQnalizatiQn, or "objectification," in which allthese cryptotypic categories are projected as attributes orfeatures of every object of naninal reference.

e.g., causation. ([ms. HI36/37] 1956:81)

So, in this PDasian way of seeing things, the philosophicalinvention of the abstract noun-stan causation, which is itselfa canplex form and which itself has manbership in several~to~ypic categorizatiQns of nouns, is the secondary ration­allzatlOn upon the cryptotypic category of English (and otherlanguages') verb phrase structure manifested in the proportiQnalsets (be) red : redden :: die : kill :: fall : fell :: ... ,a crypto~ic category called 'causative'in our granmaticaltradition.

The second Whorfian division of categories relevant to ourdiscussion is selective sanantic categories vs. roodulus sananticcategories. Independent of the Qvert or covert nature of theformal markings, a selective category

is a granmatical class with narbership fixed, and limitedas canpared with sane larger class. Apr~ selectivecategory, or lexanic category, is one canpaJ'P to whichthe next larger class is the total lexicon of the language.certain sanantic and granmatical properties are assured inthe word by selecting it fran a certain class of fixednanbership not coterminous with the whole vocabulary.([1945] 1956 ; 93 )

5. (a) Np [tree large sC1pS of sugr]

Number Size Substanceless Formlessform substance

So, tree~ as an English noun,. cannQt substitute for~ in theexample 1D the same sense as lt can substitute for scoop- of~; thus, the phrase three~ trees, as in 5b. And theobjectification of reference Whorf characterizes as the projectiononto such entities as trees the very abstract properties we wouldexpect by analogy: a certain bounded form (say rrultiple brancheseach with circular cross section) and a certain'otherwise formless'substance (say, wood). We can test the validity of this cbaracterizatiolof intuition by just thinking about the referent of the phrasethr~~ sugars, as in 5c, which might be paraphrased by thenative as three~ (conventionally-bounded-and-~-unit-)s(of)~, whether in the context of the coffee-klatsch or of the ­laboratory.

But Wharf does nQt stQP there. He goes on to point out thatthis "objectification" has extended the analogy to create anotherfonnless substance, 'time, I which we measure into units with the

(c) Np [three large

NtIDlr Si*.:

It is important to see that selective categories, regardless ofwhether they are overt (phenotypic) or covert (cryptotypic), arebasic granmatical subdivisiQns, that classify the overt segmen­table fQrms into IllUtually-exclusive classes, such as noun-stansvs. verb-stans in Latin (along with the other primary selectivecategories). Thus, a selection of one or the other implies boththe form and part of the sanantics of the very word it defines,noun vs. verb. Modulus categories, on the Qther hand,

are generally applicable and ranovable at will ... to anyword caning within a certain prerequisite larger category,which may be either selective or another roodulus category.The cases, tenses, aspects, roodes, and voices of Indo-European... languages are roodulus categories--cases beingIOOduli of the larger category Qf nouns; aspects, tenses,etc. rooduli of the larger category of verbs .... in widelydifferent types Qf speech, these familiar types of meaning andfunction cease to be associated with selectivity and roodulatiQnin the same way: ... ([1945]1956: 95)

It should be clear that the distinction here is bound to Whorf' sinheritance of the word as the relevant danain of granmaticalanalysis, though what he wishes to express lies actually in therealm of what we navv call the phrase- and clause-level syntaxof the sentence, at which parts of speech and their paradigms aredefinable. 7

In any case, by using these Whorfian analytic tools, we cannavv formulate with Whorf the principle of referential projection

(b) Np[three~

Number

large tryes]J, .-!.-

Si:<:e Substance+

Form

sugars]

Sut,tance+

FQrm

202

rretaphorical unitary dimensionality of a line, and which we refer towith noun phrases of parallel structure to the rreasure phrases we havealready seen. And in tenns of this objectification, we understand ourutterances to be predicating states of affairs at points and in intervalsalong a seaningly speech-independent time line. 'The pragmatic (indexical)category of t tense,' then, is a predicational category interpreted bythe users as really being tanporal in reference, and this sense oftenporality anchors the category as 'tense' rather than as sanethingelse, e.g. ,aspect or status. .

I cannot deal here with Wharf's presentation of the contrastmgHopi data, where the categories of the verb phrase det~nnine.a ratherdifferent ideology of processual, rather than substant1ve prImacy.'This should be read carefully in the original. I emphasize, however,that Whorf is not talking about sensation and perception at the levelof the individual's physiological-psychological processes, as can­rnentators have asserted even though he sanetimes uses the tenn"seeing" (to be sure, i~ a new, technical sense) in his. discussion.Wharf is talking about the way people who speak a certam languagefonn an ideology of reference, an understanding at the conneputallevel of how their language represents "nature." And he goes on tosay that in practical situations of task-orientation, where peoplehave to reason out a course of action vis-a-vis the v.urld, "peopleact about situations in ways which are like the ways they talk aboutthen" ([1941]1956: 148). Using a series of channing fire-insuranceexamples, arrong other kinds of evidence, Whorf tries to reconstructthe rnechaniSllS of practical rationality . . .

In his IIDdel, we recognize the disjunction between ~he Imgu1st' selaborate categorial analysis of language and the rnechan1SllS of secon­dary rationalization put to the service of practical rationality ..Just as in our earlier~exarnpl~, it ~s as. though people"quas1­consciously rationalize about practlcal sltuatlons based on allthe analogical and suggestive value of the patterns" ([1941]1956: .147)of their language; taat is, they objectify on the basis ot analog1es tocertain pervasive surface-segmentabl~lin~~ic patterns ~ and .act accordingly. 'This secondary ratlonal~zat1onof the IlJll?Uistlcsystem is, however, understood by the nat1ve speak~r as. a d1rect "denotative relationship between surface fonns ~d ::eallty out t~ere.It can renain implicit, as in IIDst practical Sltuat1ons, or, as mtechnical reasoning, it can becane explicit through the eJOOrgen~e

of new tenns or "lexations" as Whorf calls then. 'These tenns, 1tshould be recalled have their own underlying categorial structure,distinct fran that' of the linguistic foms fran which they arise byobjectification. . .

It is at this level that Wharf's analysis constitutes a cr1t1queand undennining of the constructivist scientific project of phys~~l~SIl

because his principle of projection leads him to assert the poss1b1lltythat "objectiiied" scientific tenninology--which we use to reason aboutcertain practical situations called 'data'-is itself a phenanenon ofsecondary rationalization that does not really get near non-cultural(non-symboliC) "reality" (as sane would say, the "really real"). As

Philosophers might observe the conceit of "essentialist" scientists ., " "thi 1 e " mis that they are fashioning an "object language, or ng ~ '. .

which every truly distinct individual entity in ~he uni~erse Wlll ~ Im~ls-:­tically differentiated (specifically with reternng lex1cal expresslOns)Wlthin

203

theoretical discourse, and all truly distinct relations will bedescribable as such. As Boas, himself sanething of a positivist, hadput it earlier,

when we try to think at all clearly, we think, on the whole,in v.urds· and it is well known that, even in the advancementof scien~, inaccuracy of vocabulary has often been a sturrbling­block which has made it difficult to reach accurate conclu­sions. (1911: 71-72)

Wharf points out that the abstractions of scientific uses ofordinary language may well emerge fran rationalizing cryptotypicselective categories through pervasive analogical patterns. Itthus is indeterminate to what extent those scientific conceptsbased on anyone language structure fonn a true "thing language"or are, rather, just a "quasi-syntactic pseudo-th~g language" asca.rnap and Morris ([1938] 1971:30) would have it, a set of"sentences which are apparently thing-sentences, and so aboutobjects which are not signs," but which "turn out under analysis tobe pseudo-thing sentences which. must be interpreted as syntacticalstatements about language." Viewed fran the perspective of thedifferent possible systems of objectification that play a role inideologies of "the real," this is Wharf's principle of "linguisticrelativity." Viewed fran the perspective of the positivist project,at the time a dcminant philosophical and scientific concern, thisis rather a principle of linguistic uncertainty. If we have causeto doubt that "our own concepts of 'time, t 'space,' and 'matter' are"given in substantially the same fonn by experience to all lOOn," butrather are "in part conditioned by the structure of particularlanguages" (Wharf [l94111956: 138), then how can we neatly distinguishthe tv.u classes of rreaningful statements (see footnote 8) so as tobe able to carry through the reduction (Carnap's Aufbau) of allempirical knowledge to space-time coordinates?9

We can sunmarize the line of reasoning leading to Whorf' sprojection and relativity/uncertainty principles in a IIDre IIDderntenninology, unavailable to Wharf himself. In using language as adevice of propositional reference in practical situations (theapparent IIDde of reasoning about such situations), speakers pre­suppose a reality "out there" that language codes and categorizes.And the presupposed categorizations emerge as though speakersanalogically project underlying semantic categories fran certainmaximally-expanded surface lexicalizations (segmentable v.urd-stens,phrases, etc.) into a rretalanguage of conceptual labels taken tobe "object language." Awareness of so-called reality is at leastpartially precipitated out of this process, Wharf v.uuld claim, sothat for speakers of a given language, contextualized social actionis intimately bound up with this projection.

'Ibis leads into the second area for discussion, when languageuse is itself seen as contextualized social action, of the sarreorder of phenanena as any other cultural behavior. Can we distin-guish what we might call an ideology of language use in a given society,distinct fran what we might call the social system of language useas we v.uuld "scientifically" (see footnote 2) describe it? Ifwe think of linguistic behavior as having significance and consequence

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for those who engage in it, we can rephrase the first part of thisdistinction in the following way. Is there a set of beliefs interms of which people rationalize the use of particular linguisticforms to achieve certain socially-tUlderstood purposes, to be used incertain socially-tUlderstood contexts, etc., because of such factorsas inherent power or force of language itself, suitability of languagefonns for the context in which they should be (or are characteris­tically) used, etc.? The second tenn of the distinction isequivalent to asking if a systematic cross-cultural study of languageuse is possible as a genuinely social (or genuinely anthropological)linguistics. Is there a way of analyzing the uses of languagefonns so as to relate them systematically to particular kinds ofsystems of role and status, institutional structures, corporategroup structures, etc.; in short, is it possible systematicallyto analyze a social organization of language usage? Observe that inthis second area, we are not dealing with whether or not a givenlanguage contains nanes for (has phrases or words referring to)these aspects of the society relating to its use. 'The question iswhether or not there is a cuIturally-detenninate distribution oflinguistic forms in socially-constituted contexts of use, and hownorms of such usage--and departures fran thEm--can be understood bythe users.

These two distinct "functionaliBllS" have not, tUlfortunately, beenkept analytically distinct in the literature. (See also Merton 1968:73-138 and references there.) In particular, as we shall see below,linguistics has characteristically taken at face value a nativeideology that objectifies "force" in language itself, concretizingthis force in tenns of propositional-structure-as-usual. Socialanthropological studies hare characteristically analyzed native ideologyas though it were an accurate "scientific" picture of the relationof language fonn to social context. Both of these, I will argue, areexpectable in tenns of a broadened understanding of the bases ofideology that Wharf proposed, especially as such broadened understandingexplains the tendency to assimilate our own "scientific" views to thesource frem which they have anerged, our own European folk ideologyof language.

Consider in this connection the traditional distinction betweengranmar as the description of language structure versus rhetoric asthe description (or prescription?) of strategic language use. Asit has developed into the science of linguistics, the study ofgranmar has attenpted to encoopass first and foraoost the systEm­aticity of how linguistic fonn relates to propositional reference­and-predication. The methods and theoretical apparatus of thisstudy of granmar necessitated ultimately the scientific ~tion .of recurrent sameness (Blocmfield (1926) 1970:129-30; cf. S11verstem1978: 237-8), a constant referring-and-predicating potential oflinguistic fonns, specifiable by a lIDdel, independent of theircontext of use. 'Thus, in scientific study of granmar, by this inher­itance, we have worked at specifying "langue" or "caJlletence," thecontext-independence of which is an assumption necessary to turnprescriptive granmatical doctrine into descriptive linguistic science,while at the same time preserving its characteristic methods ofdealing with linguistic data.lO

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To the extent hCM'ever, that certain fonns of language codeindexical-referential categories, their meaningfulness i~ I;JroIJ<?S­itional tenns cannot be defined independent of sane spec1f1catlOnof the context in which the fonns are uttered. As it turns out,a great ntlllber of the categories of reference-and-predication areindexical and an even greater number of categories sean to beindexical'independent of the referential-and-predicational value ofutterances. To the extent that we can give rules that tell us .the regularities of indexical reference-and-predication, ~h~ w111involve sane theory of kinds of recurrent contextual cond1t1ons.For exarIJlle, the social role of speaker,. ~dependent of whatindividual speaks an utterance, is the Ill11UIllUIll recurrent contextualfeature necessary to define the propositional contribution of theEnglish class of indexical forms of lime. Such a theory ofrecurrent contextual conditions in which tokens of forms appear,.necessary even to canplete the theory of language as a referen~la~­and-predicationalsystem, is already an implicitly social descnptlOnof what we migbt tenn the structure of contexts of utterance.

How much of the theory of social context must of necessityenter even an attenpted account of the folk inheritance of languagestructure as propositional system? It is not cle~. ~t as ~ havenoted elsewhere (Silverstein 1973; 1976b; 1977) th1S 1S not,?-n~ buta patching-up approach, bring~g in as much haphaz~ descnptlOnfran the folk realm of rhetor1c (language use) as 1S needed topreserve the analytic fiction that there is a well-defined systencorresponding to the scientifically-winnowed folk ::ealm ?f~.A much more useful analytic distinction is, folloWlng P~lrc~,. .aIlDng the types of sem1osis, or meaningfulness, called 1C?n1C, mdex1cal,and symbolic, a distinction which cross-cuts any folk-denvednotion of propositionality as a well-defined realm. Not all of thelinguistic features that effect referential-and-predicational "f~c­

tion" can be accanodated in the analytic plane of Peircean symbol1BT1;but such as can be are readily analyzed in terms of generativegrammatical syst~. I always use the tenn senantic (or senantico-referential) for this type of meaningfulness. It is that con: .tribution to the meaningfulness of utterances made by categones wh1Chare specifiable through context-independent gramnatical analysisbased on (logical) synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy fLyons 1968: 453-55) ,partonymy, etc. of sentences and their elaoonts. 2 .

