William Foley

This talk: is, like many, autobiographical in origin. It grew out of my experience in study and learning an exotic language of New Guinea, Yimas, spoken by about 200 people in a village of the same name in the East Sepik Province. Yimas is a language of a type as far away as could be imagined from my native language English and the other familiar languages of western Europe. To illustrate briefly, Yimas can often express in a single word what would correspond to a sentence in English:(1) ampa-pay-ma-taI]-wura-na-UI) me to you-first- ...

This paper was presented at the 3rd LFG conference in 1998 in Brisbane, Australia. It is an early version of a paper that appeared (in abbreviated form) in 2008 (Foley, William A. 2008. The place of Philippine languages in a typology of voice systems. In Austin, Peter K. & Musgrave, Simon (eds.), <em>Voice and grammatical relations in Austronesian languages</em>, 22–44. Stanford: CSLI Publications).

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1. The Herderian equation: linguistic ideology in the West Linguistic ideology can be defined as that cluster of beliefs that a particular speech community holds about the form and function of language. Speech communities vary in size and network density, and this can be linked to variations in linguistic ideology, a good example being the contrast between most educated laypersons' general prescriptive beliefs about language, eg the standard language is best and to be emulated, with variations from this stigmatized, versus professional linguists' descriptivist views, which value all varieties equally and attempt to describe each without prejudice. Of course, even within a community such as professional linguists, there are subgroups with their own ideological beliefs about language, such as critical discourse analysts versus minimalist grammarians. It is important to understand that ideological beliefs are not theories per se, but rather the background of largely unexamined assumptions that guide the construction of specific theories, be they folk theories or scientific ones. What concerns me here are some of the central ideas about language that have guided European political and educational policies toward language over the last few centuries. These beliefs were clearly articulated by the German Romantic philosopher Herder, who argued for an essential correlation between the language of a community and their mind or spirit (German Geist). This was part of a wider German nationalist project of the 18th and 19th centuries, to forge a unified German nation-state from numerous principalities and kingdoms of central Europe that were German speaking, and this lead to a triple equation: the culture of a people (their mental functioning as a community) is essentially correlated with the language they speak and in turn should ideally correspond to a nation-state. Note that monolingual communities are the ideological focus here. The close correlation between a language and a nation-state was further emphasized during the revolutionary period following 1789. In opposition to the overthrown and discredited notion of the subject under a monarch arose the concept of

All language description and documentation is an exercise in translation. This holds true even for seeming monolingual tasks in the discipline like a French reference grammar in French or the Oxford English Dictionary, as language forms to be described and analyzed (the object language) must be done so in another from of the language (the metalanguage) in order to be claimed to be elucidated at all. Obviously, in the descriptive and documentary tasks that most field linguists of endangered languages engage in, a more radical form of translation is required: the linguistic forms of the language under study (the object language) are described and analyzed (not to mention providing metadata in the process of documentation) in a completely different language, typically a European metropolitan language like English (the metalanguage). This holds true regardless of whatever theoretical framework one wishes to cast their description in: the framework itself needs to be elucidated, eg requires a metalanguage, and the object language needs to be translated into this metalanguage before any description can take place. In practical terms, field linguists tend to be guided by two heuristic principles in their necessary tasks of translation: effability and the Conduit Metaphor. The first holds that what can be said in one language can be said in any other language, the result of an endowment of universal human reason; and the second that the relationship between a word and its meaning is like that between a container and its contents, i.e. a word or a sentence HAS a meaning, like a glass has water in it. More precisely the Conduit Metaphor can be spelled out as having the following components (Johnson 1987): 1. ideas or thoughts are objects 2. words and sentences are containers for these objects 3. communication consists in finding the right word-container for your idea-object, sending this filled container along a conduit (e.g. writing) or through space (e.g. speech) to the hearer, who must then take the idea-object out of the word-container These two principles gel together so that the task of translation is mainly seen as one in which the translator needs to align the containers in the object language and metalanguage, as effability guarantees that there will be a match up in the contents of these containers across languages. This view of translation, albeit not one often explicitly articulated, but taken as a working methodology, is simply not tenable, as this paper will endeavor to demonstrate. Even if one assumes a principle of effability, Quine (1960, 1969) has pointed out that it is never possible to establish a unique container in the metalanguage to correspond to that of the object language; this is the Quinean principle of the indeterminacy of translation: there is no unique optimal fit of data to analytical metalanguage; rather a range of interpretive conceptual schemes may be entertained as compatible with the data. Fundamental to all of Quine's philosophy is the idea that our sensible experience of the world underdetermines our response to it, in the form of those conceptual schemes we

Interclausal relations in Papuan languages and in particular their prototyical clause chaining structures have long presented serious descriptive problems. These have been analyzed variously as instances of subordination, coordination, and even a third unique type of relationship, cosubordination. This paper argues that clause chaining structures are actually a type of coordination, but distinguished from familiar types of coordination by the type of constituent coordinated, S versus IP. The parametric variation found in clause chaining constructions across Papuan languages is in turn accounted for in terms of the types of functional heads of verbal inflections, negation, mood, tense, illocutionary force, which head the individual IPs conjoined in clause chains. This paper presents a revision of the theory of clause linkage, in particular the theory of nexus, first developed in Foley and Van Valin (1984) and restated in Van Valin and La Polla (1997) and Van Valin (2005). The original theory proposed three categories of nexus, the traditional ones of subordination and coordination and a new type, cosubordination. Subordination and coordination were distinguished along the traditional lines of embedded versus non-embedded. For our purposes here, we will define an embedded clause as one which functions as a constituent, either core or oblique (Andrews 2007; Foley 2007), of another clause, the main or matrix clause. Conventionally, grammarians have called embedded subordinate clauses which function as core arguments complements, and those which function as oblique constituents, adverbial clauses, but in our view this is not the most perspicacious terminology because it obscures their overall similarity, a similarity clearly brought out in the structure of many Papuan languages. For that reason, in this paper we will refer to both types simply as subordinate clauses and note the level of embedding, core versus oblique. Clauses linked in a coordinate nexus are not in an asymmetrical relationship of embedded versus matrix clause, but rather are joined at the same level, strung along rather like beads on a string. Designating a clause by the exocentric category S (Bresnan 2001), we can represent the contrast between subordinate and coordinate nexus as Figure 1:

