Alan Reed Libert

What can Pragmaticists Learn from Studying Artificial Languages

Among the hundreds of artificial languages put forth as possible international auxiliary languages, relatively few (e.g. Esperanto, Interlingua) have seen a substantial amount of actual use. Given this, one might think that the study of such languages might have little to offer pragmaticists, and indeed there has been very little pragmatic work on them. However, I would argue that the pragmatic investigation of artificial languages can provide useful insights and information. Most designers of artificial languages are not professional linguists. Although they usually say little or nothing about the pragmatics of their languages, what they do say can reveal popular ideas about pragmatics, which may otherwise be difficult to discover. I shall present and discuss relevant remarks by some artificial language designers. I shall also look at several pragmatic features of artificial languages. Although the amount of textual material available in most artificial languages is limited, what exists can be subjected to pragmatic analysis. Perhaps most intriguing are the a priori artificial languages (e.g. aUI), attempts to build a language without borrowing anything from natural languages, as, on the surface, these languages can appear quite odd. I shall present some texts from several artificial languages with a view to seeing whether even apparently exotic artificial languages have the same pragmatic properties as natural languages. Such work can be seen as contributing to the study of cross-linguistic pragmatics.

Adpositions and other parts of speech

Contents: Adpositions - Prepositions - Postpositions - Word Classes - Parts of Speech - Morphology - Syntax.

On Death in Artificial Languages

This chapter will treat some pragmatic issues relating to how death is reported and discussed in artificial languages such as Esperanto, and how deaths of people in artificial language movements are announced. Many, if not all, natural languages have euphemisms for dying; this is true of some (but perhaps not all) artificial languages. I will present some euphemisms in artificial languages. Very few books for learning artificial languages give instructions on condolences; I will look at the limited material on this. I will then examine several types of texts (or pragmemes) relating to death, including funerals, obituaries, and epitaphs. The most space will be given to obituaries, as they seem to be the most commonly occurring of these text types in artificial languages. At least some such obituaries are different from the obituaries that occur in ordinary natural language sources such as newspapers in that details about the family of the deceased are not given.

Adpositions and presuppositions

This paper looks at presuppositions of adpositions, a topic which has not been examined much, in spite of the very large body of work on presuppositions. Some earlier assertions about adpositional presuppositions turn out not to be relevant, because (1) they are incorrect (2) presuppose and/or presupposition are not used in a technical sense in them, or (3) the presuppositions involved are not unique to adpositions. Some adpositions, e.g. despite, have been claimed to be factive, and thus could be presupposition triggers, but it is difficult to determine this, due to the fact that their complements are arguably always themselves presupposition triggers. On the other hand, directional adpositions are clearly presuppositional, as they trigger presuppositions about the location of an object/or entity before or after the motion whose description they are partly responsible for. Such facts may lead one to speculate about word classes and presuppositionality in general, and I will briefly discuss this issue.

On Pragmemes in Artificial Languages

This chapter examines possibilities for pragmemes and practs in artificial languages, and whether and how artificial languages differ in these respects from natural languages. In some controlled languages (a type of artificial language), it is only possible to discuss a small set of topics, meaning that the set of possible pragmemes is small. Some other artificial languages are designed for use by a particular group of people, in some cases by only one person. Such differences seem to make some artificial languages quite unlike natural languages; that is, although artificial languages, no matter how strange they may seem on the surface, seem to resemble natural languages in some areas (e.g. syntax), with respect to pragmemics they appear very different. However, if artificial languages are used to report on pragmemes (e.g. in fiction), they may (and may have to) allow for a wider range of pragmemes and practs.

The Pragmatics of Indirect Discourse in Artificial Languages

In this paper I survey various pragmatic matters involving indirect discourse in artificial languages such as Esperanto: the way in which it is marked, how it is distinguished from similar structures, what happens to deictic items in it, and the choice between it and direct discourse. Ideally this will indicate that research into the pragmatics of artificial languages is of theoretical interest, and will show similarities and differences between artificial and natural languages: from a pragmatic point of view artificial languages do not seem very different from natural languages.

Adpositions, Deixis, and Anti-Deixis

In this chapter, I look at the role of adpositions in deixis, specifically in spatial and temporal deixis. There may be more controversy with respect to this word class than with, e.g., demonstratives: there are some who would say that deictic adpositions do not exist (at least in a particular language), and among those who say that they do exist, there may be disagreement as to which adpositions are deictic. After examining several spatial adpositions, I discuss anti-deixis; some adpositions in some contexts appear to be anti-deictic, that is, they point to locations which are not the same as that of the speech situation (which is different from being far from the speech situation, i.e., distal). I then discuss some temporal adpositions which may be deictic or anti-deictic. On closer examination, it turns out that the anti-deictic effects observed may not always be due to the adpositions involved. In any case, anti-deixis is a complex phenomenon worth exploring further.

New Finnish Grammar

In spite of its title, this is not a grammar of Finnish; rather, it is a novel (originally in Italian). It is very rare, if not unprecedented, for a review of a novel to appear in the Australian Journal of Linguistics, but I believe that the current review is not out of place here. This is because the Finnish language plays a role in this novel. The bulk of the book is a supposed manuscript, written by a Massimiliano Brodar and discovered and augmented by a neurologist, Petri Friari. The story told in the manuscript is roughly as follows (I focus on the beginning). In 1943 a man (Brodar) wakes up with amnesia and unable to speak; Brodar writes, ‘Later I would learn that I was on board the German hospital ship Tübingen, riding at anchor off the Italian port of Trieste, waiting to unload its cargo of wounded’ (p. 15). Friari, who is Finnish (but has exiled himself from Finland), believes that Brodar is also Finnish, because the jacket which he had on when he had been found, badly injured from a beating, had a sort of label with the name Sampo Karjalainen. Friari begins to teach Brodar (whom he takes to be named Sampo Karjalainen) Finnish, although he would not have seen it as teaching but as helping him recover his native language. Eventually Brodar goes to Finland; it turns out that he is not Finnish and that his name is not Sampo Karjalainen. I am not qualified to judge the literary merit of this book, but I think it is reasonably pleasant to read. The main interest of it for linguists will be the remarks made about Finnish, and about the process of regaining language. An example of the former is the following, from a conversation between Brodar and another character, the latter speaking first (pp. 82–83):

Foreign Languages: What They Don't Often Tell You

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