Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (27 page)

But form is not all there is to human communication. Surely human communication differs from that of other species by more than a larger set of sounds, gestures, or words. There must be more to human communication than that. We are able to discuss much more complex matters and a much wider range of subjects than any other species. How do we do that? Two ways. The first and most obvious way is that we are smarter than other species. Human brains are the highest cognitive accomplishment of nature on this planet, so far as we know. The expression of this greater complexity of human thinking and communication requires tools that go beyond the tools available to other species. Linguists vary as to what they think these tools are, though there is wide consensus about several of them. My own vote for the most important tool goes for what the late linguist Charles Hockett labeled “duality of patterning.” There are different ways to conceive of this. But basically humans organize their sounds into patterns and then organize these sound patterns into grammatical patterns of words and sentences. This layered organization of human speech is what enables us to communicate so much more than any other species, given our larger, but still finite, brains.

We can illustrate the organization of sounds looking at an example similar (but not identical) to one we have already seen, using the simple words
pin, pan, bin,
and
spin. Pin
is formed by the sequence
p
+
i
+
n.
Think of each of these three positions of letters as “slots” and the letters themselves (
p, i, n
) as “fillers.” The slots represent the horizontal, or linear, organization of the word from left to right on the page or first to last as spoken sounds emerge from the mouth. The fillers are the vertical organization of the word. If we add a unit to the linear organization, we get a longer word, such as
spin,
by adding
s
to the front of
pin.
If we change things around in the vertical organization, we get different words of the same size, like
pan
from
pin,
when we substitute an
a
for the
i
in
pin,
and so on.

This is more complex than it might seem, though, because not just any filler or extension of a word is possible. We can add an
s
to
pin
to get
spin,
for example, but we cannot add a
t,
to get
tpin.
We can replace
i
with
e
to get
pen,
but we cannot place an
s
there to get
psn,
at least not if we want to form English words. This sound-based organization of the language is referred to as phonology. The physical nature of the individual sounds used in the organization is, roughly, phonetics. This is the first part of duality—the organization of sounds into words.

I should add immediately, however, that humans are resourceful, and that if for some reason they are unable to, or choose not to, use speech sounds, another channel of communication, sign language, is available. In sign languages the forms corresponding to sounds in spoken language are gestures or signs. Linguists have discovered that although the physical nature of gestures is obviously different from the physical nature of sounds, the organization of these elements into words and larger units, such as phrases and sentences, follows similar principles. Thus we can have a conception of phonology that includes both gestures and sounds.

Whether we use gestures or sounds, we need more than just words to have a grammar. Since grammar is essential to human communication, speakers of all human languages organize words into larger units—phrases, sentences, stories, conversations, and so forth. This form of compositionality is called grammar by some and syntax by others. No other creature has anything remotely like duality of patterning or compositionality. Yet
all
humans have this.

The Pirahãs certainly do. So consider the Pirahã sentence
Kóhoi kabatií kohóaipí
(Kóhoi eats the tapir). The Pirahãs put the object before the verb, a pattern we find in many languages, so
kabatií
means “tapir” and
kohóaipí
means “eat.” This shows us that Pirahã organizes its phonemes into words and its words into sentences. So the Pirahã language has duality of patterning and compositionality. It is hard to imagine a human language without these.

The most crucial component of language to my way of thinking, though, is meaning. Meaning is the gyroscope of grammar. I like this gyroscope metaphor because it expresses the belief of a large number of linguists, including me, that a slight difference in meaning, like the slight motion of a gyroscope, can lead to a large difference in the attitude of the rocket or the form of the sentence.

In other words, language is about meaning. We begin with a meaning and we encase it in grammar. All of grammar is guided by meaning. But what is meaning? That question has bothered thinkers for millennia. At the risk of biting off much more than I can chew, here’s my sketch of the core parts.

Philosophers and linguists talk about meaning in terms of its two parts, sense and reference. Reference is the use of language by the speaker and the hearer to agree on a specific object that they are talking about. So when two people in conversation use, say, the nouns
boy, Bill, you,
these words refer to entities in the real world. We know the boy or the person named Bill or who “you” is when we talk (or there will be severe miscommunication until both the hearer and the speaker agree on who or what they are referring to).