By contrast I maintain that the indexical plane of meanmgfulnessproperly encanp~es the folk realm of rhetoric (the systen of lan­guage use), how language signals derive t~eir ~iallY-:mderstood

effects in various socially-constituted sltuahons of discourse.'!bat is to understand how speaking (or other similar uses of language)is eff~tive social action, accanplishing such various social endsas warning insulting, marrying, condenming, christening, growingyams ~ sores heal, creating ligbt in the world, etc:, wemust'systenatize the description of relationships of coex1Stence(tUlderstood copresence) that hold between elanents of speech andelenents canprising the context in which. speech elanents are uttered.In the context of our discussion, this can perhaps be best :mderstoodby developing the contrast of two functionaliBTIS (Silverstem 1976b;44-45 i ffi3. 1978), the second encanpassing the first as the appropriate

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means of cross--linguistic (and cross-cultural) canparison anddescription. These tiro functionalisns have not been carefullyenough distinguished in the literature, and I hope that the dis­cussion here helps to explain why this should be so.

'lb begin with, there is one sense in which language is"functianal," inaswch as its use seans to the natives to be poten­tiallypurposive, or actually effective, or the like, in their ownindividual experience. Let us call this goal-directed and sanetimesgoal-achieving categorization of occasions of use the functionl oflanguage. From the discussion above, it should be clear thatfunction1 is closely related to native understanding of the individual'sability to use fonns of language strategically, and in a mannersubject to ~valuation in accordance with an ideology of approp­riateness. l Insofar as function, is externalized in verbalizationsabout language-what Bloanfield l1ked to ridicule as "secondary andtertiary responses to language" ( [1944] 1970; 413-25)--it impliesa metalinguistic functionl for language it~lf, with ei~her.a .special vocabulary and/or syntax, or a partJ.cular meta1J.ngu:LstlCuse of otherwise fonnally undifferentiated linguistic material. Aswe shall see in detail below, the ideology of "perfonnativity" deron­strates nicely the interdependence of metalinguistic functionl andformation of linguistic ideology.

But there is a contrasting sense in which language is "func­tional," inasnuch as by characteristic distribution of particularfOImS in certain contexts of use, these foImS (or, rather, tokensof than) serve as specifically linguistic indicators (or indices)differentially pointing to (indexing) configurations of contextual

features. Let us call this indexical quality of speech fOImS, orindexical rrode of their signification, functionZ' It is veryimportant to realize that indexical fonns are not to be restrictedto surface.-segm:mtable lIDrphanes, or caIDinations of morphanes. Anylinguistic configuration is potentially indexical. There is, to besure, a trivial sense of this, in which any occurrence of speechminimally indexes the individual in the role of speaker; but thereis also a nontrivial sense in which any particular abstractablefeature(s) of speech might be discovered to be indexical of par­ticular features of context, fran "phonane- or lIDrphane-sized" chunksof language all the way "up" to choice of particular "language" itself.Furthe:mx>re, any particular "surface" stretch of language willprobably figure in multiple indexical functions2. Perhaps in onesuch function2 it will be isolable as the total indexical fonn, whilein another such functioll2 it will be isolable as a canponent of anindexical fonn.

In actual speech situations--Le., at the level of tokens orinstances of usage-we can identify tiro contrasting kinds ofindexical relation of a speech elanent in particular to its contextof· utterance. Where the participwts understand the copresence ofsane indexed aspect of the context independently of the occurrenceof the indexical feature of language-even though there is such anindexical relationship-we might say that the participants' indexicalunderstanding of speech-fonn to context presupposes the-existence­in-context-of the indexed feature. Contrastively, where the participantsunderstand the copresence of sane indexed aspect of the context only

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by the occurrence of of the indexical feature of language, wemight say that the participants' indexical understanding of speech­fonn in context creates the existence-in-context-of the indexedfeature. ClJviously, presupposition/creativity in this sensedepends upon the particular configuration of sinultaneous carr­rnunicative codes in use at a particular "nx:ment" defined by theindexical feature of speech at issue, upon the relevant priorcannunicative behavior of the participants, etc. However, indiscussing regularities of speech usage in this way, we mustfonnulate the range of characteristic indexical presupposition/creativity at the level of indexical types (i.e., the elanents oflinguistic structure) for the various indexical features of language.Thus, the true locative deictics (locative shifters) in Englishare relatively presupposing, where they can be isolated as lexical­fonn indexes independent of syntax. since they fail to referindexically unless the existence of their referent can beguaranteed on other grounds (e. g., visually, by syntactically­connected reference or predication, etc.). With a finer analyticdelicacy, the isolable English deictic that is more highlypresupposing than this; which fact becanes all the more importantin the discourse-internal deictic (corefe.rence) functions2 of thesewords. Inversely, many linguistic indexes of speaker-hearer statusrelationships are relatively creative, as for example the AmericanEnglish alternant fOImS of indexical reference to addressee(Brown & Ford 1961), e.g., names, since they are characteristicallythe very means of establishing the social dimensions they index inparticular interactions, potentially quite independent of othercamnmicative codes.

A great deal of the give-and-take of actual interactiondepends on the constantly-shifting camnmicative negotiation andratification of indexical presupposition vs. indexical creativity,of language vs. other cannunicative media. The functionall gameis played through the functioning2 of indexicals. In this largersense, it is through indexicals that any signalling systan suchas language makes contact with other systans that fonn the universeof conventional social praxis, and hence, this analytic danain oflanguage is rightly called pragmatics. Formal surface features oflanguage are thus not either sanantic or pragmatic; they functionZpragmatically in many indexical systans at the same time as theycontribute to the artificially-abstracted reference-and-predicationdanain of context-independent propositionality. This latter danain,sanantics, is never identifiable with any actual utterance-type(possiblel~entence)or locatable in any actual function l oflanguage; indeed, sanantics in this sense is an ideall.zationabstracted fran the pragmatic systans of language, a point towhich we can return below.

Here, I have merely sketched two notions of "function" whichhave been current in the l:lterature, and which must be distinguishedso as to pennit a lIDre precise statanent of the role of linguisticideology in language use. If pragmatics is the descriptive danainof language use, then we will now concern ourselves with what we might~ll the native Pragmatic ideology, expressed in~ metapragmatictheories, or ethno-metapragmatics. SUch theories, as rationalizations

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about the use of language, are to be distinguished in principle franmetalinguistic (in particular, metapragmatic) features of language,those fonns which allow reference-tol and predication-aboutI languageitself. In what follows, in fact, I will be endeavoring to daJDnstratea relationship between metapragmatic features of language andethrJo.-metapragnntics, as a further example of the kind ofphenarenon that Whorf dealt with at the level of an ideology ofreference. To be sure, metapragmatic features of language constitutea functionalI subsystan of referring-and-predicating use oflanguage, where language use itself happens to be the topic ofdiscourse. We can see here an expectable objectification parallelto toose discussed above. Such objectification can be illustratedwith one particularly influential theory of "speech acts" thathas anerged in Anglo-American learned circles.

But, llDre generally, I think we can subsume this kind ofprojection-by-objectification as a particularly obvious factorcontributing to a wider phenarenon that underlies native pragmaticideologies. '!his is the tendency to rationalize the pragmaticsystan of a language, in native understanding, with an ideologyof language that centers on reference-and-predication. '!hat is,native p~tic ideology explains or rationalizes about function2(presupposing/creative indexical effect) by analogically projectingbasic structures of reference-and-predication (propositionality)as units of functionall effectiveness. '!here would appear to bespecific, identifiable caJilOnents of this tendency. First, thereis the tendency of pragmatic ideology to focus upon identifiablesurface lexical itEm>. '!he effectiveness of language in context isexplained by locating the power in words, phrases, and similarsurface-segmentable itEm> of propositional analysis. Second, thereis the tendency to focus upon these units' contributions to pro­positionality as the starting point for explanation of other effects.Particular functional2 effects are explained as "metaphors" of"literal" referential-and-predicational meanings, or "extensions"of basic reference, used to effect certain functions, thanselvesperhaps constituted fran metalinguistic propositiona! material.'!hird, there is the tendency to understand the functionl of languagein tenns of presupposing functional2 relationships (rather thancreative ones). Appropriate language use is, as it were, con­stituted as a "metonym" of its context, a making explicit of whatone can purportedly know independent of the occurrence of speech.Functionall failures are recognized to the extent they are soreducible. In a sense, this is parallel to the way referentialideology values a speech fonn as a "metonym" of the referentprojected fran it, seemingly a speech-independent entity existing"out there" which language merely reflects. '!he result of thisconstellation of tendencies is that natives' understanding oftheir own syst6lS of linguistic usage frequently conflicts withthe caIParative-functional perspective.

Qle of the clearest examples of this, it seans to me, is thepragmatic ideology that centers all language use, Le., functionl(and thence function2 ) on the concept of "perfonnativity," franwhich has anerged a philosophical doctrine of sane persuasivenessin linguistic circles. To discuss this, I will briefly review

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sane of the salient characteristics of the so-called perfonnativeconstructions as such, and then discuss the Whorfian foundationsof the ideology of perfonnativity. '!bis example should point upthe mutual relationship between ideology and functionl' at thesame time as it clarifies what we should be looking for ascanparatists of functional systEm> of language.

So-called "explicit ~rfonnatives" (Austin 21975:68-69) orexplicitly perfo:nnative constructions in a language such as Englishhave the overt fonn of first person Subject, second person (Indirect)Object propositional statanents, with simplex Verb in fonnallyPresent non-Durative inflection, and sanetimes a Conplanent ofclausal or equivalent structure. '!bough they are overtlystatanental in fonn, they sean to acccrnplich, to "do," sanespecific predicated transfonnations of the social relations andother contextual understandings in the situation of speech, forexample transforming the non-speech social roles of the participants.'!bus, uttering 1. pranise~ that ... puts the speaker in sane newunderstood relationship of obligation to the addressee. '!beuttering of this fOImlla under certain "presupposed" conditionsconventionally "creates" new conditions in the context of utterance.Similarly, many s:imple granmatical transfonns of otherwise seaninglyexplicit perfonnative constructions conventionally effect similarcontextual transfo:nnations, e.g., Passengers are hereby warnedthat. ... Observe that here it is possible directly to reconstitutea kind of full, statanental-like syntactic fonn, [Speaker-as­Authority) hereby~ passengers [-as-Addressees) that ... ,of whichthe earlier fonn is an agentless passive. 15 So long as our nativeunderstanding of such transfonned constructions depends onreducing than to "explicit" fonn, the latter serve as the startingpoint for all ideology of perfonnativity.

I should stress here that the explicit perfo:nnative formuladescribes the conventionally-understood activity that speaker(and addressee, etc.) are engaged in at the m::xnent of utteranceby virtue of speech. It is, as I tenned it abov~lmetapragmatic.In a llDre technical sense, we could say--Austin ( 1975: 6; 70-71)notwithstanding-that it predicates of the speaker the doing ofa certain kind of activity with respect to the addressee, etc.And the conventionally-based understanding of the ccrnpulsivetransforming effect of engaging in this particular linguisticactivity means s:imply this. '!he zero tense-aspect fonn (hence,prmm,tically, the residual present-nondurative) of the particularpredicated proposition has all the nonnal effects of statanentalspeech. Natives have the expectation that the predicated trans­fonnative activity will be effected--that the performative will be"felicitous"--given that certain prerequisites are satisfied, inexactly the same way that predications are taken as UIlll3.J'kedly'true' propositions in the absence of contraindications. We canthen understand why, for exanple, it is a legal concern to establishthat the presupposed contextual conditions obtained in sane situation,that certain perfonnative formulae--or their equivalents--were infact uttered under these conditions, and then that the speaker didor did not carry through on the expected transfonned social relationsvis-a-vis sane addressee (typically now a plaintiff). Qle mightmention breach of pranise of narriage, or the Marvin vs. Marvin

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case. Legal reasoning, we can see, makes explicit the ideology ofperfonnativityor its equivalent. What is of concern is whetheror not the equivalent of what we can name as a social interactionof a particular type did or did not in effect take place, andeffectively take place.

Of course not all perfonnative formulae becane the topics oflegal procedures, nor are legal procedures always couched in tennsof trying to discover whether or not the equivalent of sane per­fonnative fonrnla was uttered, under specific conditions. Butthis kind of phenanenon is the paradigm case of native ideologicalreasoning about the effective use of language. And further, I amnot cla:ilning that the ideology of explicit perfonnativity hereobscures what is going on; on the contrary, explicit perfonnativityhere is what I \\Duld term transparent to accurate ideologicalreflection, at least to that degree of delicacy of giving part ofa functional l typology of speech events in which people engage.Ideology and praxis reinforce each other in this respect; a pointwhich will, I hope, becane analytically precise below.

The question for the linguist is, rather, if all effectiveuse of language can be "scientifically" treated in exactly thesame way. Can all the conventional understandings about howlanguage is a transforming social mediwn be expressed in tenns ofthis functionall ideology of explicit perfonnativity? Do thesespeech-event names that occur as predicates of fonrnlae used incertain circumstances, and seemingly accomplishing certain socialends, delimit a principled area for "scientific" study? Can wet~eat language use as a functionall realm in this way comparatively,Wlthout sane framework for functiona12 explanation? I would maintainthat this approach dffiOnstrates the pnenanenon of "secondaryexplanation" with which Boas and Whorf were concerned, the Emergenceof a mode of discourse about language use that shows all theproperties we have discussed above.

The rrost extensive exemplification of this ideology is foundin the \\Drks of the philosopher J.L. Austin (especially 21975, basedon 1955 lectures) and his followers. To Austin we owe thetrichotany "locution---illocution--perlocution" as three "acts"that are engaged in every time saneone uses language. These areessentially three kinds of abstraction to be analyzed out of anygiven use, any given social event of speaking (or its equivalent).In effect, any given social event of using language carbines orlaminates the "acts" into one spatia-temporally manifested behavioralinteraction. That is, to use language is to engage in locutionaryacts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts all at once,each of these being a way of understanding-and a way of analyzing-­the use of language in a single social event. Where do Austin 'sideas cane fran about the nature of these "acts" and the "forces"and "effects" they anbody? I would claim that we can see theirorigin in the objectification that Whorf talked about I the projec­tion of cryptotypic selective categorizations of lexical fonns inthe typical metapragmatic discourse of a language such as English.Fran this objectification we can see projected various "forces"that constitute "acts" of various types. Consider the set of kindsof "acts" that Austin distinguished: "phonetic," "phatic,""rhetic, II these together making up the "locutionary act,"

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"illocutionary act," and "perlocutionary act." I would claim thateach of these levels in effect results fran an objectification ofsane particular alternative way of reporting "what happened" inan event of using language as a social activity . Each of these"acts" corresponds to a particular metapragmatic form that reportsthe event fran a particular point of view. Let us take these inorder.

