Joel Sherzer

Verbal and nonverbal deixis: the pointed lip gesture among the San Blas Cuna

The pointed lip gesture is a facial gesture in use among the Cuna Indians of San Blas, Panama. It occurs in various contexts with meanings which at first appear to be unrelated. An analysis of the contexts reveals, however, that the meaning ‘pointing’ is always present and that further meanings are derived from the discourse structures in which the pointed lip gesture is found.

Talking Backwards in Cuna: The Sociological Reality of Phonological Descriptions

The Cuna Indians of Panama play a word game which sheds light on problems involved in the linguistic description of Cuna phonology. Investigation of the game led to the discovery that not all speakers play it the same way; i.e., there is variation in the forms different speakers use when playing. One of the possible interpretations of this variation is that there is more than one model or grammar in use among Cuna speakers. The possibility of the existence of alternative linguistic models goes against the most current view in theoretical linguistics, which argues that all speakers of a language have the same model for that language. The data from the Cuna game support instead a sociolinguistic perspective which holds that for at least certain areas of language variation or heterogeneity rather than homogeneity is common.

Poetic structuring of Kuna discourse: The line*

A central feature of the oral discourse of the Kuna Indians of Panama is the line. The nature of lines, verses, and other poetic and rhetorical units has recently emerged as a significant topic within the study of native American languages and discourse generally. Investigation of the structuring of Kuna lines requires attention to the intersection and interplay of linguistic, sociolinguistic, and poetic structures, patterns, and processes. (Discourse, line and verse patterning, ethnopoetics; Panama, Kuna.) The Kuna Indians are more than 25,000 agriculturalists who inhabit, mainly, a string of islands along the northeast coast of Panama, known as San Bias. Kuna verbal life provides a laboratory for the study of the structuring and performance of oral discourse. The Kuna have a very diverse range of linguistic varieties, styles, and genres, from colloquial and everyday to formal and ritual, in both

Areal Linguistics in North America

At a conference on the Universals of language held in 1961, Roman Jakobson (1966: 274) stated that: We most urgently need a systematic world-wide mapping of linguistic structural properties: distinctive features, inherent and prosodic — their types of concurrence and concatenation; grammatical concepts and the principles of their expression. The primary and less difficult task would be to prepare a phonemic atlas of the world.

Areal Studies and Culture History: Language as a Key to the Historical Study of Culture Contact

Linguistics has long been recognized as a valuable tool in unraveling culture history. The types of historical linguistic relationships usually focused on, however, are genetic. Diffusional areal relationships provide valuable evidence of communicative contacts among groups and of the nature of this contact. Such relationships can be found in all aspects of language--syntactic-semantic, phonetic, and lexical--as well as in such uses of language as folklore. Examples are drawn from North American Indian languages.

Ceremonial dialogic greetings among the Kuna Indians of Panama

Ceremonial dialogue is the form in which chiefs among the Kuna Indians of Panama perform myth, history, and personal experience to the Kuna community. Arkan kae, the ritual greeting between two chiefs from separate villages, is also performed in this way. The language of arkan kae, like the language of Kuna ceremonial dialogue more generally, is ritual, metaphorical, and poetic. With regard to content, arkan kae deals with the health of the chiefs and their villages, their travels, and their experiences. While not as ritually elaborated or structured, the arkan kae pattern of ceremonial dialogic greeting emerges between two friends or family members who have not seen one another for a long time, as they report and narrate to one another about their experiences during the period when they were separated. It should also be pointed out that the ceremonial dialogic model for speech, widespread in indigenous, oral societies in Latin America, is gradually but sometimes brutally becoming replaced with another model, with which it has long been in competition and conflict, the European derived, monologic and literate model.

Humor and Comedy in Puppetry: Celebration in Popular Culture.

This volume is about puppetry, an expression of popular and folk culture which is extremely widespread around the world and yet has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Puppetry, which is intended for audiences of adults as well as children, is a form of communication and entertainment and an esthetic and artistic creation. Of the many aspects of puppetry worthy of scholarly study, this books focus is on a central and dominant feature--humor and comedy.

IN MEMORIUM: William Bright

William Bright, friend and colleague, died on October 15, 2006, near Boulder, Colorado. Bill received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Berkeley in 1955. He taught linguistics and anthropology at UCLA for 29 years until his retirement in 1988. Up to the time of his death he was adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. He wrote more than 200 books, articles, and reviews, of relevance to many disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, literature, psychology, and sociology. He was the editor of Language , the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, from 1965 to 1987. He was a leading figure in the field of sociolinguistics, and he edited Language in Society from 1993 to 1999.

Verbal Art in San Blas: Kuna Culture through Its Discourse

First published in 1990, this linguistic study of the Kuna Indians of Panama is now available only from UNM Press.

Universals of linguistic structure: A north American Indian perspective

Abstract Drawing on a continent-wide survey of North American Indian languages, a series of typological generalizations is postulated. Exceptions are discussed in terms of patterning internal to the languages and areal contacts. Implications are drawn regarding markedness, language change, and the diffusion of linguistic traits.