On the other hand, there are nouns that do not refer to anything. When I say that “John rode the unicorn,” it is pretty clear that
unicorn
doesn’t refer to anything in the real world. Likewise, if I say that “I will keep tabs on you,”
tabs
doesn’t actually refer to any object in this expression—it is part of an idiom. And there are things other than nouns that refer to things; for example, in
I had built a house, had built
includes a reference to a point of past completion. In
The house is yellow, yellow
refers to a particular color quality. There is disagreement on what it means to refer to things (some linguists deny that verbs and adjectives can refer) or how important this property is for defining parts of speech.

The other basic component of meaning is sense. We can understand sense as having two subparts. First, it includes the way that speakers think about entities, actions, and qualities—all those things we use in our speech. (What do I have in mind when I say “big,” for example, in
big butterfly,
versus
big loss
or
big elephant
?) Second, sense is about the relations between words and the ways that they are used.

Think of what
break
means in examples like
John broke his arm, John broke the ice in the frigid conversation, John broke the sentence down for me,
or
John broke into the house,
for example. The only way that we can know what
break
means is to know how it is used. And using a word means selecting a particular context, a set of background assumptions shared by the speaker and the hearer, including how particular words should be used, and the other words that the word in question is used with.

That is meaning in a nutshell: the way a word or a sentence is used, the way it relates to other words and sentences, and what speakers agree that a word or a sentence points to in the world. And the Pirahãs, like all humans, mean things when they speak. But that doesn’t mean that we all use the same meanings. Like all humans, what Pirahãs mean when they talk is severely circumscribed by their values and beliefs.

We learn, therefore, when we study words from any language, that we must understand each word at various levels simultaneously. We must understand a word’s cultural relevance and use. We must understand its sound structure. And we must understand how the word is used in context, in specific sentences and stories. Most linguists agree on these three levels of understanding the word. But Pirahã has also taught us something else. It has taught us that not only can the meaning of individual words be the result of culture, such as the closely related words for
friend
and
enemy,
but that the very sounds of the words, whether they are whistled, hummed, and so on, can themselves be determined by culture—and this latter lesson, which is abundantly illustrated in other languages, has not been discussed much in the linguistic literature. Pirahã gives us an extremely clear example for future linguistic investigations.

13                  How Much Grammar Do People Need?

I
n
Mrs. Doubtfire,
the Robin Williams character phones the Sally Field character and says, in reference to an ad, “I . . . am . . . job?”Besides being funny in the context of the film, both the movie characters and the audience know immediately that what the speaker
means
is “I want the job you have advertised.”

How does the audience know this? It isn’t in the words or the way they are put together in a sentence, not completely anyway. The relevant meaning that someone wants a job comes rather from the context, in a movie or in life, and the culture in which the sentence is spoken. That is, grammar is a component of communication but it is not all there is to communication. In the
Mrs. Doubtfire
example, the grammar is almost all wrong and yet the correct meaning is still communicated.

When we learn to convey meaning in another language, our first step, like Robin Williams’s, is not grammar but culture. To appreciate how culture can affect language (even effect it on occasion), think about the process of learning another language.

What does this task entail? If you learn to pronounce French vowels perfectly and come to completely understand and control the meaning of every French word, can you rightly claim to speak French? Would pronunciation and knowledge of words be enough to tell you the appropriate sentence to use in a particular social setting? Would this knowledge suffice to read Voltaire in the original like a French intellectual? The answer to these questions is no. Language is not only more than the sum of its parts (words and sounds and sentences)—it is by itself insufficient for full communication and understanding without knowledge of an enveloping culture.

Culture guides us all in the meanings that we perceive in the world around us, and language is part of the world around us. An American is not likely to talk about the behavior of the Amazonian bush dog (
Speothos venaticus
)—these dogs are unknown to most Americans. This is an obvious way in which culture and experience restrict our “universe of discourse,” the things that we talk about. But there are often less obvious, more interesting ways in which culture affects our language. In the content of our stories, culture plays the major role in comprehension.

For example, comparing Pirahãs with Americans, Americans usually talk about seeing ghosts only in fiction. This is not because most Americans have not heard of ghosts, but because they do not believe in them. And even among those Americans who claim to believe in ghosts, very few claim to have actually seen a ghost. This is fairly recent in the history of English. In the colonial days, Americans talked often about supernatural events that they had witnessed—as transcripts of witch trials reveal. Culture affects the way that we talk in some instances. Most of us agree on this.