SUppose that, in our presence, a particular man utters toa particular v.ana.n-here I try to duplicate the signal used in asprecise transcription as possible-' I [glqf±: l .' I This is certainlynot what would call an utterance of toe English language. But, ifasked, "What happened?" one acceptable way in which we could reportis ~o describe the event as follCNlS: "He said to her, I [glqf;l,:] , . "Not~ce that we have described the event in terms of a particularAgent ("he") engaging in a particular kind of activity with respect~ some recipient/goal of the action ("her"). Notice, moreJJll.POrtantly, that we have described the activity with a construc­t~on, "say , ~lqf;l,:]' :" that quotes or duplicates the articulateds~gnal framed by, or mtroduced by, a specifically linguisticframing verb indicating that what is framed was a noise camunicatedthrough articulate pronunciation.

The specific meaning of the verb~ (in sane systemticpresentation of semnticity) does not concern us here' what concernsus ~s the fact that this verb occurs in discourse as ~ framingdev~ce for a token representing actual linguistic materialquoted fran a particular speech event. If we may put this' intothe fraID8\\Ork of Whorf, the verb~ is a lexical form one ofthe,s~lect~ve cryptotypes of which is 'engage in physi~al speechact~v~ty w~th the resulting utterance-signal '. Austinobj~ctifi:;s this ,meaning-category by declaring any so-describableact~on a phonetlC act." Its resulting signal as we have seenthe material that fonns the granmatical object'of the verb in themetapragmatic construction, Austin calls a "phone." Thus a"phonetic act" results in a "phone."16 ', Now, let us imagine another evert of interaction. SUppose that,~n our p~esence, a particular man utters to a particular waran--here agam I try to duplicate the signal used in a conventionalizedtranscription-"I will buy a loaf of bread." If again asked, "Whathappened?" an acceptable way in which we could report is to describeth~ event ~ ~ollo:vs: "He said to her, 'I will buy a loaf of bread' ."ThlS descnptlon differs fran the first only in the particulars~gnal that, is framed by the verb say. Here, the particulars~l rephca consists, as Austin-r-1975:92) says, of "certainvocables or words, i.e. noises of certain types belonging to and~ belonging to a certain vocabulary in a certain constructioni. e. ~~orming.to and as conforming to a certain granmar, with ~certun mtonatlon, & c." The framed signal, in other \\DreIs, isa token of ~ sentence of a particular language, formed according tothe gI'llllImtlcal rules of selection and canbination of meaningfullexical units and suprasegmimtal features.

So _thi~ i~ a s~n~ way in which the verb~ co-occurs withother ImgulStlc un~ts m metapragmatic discourse. It frames asignal that is an exact repetition of a well-formed linguistic

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expression of sane language. We might say with Whorf that theverb~ is a lexical form, one of the selective cryptotypes ofwhich is 'engage in language-specific speech activity with theresulting utterance-signal '. Austin objectifies this meaning-category by declaring any so-describable action a "phatic act."Its resulting abstraction he calls a "pheme," that type which isreproduced framed in the utterance-token describing what went on.

Let us continue with the consideration of this second inter­action, and note that there is another way to report "what happened."We might report, ''He said to her that he \\QuId buy a loaf ofbread. " We should focus our attention here on the forms thatdiffer frcxn the :imnediately preceding type of report. Instead of "I"in the framed canplement we have used "he;" instead of "will," "would";

, d "introducing this wOOle stretch of the sentence is the wor "that.So the report starts out the same as the previous one (' 'He said toher ... "), but then continues with "that" followed by a sentence-formwith change of pronoun and change of tense frcxn what was actuallyuttered in the original social interaction. The changes are, ofcourse, systanatic, and distinguish what has cane to b~ ~l1ed"indirect quotation" in our inherited rhetorical traditlon,opposed to "direct quotation." But note that we face the task ofhaving to account precisely for what "ranains the same" in theset\\Q nodes of reporting a speech interaction, and what changes.

Briefly, and without treating all the details, we can speci~ythat what ranains the same in the "direct" and "indirect" quotatlonforms is the propositional content, the value of speech as astatement-about sanething or someone. In the fully "direct"quotation, we frame the exact linguistically-describable (~am­matical) form that was uttered, presumably thereby presernngwhatever propositional value it had. In the fully "indirect"quotation, we frame a signal-form that is distinct fran theoriginal utterance, but conventionally equiv~lent to it in prop­ositional value in this particular construCtlOn. Thus, thereare characteristic transformations in the overt forms of variousindexical categories which, in this construction-frame, IlR.ISt beunderstood (indexically valuated) relative to those of the metaprag­matic frame in order to appreciate the equivalence of originalmessage (in its contexhof utterance) and the reported OIE (in itscontext of utterance). This use of ~ framing constructionswould lead us to observe, with Whorf, that~ is a lexical form,one of the selective cryptotypes of which is'engage in referring­and-predicating linguistic activity with the resulting propositionalcontent '. Austin objectifies this meaning category bydeclaring any so-describable action a "rhetic act." Its resultingabstraction he calls a "rheme," that which is the specific propositionalvalue characterized in the framed report construction.

All three of these acts, according to Austin, are involved inthe canposite he terms the "locutionary act," the use of physicalsignals organized into conventional words--and-sentences of sane .speC1fi~ language, to make propositions. '!be very same metapragmatlCframing verb, ~, occurs in three basically distinct granmatical18constructions, or potentially distinct granmatical constructions,in the metapragmatic discourse describing the social action of

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using a language such as English. As we would now expect, followingWharf, the native speaker, here Austin, captures both the samenessof the explicit metapragmatic lexical verb sten (hence unitingall these into a level called "locution") and the cryptotypic(or senantic co-occurrence) distinctions of the underlying gram­matical categorizaions of syntax (hence distinguishing "phonetic,""phatic," and "rhetic" acts as subcanponents) by objectifying themetapragmatic capability of his own language into a "nativetheory" of the true nature of speech. Actual behavior "consists of"these acts, according to the native view, and the technical theoryof "locution" describing then is the projection of this objectifyingprocess. Again let me emphasize that the correctness or incor­rectness of the theory--or its utility, if one wishes--is not atissue. '!he claim I make here is that it is not by chance, notunexpected as the "unmarked" outcome, that the native theorymatches precisely the syntactico-senantic and lexical propertiesof the metapragmatic di§course of the language under investigationby the native speaker.

If we return to the interaction we have just described int\\Q different ways I we might add a third possible description,"He pranised her that he would buy a loaf of bread," or even,"He pranised her to buy a loaf of bread." Note in the first ofthese that the framed construction is precisely the same as the"indirect quotation," frcxn Vthich it would be easy to conclude thatpranising is really saying in the three senses noted above, plussanething else. That is, it is easy to conclude that pranise isa hyponym of ~, especially since it is both a metapragmaticframing verb, as used here, and also a "performative" iten,as in the usage, "I pranise to buy a loaf of bread." In thelatter, as we noted above, it seans to be central to the descriptionof the very action that is ongoing-which seans to consist oftalk. Without sane in-depth and systanatic study of the syntacticproperties of the two verbs, 20 a native speaker might rationalizethat the seaning linguistic hyponym relationship reflects a realinclusion relationship at the level of Vthat has happened. Onemight conclude, namely, that to pranise is to say sane formula"rhetically" equivalent to .! pranise~ that ... in its performativeuse.

'!his is, ultimately, precisely the understanding that emergesin Austin's notion of an "illocutionary act." Such an act isprojected fran an objectification of the metapragmatic usage thatmasquerades as syntactic indirect quotation. The fact that thismetapragmatic iten figures in a fonnula of direct discourse, the"explicit performative" formula, Vthere it is a creative indexical,leads to the postulation of a special "force," "illocutionary force,"that is seen1ngly located in the utterance of a token of the explicitperformative. Given Austin's concentration on lexical itens , inparticular on the predicates of the explicit performatives, it isalnDst as if these lexical forms aJiJodied the "force" (a furtherdevel0Jlllent that, to be sure I characterizes the writings of many ofhis followers wOO, understandably enough, search for loci of forces).Thus, illocutionary forces are distinguished only insofar as distinctexplicit performative formulae can be recognized; in effect, this

214

reduces the study of function1 to classifying all uses of particularlinguistic tonns by many-to-one relations with explicit pertonnatives.Obviously, this yields no unique partition of fonns, nor has it resultedin a coherent description, beyond a limitless profusion of "indirectillocutionary acts" and such. I will return to this problan below.

First, however, let us return to the interaction about which wehave been answering the question, "What happened?" '!here v.ould seanto be another response we might give, namely, a description akin to"He made her happy." There is a \\bole class of such utterance-types,to be sure, tor exalq)le, ''He pleased her," etc. The following ranarksapply only insotar as these have sanantic-syntactic parallelism tothis tonn, that is, insofar as the description codes the speech eventas one in \\bich an individual A brings about (' causes t) sane state inindividual B (or any similar 'effect') as a result consequent uponreaching a certain point of the event (here, the endpoint). Thereis a cryptotypic systen of inherent ("lexicalized") aspect in English(as in any language), which interacts with factors of understood cross­clause co-reference (e.g., object-raising) and sequencing (e.g.,relative tense-aspect). We might Sl.BIJlW'ize this granmaticalanalysis by the schena; [A's engaging in sane activity up to acertain point) consequently theretore [B's being in sane particularstate). One kind of 'cause' and 'eftect' is objectified tran thiskind of grarnnatical equivalence set, one in which purposivity I inten­tionality, etc. are not invariably grammatically coded.

But it would seen that if it is possible to describe such anevent as A speaking to B by this kind of construction, which can alsobe used for many other kinds of activities that A and B might engagein, we can objectify the event of speaking as "causing sane particulareffect." Thus, the social actiVity of using language can be said tobring about "perlocutionary" results; that is "the perlocutionary~ct ... is the achieving of certain eftects by saying sanething" (Austin

1975; 12I);"" Whether thIS be "the acfiievanent of a perlocutionaryobject (convince persuade) or the production of a perlocutionarysequel" (Austin 21975; 118). Unfortunately, as even Austin himselfpointed out, none of the proposed "tests" to distinguish "illocution"fran "perlocution" v.orksj and it seans obvious \\by not, given thesufficiency of the schena above in suggesting the objectification into"perlocution ;" for example, whatever can be so predicated ot B in theschena might be considered a "perlocutionary effect."

To be sure, ntllrerous internal contradictions have been andmight be found in this native pragmatic ideology, and numerous"perlocutionary" sequels. There is no reason why an ideology thatgrows piecaneal fIull various metapragmatic tormulations ot a languageshould show internal consistency, nor indeed give adequate analyticinsight in areas of social practice relatively unsusceptibleto the kinds of processes we have postulated. My discussion herehas rather been directed to showing how these processes can explainthe vivid reality of native metapragmatic projections to the usersof a language. Through these "forces" and so forth the user canrationalize functionl, the sense of conventional, goal-directedpurposivity in the social activity of using language. Wherefunctionl in fact merges with function2' as in the explicit perfor­mative formulae, each felicitous use of \\bich is a creative

215

inde::,ical, of t~ conve~tional goal-situation, the ideologicalreahty f1nds 1ts conf1nnation in social actuality. Fran theseparadi@ll situations, and their transparent functional trans­~ation into ideological tenns, canes the frequently i~c~lete or1ncoherent account of typical native theory.

We might generalize this analysis to frame an hypothesis aboutthe precursors to the fonnation of an Austin-like native ideology of"locut~on-illocution--perlocution"as a theory of language usefound ill the configuration of linguistic structure and rneta- 'pragmatic discourse. We have seen that partiCUlar features ofthe English (and similar) configurations sean to serve as under­pinnings to particular objectifications. These have been;1) a specifically linguistic, agentive metapragmatic tenninology~of verbs), that is understood as a taxonany of hyponyms of~ (that1S, of a specifically linguistic, or at least "camunicative"verb), an~ that allows at least partially parallel canplanentcc:'nstru~tlOns. .Observe that the various rnetapra@llatic construc­t1<:>ns ~1~h ~ 1tself are in one-one relation with certain c~nentobJect1f1cat10ns of "locution"; this might also be a generalizableproperty. 2) a structural equivalent to "explicit pertonnative"usage of at least a subset of the fonns inO}. This isIresumab~y the zero ten~e-aspect-etc. fonn of an inherently-perfechve .metapra@llat1c verb, together with appropriate first­person-act~-on-seeond-personinflections/syntax, the \\bole schenathere~y servrng as a creative indeXical. 'Ibis usage will renderfunctl<;>n2 tr~sparent as functionl , facilitating identification ofpurpoS1V1ty 1n these tenns, and grasping function as "illocution"or such. 3) possibil:ityof equivalent descriptiorts of carmunicationwith 'A c::use/make/do'-pIUS-'B effect/result' rnetapragmaticconstructlOns that do not specifically encode agency/intention oft1;Je Agent of the verb 'cause/make/do'. 'Ibis pennits the distinc­t10~ bet\reen conventional (intentionally puxposive) action-type intre1deol~ v~. actual (effected) action-token, thereby establishing:; level ~1ke ~rlocution." It should be possible to find numerous1ntere~t1ng var1ations of ,this distinction among various societies,~epend~ o~ de~ of direct agency (or conventionallY-codable::-ntent:l.On) :unpl1ed in the higher clause, types of linkage ofcause' and 'effect' clauses, etc.

" .~ t~ J?Oi~t c;>f view of extending Whorf I s understanding ofproJect10n, lt 18 1nteresting that, just as trees or any objects

are said to be characterized by all the language-independentcatego::ies of attributes of scoops of sugar, all uses of speech~ sa1~ to be characterized by the categories of locutionary-­1llo:u~10nary--perlocutionaryaspects that grow fran apprehendingexphc1t pertonnatives and similar metapragmatiC fonns' thuslocutionary "meaning" of grammatical construction ill~utio~"force" of the construction used in a type of context perlocutionary"effect" of the utterance by its occurrence. As noted the factof explicit performative usag~ facilitates the identification offunctionall distinctions, and contributes to the native sense ofmultiple functiDnal~tYl' Nevertheless, explicit perfonnativitydernds ~. the exJ.stence of certain metapragmatic configurationsan tile quaB1-propositional indexical (functional2 ) usage of than '

216

in certain contexts of discourse. Explicit perfonnativity is theresult of the surface-structural intersection of the metapragmaticpropositional function and of various contextualized functionslwith specific functionlU2 properties. This function~ly-~i~oussurface-fonnation renders max1mally transparent creatJ.ve mdex1cal(functional ) relationships otherwise difficult to appreheI.td: Thistransparenc~ allows the strategic fo:nnulation of perfonnat1v1tyas presupposed indexical (functional

2) relationships of the surface­

structural fonn, plus the functional l "illoc~tionary force,"\\bich, at an ideological level, properly applied, .has its creative indexical (funct~ona12) effect .. It 1S no wonderthat in societies which hyper-ratlOnahze effect1ve means topractical ends, such as our own, there is a constant historicalcreation of new explicit perfonnative fomulae fran older metaprag­matic means cast into appropriate verb or verb-phrase fonns(cf. n. 16 and refs. there).

