ETHNOSEMANTICS

John Leavitt

Introduction

What is meaning? And, more specifically, do all humansmeanthe same things by words that can be used successfully to point to the same thing?

There is an urban legend that says that when Captain Cook first visited Australia, he saw an animal he had never seen before hopping along. He asked one of the locals what the animal was called, and the answer was‘kangaroo’. Turns out that‘kangaroo’in the Australian language means‘I don’t know’.¹

This is, apparently, a completely false story. The word would indeed seem to come from Captain Cook’sfirst encounters with Australian native people, butgaŋurruin Guugu Yimidhirr turns out to mean – a kangaroo, ‘a large black or grey kangaroo, probably specifically the male Macropus robustus’(Dixonet al., 1990: 67–8), also known as a wallaroo. But this real history illustrates the point better than the false one. The source word for‘kangaroo’was in fact an adequate indicator of the animal that went hopping by that day. This still tells us very little about what the word gaŋurru, or indeed what a maleMacropus robustus,meantto the people Cook met. We have some idea of what it means to English-speaking North Americans: a kangaroo is an amusing animal with a funny name. You can go see it in person in a zoo, and it’s often to be seen on television nature programmes; it hops, carries its babies in a pouch–making stuffed kangaroos a double gift for children: you get a big one and a little one for the price of one–and boxes ferociously, always beating Bugs Bunny in cartoons. It is very likely, to say the least, that the kangaroo, and the wordgaŋurru,meant something very different to the people who gave it that name– and who, for instance, hunted and ate them. But it depends on what you mean by‘mean’.

In the history of Western theories of the meaning of meaning we see a kind of pendulum swing between, on the one hand, approaches that assume or seek to discover what ‘meaning’ means in general for human beings, and on the other, those that take as central the diversity of human languages and cultures and try to discover the patterning of meaning in each case.

Hence the difference betweensemanticsas a general science of meaning andethnosemanticsas the exploration of particular meaningful universes.

Ethnosemantics

Most textbooks on semantics begin by defining the field as the study or science of meaning (Ullmann, 1957: 1; Palmer, 1976: 1; Lyons, 1977: 1; Saeed, 2003: 3; Goddard, 2011: 1;

cf. Tamba, 2007: 7)–some of them put the definition in the title (Ullmann, 1962); it has come to constitute an important aspect of linguistics, philosophy, and other disciplines. This inter- disciplinarity is reflective of the many meanings of the word‘meaning’and other words that are its semantic neighbours, to use the metaphor of the semanticfield that was popular for a time (see below). For while everybody feels that they know what meaning means, its many partial synonyms in fact cover a lot of semantic ground. In English, meaning is not quite the same thing as sense, signification, significance, or import; in French one hassens (which also means

‘direction’),signification,signifiance,acception; the colloquial usage translating‘to mean’, as in‘What does X mean?’, is vouloir dire ‘to want to say’. In German, the division between Sinn, often translated meaning or sense or, more technically, intension, and Bedeutung, often translated as meaning or reference or extension, has been the source of over a century of philosophical discussion since Frege.

The word semantics,first used in the late nineteenth century, derives from the Greeksemainein

‘to say, indicate’, itself from séma‘sign’. These are also the sources of the term semiotics, the science of signs. Semantics translates the Frenchsémantique, introduced in 1883 by Michel Bréal as a name for a postulated linguistic science that would study the transformations of meaning along with the transformations of sounds and words. A parallel project, but much more closely tied to classical atomistic historical linguistics, had existed in Germany since the beginning of the century under the name semasiology (history of GermanSemasiologie and Frenchsémantiquein Nerlich, 1992).

For its part, the addition of the prefix ethno-, from the Greekéthnos, a people or a nation, to afield of study indicates a comparative, cross-cultural extension of thefield, with the implied or explicit criticism that the discipline as constituted without the prefix does not truly live up to a claim of universality, but in fact represents the unchallenged formalization of modern Western assumptions. Thus ethnosemantics would be the study of meaning across cultures, whether by looking at differences in what is meant by words with the same apparent referent (e.g., a grey kangaroo), by discovering ways of organizing knowledge or theories about the attribution of meaning, and/or by seeking to identify universals in what people signify and the ways they do so. In this broad sense, ethnosemantics covers much of what is studied in cultural and social anthropology, linguistics, history, and comparative religion.