Like Americans, Pirahãs restrict their conversation to conform to their cultural experiences and values.

One of these values is the nonimportation of outside subject matter for conversations. The Pirahãs, for example, will not discuss how to build a house out of bricks, because Pirahãs do not build brick houses. They might well describe a brick house that they have seen, in response to a question from an outsider or to a question from another Pirahã just after their arrival back from the city. But after that a brick house wouldn’t arise spontaneously in their conversation.

By and large, Pirahãs do not import foreign thoughts, philosophies, or technology. They do enjoy using labor-saving devices, such as mechanized manioc grinders and small outboard motors for their canoes, but they see these things as elements “gathered” from outsiders, with outsiders responsible for the fuel, care, and replacement required. They have rejected in the past any device that would require change in their knowledge or their practices. If such devices cannot simply be appended to Pirahãs’ traditional ways of doing things, they are rejected.

For example, a motor may be used if it attaches easily to a canoe and helps the Pirahãs continue traditional activities, because the Pirahãs have seen motors used by caboclos. And Pirahãs consider the caboclo culture to be a subset of their own; caboclos are just another part of the world around them. A fishing pole, on the other hand, would not be used because it requires a way of fishing that the Pirahãs do not observe either among themselves or among caboclos. Pirahã verbs for fishing mean literally “to spear fish” and “to pull out fish by hand.” There is no word for pulling out fish with a pole. They are not interested in skills demonstrated only by Americans. Americans are not part of their normal environment. They have gotten to know only six Americans, all missionaries, and a smattering of very short-term visitors, in the past fifty years. You might hear Pirahãs talk about how to install a motor that was given to them, for example: “The foreigner said to attach the propeller after the motor is seated in the canoe.” But you won’t hear them talk about how to use a rod and reel, even though Americans have given them these devices and shown them how to use them.

To talk about things that have no place in their own culture, such as other gods, Western ideas of germs, and so on, would require the Pirahãs to adopt a change in life and thought. So they avoid such talk. There are some apparent exceptions. For example, the Pirahãs do talk occasionally about caboclo beliefs—but these beliefs have long been part of their own environment, since caboclos talk to them about their beliefs frequently. Such beliefs have become subjects of conversation after centuries of contact, gradually becoming part of the Pirahãs’ environment.

In this sense, the Pirahãs’ discourse is more esoteric than exoteric, more directed to topics that do not challenge Pirahãs’ views. Of course, all peoples are like this to some degree. It is the extent to which this is enforced among the Pirahãs that makes them stand out from, say, Western societies, in which discussion of new ideas and foreign ways is also not generally highly valued.
^*

There is no one single example that illustrates esoteric versus exoteric communication. Rather, esoteric communication is a product of narrow ranges of culturally acceptable ways of talking and topics for talking. The information conveyed is new, but not novel, in the sense that it fits general expectations. One American can say on the radio, “The Martians are landing down the street,” and other Americans can react in shock to this entirely new threat.

But not only can Americans say that the Martians are coming, they do say all sorts of things like that, every day. The Pirahãs could say that the Martians are coming, if they had seen any, but they won’t unless they do. Pirahãs talk about fishing, hunting, other Pirahãs, spirits they have seen, and so on—about experiences that they live daily. This is not because they are not creative but because this is a cultural value. It is a very conservative culture.

W
hat does grammar entail ultimately, beyond culture, general human intelligence, and meaning? How much grammar does one need? A big part of grammar, once again, is projecting the meaning of a verb onto a sentence. On the other hand, forming sentences is more complicated than just filling in the meaning of the sentence’s verb. One of the additional devices that many grammars call upon is modification.

Modification narrows the meaning of a word or a phrase. It complicates the meaning and the form by adding words and meanings that are not required by the verb. So I can say, “John gave the book to the boy,”or “John gave the book to the
fat
boy,” or “
Yesterday,
John gave the book to the boy,” or “John gave the book to the boy
in the club.
”

The italicized portions of the sentences are not required by the meaning of the verb. They only limit further the meaning of what is being talked about. This is modification in its briefest essence.