As a second exanple we might carpare and contrast the so-called"linguistic etiquette" of Javanese, bo~h as an ideologic:a1 ee:mstructrationalizing function] and as a funct10na12 systan of m~ex1cals.The fonner aspect has neen very elegantly presented and g7ven ananalysis in Clifford Geertz' s Religion of Java (1960) ~ \\b11e the .latter aspect has been stressed by such writers as Elmor Horne, mher pedagogical and reference works (1961; 1963; 1974), .E.M. Uhlenbeck (1970) \\bo has discussed Geertz's presentatJ.on franthe point of view of lingustic structure and actual lite~ us~e~and S. Poedjosoedarm:> (1968; 1969), \\bo brings structura~ hngu1StJ.Cdescription to his (otherwise native?) canmnd. A Class1C systan oflinguistic expression of social status ~tries,.such as those ofage, wealth, occupation, and of social distance: th1s <Xl?Plex .alternation of lexical fonns is only partly of inherent 1ndex1calsignificance, indicating status and/or familiarity. relatio~ps ofthe user (speaker) and addressee, as will be descnbed. Yet 1I.ttenns of the first fomulation, which. seans to be based essentJ.allyon the interpretations of fairly highly-placed participants, inusing the systan of linguistic etiquette "one surrounds the otherwith a wall of behavioral (lair) fonnality which protects thestability of his inner life (OOtin)" (Geertz 1960:255), .according asthe addressee's position vis-a-vis the speaker danands 1t. In .other words, the ideology of use of these fonns focuses on ~ra~eg1caddressee-oriented functional value of fonns, the use of Wh1ch. 1Sdictated by certain presuppostng indexical relationships betweenspeech and its social context. Ideologically, etiquette vocabularyis ranked in levels that match the linear conception of socialstratification' functionallY2' there are many interacting systans.all of \\bich. c:m be concentrated on speaker-addressee relationships,but they haveIi'""ciiiPlex and sanetimes contradictory in~exicalquality Let us take the ideologically-based fomulatlOn of Geertzfirst, ~ntrasting then \\hat we can make of the rore analyticdata to hand. .

As we would expect, the first view locates the effectJ.venessof language use in lexical fonns, particularly in. set~ of ra.nke<!­alte:mant \\Ords for the same referential-and-predwatlOnal meanmgs.These llsets of linked conjugates" of lexical fonns, as Geertz (1960;253)

217

calls than, range in size fran one, where the referential meaning isindifferent to status-ranking, up to three, or in sane cases five,each alternant ranked with respect to the others. As Uhlenbeck(1970: 442) observes, the Javanese metapragnntic tenr.inology forthis phenanenon is ambiguous:

The main tenns, namely KRAMA polite behaviour,~~,MADYA, middle, in between, and NGCKO, canparable as to meaningand fonnal structure to French tutoyer, are handled in twodifferent ways. CXIe may say that one speaks in or uses KRAMA,MADYA, or NGOKO, or that a sentence [Le., sentence-token orutterance--MS] is in KRAMA, MADYA or NGOKO. In that case thetenns refer to the speech style chosen by the speaker. Butone may also say of a word or a grlllJJmtical elanent that it isKRAMA, MADYA or NGOKO.

Given the variation in nuni:>er of lexical alternants in theparadignBof these etiquette itans, there is obviously no way ofassigning similar levels directly both to words and to the syntagmaticcanbinations in which. they occur. Thus, the native theory hastypically derived a fine partition of levels of~ (or speechstyIe) fran canbinations of certain kinds of ranked alternants,subdividing the three basic levels into as many as nine varietiesof refinanent (Poedjosoedanno 1968; 59-62; Horne 1974: xxxii-xxxiii;Uhlenbeck[ 1970: 443] reports eight), each appropriate as a means ofpaying the right alIDunt of deference to the person of the inter­locutor, based on speaker's social distance and relative status.

But I as Geertz points out and illustrates, not everyone intraditional Javanese society controls the use of these lexicalconjugates to the same degree. Using the tenn "dialect" to referto a speaker's repertoire of alte:mant styles, he observes (1960:249)that

A further crnplication is 1hat status meanings are cemnunicatedin speech, not only intent:!i.onally in tenns of word selectionwithin the speaker's dialect but unintentionally in tennsortiie dialect he uses as a whole. Not only are there "levels"of speech within the dialect \\bich are ranked in tenns of theirstatus (or alus (refined] /kasar [coarse] ) connotations;the various dialects in the-ooiiiimity as a \\bole are alsoranked in tanns of the alus to kasar spectrum, this latter sortof ranking being characteristic-;-o!course, of any stratifiedsociety.

'!hus, the greater the numerical delicacy of alternant levels thata speaker uses, as well as the higher peak on the spectrum of levelsthat he achieves, the rore refined (and statusful) a persona hecreates for himself, 2~ne associated with higher and higher segmentsof Javanese society.

The analysis that Geertz offers, then, as sunmarized in the chartsin 6. reproduced fran his discussion (1960: 250-52) I distinguishesthe "dialects" of each of three typical groups (relevant to the largersocial analysis fran which the account is drawn) I each such dialect

218

being a repertoire of ranked divisions, made up of basic "stylanes"(keyed by numbers) as IIPdified or 1.lIIlOCldified by "honorifics" (keyedalphabetically). The basic stylanes are expressed fonnally byfran one to three lexical conjugates for a particular understoodEnglish translation-equivalent. "In sane cases the madya conjugateis the san:e as the ngoka (e. g., Ian [' and' in charts I, II, levels 1,2]);sanet:i.Ioos it is the same as the krama (e.g., samp€jan, ~, selrul['you', 'eat', 'rice' in charts I, II, levels 2, 3]); and of course,sanetilres the conjugate is the san:e in all three cases (e.g.,~ ['cassava' in all charts, levels 1, 2, 3])" (Geertz 1960:253; bracketedmaterial added). There are additional lexical conjugates, however,"\\hich occur independently of the first kinds of conjugates and \\hichact to raise the level of speech indicated by the first, inevitable[stylene] selection, one 'notch' higher--or, better, one-half notch."Thus the level 3a in charts I and II I, and the level lb in chart I II ,the former showing this "honorific" usage in addition to Krama,the latter showing this "honorific" usage in addition to Ngoko.However, there is one IIPre "honorific" usage, associated withbasic Ngoka stylene, and hence called by Geertz "low honorifics,""the use of krarna \\Ords •.. lifting ngoko biasa (level 1), tongoka madya (level la)," as shown in charts I, II, and III, forthe glosses 'you' [kowe I : saJl¥?€3an la] and 'eat' [ mangan I : ~ la] .

This is an analysis based IOOre on ideologically-interpretedfunctional, statements about examples such as the one illustrated thanon form-fU1'lction2 covariation, since a number of puzzles energe, whichother authors (particularly Uhlenbeck 1970) have called attention to.The illustrated example, as a question with a second person subject,seans to concentrate all of the functional power of the lexicalalternants on the speaker-hearer relationship; this is a fonnboth addressed to and questioning a proposition predicable ofthe addressee, the referent of the explicit subject. Further, howcan we understand the facts as shown in chart III, that for prijajispeech the half-Ievel-raising honorifics occur with both basicNgoka (level I) and basic Krama (level 3), but that Ngoko alsohas certain Krarna \\Drds additiR~lly used (in level la) withoutraising the level fran I to 3~ It should be observed that theseare precisely the \\Drds which, in charts I and II, are seen tospan levels la, 2, 3 as their range of usage. We might considerwhy these Krarna items do not raise level la above level lb inchart III, that is, take it out of the realm of the Ngoko stylene.And, though there appear to be certain specifically level 2(Jdadya) terns shown in charts I, II, there appears to be, inex­plicably, no "honorific" lIXXiification. To be sure, the "lowhonorifics" (as Geertz points out, really just Krarna conjugates),sean already to be used in expressing level 2; but what of the"high honorifics" that constitute both levels 3a and lb? How canthis and the other asynmetries of the chart be accounted for?Finally, as Geertz observes in a footnote (1960: 255n), "sanetimesthe status of a third person referred to, especially if he [sic]be quite high., may detennine the fonn used: ... [ e.g., ] the high,krama fonn of 'house I \\hen speaking of the one the district officerIives in." The speaker-addressee focus of the system as presentedmakes this seem sanehow extraneous. Presumably it is so in the

-'......::0:l:ioz<5

~<15

"tl

"o

.~

..;;

jo

-g-C'.•• 0"'tl.~o c

..0 •c Eo 00>"c·... a.c ":6 jc co 0Q.:=­00a.~

D­c ,.~

~ ~

"og>1!..'0"oa.

".!!.~

M

219

o"tl..."

g>.!!."tlo

".!!....a.E~

".!lo~o

"tl..."a.~o

"o:~~..:a.~

E ·0o "8. .~<J1

".!l

a.eo

og.

Chart II

DIALECT OF PEASANTS AND UNEDUCATED TOWNSPEOPLE

Level are you going to eat rice and cassava now Complete sentence

2 napa odjeng sekul saniki Napa sampejan adjeng nedo seltulIan kaspe soniki? •

sampe-jan neqo

1a Ian kas"e Apo sampejon arep ne~a sego Iankaspe saiki?

I- apa arep sega saiki

1 kowe mangon Apa Icowe arep mangan sega Iankaspe saiki?

Cl1art III

DIALECT OF THE PRIJAJIS

Level are you going to eat rice and cassava now Complete sentence

30 pandjenengan dahar Menapa pandjenengan ba"'e "'ahar

I---sekul kalijan kaspe samenika?

menapo bade sekul kalijan kasptl sameniko

3 sampejan ne40Menapa sampejan ba~!e neqa seloulkalijan kospe samenika?

Ib pandjenengon qahar Apo pandjenengan arep 40har sega

I---Ian kaspe $oiki?

1a apa sompejan arep ne~a sego Ian kaspe saiki Apa sampejan arep netJa sego Iankaspe saiki?

I--

1 kowe mangon Ape kowe arep mangan sega Iankaspe saiki?

-

l\)

~

l\)l\)...

222

ideological concentration on the functionl of marking speakerdeference to addressee by use of higher and higher "honorific"levels .diacritically within the basic dimension of speaker-hearerfamiliarity ("intimacy" in Brown & Gi1man's [1960:257] sense)signalled with the "styleme" distinction of Ngoko (for intimates),Krama (for non-intimates). By this reckoning, it is clear \\hyprija,ji would claim that within their systan, "the middle stylane-­considered to be vulgar--drops out" (Geertz 1960:254); for intheir view, it is the "honorifics" only that count, and the middlestyleme, level 2, uses none according to this model.

Persuasive as this might sean, since, for example, in manyrespects Poec!josoedanno (1968) in part organizes a sanewbat fullerlinguistic treatment around these same unidimensional levels, itseems that the native ideology of function1 does not distinguishannng several analytically distinct kinds of alternations. Franthe second point of view, indeed, the example used in the chartsof 6. is particularly poorly chosen (though it is powerful andrevealing in the first perspective), since it conflates variousfunctiona12 systens involving the relationship between actual speakerand the adaressee, be~n speaker and referent of various,syntactically-definable noun phrases, etc. Additionally,and perhaps for this reason, it does not display clearly the \\holerange of fonnally-alternative types of linguistic units that can berecognized in the broad functional area of 'status marking'. Whenwe speak of paradigmatic alternations of lexical fonns, there seanto be no fewer than four special, marked subsystans that cont2lf'twith the basic non-polite, infonnal Ngoko lexical conjugates.Two of these, Krama !Z§d Madya, function2 to mark speaker-addresseerelations primarily, \\hile two, Krama Inggil and Krama An~, func­tion to indicate the speaker's evaluation of the (sanetimesrela~ive) deference-entitlements of specific referent(s). (bservethat these last two systens, \\hen applied to addressee as referent,have the not unexpected effect of merging in function2 Wfth thefirst two systans. Fran a formal point of view, moreover, Madyais a snaller set of itens than Krama, and in many cases isphonologically derived fran it. Similarly, Krama An<;iaP is asnaller set of itens than Krama Inggil, and the fonner are uniquelylimited to certain verbs that take Dative-like person-referentobjects, only with reference to \\hich do they functio~ toexpress status. In many ways, the functional a.synm3trles followthe same directionality: Madya and Krama Anc;lap itens take precedencewhen they are to be anploYed' and the other two sets appearresidually. When all of these sets are considered in contrastwith Ngoko, the latter also then appears to be a residual set ofbasic fonns, thus negatively characterizable.

Let us briefly characterize each of the functiona12 systens I

starting with those focusing on the referent. The most specializedOf these is the set of ca. twenty Krama An<;iap fonns, all but threeof \\hich sean to be verbs of social interaction, typically andin particular the social interactions that involve speech, andthat are directed to sane Dative-role person, such as invite,obey,~ [against], and, most significantly for the sanantics of

223

this set, give [to]. They are, then, typically metapragmaticverbs \\hich can be used in first-person (speaker) Agent con­structions, and in second-person (addressee) Dative-objectconstructions, in which carbined usage (with special (Krama Anc;laP)pronaninal fonns, note) they would appear to be akin to explic~tperfonnative constructions. There is a many-to-one relationshlpof Ngoko to Krama Ant;iap lexical foms, so that theE is, fran onepoint of view, a kind of delicacy by euphanistic allusion, ratherthan specificity of metapragmatic (and "illocutionary") import.These fonns index the speaker's estimation that the referent ofthe Agent of the verb engages "humbly" in sane social activitydirected toward a socially elevated person, the referent of theDative-object. This "huni>le" relationship is coded in the verbstan (and sanetimas in associated pronouns) as a true metapragmaticlexicalization of the manner of the pragmatic speech activity.That it is so coded makes its objectified reality all the moresalient in the functiona11 anployment of speakers; this level hasall the transparency properties of the explicit perfonnatives ofour own language, indexing as well estimation of deferentialAgent-to-Dative relations. 26

The larger and residual set of referent-focused fonns, calledKrama Inggil, number about 250-260 (Horne 1961: 56-57; Poedjosoedarm:>1968: 67; Uh1enbeck 1970: 449),

which morphologically as well as sanantically are ratherhaoogeneous. Morphologically they are either nouns or verbs,with the nouns in the majority. Sanantically they... are allrelated to the human person. There are KRAMA INGGIL-wordsfor the human body and for virtually all its parts, for nearlyall its vital functions and for its products of excretion, forbirth, death and uneamnn illnesses. . .. for nearly all itensof Javanese male and female apparel and for the things aperson nonna.lly carries with him or uses daily. . .. fornearly all kinsfolk in the ascending and descending generationsand... for the most eamnn and general human activities suchas bathing, sleeping, sitting, standing, eating, drinking,walking, thinking, speaking, asking, giVing, receiving, etc.