This paper looks at the processes involved in the genesis of three pidgins of New Guinea. I will argue that the main principle at work in the formation of the morphosyntax of pidgins is a general human capacity for language simplification, but that these processes of simplification are subject both to the effects of specific linguistic features in the local multilingual contact situation that gives rise to the pidgin and to constraints resulting from a universal linguistic endowment. By a comparative look across a range of morphosyntactic features at the processes of simplification that produced three unrelated pidgins of New Guinea, Yimas Pidgin, Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin, the article exemplifies some of the types of structures that can result in pidgins from this general human capacity for language simplification, sifted through both local conditions and universal constraints.

A central question posed by this volume is how does language documentation differ from language description (Austin, this volume; Himmelmann 1998:166): 'the aim of language documentation is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community. Linguistic practices and traditions are manifest in two ways: (1) the observable linguistic behavior, manifest in everyday interaction between members of the speech community, and (2) the native speakers' metalinguistic knowledge, manifest in their ability to provide interpretations and systemizations for linguistic units and events. This definition of the aim of a language documentation differs fundamentally from the aim of language descriptions: a language description aims at the record of A LANGUAGE, with 'language' being understood as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules that constitute the invariant underlying structure of the utterances observable in a speech community'. The main point of this paper is to take issue with such a rigid Saussurean dichotomy and to argue further that setting up the distinction in just this way is a reflection of linguistics' own, and largely unacknowledged (but see Harris (1980)), Western ideology of language, as reflected in its cultural practices of normative dictionaries and reference grammars. i.e. a set of elements and a set of rules à la the Himmelmann (1998;166) quote above. These cultural practices are largely, as Harris (1980) points out, the result of the rise of vernacular literacy movements in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so that scientific thinking about language in linguistics is very much an artifact of its practitioners' own literate practices and the centuries long tradition of literacy which has preceded them. Literacy leads to the construction of powerful normative pressures in a number of areas: not only are prescriptive cultural products like grammars and dictionaries highly valued, but also the end products of literacy, literate texts, are given greater weighting over oral speech acts. When a linguist moves to a fieldwork situation, she inevitably and mostly unconsciously brings her native ideology of language with her (to a significant extent canonized by her training in linguistics). But preliterate communities are unlikely to share her assumptions. Although recognizing the lack of literacy practices, many fieldworkers will nonetheless through the filter of their own native language ideology value some text types over others as sources of data, narratives over conversations, ritual language over gossip, songs over curses, and use these as their primary bases for the construction of their own (ultimately normative, especially in the most endangered or moribund language communities) grammars and dictionaries. It is truly remarkable how most text collections in the languages of traditional communities around the world have such a high percentage of narratives, sometimes only these. Clearly, the linguists recording these have valorized them on the basis of their close analogy with literate texts in their own cultural tradition, an identification aided no doubt by cultural products like Aesop's Fables in that tradition. Whether the native community shares this differential

The New Guinea region is the most linguistically diverse region in the world, with some thousand languages in less than 900,000 sq km. There are about three dozen language families and close to that number of language isolates, although two very different language families dominate, the coastal Austronesian languages and the montane Trans New Guinea family, each with about 300 languages. The other smaller families are largely restricted to the northern lowlands. Typologically the languages exhibit enormous variation and many unusual properties. Vowel systems in which central vowels predominate and consonantal systems lacking fricatives and rarer still, nasals are attested. Morphological types range from isolating to polysynthetic, and most languages are head marking. Verbs normally carry more complex inflection than nouns. Of nominal categories, gender is often exuberantly elaborated, but surprisingly case is not, the weak development of which is an areal feature in contrast to Australian languages on

... 2000. 29:357-404 Copyright ? 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved THE LANGUAGES OF NEW GUINEA William A. Foley Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2006; email: [email protected] ...

CiteSeerX - Document Details (Isaac Councill, Lee Giles): man bought fish in the store.' (b) bi-bilh-in ng lalake sa tindahan ang isda IRR-buy-VC CORE man OBL store fish `The man will buy the fish in the store.' (c) bi-bilh-an ng lalake ng isda ang tindahan IRR-buy-VC CORE man ...

Pidgins and creoles have been the center of linguistic controversy for over a century now (Coelho 1880-6; Schuchardt 1883, 1889, 1909) and give no indication of yielding that position today (Bickerton 1981, 1984). Many of the issues of a hundred years ago remain unresolved, and much of current discussion was anticipated by Schuchardt in his many articles. Even standard definitions of pidginization and creolization have not been accepted by all scholars concerned with the field (see, for example, the conflicting definitions in ...

Publication View. 5105849. Comparative syntax in Austronesian. (1976). Foley, William Auguste. Abstract. Thesis (Ph. D. in Linguistics)--Univ. of California, June 1976.. Bibliography: leaves 234-241. Publication details. Publisher, [Berkeley],. ...

This is the first comprehensive textbook in anthropological linguistics to be published for very many years. It provides a remarkably complete and authoritative review of research questions which span the disciplines of linguinitics and anthropology, yet presents a coherent, unified, biologically based view of this cross disciplinary field.