Another aspect of language that can affect grammar is what Chomsky often calls displacement, uttering a sentence that is grammatical, but where the words are not in their expected order—they are instead in different places in the sentence for pragmatic effect, that is, to alter the relationship between new and old information or important versus background or less important information in a story.

If we look at a couple of English sentences we can get an idea about displacement and its functions. If I say “John saw Bill,” I use the order that we expect as speakers of English. The subject,
John,
comes first, followed by the verb, then the direct object,
Bill.
If I say, though, that “Bill was seen by John,” the verb
see
is lacking a direct object.
Bill
is the subject in this sentence, and the former subject,
John,
is the object of the preposition
by.
The contrast between the first, active-voice sentence and the second, passive-voice sentence is related, according to most studies, to the function of the two sentences in English stories. For example, we might use the passive voice when Bill is the topic of our story and the active voice when John is the topic.

Another example of displacement is found in the different moods of a sentence, such as declarative, interrogative, and imperative. If I say, “The man is in the room,” the order is again what we expect for this kind of sentence. But if I make this a question, the verb,
is,
is displaced to the beginning of the sentence, as in “Is the man in the room?” In this type of question, the verb precedes the subject, whereas the verb normally follows the subject. Or we can make this into a different type of question, one that asks for more information, and say, “Where is the man?” In this type of question, both the verb and the thing being questioned precede the subject—they are displaced from their normal positions.

Most of Chomsky’s research career has been concerned with understanding how constituents of the sentence can be displaced in this way. He has never been interested in why they are displaced (except to say that it is for “pragmatic reasons” or some such), only in the mechanics of how the displacement works.

But in esoteric societies of intimates like the Pirahãs’ society, displacement can be rare or nonexistent. There is none or nearly none in Pirahã. The story and the context communicate the sorts of things that displacement handles in English. And many other languages are the same.

One possibility, a possibility explored at length in Chomsky’s theory, is that when we don’t hear displacement it is still there, at an abstract level of grammar that Chomsky calls “logical form,” and that the grammar of such a language is no different from English’s, except that you can hear the displacement in English but not, say, in Pirahã. But we might legitmately criticize Chomsky’s theory on this score for being more baroque than is necessary. If there is a way to understand sentences without displacement at any level, abstract or otherwise, then perhaps grammar is less important than we imagined.

And in fact there are many theories that can accept languages like Pirahã, languages without displacement and with very little modification, at face value, with no need for “logical form” and other such abstractions.

I suggest that we get on with our discussion of Pirahã without the assumption of abstract levels and without an inflated sense of the importance of grammar in language and cognition and see how far this gets us.

Maybe we don’t need much grammar after all in an esoteric culture. If this were true, then we would have a way of better understanding the relative simplicity of Pirahã grammar. If my cultural suggestions are plausible, then there is nothing primitive about the Pirahãs cognitive abilities. There is nothing bizarre about them or their language. Rather, their language and grammar perfectly fit their esoteric culture. And if this is on the right track, we have begun to see the need for a novel and fresh approach to the understanding of human grammar.

In this approach grammar would neither be as necessary nor as autonomous as Chomsky has claimed for more than forty years. To take one example, Robert Van Valin of the University of Düsseldorf has developed an alternative to Chomsky’s theory in which the latter’s meaning-independent grammar plays a much-reduced role in the overall understanding of human language and in which grammar is driven largely by meaning. He calls his theory “Role and Reference Grammar.” There is a natural place in Van Valin’s theory for using culture to explain aspects of grammar. So, although this has not yet been developed, the theory might provide a comfortable home for the ideas I am proposing here.

Van Valin is not the only one to develop a well-articulated alternative to universal grammar. William Croft of the University of New Mexico has developed a theory in which it is claimed that all the commonalities among human languages are really commonalities of human cognition across our species and require nothing so baroque as a Chomskyan universal grammar. Croft refers to his theory as “Radical Construction Grammar.”

A study of Pirahã supports these alternative approaches even while it suggests that they are not quite complete. As we examine more languages like Pirahã, we should be able to develop a stronger theory, based on the foundation of these important pioneering works. Such a theory might provide a more likely source for human grammar than the universal grammar of Chomsky (which Pinker calls “the language instinct”). The universal grammar/language instinct hypothesis simply has nothing of interest to tell us about how culture and grammar interact, which now seems to be vital to any complete understanding of language.