In spite of this vastness of potential reference, the term ethnosemantics is most commonly used to label a primarily North American intellectual movement, also called ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology (although ‘cognitive anthropology’has come to designate a much wider field: seeChapter 26this volume), that played an important role in the interface between linguistics and anthropology particularly from the mid 1950s into the 1970s. More recently, the term has been revived in the attempt to locate universal semantic primitives and map their deployment in different languages and societies (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1996).

Here I would like to use ‘ethnosemantics’ in a somewhat wider sense, given both the potential breadth of meaning of the term itself and the historical links of‘classical ethnosemantics’ with what went earlier, as well as its contrast with what came later. I will enlarge the discussion to include two other major intellectual movements: the linguistically inspired anthropology developed by Franz Boas and his students during thefirst four decades of the twentieth century;

and the parallel and largely contemporary school in German linguistics and literary studies called, variously, neo-Humboldtian, neo-Romantic, word-field theory, or content-oriented linguistics.

The key question in putting an ethno- before semantics is whether meanings are universal, either innate in the mind or given by the world, or whether they vary from language to language, society to society. In thefirst view, ethnosemantics would be a way to verify and specify general

semantics; in the second, each‘semantic system’(Goodenough, 1956: 195) requires independent analysis, and all universal bets are off. In this, the questions behind ethnosemantics, and its different formulations, reconnect with some of the fundamental questions of Western thought since the Renaissance, pitting universalists against pluralists of various stripes (Leavitt, 2011). And semantics as afield, at least as it is practised in anthropology and linguistics, has continued to veer between accepting and neglecting or rejecting the importance – or existence– of a plurality of diverse systems of meaning. Here, of course, I will be making no attempt at a history of semantic theory (but see Ullmann, 1962; Nerlich, 1992; Larrivée, 2008) or a general presentation of the field, but looking at the rise, fall, and arguments of some schools that can properly be called ethnosemantic.

Let us note that the disappearance of these schools does not result from their having been proved mistaken, but from broader shifts of intellectual trends of the kind Roy D’Andrade (1995: 3) has called‘agenda hopping’.

Boasian cultural semantics

In his introduction to the major collection of articles from the ethnosemantics movement of the 1960s, Stephen Tyler (1969) notes that‘most’earlier anthropology had presumed the universality of our categories and simply sought to map other people’s categories onto these. The one great exception that he recognizes is Franz Boas (1969: 6, 20 n. 6). In fact, the general thrust of the comparative cultural linguistics practised by Boas (1858–1942) from the late 1880s, and by his students Edward Sapir, Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, was clearly ethnosemantic in that it sought to identify differences in meaning at all levels of language beyond the phoneme: among lexemes, and especially among differing grammatical categories.

Boas, like the neo-Humboldtians in Germany (see below), drew on a series of primarily German precursors–Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Romantics–who had both conceived languages as distinctive coherent systems and had held that formulation in signs was a necessary part of human conceptualization. These views contrasted with the main traditions in Western philo- sophy (Descartes, Locke, Kant), which saw thought and conceptualization as preceding their formulation in words, and in language study, which saw sounds and words as isolated units changing through time. The systemic view of distinct languages and the requirement that concepts be conceived through such systems meant that for Herderet al., the world was seen as a multitude of worlds, each people/nation/culture/language as an indivisible whole expressing a unique spirit. This multitudinous view of the universe was particularly operationalized in the work of Humboldt, who maintained that each language or language type organized meaning in its own ways and sought to document these ways, analysing dozens of languages that were as different as possible from each other.

The‘Humboldtian stream’in linguistics (Koerner, 1977) was carried on as a minority tendency through the nineteenth century, as against the majority of practitioners of Indo-European-based historical linguistics. It was maintained particularly in the linguistics of Heymann Steinthal and the cultural psychology of his collaborator Moritz Lazarus, who together edited theZeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, ‘Journal of the Psychology of Peoples’, starting in 1859 (Trautmann-Waller, 2004, 2006). Boas, trained in Germany before going to the United States, came out of this cultural and scientific milieu (Bunzl, 1996).