As Poedjosoedanoo notes, the Krama Inggil words are phonologicallyunrelated to their conjugates at other levels, many being historicallyborrowings fran Sanskrit or literary Old Javanese. Again herewe sanetimes find a many-to-one relationship of Ngoko to Krama Inggilconjugates, though apparently not so extensive as in Krama Anc;laP.FunctionallY2' the Krama Inggil vocabulary indexes residual estimationof deference entitlement of referents, \\here for example Agent ofhigher rank 'gives' CIa) sanething to Dative-object person, or \\herea phrase referring to the body part or possession of such a (high­rank) referent is enployed, or any other such appropriate syntacticconstruction other than the specific case detennining Krama An~usage. By a kind of residual logic, then, Krama Inggil canesto express in verb lexanes the high-status position of Agents and(Intransitive) Actors, and in naninal lexemes this evaluation ofPossessors and similar relative semantic roles (e.g., poles

224

of kin relationships). To be sure, this can apply also to cases wherethe addressee is referred to, Le., in cases of functional overlapwhere indexical reference and in~1cal deference are Si~lled tothe addressee (vis-a-vis speaker).

Both of these cases, that detennining KranR Andap and thatdetennining Krama Inggil, are independent of the chOice of other"levels" of lexical conjugates, such as Ngoko, Krama, Madya. Andindeed they cooccur with all three. What is especially interestingis that in the first case, we have a set of metapragmatic itanswhere the social indexical function presupposes the sanantico­referential (and hence ~position;J surface structure) identificationof the particular fonns which are subject to alternation. Thisseans to be the case as well in the KranR Inggil fonns, where theparticular sanantico-referential danain, and IOOrphosyntacticconstructions involving the (residual) Agent/Actor or Possessor/Relatum are presupposed by the choice of social index. Outsideof this presupposed danain, the indexical systan focusing onparticular referents of particular surface-structure categoriesdoes not operate as such, and other strategies III.lSt be found, ifavailable, to implarent this same functio~. I stress this presup­position of reference-and-predication, and the structures thisimplies, to draw attention to the canparability of these cases withthe case of the theory of "illocution," etc. as it is an example offunctiona12 tI'?.nsparency. In all of these cases, we may apprehendthe functiona12 systan by the way in which particular functionsl canbe associated with surface lexicalizations identifiable throughtheir referential-and-predicational contributions. Characteristically,as we saw in the first presentation of Krama Inggil (not specificallyseparating KranR Andap), it is given as both "honorific" vocabularyand "level" labeled'3a in charts I,III of 6., and called Krama Inggilin the description (Geertz 1960: 253ff.); and, it is apprehendedthrough the specific function1 2 of marking speaker deference toaddressee-as-referent, in keeping with the overall ideology of theuse (functionl ) of speech for politeness in speaker-addresseerelations.

Turning now to the other sets of lexical conjugates, whichalways focus on speaker-addressee relations, we might begin withthe set of specifically Madya itEm3, numbe2~ng about 35, many ofwhich are a kind of attenuated Krama form, seaningly shortened orabbreviated, and also special second person pronouns. '!be Madyaspeech styles, however, "are not only characterized by the presenceof certain special elanents, but also negatively by the exclusionof certain rn:KO-words," totalling about 50 lexical itEm3 (includingS(IOO prepositions and conjunctions). "In what is called MADYA, theyare replaced by specific MADYA-elarents if such elanents exist, ifthese are absent, by their KRAMA-counterparts" (Uhlenbeck 1970: 451).Additionally, as noted by all writers, certain Krama affixes areavoided in so-called Madya-style speech, and Ngoko equivalents areused.

It is thus seen that the Madya style of speaking is basicallynegatively defined, and IOOreover, of relatively uncodified charac­ter. On the one hand, as Uhlenbeck notes, "the process of abbreviation[of Krama elanents seen in Madya ones] has the important functionof making respect fonns less formal and of putting the relation ...on

225

a IOOre intimate and confidential footing ... ," if we take theprocess as an iconic metaphor vis-a-vis full Krama function2 . Onthe other band, Madya as a style, or, as Uhlenbeck (1970: 452-3)notes, set of styles, leaves the speaker "relatively free toregulate the mmoor of KRAMA-elarents in the sentence [-token] ,thereby varying the measure of respect he wants to convey towardshis speech partner." It is no wonder the prijaj i, for whan precisionis all in the ~asor strategy, deny using this imprecise,negatively-defined, ccrnpranise level of speech~30

'!be Krama set of lexical conjugates, numbering about 850(Poedjosoeclanro 1968: 64), are enployed not only in so-called Kramaspeech stylas, but, to varying degrees, in Madya styles as \I.e11 .Being functionallY2 specific to speaker-addressee relationships, useof all the Krama possibilities of lexical conjugates(includingcertain affixes) constitutes the various Krama styles, while, aswe have seen, the Madya styles have varying usage of Krama wordsboth residually (when, avoiding Ngoko, no special Madya conjugateis available), and sporadically. This latter, sporadic usage ofKrama conjugates, is said to index degree of status difference bydensity of occurrence of Krama i tEm3. While sane Krama i tEm3 donot resanble the Ngoko conjugate in form, nnst sean to fall intonumerous derivational subgroups (Krama derivable fran Ngoko) , andapparently for the prijaji it is a source of S(IOO lII1I.\sarent thatI!l€!li>ers of other groups hypercorrect, and analogize non-standardKrama derivations, etc. (Geertz 1960: 258-59; Poedjosoedarmo 1968:66; Uhlenbeck 1970; 457),31 in their efforts to speak in the alusmanner.

As should be clear at this point, the native perception isthat there are linearly-ranked levels or styles of speech, eachof which has a fixed position in a systan that functionsl tomaintain the correct aroount of deference and distance of speakerto addressee. '!bese levels are characterized by various canbinationsof the vocabulary and affixes just reviewed, when fixed infunctional2 focus upon the speaker-addressee relationshiP':" As wehave seen, this functiona12 focus is accessible either directlythrough functionl , for sucfi lexical sets as Madya and Krama, orfor such a quasi-performative set as Krama Ant;iap, or the func-tional focus is accessible indirectly through the presupposition ofreferefltial identification of the units of alternation, as forboth Krama Anqap and Krama Inggil.

'!bus, in the schena of nine speech levels, the highest iscalled Muda Krama ("young Krama"), and "consists of KrOOO affixes,KrOOx) voc:ibulary, and KrCm3 Inggel words [including syntacticallyappropriate Krama Andap] to denote the person, possessions, and actionsof the addressee" (POedjosoedar'mo 1968: 59). 'Ibis constitutesGeertz I s level 3a on the charts given in 6. '!be second and thirdlevels, called Kramantara ("equal Krama") and Werda Krama ("old Krama.")respectively, use the Krama conjugates without KrWm Inggilindexically focused on the speaker-addressee relationship; theyappear to differ only in a pair of suffixes. 'lbese correspond toGeertz's level 3. '!be fourth level, called Madya Krama (''middleKrarna") is like the fifth just below, but arploys addressee-directedKrama Inggil. '!be fifth level of nine is called Madyantara ("equal

226

Madya") , and consists "of Ngoko affixes and Mady6 words (Kr&owords in the absence of Mady6). Kr&ID Inggel oords are not usedto refer to the addressee" (PoedjosoedanID 1968:60) . This wouldseem to be Geertz's level 2. The sixth level, called MadyaNgoko ("sani-Ngoko"), is similar to the fifth, except that "a fewNgoko oords may be substituted for either Mady6 or Kr<m5 ones, butwhich oords will occur in Ngoko cannot be predicted. The lower thestatus of the addressee, the rrore frequent the Ngoko oords will be."The seventh level, called Basa Antya,is basically Ngoko with KramaInggil fonns focused on the addressee, plus "occasional Krarooords" where the higher the status of the addressee, the rrorefrequently these are said to occur. '!his is not quite the sameas what Geertz labels la or lb, because both Krama Inggil and Kramaforms will occur, whereas Geertz seems to consider these forms asalternatives in the basic Ngoko "styleme." PrestmJably, we shouldtake this as akin to Geertz' s la, since the eighth level, calledAntya Basa, is precisely his level lb. '!he ninth level, finally,called Ngoko I..ugu ("plain Ngoko"), consists of straight Ngokofonns, "except, of course, for KrCInO Inggel oords in re~~ingto a respected third person" (Poedjosoedanno 1968: 61). Exceptfor the last provision, this corresponds to Geertz' s level 1.'!hat is, even if Krama Inggil occurs with respect to a non-addresseereferent, this does not raise the "level" of the utterance, since"levels, " as should be very clear, are based on the particularrationalization afthe functionl of speech that makes speaker-addresseeindexical functions2 the basis of an ideology of how and why thesystEm oorks.

Just as in our first extended example, then, the ideologyof linguistic etiquette presents a pragmatic systEm organized intenns of presupposed dimensions of the context of use, includingrrost importantly the central role of referential-and-predicational(propositional) structure. Either directly, through the functiona12alternation of individual "isosernantic" Ngoko--Krama--Madyalexical conjugates, or indirectly, through the rootapragmaticfunctional1 lexicalization of one fran arrong the number ofiunctiona12 possibilities of Krama Anqap and Krama Inggil, theideology is an understanding fashioned fran a particular pointof View, one that constitutes the functional2 systEm as a reinforce­ment of socially real relationships of speaker and addressee, thatis, as reflecting the structure of a situation, for which speechof a certain "level" is appropriate. The functional appropriate-ness of a particular level is thus not to transfonn, but to"regularize stimuli so that they will not puzzle, shock, or sur­prise. . ..one should provide an ordered picture for others so asnot to upset than" (Geertz 1960; 248). This means being sensitiveto the givens of the situation, in which one pays attention to whatwould be expected by interlocutors of a certain type. '!he dynamiccharacter of the use of etiquette, as noted in n. 21 and as anphasizedespecially by Poedjosoedarmo (1968: 77-78) and Uhlenbeck (1.970:448;455-56), its taJPOral course as a creative, strategic systEm in use,is hardly anphasized, nor indeed the alus/~ indexing functio~

(which Geertz called "unintentional") with respect to the speaker,again a potentially creative aspect of the use of these fonns. Even

227

in the case of the Krama An<;lap lexical conjugates, seaningly rrostlike our own explicit perfonnatives in rootap~tic origins, itis not any transfonnative "illocutionary force" that is objectifiedin the native ideology, so much as the situationally-appropriate"humble" perfonnance of an action with respect to a higher-rankperson, elevated into a function. Indeed, it is no wonder thatin Krama Andap, there is little ~fferentiationof distinct kindsof action; these lexical conjugates focus upon the manner in whichthe action is performed, large numbers of distinct Ngoko action­verbs sumnarized with a single fonn, which serves for all.

Finally, as an aspect of this phenanenon that will lead intothe last section of my discussion, one should note the trends inhistorical renewal of the vocabulary levels. Fran Poedjosoedanno 's(1968:73) point of view, this ")dnd of change is always in a downwarddirection--that is, KrCmS Inggel becares KrOnJ, or 'Kr&D becares Ngoko,or sorretimes KrCmS Inggel even becorres Ngoko." It is clear thatthis is "downward" change only in tenns of the ideological constructof speech levels, not in tenns of the sets of lexical conjugates.For Krama Inggil: [its absence] is functionallY2 different franKrama:Ngoko as a lexical opposition; the former is in the planeof referent-focused function2 , and the latter, addressee-focused.Thus, the changes are emerging fran the functional1 restriction ofolder Krama Inggil to this latter systEm. Only within this rrorerestricted ideological equation of vocabulary conjugate sets andspeech levels does the directionality of change make sense: thoselevels with Krama Inggil itEmS functionallY2 focused on addresseeare, ceteris paribus, higher than levels with only Krama (alwaysperforce functionally focused on addressee), and those with Kramahigher than those witft Ngoko. So the historical change reflects inan interesting way the ideological inflection of function of theetiquette systEm, rather than the functiona12 structure. lparticularlythe renewal of both Krama and Ngoko fran Kraiiia Inggil is in effectfunctional narrowing of the latter, parallel to narrowing of"rooaning" ti.e., sense) in the restricted functional plane ofsanantico-referentiality. I will return to the paralleliBII afterI briefly present my final example for discussion.

The last example, or rather class of examples, is too wellknown to need extended descriptive treatrrent, for there is a largeliterature on the pronaninal alternations in European (and other)languages that are functional systEmS of speaker-addressee defer­ence and intimacy marking. Such. "T' (for French tu, German du,Russian Ho, etc.) VB. "V" (for French~, GeItl'lllilSie, Russian vi,etc.) alternations have been described in a nunber of sociolinguisticstudies following upon Brown & Gilman's (1960) pioneering andnow-classic paper, e.g., Friedrich 1966 on Russian, Ervin-Tripp 1971canparatively, Bates and Benigni 1975 on Italian, Paulston 1976 onSwedish. 33 (I have discussed the universal functional charac­teristics of such systEmS in S11verstein 1976b: 31; 3~40.)Basically, the very same pronaninal surface fonns (or the cor­related verb inflections) that differentiate singular VB. pluralreference, or second person (addressee included) VB. third person(other) reference, or both of these, functio~ in this systEm todifferentiate various relationships of speaker and addressee, along

228 229

(6)

FlgUl'e 7. The two-dimensional semantic (0) in equilibrium and (b) under tension.

social dimensions that Brown & Gilman surnnarize as "power" and"solidarity. "

As is shCNlIl in (a) of their figure reproduced in 7., there isan older tv.o-diIrensional system of usage at a stage in the historyof each of the European languages, in which the asynmetries of"power" (essentially deference entitlanent) are indexed by asynrnetriesof using T vs. V pronaninals; one defers to "powerful" alter withV address, and inversely, alter replies with V address to ego. '!heother diIrension, "differentiating address aIlPng power equals" (1960;258), and hence sho.vn only in the central area of the figure,is a synmetric use of V for non-"solidary" (or nonintimate, nonfamiliar)linguistic address, and T for "solidary" (or intimate I familiar).In such a systen, there :Ls a priority to the "power" diIrension fordefining pronani.nal usage in a social intMaction, and "solidarity"is thus the residually indexed diIrension.

