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In 1940 the famous linguist Benjamin Whorf analyzed the grammar of complex words in Shawnee using the notion of figure and ground, which he took from gestalt psychology. Whorf found typical figures in Shawnee stem words such as pap- 'roomy configuration' and kish- 'warm, hot'. He found typical grounds in suffixes such as -peewe 'hair, feathers' and -aapo 'liquid,' and he observed that figures precede grounds in Shawnee word grammar, just as they do in English sentence grammar. The opposite order prevails in Navajo.
The example gives us a taste of how grammar reveals patterns of thought, which was the question that led me to the topic of language and culture. An exposure to the writings of Benjamin Whorf in grad school at the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s convinced me that the grammar of each language would reveal a distinctive way of thought. But the approach to grammar that was widely taught at the time was the mathematically inspired "generative linguistics." I studied it, but found it barren, in part because it focused on a quest for rules of word order applying to all languages and in part because the proposed "syntactic universals" were implausible. The meanings of words and grammatical constructions occupied only a marginal position in these mathematically inspired theories. Meanings specific to another culture existed outside the theory altogether. As one consequence, Whorf was also being marginalized along with the whole theory of linguistic relativism.
Seeking more engagement with meaning in language, I turned to the contemporary anthropological approaches. They went by such technical sounding terms as "ethnoscience" and "componential analysis". And they were technical. Some researchers tried to apply generative assumptions to fields of meaning. That is, they assumed that you could understand a domain such as kinship terms by identifying a few recurring features of meaning (e.g. sex, generation, lineality) in their definitions. Give each feature a symbol and write rules that recombine the symbols and generate appropriate native language terms for each type of relative.
I tried to apply these approaches to the study of two languages in the Salish family of northwestern North America, commonly known for historical reasons as Shuswap and Coeur d'Alene. Of course they have their own names for their languages, and their names are more interesting than the English names. I found that their terms for plants, places, and anatomy resisted arrangement into tidy tables organized by features, and no small set of formulas could be devised to generate terms from meanings. Each domain had its own organizing principles. I published these results in journals such as Syesis, Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of Ethnobiology, and American Ethnologist and in ponderous edited volumes. The research was exciting then, and I still find it so. Some of this is discussed and referenced in Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics.
In the late-1980s two books revived my enthusiasm for Whorfian linguistics. These were the daunting and rigorous Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. I, by Ronald Langacker and the much more accessible Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff. Langacker later produced more generally readable texts, such as my own favorite: Grammar and Conceptualization (1999). Langacker and Lakoff were developing a theory they termed "cognitive linguistics". They didn't propose universals of word order, but they identified universals in how people frame their experiences. These frames or "schemas" become part of linguistic symbols and networks of symbols. Langacker proposed that in every language certain aspects of attention and cognition are symbolized in grammar. These include relative prominence, figure and ground, process, granularity, and complex categories. Lakoff discussed complex categories, universal schemas of up and down, the trajectories of objects, and the importance of metaphor and metonymy. For both theorists, meaning was very much a part of grammar. I reread Whorf and realized that he would see the theory as an elaboration of his own approach. Other notable theorists whose ideas I found particularly instructive include, in no particular order, Charles Fillmore (frames), Len Talmy (force dynamics and spatial schemas), Wallace Chafe (meaning in grammar), Joan Bybee (nouns and verbs), Eve Sweetser and Elizabeth Traugott (language change), Zoltán Kövecses (emotion schemas), Dirk Geeraerts (historiography), Michael Tomasello and Chris Sinha (intersubjectivity, development), John Haviland and Stephen Levinson (spatial orientation), Naomi Quinn (proposition-schemas) and John Lucy (linguistic relativity). Fine case studies are being produced by David Tuggy (Nahuatl), Eugene Casad (Cora), Ning Yu (Chinese), and others.
Though Lakoff and Langacker emphasized the importance of universal experiences and thought processes, they also recognized the importance of cultural influences on the thoughts of individuals. Each society offers certain kinds of experiences and organizes meanings according to what is given prominence in the culture and according to how things and events are thought to be connected. Hence, cognitive linguistic theory offered the promise of a new approach to the study of language-and-culture. On the one hand, one studies grammar to learn how it reflects important universal ideas and ideas of importance in specific cultures; on the other hand, one studies culture to uncover frames and schemas that may have grammatical significance. Thus, one discovers that the eight to ten classes of nouns found in some form in every Bantu language (e.g. Kiswahili, Chishona, Gikuyu) reflect the general importance of ideas about such things as ancestors who send rain, the spirits of deceased chiefs who inhabit the bodies of lions, and the domestic activity of pounding grain in a mortar and pestle. Nouns connected to one of these schemas take the same prefixes and demonstrative pronouns. Typically the noun classes are named by linguists with handy glosses such as "persons," "animals," "things," or "abstract entities," but a more thorough study of the meanings of terms in each class reveals connections to central schemas, as was noticed by the famous archaeologist Louis B. Leakey in his grammar of Gikuyu. Many of these schemas that govern grammar are what we would call "scenarios," which are conventional sequences of events such as the daily pounding of grain in Shona or, in Gikuyu folklore, the role of the chameleon, who failed to bring the news that Ngai conferred immortality on humans.
Now we have a way forward by which we can learn volumes about the connections between language and thought. We can use our study of cultural schemas to illuminate a particular area of grammar, which might be something as complicated as a set of noun classifiers or as deceptively simple as a single preposition. I used the culture-first approach in several studies of noun classes in the Shona language of Zimbabwe. Or we can put grammar first, perhaps making a collection of the different ways one can use a certain prefix. I applied this approach to the prefix ka- in Pilipino (Tagalog), finding that it shows up in several distinctive grammatical patterns ("constructions"), each of which has particular meanings. Looking at all the usages, we find that Pilipino ka- operates somewhat like the English suffix -er in drawing our attention to something connected to the image conjured up by the root word that it modifies. A "roofer" is not the roof; it's the one who does the roofing. We try to discover the kinds of meaningful connections that have significance for grammar. This introduction of cultural meaning into cognitive linguistics while raising the prominence of culture in the theory is the approach that I call "cultural linguistics." In teaching this approach at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, I found that both graduate and undergraduate students took it up with enthusiasm, and much of their work has been published. For my part, I am currently retired from teaching. I hold the title of Professor Emeritus.
There is much more to cultural linguistics. It can also be applied to questions of how people think and talk about their own discourse, so our approach unifies such traditionally disjoint linguistic subfields as "semantics," "syntax," "discourse," and "sociolinguistics." It has interesting applications in phonology and applied linguistics. Anyone attempting to learn a language will benefit from cultural linguistics and find it useful for tying together language and cultural studies. Much research has been done--more in cognitive linguistics than in cultural--but given the vast and unifying implications of the theory, it's safe to say that the work has hardly begun. I hope you will consider it and find a way to participate in the advancement of the field or to take advantage of its theory and findings.