Boas, who was at once an ethnologist, a linguist, and a physical anthropologist, held that languages are systems, and that human cultures are semantic wholes, internally integrated to some degree. The existence of such wholes is revealed geographically by the transformations that given cultural elements undergo when crossing a cultural boundary (hence Boas’s often misunderstood

Ethnosemantics

interest in diffusion); the existence of linguistic systems is revealed in exactly the same way, by border phenomena, predictable mishearings and misunderstandings, which can be understood as mutual interference between systems (see, for instance, Chapter 32 this volume). This is the model Boas laid out for phonology and phonetics in his paper‘On Alternating Sounds’(1889).

Now the level of sounds, however systemic Boas maintains that it is, does not, in itself, involve meaning. But exactly the same model of internal organization which becomes perceptible when violated is extended to meaning, whether of lexical items or grammatical patterns, in the major statement of Boas’s linguistics, his introduction to theHandbook of American Indian Languages(1911).

Here he discusses the different levels of language. First, the organization of sounds. But then he goes on to words: since it is impossible to have a separate word for every experience, any division of the world into words requires the constitution of categories, and to some degree these categories, their extensions and groupings, can differ from language to language.

Since the total range of personal experience which language serves to express is infi- nitely varied, and its whole scope must be expressed by a limited number of phonetic groups, it is obvious that an extended classification of experiences must underlie all articulate speech.

(Boas, 1911: 24) Boas’s examples again draw on the contrast between systems, giving examples of how concepts that are identified or grouped together in modern Western languages are divided up in others, and conversely how those that modern Western languages treat as unrelated may be grouped together. This is a point that has raised great contention in the literature, so I will dwell on two of his examples a bit here, beginning with the second. The Dakota language draws on a single root, xtaka, glossed‘to grip’, to produce words for concepts which it would not occur to a speaker of a modern Western language to group together:naxta’ka ‘to kick’,paxta’ka‘to bind in bundles’, yaxta’ka‘to bite’,ic’axta’ka‘to be near to’,boxta’ka‘to pound’(Boas, 1911: 26). The point here is that while it is perfectly possible for the reader to recognize the justification of this grouping, to see what these all have in common, it is simply not something that is evident or obvious to speakers of a modern Western language.

It is the converse example, that of snow, that has produced heated debate. As an example of experiences that modern Western languages group together in a single term, and by immediate implication a single concept, but which another tradition divides up (just as we separate ‘to kick’,‘to bind in bundles’, etc.), Boas offers the example of Inuktitut words for snow. There are, he says, four (Boas, 1911: 25–6): aput, glossed‘snow on the ground’;qana ‘falling snow’; piqsirpoq‘drifting snow’; andqimuqsuq‘a snowdrift’.

This example was picked up by other authors and rapidly became the urban legend that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow, used sometimes as an example of the wondrous variety of conceptualizations of the world, at other times as an example of the inability of the primitive mind to generalize or abstract. The debunking of the legend (Martin, 1986), and the fact that avid skiers, for example, have an elaborate vocabulary of snow in English, were used for general attacks against any argument that differences in lexicon matter at all (Pullum, 1991).

To understand what Boas was arguing it is helpful to go back to the text itself. The Inuktitut snow example comes immediately after a brief discussion of the fact that English has different words for what we can also conceive as different forms of water: water, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam.‘It is perfectly conceivable that this variety of ideas, each of which is expressed by a single independent term in English, might be expressed in other languages by derivations from the same term’(Boas, 1911: 25).

So the whole argument, with its counterpunching examples, is serving to say that‘each lan- guage, from the point of view of another language, may be arbitrary in its classifications; that which appears as a single simple idea in one language may be characterized by a series of distinct phonetic groups in another’(Boas, 1911: 26).

Boas recognized that there is nothing surprising about an important part of the environment or a crucial aspect of a people’s life receiving a richer and more specific vocabulary than might be expected among people in other circumstances.

It seems fairly evident that the selection of such simple terms must to a certain extent depend upon the chief interests of a people; and where it is necessary to distinguish a certain phenomenon in many aspects, which in the life of the people play each an entirely independent rôle, many independent words may develop, while in other cases modifications of a single term may suffice.