Brown & Gilman seek to explain the evolution of the pronaninalsystens of the various European languages, in which, to differentdegrees, there arise new systens with "solidarity" as the prior oronly diIrension of social functio~ of the pronaninals (1960;259):

Well into the nineteenth century the power senantic prevailedand waiters, canoon soldiers and anployees were called 1: while

T

parents, masters, and elder brothers were called y. How­ever, all our evidence consistently indicates that in thepast century the solidarity semantic has gained supremacy .. . . '!he abstract result is a siIrq:Jle one-di1oonsional systenwith the reciprocal T for the solidary and the reciprocalV for the nonsoli<:1arY.

Noting that "the diIrension of solidarity is potentially applicableto all persons addressed," they use a disequilibrium 100001, as.shown in (b) of our figure 7., to explain the fact of change, Ifnot its directionality. As represented in the figure, the dimen­sions of "power" and "solidarity" are essentially independentin this IOOdel rather than hierarchiea.1. '!he disequilibrium followsfran this, inasmch as an addressee represented by the categoryat the upper left denands at the SllIOO t:iJre reference both with"superior" V and with "solidary" T; inversely for the addressee atthe lower right of the figure. So it is the tendency to independenceof these social diIrensions, and the resulting disequilibrium offunction , that leads to the collapse of one of the diIrensions--inall thes~ cases, "power"-and the preservation and even functiona12inversion of the other (the "solidary". T being the unmarked usage,according to Brown & Gilman.)35

In a IOOst interesting section of their paper entitled"Sanantics, social structure I and ideology," however, Brown &; Gilmanreflect on this IOOdel (1960: 267);

It is possible, of course, that human cognition favors thebinary choice without contingencies and so found its way tothe suppression of one diIrension. However, this theory doesnot account for the fact that it was the rule of solidaritythat triUIIPhed. We believe, therefore, that the developnent ofopen societies with an equalitarian [sic] ideology actedagainst the nonreciprocal power semantic and in favor ofsolidarity. It is our suggestion that the larger socialchanges created a distaste for the face-to-face expressionof differential power.

And indeed, when we examine the questiQl in this light, it wouldappear that a disequilibrium IOOdel is sanewhat unnecessary (asidefran t~ fact that it :Ls not clear such a nodel as in Th. couldrepresent actual functiona12 norms, rather than areas of undefinedpotential aniJiguity, at any stage of history). For, it seans toroo that, properly put, the question is, how does ideology engage withsuch a systen as that in figure 7a, so as to change it. How do theusers of a functiona12 systen explain the way their language hasfunctional1 effect in context and the way it~ to~functiona11 effect? It is my contention that I as the citationsfran partisans of linguistic reform (Brown & Gilman 1960; 264-66)show, functiona12 structure :Ls understood and represented in roota­pragmatic ideology as a kind of rootaphorical transfer (analogy) franthe structure and asynmetric synbolism of senantico-referentialcategories I particularly as EfIixx:lied in lexical form.

(])serve that in the case of pronaninal forms, there is astraightforward indexical-referential plane of function2 , determining

T

V

V

T

(a)

ISuperior and Th Superior and Not

Solidary I Solidary

I

Equal and Equal and NotSolidary Solidary

T ~-<~

II

Inferior and NotInferior and Tt VSolidary

ISolidary

Superiors

Equal and Equal and NotSolidary Solidary

T V~ ~

Inferiors

I

V

T

V

230

categories of lperson~ and there is a straightforward referentialcategory of 'mIllDer'. In the third person, the basic or"unmarked" person of the set, the category of 'number' is frequentlyand basically a senantico-referential category (as opposed to thealways-indexical total vs. partial "enumerability" entailed byfirst or second person naninal categories ) . For the third person,imreover, the 'singular' is unmarked and the 'plural' is marked(referentially detenninate or specific). In the first- andsecond-person categories, the totally emnnerable fonns (implyingI singular' ), so-called "first person singular" and "second personsingular," are the marked members of the number opposition. Yet,it wuld seem that typical metapragmatic ideology grasps the socialfuncti~ of the T ; V opposition as metaphor of the functionl ofthe thira person (senantico-referential) opposition 'singular' ;'plural', to describe one vs. many objects. Functiona1

2categories are rationalized in this way, literalizing the perceivedmetaphor of referential categories: " ... 1' esprit de fanatisme,d 1orgueil et de foodalite, nous a fait contracter I' habitude denous servir de la seconde personne du pluriel lorsque nous parlons~ un seul," a 1793 speech of Malbec is quoted by Brown & Gilman(1960:264); similarly they cite early Society of Friends literaturefran the mid-seventeenth century "arguing that T to one and V tomany is the natural and logical fonn of address-in all la.ngu"iges"(1960; 265), hence in English.

The logic of these ideological views is simply that languageuse is a reflection of the context, and, the addressee being asingle object to-be.--referred-to (the functionl of the pronaninalthen), the pronaninal used should reflect this equality ofones. When this becares the daninant accepted ideological fonnationof a particular group, the functio~ of the pronaninal systEm haschanged. For, the "solidarity" of adherence to this literalizationof the metaphor is what detennines IlDltual (i.e., reciprocal) Tusage; and the social functio~ of the systEm of pronaninals ­indexes the triumph of this ideological solidarity within thegroup.

I have been sketching one outcane-the one erphasized byBrown & Gilman-of the rationalization of pronaninal function2in tenns of an egalitarian value systEm. This "loss" or(ct. n. 35) sutmergence of the "power"-base of pronaninalfunction2 has characterized the continuous linguistic history of thedaninant leading sectors of the Ellropean nations of the Continent.Hence, the innovative usage has tended to become standard. Butthere is obviously another possible outcane of the very same processof ideological engaganent with the functional systEm, as shownby the history of our own language, English. fu~ result is the lossof the referential category itself, as has happened in the secondperson of the standard language. To the extent that adherenceto the ideologically-specified innovation of unifonnly using Tindexes "solidarity" within a particular group, avoidance of theinnovation (i.e., avoidance of use of the !. fonn) is the only ~to differentiate oneself fran the particular innovating group.And indeed. the category of number has disappeared fran the Englishstandard language, not haphazardly (it is the claim here), nor by

231

sane inexplicable tendency for "polite" fonns to be generalized ("polite"of speaker? of addressee? of "context"?). I think it is the outcaneof a different, negative valuation of the ideological grasp ofthe previously-functioning

2pragnatic systEm, changing the standard

language secondarily.Qlr purpose in this part has not been linguistically to account

for the rise of egalitarian ideology in general, nor to make aclaim about the effects of propositional linguistic structure on"world view," as should be clear. The purpose has been to examinea particularly interesting historical linguistic change (or set ofhistorical changes of parallel and interacting character), explan­ation of which SeEmS to implicate precisely the same function -ideologyrelationship we have been stressing in generalizing fran Whorf' sinsights about reference to the first tw pragmatic examples. Hereagain we can discern the centrality of surface lexical fonns (pronouns)that can be defined in tenns of categories of reference (person, mun­ber), of which other pragmatic dimensions ("power," "solidarity") aretaken to be metaphorical transfers, with the markedness relationssimilarly transposed (singular lU] ; plural [M] ;: solidary; non­solidary). Here again, the ideological fOrIlDllation deals with thepresupposing functional2 relationships of the systen of fonns,rationalizing the opposUion of surface fonns in tenns of "oneform--one function1--one func~ion2" lOg~C.; thus, tutoyer1="tutoyer

2" vs.vouvo¥erl="vouvoyer ," etc., m tfie natIve apprehension of thefunctlonal2 systen ~ugh metapragnatic constitution of a functional1systen.

Ideology engages metapragmatically with functional2

structurethrough the constitution of a referentially-based (or referentially­cente:ect) functional1 systen, th~ constitution of which is a function2­changIng (hence, structure-changmg) process. Our exanples of Englisn"speech acts," Javanese "linguistic etiquette," and ContinentalEuropean "pronouns of power and solidarity" have all d.aJDnstratedthis phenanenon, different though the degree of analytic accuracyin the ideological apprehension of the structures involved. Inthe first case, it was clear that insofar as metapragmatically-derived function, is in one-to-one relation with functio~, i.e.,for the true so-called "explicit perfonnatives " the ideo!ogy of"illocution" and functi~n2 are rmtually reinfo~cing. This was onlypartially true of the ideOlogy of politeness in Javanese and theanal:(sis of itS.functiona12 structure; f~r here, only part of themachmery of etlquette shows metapragmatIc function

l-function

2~verlap, the Krama Inggil/An<;IaP lexicon. But sigIl1ficantly,I t SeEmS to be that part rn::>st central to historical change andrenewal of lexical sets, i tens from this conjugate danain renewingother ones, for example. And in the case of the T/V pronaninalusage, the only mechanien for rationalizing a functio~ is thecreation of a metaphorical basis in the systen of reference--a meta­phorical basis in 'singular': I plural' "muneration," as Whorf[1941] 1956 would rEmind us--in tenns of which we can calibrate

our understanding of functio~. Only by this process we have changedwhat function2 is, either by fuming creative indexicality intopresupposing mdexicality (a minimal disturbance), or by increasinglysevere changes up to defining a functiona1

2category out of existence.

232

Perhaps reconsidering the nature of the three examples we havelooked at will show how this is a generalization of the principlesthat Whorf proposed for the plane of reference. In all threeexlllllJles, we considered the degree to which a native metapragmaticdiscourse in terns of function of linguistic forns matches orfails to match a "scientific" tunctiona_12 analysis of these forns.We also considered, particularly with thB last exlllllJle, theconsequences over time of this disparity in grasping the functionalsystans, or rather of the particular way in which an ideology offunction is the necessary (and, empirically, Ubiquitous) crnponentof histo~ical change of functiona12 systans~including th~ residualfunctional systan, what I have tenned earher the sananhco­referentiaf granmatical systan, the categories of which are notindexical. Whorf pointed to the historical process of folketynvlogy ([1942] 1956:261-62) as a deroonstration over time ofhis principles of projection and objectification. Such a processrationalizes fonnerly WlIlX)tivated lexical forns into rore rotivated,referentially-transparent surface constructions, such as sparrowgrass fran fonner asparagus (or, rather [splil r4g(r )as 1, via the.understanding that~his is 'grass for sparrows'. or Welsh rarebltfram Welsh rabbit, via the literalization that this is not madewith 'riiEbit' as an ingredient at all, and hence nust be the(frequently haJDphonous) sequence of rorphanes shown. Whorf alsopointed to the constant creation of "lexations" for objectifiedcryptotypes (for exlllllJle, in the passage [ms. 1936/371 1956:81quoted above), allowing the philosophically and scientificallyinclined users of a referential systan to discourse about theseobjectifications while intending to discourse about "reality" as itappears fram the phenotypes of the referential systan. (Recall againCarnap and M:>rris here.) Hence, words like causation, gender,etc., which can never--because of their own cryptotypic categories-­"mean" exactly the same thing as the granmatico-sanantic cate-goria> they are based upon. In both these areas, it seans to ne,we have parallels at the level of linguistic function, of pragmatics.On the one hand, we have the tendency, whether by functional1extensions of metap:ra.!1Jllll.tic referential lexical itans or construc­tions, or by functima11literalization of function2-as-metaphor,constantly to rational1ze functiona12 sys~gms in tne image ofthe referential-and-predicational systan. On the other hand,we have the difficulty that this rationalization through a ~ctional1apprehension of language can never be the same as the functlOnal2effect of language for which it fOmJlllates the conditions ofstrategic (or typical) use. Creative funct~ona~2 effe<;:ts ~nparticular are lost to functional1 rational~tlOn, wh:ch 18 charac?­teristically fOmJlllated in terns of presuPPOSlOg funchona12 relatlOnsof speech to context l and functio~.

This parallelian has implications, it VoOuld sean, in threeways: first, for the nature of historical change as a ~eneral J?rocess;second, for the synchronic investigability of language use; third,for the thane with which we began, how Boas justified the "ethnologic"relevance of language. I will nerely adUIlbrate a full discussionof these points here, since my presentation has been in terms ofwhat I would call characteristic exemplars, not in tenns of ccmparison

233

carefully controlled by variables of an hypothesis.If we consider the kinds of historical regularities that

Kury,lowicz ( [1945/491 1966) fOmJlllated out of an older notion of"analogy" together with the changes studied here, we find that theyhave II1lch in caJJlX)n. At the roost obvious level, his second law(1966: 164-65), that granmatical restructurings "suivent ladirection: fonnes de fondation~ fonnes fondees, dent Ierapport ctecoule de leurs spheres d I emploi," covers, for propos­itional linguistic structure, the cases we have seen of II1llti­functiona11 formations imposing their forns on roore restrictedlyfunctional formations. Kury,lowicz' s is a structural "sanantic"(in the ola, wide usage) basis for formal restructuring, coveringchanges fram unmarked to marked manbers of an opposition, frangeneral to restricted. 'Ihe parallel direction for the indexicalcategories in which we are interested is fran referentially-based,lexicalized pragmatically presupposing (thus, subject to functional lapprehension with identical or near identical netapragmatic forns)to functionallY2-independent, nonlexica1ized pragmatically creativeones. Again, oBviously his third law (1966: 165-69) gives asurface-structural criterion for the direction of reshaping, because"une structure consistant en membre constitutif plus llHJilresubordonne fonne Ie fondElllentdu membre constitutif isole, maisisofonctionnel. " Essentially this deals with the tendency forSaussurean "relatively rootivated" constructions to determine thereshaping of dependent "relatively arbitrary" ones. In the largerfunctional sphere, the surface-structure linearization of a func­tiona12 fonn that metapragmatic functional~ ideology provides in adiscourse about language use, serves as the "fondanent" of historicalchange in the function2 and shape of the dependent fonn. With arore careful representation of the extended exanples, 1 think wecould see the parallelians and generalizations of Kury,lowicz' sfirst, fourth, and fifth laws as well, as central tendenciesin the functional -structural history of languages.

If this is t~e case, then I would suggest that granmatica1change is of a piece with functional2-structural change rooregenerally I and that it is plausible to see the same mechanians atwork, an integrally dialectic involvanent with linguistic ideologyin its specific, metalinguistic expression. To what extent thisis an individual phenanenon, and to what extent social (here, thatis, institutionalized as a way of apprehending the functional2nature of language) presumably detennines saoothing about theextent of the inevitable "change" resulting fran this dialectic. 40But the principal point here is that the kind of granmaticalchange or restructuring in the (sanantico-) referential systan is,it would sean, the outcare of the same kind of process as is atwork in the pragmatic systan.

But if to rationalize, t(' "understand" one's own linguisticusage is potentially to chang", it, precisely because of theinevitable functional~distortion of functiona12 properties I

what does this imply atlout the nature of granmatica1 description?On a micro-scale, there is a dialectic process in our caning togrips with any (and every) event of using language. And the processesof systamtization, regimentation, and seeing the rule-governed

2)4

"underlying relationships" of linguistic forns--which we demandalways of our sources of data, especially ourselves--would seem tobe capable of destroying the very data themselves: '!here is obviouslya hierarchy of "elicitability" of kinds of functiona12 datathrough seeking judgments about them, and one would hOpe, withWharf, that this caution can be developed further in the rrostprecise (though negative) terns, yielding a scale of confidence in(or, rather, distrust of) the accuracy of structural data.Linguistics has gone through a period of intense "methodological"concern which focused upon the transcriptions of forms as data,and logically-reconstructed canons for justifiable analysis.There is,unfortunately, little methodological concern at present,all the rrore unfortunate, it should be realized, because of thestrivings to becane an actual social science studying "pragmatics"of language along with semantico-referential structure. Pragmaticscannot be done in a principled manner until the "Whorfian Paradox,"or Whorfian doubt--vs. Cartesian certitude-is faced squarely.This starts fran seeing language as of the same "cultural" orderas the rest of social life.

Thus, it is ironic in a sense how we are led back to seeinglanguage as a "paradigm" of things cultural. It is not as Boas'epitcme of systematic social determination of the unconsciouscognitive categories carrron to the manbers of a society, his"primary ethnologic phenanena." It is as a strikingly clearand revealing area for derronstrating the formation of what Boascalled "secondary rationalizations," what we would call an ideologyof lingustic fonn and function. With language, that is, we mightjcane rrost clearly to fonnulate the social scientist's dilemma of"structure" vs. "action" in a never-ending historical rrovement.If "structure" is a set of (fonnalizable) patterns according towhich "action" (contextually-situated social behavior) is inter­pretable, a so-called synchronic statement (or rrodel) of "structure"tells us in what respect "action" remains the same within a socialsystem, in what sense discernible instances of social behaviorremain "the same" action. What we find, however, when we attempt toapprehend everything in such structural terns (here we return toWharf's theme of "indeterminacy"), is that plus c'est la mane chose,plus s:a change.

Footnotes

*1 acknowledge gratefully the support of the John S1rronGuggenheim MeJrorial Foundation during the preparation of thisversion of the text. Earlier or excerpted versions were deliveredat Brown University (Charles Colver Lecture Series, 10 NoveIDer 1978),Johns Hopkins University (History of Ideas Seminar, 5 Decanber1978) I Washington Linguistics Club (6 December 1978), andTemple University (Anthropology Department Colloquium, 26 January1979) . The reactions of those audiences--as also of the audienceat the Chicago Linguistic Society--gave me the stinulation to attempt

II·II

III!III

!II~

Ij.

I

I

I

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yet again to clarify the issues raised. Erving Goffman is notresponsible for my errors.

lone should thus not be startled to see its camPn appear­ance in the works of linguists. No fewer than two articles ina single recent issue of Language (vol. 53, no. 2) begin thisway. see Morgan 1977: 277 and Bickerton 1977: 466.

2By "scientific" study of language, I intend to includeall canparative (cross--linguistic) systematization groundedin formal-·functiona1 analysis, an attribute, it would seem,of all relatively successful approaches to date, regardlessof practitioners' rhetorical stances as being formal or struc­tural vs. semantic or functional. Thus, any description of asingle language implies corrparison of systenJ3 for justifica­tion of the very terns of analysis.

3In a real sense I Whorf united the two important linesof work. On the one hand, his discussions of the nature oflinguistic categories make analytically precise the concernof Sapir for "fo:rm-feeling." 'Ibis is not adequately explained(indeed, it is left alrrost mystical) by the system of linguis­tic categories or "concepts" of Language (Sapir 1921:ch.5).On the other hand, Whorf's clarification was possible only byemploying the analytic niceties that derive from Bloanfield'ssystem of granmatical description in Lan~ (1933: ch. 16), thetenns from which appear frequently in Whorf' s technical writ­ings.

4See now Alford 1978 for an exuberant preliminary exposeof SClIll3 of the discrepancies between Whorf' s writings andthe claims of his critics. The expose itself lacks perspectiveon certain points, however.

~"Though, as indicated, the original, posthUllDus publica­tion date was 1945 (in Language), editorial footnotes in boththe original and reprinted editions give 1937 as the date ofwriting, which was done "at the request of Franz Boas," witha view to publication in IJAL. 'Ibis is of importance primarilyto show the priority of Wharf's position as linguistic analystand theorist with fully respected professional credentials,in the light of which all his late popularizations must beread.

6nro points should be underlined in this connection. First,for Whorf the covert idea or cryptotype can only be "rrore or lessduplicated in a oord and a lexical concept," i.e., a lexical itemof sane meta1inguistic sub-part of the language in question. Thisis because each such metalinguistic lexical item itself hasboth phenotypic and cryptotypic aspects of its meaning, hence of itsreferential value I which can never be precisely the same as thecryptotype out of which it was precipitated. Second, as to theproportional sets of words that illustrate a cryptotypic category,

the advance of syntactic analysis to the refinaoont called "gen­erative semantics" would require that syntactic constructions beincluded in the proportion, e.g., ron : cause to ron :: ... (withall the surface bracketting that this i.rrq>lies)-:- Specifically fransuch putative proportions of meaning involving both lexical itemsand gramnatical constructions, has care the rediscovery of theprinciple of the sanantic harogeneity of "lexical" vs. "gramnatical"!reaning, and hence the representation of pre-lexicalized abstractunderlying fonns. It has often been remarked that the "abstract"and "underlying" elements generally look like and share certainessential properties with surface lexical items, for exanple, the"abstract" predicate CAUSE and the surface lexical iten~. Thisis, of course, no accident, given the logical fonn of proportionslying behind the analyses in the first place, as illustrated.However, precisely the same ultimate differentiation of abstractunderlying vs. surface lexical element is insisted upon in moderntheories, as we see in Wharf's differentiation of the scientificcrypt~type vs. the native's rretalinguistic lexation.

There are t\\O rrore Whorfian types of category, which Isketch here for the sake of ~leteness. First, there is thedistinction between specific vs. generic categories, that is"an individual fonnal class existing in an individual language"vs. "a hierarchy fonned by grouping classes of similar or (and)canplementary types" ([1945] 1956 :100) . Thus' past tenporalreference' is a specific category of English, while 'tense' isa generic category that hierarchically subsumes the pair ofcategories 'past I and 'non-past.' Second, there is the distinctionbetween selective vs. alternative isosenantic categories, thatis, necessary (obligatory) purely fonnal distinctions in wordsvs. optional purely fonnal distinctions, neither of which has anyeffect on (referential) meanings. Thus, conjugation markers ofFrench verb classes are necessary fonnal distinctions with nocontrastive effect on !reaning, hence, selective isosenantic classes.Optional differentiation of special latinate or Greek plurals(as opposed to English ones) in certain learned words in English,e.g., vacua; vacUtmlS, schenata : schenas, indices: indexes, etc.,has no effect on the referential !reaning of 'plural', and hencelearned plurals are an alternative isosenantic category (to besure, with pragmatic effect as indices of speaker status, etc.).These t\\O category types are of lesser i.rrq>ortance to Whorf' s cen­tral ~heses than the t\\O discussed in the text.

Indeed, the parallelisn of the analyses of these philsophersand that of Wharf is not fortuitous, even though in a sense theyeama· to opposite conclusions in the constructivist or physicalistdebate on fashioning a pure object language. Morris, in par­ticular I represented in his writings both the Vienna Circlepositivisn of Carnap and the American pragmatisn of the school ofDewey (and thence I of Peirce). It is clear that Wharf knew of thisphilosophical tradition (one wonders to what extent it was discussedanong Sapir's circle at Yale), at which he directs barbs in severalpassages of his Technol9fQT Review articles in 1940-41; for

2:37

exanple:

The situation is not likely to be aided by the philosophicaland mathenatical analyst who may try to exploit the fieldof higher linguistic symbolism with little knowledge oflinguistics itself. Unfortunately the essays of rrost modernwriters in this field suffer fran this lack of apprenticeshiptraining. 'lb strive at higher mathenatical fOIlllllas forlinguistic meaning while knowing nothing correctly of theshirt-sleeve rudinents of language is to court disaster.Physics cbes not begin with atonic structures and cosmicrays, but with rrotions of ordinary gross physical objects andsymbolic (mathenatical) expressions for these rrovements.Linguistics likewise does not begin with rreaning nor withthe structure of logical propositions, but with the obliga­tory patterns made by the gross audible sounds of a givenlanguage and with certain symbolic expressions of its own forthese patterns. Out of these relatively si.rrq>le tenns dealingwith gross sound patterning are evolved the higher analyticalprocedures of the science, just as out of the si.rrq>le experi­ments and matbenatics concerning falling and sliding blocks Of\rood is evolved all the higher mathenatics of physics upinto quantum theory. ( [1940b]1956: 222-23)

Note Wharf's reliance on the fundamental analytic basis ofphonology (phonenics) as the precedent for all of "scientific"linguistics, in contrast to the seemingly a priori senantics ofthe philosophers he criticizes. In this, he duplicates LeonardBloanfield who, all the while endorsing the programs of bothbehaviorisn (influenced by Albert Paul Weiss) and physicalisn,criticizes the Vienna Circle authors and even refers then tohis Language (1933) in a trenchant footnote to his 1935 LSAPresidential Address, "language or Ideas?" (Bloanfield [1936)1970; 322-28; see 323n. 4). After presenting sane exanples franthese writers, Bloanfield observes that

Carnap, so far as I have found,. nowhere mentions the factthat the discourse of logic presupposes descriptivelinguistics and uses the technical tenus of this enpiricalscience. The ~lex linguistic background of logicaland mathenatical statement is generally ignored byphilosophers and logicians; ...

Given, however, that Bloanfield's endorsement of the physicalistdoctrine in that paper took the following fonn:

Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath have found that all scientificallymeaningful statements are translatable into physical teI'llS--that is, into statanents about rrovanents which can be ob-served and descrihed in coordinates of space and tine.Statanents that are not made in these tenus are eitherscientifically meaningless or else make sense only ifthey are translated into statements about language.

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--It is no wonder that Wharf, already having been trained as anengineer (B. S., MIT, '18), concentrated his "relativist" attackson precisely this issue, fran 1936 on. The chronology of give-and­take, even within the lingustic profession, cannot, of course,be fully doClllrented here, though this illuminating task should besystanatically undertaken. I have merely been pointing out thatWharf's writings reflect preoccupations that were shared, a canrondiscourse about issues, and a pointed concern not only with theexplicit addressees of an article but with the implicit audience(e.g. Bloanfield himself in an appendix to the Shawnee[Algonquianlstan-list of C.F. Voegelin that Blocmfield was sure to read;see [1940a] 1956:162-63).

9rro be sure, Whorf proposes that scientific linguistics (inthe sense of n. 2 above) will be no little aid both in understandingthe implications of the relativity and uncertainty principles,and in overcaning them. To what extent this is all tongue-in-cheekis an interesting question, since, like nost positiVists (or thosewhose scientific training was in that tradition) I Wharf had a mysticinside screaming to get out. Yet, just as Blocmfield took up theproselytizing cause of an independent, professionalized linguisticsas Science rescuing language fran students of culture (sc., literature)in such journals as Classical Weekly, American Journal of Philology,Modern Language Journal, Modern Philology, etc., so Whorf took upthe same cause as Cultural SCience reSCUing students of science(sc., physics, chemistry) fran language in The Technologv Review.In these rhetorical poses, each was rescuing himself fran afonner existence, a canron happening in academic life which anyreader of this will recognize inmediately. Hence the vehemenceand fervor of the rhetorical schema: "How could~ [addressee(s)] ( =he [audience, i. e., prior influence] ( = 1. [speaker]) ) have beenso taken in?" -

10Hence, one is led to what Labov ( [1970] 1972: 185-87) hascalled the "Saussurian Paradox: the social aspect of language[1. e., langue--MS] is studied by observing anyone individual,

but the individual aspect [ i. e., parole--MS] only by observinglanguage in its social context" (186). Unfortunately, however, thispsychologistic interpretation of langue as Chansky's "conpetence"is a misreading of Saussure who says of langue rather that

C' est un tresor depose par la pratique de la parole dans lessujets appartenant Ii une m6ne cannaunite, un systane gram­matical existant virtuellement dans chaque cerveau, ou plusexactement dans les cerveaux d'un ensemble d'individus;car la langue n' est canple'te dans aucun, elle n' existeparfaitEment que dans la masse. (Saussure 51960; 30 [§Introd. ,III.2 ])

What Saussure describes as "existant virtuellement dans chaque cerveau"later !IIoorican linguists, themselves misreading Bloanfield' scurious treatment of the issue, have literally located in every(hence "anyone") speaker. Saussure intends only to characterizethe Durkheimian understanding of carmunity-wide nonns for the systematicrelationship of linguistic utterance-types (signn:raDts) tointensional classes of referents (signifies), such nonns assured tobe independent of the context of use, the psycho-physiological

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make-u~ of the individuals, etc.1 Now-classic statements of at least portions of this point

of view are Jakobson [1957] 1971:130-47; 1960 and Hymes [1964]1974: 3-27; [1972] 1974: 29-66. 'Ibe first of these is explicitlysemiotic and fonnally analytic; the perspective of the otherthree is clearly "functional," but not especially semiotic, in lightof the results of the first. 'Ibis rapprochement is a IOOre recentdevelopnent in many later studies-including my own-influenced bythe ones cited.

12In this respect, there is one plane of meaningfulness thatis entirely equivalent to, though the obverse of, granrnar. Chanskyclearly means this by the notion of an interpretative semanticsof "logical fonn" entailed by an autonarous norphosyntax. Also,that part of generative semantics that works--that deals withtraditional 1 sense' rather than actual 'reference' --rests on thesame property, i.e., is sanantic in the same way. The partialequivalence of these two approaches ought to be given widerrecognition. They differ rather in the treatment of context-depen~nt fOmHreaning. for which their methods are simply inappropriate.