(Boas, 1911: 26) This suggests that single lexemes are likely to change fairly easily if the‘interests of a people’ change. This is not the case when one goes up a level to that of grammatical patterns, which are farther from active awareness (Silverstein, 1981 [2001]). Boas divides his presentation between

‘grammatical processes’and a long discussion of grammatical categories. Again, his focus here is on the interference between systems. Boas presumes that grammatical categories have meaning– they are as semantic as any other part of language (Jakobson, 1959); and that, in particular, obligatory grammatical categories operate as largely unconscious frames for organizing ideational content. He goes through the obligatory categories of modern Western languages–noun and verb, tense, gender, number – and shows how these cannot be assumed to operate for all languages, many of which presume very different underlying forms. In each case, contrast of different languages is what serves to bring out underlying patterns in each. His conclusion:

The few examples that I have given here illustrate that many of the categories which we are inclined to consider as essential may be absent in foreign languages, and that other categories may occur as substitutes.

(Boas, 1911: 42) Boas follows this section with a one-page‘interpretation of grammatical categories’in which he sums up his whole procedure:

We conclude from the examples here given that in a discussion of the characteristics of various languages different fundamental categories will be found, and that in a com- parison of different languages it will be necessary to compare as well the phonetic characteristics as the characteristics of the vocabulary and those of the grammatical concepts in order to give each language its proper place.

(1911: 43) This kind of a view is profoundly ethnosemantic; and it motivates the mode of description of languages in the rest of the volume and in the whole‘Boas project’ for language description (Stocking, 1974):

In accordance with the general views expressed in the introductory chapters, the method of treatment has been throughout an analytical one. No attempt has been

Ethnosemantics

made to compare the forms of the Indian grammars with the grammars of English, Latin, or even among themselves; but in each case the psychological groupings which are given depend entirely upon the inner form of each language. In other words, the grammar has been treated as though an intelligent Indian was going to develop the forms of his own thoughts by an analysis of his own form of speech.

(p. 81) The idea of an‘inner form of each language’comes straight from Humboldt and, as we will see, will motivate the neo-Humboldtians in Germany.

Some of Boas’s students and students’students continued to develop these ideas. His most brilliant linguistic student was Edward Sapir (1884–1939), who organized his 1921 bookLanguage by dividing chapters on the formal patterning of grammar and the conceptual patterning of grammar. Boas’s student Dorothy D. Lee (1905–75) and Sapir’s student B. L. Whorf (1897–1941) spent much of their careers exploring the semantic implications of grammatical forms in, respectively, the Wintu language of northern California and the Hopi language of Arizona. In both cases, the working assumption is that linguistic form implies meaning – it is what Dell Hymes would later call form-meaning covariation (e.g., 1981: 333) – and that one must not assume that one already controls the world of meaning, or that meaning worlds are all the same.

Instead, one must begin with the actual forms, ideally forms that are obligatory or widespread in the language, follow their usage, and map out their implications–which can, and often does, lead to surprises. This as opposed to presuming the universality of meanings and mapping the forms onto what we think we already know (seeChapter 2 this volume).

For the Boasians, meaning is everywhere, at all levels of language. As Whorf wrote in a manuscript found after his death (1956: 73)

What needs to be seen by anthropologists, who to a large extent may have gotten the idea that linguistics is merely a highly specialised and tediously technical pigeonhole in a far corner of the anthropological workshop, is that linguistics is essentially the quest of MEANING … the simple fact is that its real concern is to light up the thick darkness of the language, and thereby of much of the thought, the culture, and out- look upon life of a given community, with the light of this ‘golden something,’as I have heard it called, this transmuting principle of meaning.

Given that the Boasians noted the parallel of diversity in systems of meaning (‘thought’) to that among phonological systems, one can appreciate John Lucy’s characterization of Whorf’s claim of a relationship between language patterning and thought patterning as‘semantic accent’(2003: 5).

Neo-Humboldtian comparative semantics

Equally ethnosemantic was the‘content analysis’or‘neo-Humboldtian’school that dominated German linguistics and literary history from the 1920s into the 1970s.

By the 1920s a number of German philologists and literary scholars were looking back to Humboldt’s arguments, maintained through the nineteenth century by a small group of scholars, notably Steinthal, that each language could be studied as a coherent system, and that the meanings carried in the language, its ‘contents’, formed a whole that could be identified with the world orientation or world-view of its speakers. This conception of languages, and indeed cultures, as multiple systems was directly opposed to that which came to dominate historical linguistics, which sought to isolate each sound or word as a single unit whose transformations