A large part of the general linguistic writings of such PragueSchool scholars as Havranek, MukaTovskY, et al. was devoted top~viding a theoretical basis for rationalizing the functionalldifferentiation of Czech and similarly nodernizing languages ofpost-World War I national autonany. See Garvin [1955]31964:3-69; Jakobsen [1963] 1971; 522-26. Similarly, Bloanfield I scelebrated ilLiterate and illiterate speech" ( [1927] ) poses afunctional1 problem about good vs. bad speech, but, failing toprovide a solution in purely fonnal tenns of grammtical structure,falls back on speculation about certain individuals being "betternodeIs of conduct and speech than others" ( [1927]1970: 156) .In the course of his discusssion of Menanini, however, Bloanfieldprovides many examples of what I will call functiona12 differentiation(see Wlow) of linguistic features.

l<.brhus, we must distinguish between the functionl of reference­and~predication, or propositionality, and the plane of meaningfulnessof linguistic elements called semanticity. Insofar as the latter isan empirically-investigable danain, as Jakobson has pointed outmany times (esp. ms 1956: 8-16), following Peirce, it presupposesthe metasanantic functionl of language, the use of a language itselfto state equivalences of sense-relations (see above and n. 12), whatseem to be context-independent equivalences of referential-and­predicational contributions of linguistic surface fonns. Unfor­tunately, semantics has been confused at times with propositionalfunctionl, or worse, with referencel' But only through the mediation ofmetasemanticsl does semanticity becaJE a kind reference2'

15a:>serve also that the addressees are characterized with asocial~role term that specifies nore precisely than a simple YQl.l. whichof the chance receivers of the message are socially-constituted addres­sees ~and which, residually, are socially-constituted audience).

1 In the fraIJle\\Ork of the \\Orks of n. 11 above, we might saythat the metapragmatic construction focuses on the signal-form asproduced over a certain channel, or at least as produced fron acertain source nodality. We might speculate on other, similarly

240constructed channel-signal foci of report in a rodern cemnunicationssystem such as English, e.g., "He wrote,' • ,"and the extent towhich it is conventionally understood that~framed signal is areplica of the reported instance. Would Austin (and his followers)also see "acts" of these types for every such possibility? Noticethat anbedded replicas of speech--as in "He 'Good Morning! 'ed me threetimes within an hour! "--fom the basis of what Benveniste has called"verbes delocutifs" ([1958 )1966: 277-85), perhaps best to betranslated as delocutionary~. Here, the metapragmatic construc­tion rank-shifts the quoted signal to inflectable status, and thenceis historically derived a fom which frequently is itself an explicitperfonnative, e.g., Je vous salue. The lexicalized focus here ispurely on the signal, the source and channel being implicit in thedegree of imitation in the replica. An extensive cross-linguistictreatment, drawing out the implications for such topics as onanatopoeia,is an~rtant desideratum.

Thereby hangs a huge logico-linguistic literature on so-calledopaque contexts of reference and related matters, about whi.ch it isnot ~ purpose to write here.

8Note that certain reduced forns in English, lacking that inindirect reports, and even with converging stress-intonation-juncture,sanetimes attenuate the opposition.

19rro be sure, Aust in's theory is the historical descendant ofa long line of native analyses in the European tradition, a truehistorically-continuous ideology of language that has affected allour technical traditions of dealing with language. In turn, thesehave affected the characteristic metapragmatics of the Europeanlanguage-camunities thEm:>elves. Thus, I should point out that thehistorical question of the rise of these various syntactic constructionswith~, or with other, rore technical lexical itEm:> (e.g., predicate(v. ), utter) in the varioos European languages as precursors of, orconsequences of, such native theories, is not being considered here,though an essential problem. Below, in fact, I will hold that there isa necessary dialectic relationship betl\een the two, because ideologyinforms functio~ and thereby the native grasp of function2' ultiIIatelychang~ it.

As we noted above on the subject of Boas' structuralist discovery,the only "scientific" study of lexicon (and lexical sanantics) is throughgranrnatical systems. Thus, for exanple, there is a profoond differencebetween these two verbs in terns of their semantic-role coding, reflec­ted in the discourse properties that emerge in carqJlex sentences. canpare"He pranised to buy a loaf of bread" and "He said to buy a loaf ofbread. " In the first, the explicit subject of the framing verb praniseis coreferential with the (anaphorically deleted) understood Agent ofthe f:ramed verb~. In the second, the explicit subject of~ ispointedly not co-referential with any putatively deleted Agent of ~.The understood Agent of £!&. can presumably be established by establishingwho was the addressee of the original described interaction. Suchlexicalized (hence cryptotypic) same- vs. switch-reference propertiesof language are not, in general, systematically considered by nativespeakers without the caJParative perspective gained fran "scientific"study of cross-clause reference-maintenance in languages.

21Notwithstanding Geertz' s use of the characterization "unin­tentional" for this rather creative indexical relationship, it is

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clear fran his discussion of "The role of etiquette" in general inthe. upper reaches.of Javanese society that this is merely an unideo­log:L:;:ed, or unrat10nalized functionr, though obviously available as

a SOClal strategy. Note the following (1960: 243-44):

~~ means to humble oneself politely and is thecorrect behavior to adopt toward anyone who is either ofapl?~~te~y equal rank or higher. '" I have seen llWlyprlJap [ehte] conversations that seared to consist alnostez.ttirely.of an attenpt b~ ~ach of the participants to puthimself In the lower posltlon, a kind of obsessive competitionu;> be bottom dog. (The coopetition is pretense, of course. Ifelther were to flatly acknowledge the other's inferiority insuch a situation it 'oroUld be a grave insult.) ... The~lished prijaji can express all sorts of nuances of status(and insult), many of which escape Western perception alto­~ethe::;.and a true virtuoso can reduce novices to qUivering:J.llJIDblhty. As a Javanese put it, ' ... when I am going toreply to [such a friend] ... I can't [be andap--asor too] so Ifeel ashamed. I '

As we. shall see, the accaJplishment here is to employ as manyfunct~onal~ systems as possible to focus on the speaker-addresseerelatlonshlp, and in so doing, to daIDnstrate such esotericcanpetence as only ~hose \\Qrthy of similar treatment \\QuId have.As Geertz notes, this can spiral out of hand to a westernobse1]~r.. '

"1blS 'oroUld appear to be a conflict between the locallyparadigmatic lexical-conjugate perspective on the problem andt~e perspective of syntagmatic canDinations, since in tenns of thefust, Geertz states, "the occurrence of one of [the linkedconjugates in a set] for any given meaning ...will predict theoccurrence of the other [at the same level of "style"] if the meaningconce.J;l1ed occurs ... " (1960: 253).~ 'syntactic definition' of a surface fom I mean the

catego::ization resulting fran a PropositionallY-~ed gramnaticalanalysls of sentences. In this way, such units as Noun PhraseNoun, etc. receive characterizations in terns of the fonnal 'structure of sentences. I call attention to this because it maynot be apparent to all readers that every functional -functionalsy:;>tem implies its own segmentation and organizationlof surface fornswhlch~ th~lves functionally ambiguous roost of the time. '

Poedjosoedanoo (1968: 64; 1969: 190) characterizes and liststhe membership (then 67 i tans) of a further, truly coarse andvulgar. Q<asar) set of lexical items, considered to be a subsetof baslc Ngoko, "for the IlX>St part nouns, adjectives, and verbsexpressing such very OOlllDn things as parts of the body conditionsof the body, and bodily functions." These are like a l~vel ofslang ~d obscenity, inasmch as there are ordinary Ngoko equiva­lents2pthout the VUlgar connotations.. . "Though, as exanples given by Poec!jOsoeda:n!o (1968: 77)mdicate, the presence of an audience in particular relationships tothe addressee (e.g., in-laws [audience] of an elder sibling [ addressee]

242

of speaker) is ala:> regularly indexed in this way. Actually, asthe exarrples sean to indicate, this usage might be studied as a kindof stylized display of the basic speaker-addressee indexes, m::>ved toa IIDr~,.status-marked plane during "relations in public."

a:>observe that in many languages, the first-person Agent onsecond-pers:>n [+human) Patient (or Dative [praroted to Patient) )has an inflection that bespeaks politeness or deference, or justavoidance of specification. This interacts with splits of ergativity­accusativity in "global" (conbined Agent-an-Patient) inflectionalsystEmS (Silverstein 1976a: 118; 124-25), or merges first-on-secondforms with passives, :inpers:>nals, etc. '!he fact of lexicalizationof the phenanenon in a predicational fonn (Le., verb) used inmetap~tic discourse is what we should highlight in Javanese.

Note in relation to this usage that the speaker neverrefers to himself with Krama Inggil vocabulary (save the King), whichusage would be theoretically possible (where referent equals speaker) I

but in direct contravention of the Andap-asor ethic cited in n. 21.Th don§'O would be arrogant.

"""Even in the case of Krama. Andap pronaninals, the socialindexical function2 presupposes the' indexical-referential functi0n2ident~~ing 'person' in the particular noun phrase.

Indeed, Poedjosoedanno (1968: 67) seans to echo the attitudeof Geertz's Prijaji a:>urces (quoted above) in characterizing theMadya conjugates as of two sorts: "Sane are the result of sane kindof corruption of standard Kr2m3 words, while others ... sean to beold borrowings of Krano words from sane local non-prestigiousdialect." Cbserve the negative bias of this essentially historical-­rather than synchronic-characterization.

30Recalling Geertz's observation quoted above that "in sanecases the madya conjugate is the same as the ngoko ... ; sanetimesit is the same as the krama" (1960:253), this structural character­ization of the "level" Madya gives the basis for the seaning dis­parity. Also, these remarks on attitude perhaps explain why the(apparently) prijaji view even of the urbanized non-prijaji stylerepertoire (as srown in chart I) shows no "honorific," i.e.,Krama. Inggil m::>dification of the level 2 Madya.

31Horne (1963; 122n. 13) also notes the existence of a Krama Desa,a "fonn of Krama Madya that is spoken in the country villages of Java;there are only a fffY{ special KD words." This is presumably on thesame order of variability as the geographically-distinct notions ofwhat is standard Krama fonn, what hypercorrect, etc., to whichPoedj~ refers in his discussion. Perhaps this imputationof a special Krama. Desa to villagers, equated with Geertz' sstylene 2 in charts I and II of 6, explains the perception thatvill~~rs have no actual Krama (level 3) usage.

As was noted above, Uhlenbeck gives eight "levels" of speech,only two subvarieties of Ngoko, "NGOKO proper and NGOKO-ANpAP." Iwould imagine that the latter is equivalent to Poedjosoeclanro' slevels 7 and 8, the fonner to level 9.

::i3U should also be noted that in the course of presentingfield-based graIIIIRt1cal rmterial, many linguists incidentallymention ernparable pronaninal usage, e .g., Ne\wJa.n (1944: 101).who, explaining a gloss notes "the polite fonn of address [in Yokuts)

243

practiced by a man toward his m::>therc:in-law; he must address her asrm'ak', 'you (dual)', and refer to her as 'amak', 'they (dual) ',"orO' Grady (1964: 60), whose glosses for various pronaninal suffixessimply indicate the equivalence of second person singular addressedto m::>ther' s brother and second pers:>n dual otherwise, for Nyangurmta(West~:rn Australia).~ be sure, both Friedrich 1966 and Ervin-Tripp 1971 refine

the speci~ication of the social dimensions of a situation, specifyingm::>re partlcular statuses and attitudinal factors. '!his m::>re fine­grained analysis shows the same fonnal property of a hierarchy ofindexical effect, however, one which Ervin-Tripp represents in termsof a !:J5eision flow-chart the outcomes of which are T vs. V.

'!hus, "power"-laden relationships, such as 'father-of' "arenow reinterpreted for purposes of T and V" as relationships of'"solidarity," such as 'sarne-family=as' (Bro.m & Gilrmn 1960:259).This reinterpretation effectively raroves the social relations of"power" fran the set controlling T : V usage, hence from thefunctiona12 danain. Note, however, the "interesting residualof the power relation in the contaJPOrary notion that the right toinitiate the reciprocal T belongs to the member of the dyad havingthe better power-based claim to say T without reciprocation." Whatmight be a ITllch IIDre realistic, non-Ideological interpretation ofthe historical change is that "power" has beccme an indirect socialvariable, indexed only by the unremarkable initiation of shiftof usage in the course of an interaction or long-tenn a:>cial relation.See the canparable use of names in Anerican address over thecourse of interactions, as described by Brown & Ford (1961:fig. 1 and discussion).

36while this is obviously not the place for a treatment ofcategorial systans of language, or of theory of markedness, I shouldrefer the puzzled non-linguist who has not been familiarized withthis stock-in-trade of linguists to the refs. SUJIIJlarized inSilverstein 1976a:116-22, on person, munber, and rmrkedness, orto Ly~J7S 1968: 79-80; 270-83.

Ccrrpare Brown & Gilman's (1960:266) observation:

Sane Friends use "thee" today; ... Interestingly many Friends ala:>use "you." "Thee" is likely to be reserved for Friends aIlDng than­saves and "you" is said to outsiders. '!his seans to be a survi­val of the solidarity semantic. In English at large of course"thou" i.s no longer used.... the forces at work sean'to have 'included a popular reaction against the radicalisn ofQuakers and Levelers ...

38Cf. French leave, Dutch treat, Dutch oven Oklahana creditc~d, all of which nationality/geographical n~plus-noun construc­tlons generally denote (hunorously) sanething not an exemplar ofthe head noun at all. '!he last example, which I ONe to Mr. Hiram::inith, of Wann Springs, Oregon, is apparently an in-joke referringb a length of rubber hose to be used as a gasoline-tank siphon franthe Cfs of other, unsuspecting residents of "Indian Territory!"

9rIhe exanples analyzed at length will show the varieties ofdirect vs. indirect rationalization, "explicit perfonnativity"

244

being the JOOSt direct (~d hence transparent to referentia~-and­

predicational JOOtivation)>> and sarething like highly. c~atlvediscontinuous intonational-contour indexes the JOOst llldlrect (~dhence very opaque to referential-and-predicational JOOtivation andthence restructuring).

40It is at this level of process that diachrony and synchronymerge» in a way related to the ancient, the later Neogranma.rian,and even Saussurean-Bloomfieldian assertion that "analogy" wasreally a fact of (synchronic) granmar.

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