Robbins Burling

The selective advantage of complex language

Abstract The progressive evolution of the biological capacity to learn and use highly complex language is unlikely to be explained primarily by any subsistence or technological advantages that language offers. Rather, language probably served social purposes. In particular, two relationships could have driven selection in favor of increasingly complex language. First, in most or all societies, those who rise to positions of leadership tend to be recognized as having high languistic skills. Second, in the kinds of society in which language must be presumed to have evolved, leaders tend to raise more children to maturity than do other people. Together, these two relationships would give a long-term selective advantage to increasingly skillful speakers.

American Kinship Terms Once More

The several formal analyses that have been made of American kinship terminology have 1) failed to account for the variable usage of either children or adults, 2) failed to capitalize upon the natural colloquial ability of all speakers to provide verbal definitions of some terms, and 3) been rather overburdened with abstruse symbolic notation. By approaching terminological usage as a system built by means of a sequence of principles (a sequence that seems to correspond to the manner in which children learn to use their terms) and by capitalizing upon verbal definitions, it is possible to offer an analysis which also suggests that some aspects of our terminology are more central and uniform, while other aspects are more variable and peripheral. Such an analysis appears somewhat banal when compared to other more elaborate and symbolically sophisticated analyses, but its very banality suggests that it may be closer to the cognitive structure of speakers of American English.

SOCIAL CONSTRAINTS ON ADULT LANGUAGE LEARNING

In a somewhat different vein, Krashen has suggested that the close of the critical period may be related to Inhelder and Piaget’s stage of formal operations, which is believed to begin at about the time of p~berty.~,~ It is claimed that this is the period when the child begins to formulate abstract hypotheses in order to explain phenomena and the time when he wants general solutions to problems rather than merely ad hoc solutions. The tendency of adolescents to construct theories may inhibit “natural” language acquisition, with the result that adolescents and adults no longer are able to avoid constructing a conscious theory of the language they are learning. Whether the emphasis is placed upon neurofunctional maturation or upon Piagetian stages of mental operation, these arguments point to maturational changes that turn the postadolescent into a different kind of learner than the younger child, but others have been more impressed with the social and psychological factors that hamper adult learning. In his book The Pidginization Process, John Schumann offers us a case study of an adult Costa Rican worker in the United States who made very little progress in English.6 Schumann attributes the worker’s low achievement to what he calls the “social and psychological distance” of the learner from speakers of English.6 As factors of social distance that can affect the rate of learning, Schumann cites the political, cultural, technical, and economic dominance relationships between the two language groups; the degree of assimilation desired; the cohesiveness of the groups; relative size of the

A proposal for computer-assisted instruction in vocabulary

First, the biases of language pedagogy reflect the biases of much of modern linguistics. Phonology and syntax form patterns that linguists find appealing, and it has been tempting to apply our expanding theoretical knowledge of these topics to practical language teaching. The lexicon, by comparison, seems to form a relatively disorganized heap that is resistant to orderly patterning. Linguistic analysis of vocabulary has yielded relatively little that might inspire derivative pedagogical applications.

Where did the Question ‘Where did My Tribe Come From?’ Come From?

Author expresses great scepticism about migration stories. People migrate all the time and in every direction - back and forth and up and down - and surely people in north-eastern India, like people everywhere else, have been migrating for thousands of years. Author presumes that people have migrated from every direction into what is now the Garo Hills. His scepticism is not about the migration of people, but about the migration of tribes and about the north-eastern rhetoric of migration that is expressed in terms of tribes. He does not believe that tribes very often pick themselves up and move to a new location. If Where did the Garos come from? is not a reasonable question, we ought to ask a different question - a question about the question: Where did the question come from? Author emphasises the western roots of the question because he believes that side of it has been rather badly neglected. Keywords:Garo Hills; Garos; India; migrations; Tribe; western roots

Language, Ethnicity and Migration in North-Eastern India

Abstract The peoples of north-eastern India often construct migration stories in an attempt to explain their history and present distribution. These stories assume that language and ethnic (tribal) boundaries coincide, and that they endure through long periods. Ethnic boundaries, however, are widely contested in north-eastern India, and even language boundaries are interpreted in varied ways so as to support particular ethnic and political goals. While people certainly migrate, they rarely do so as coherent tribes, and the present distribution of ethnic groups is better seen as an adjustment to environmental, economic, and political conditions than as the outcome of migrations. In the past, ethnic differences were constructed, and ethnic loyalty invoked, both to justify aggression and to rally defence against aggressors. Ethnicity is still used today, both to assert local differences and in an attempt to forge unity. Ethnic sentiments have contributed to the simmering violence that has punctuated the history of north-eastern India since the end of the colonial period.

Personal Names in a Mande (Garo) Village

Abstract The Mandes (Garos), a hill people of northeastern India, have had no fixed inventory of personal names. Instead of choosing a conventional name for a child, parents try to find a sequence of sounds that has rarely or never before been used to name a Mande. Given names often reveal the persons gender but they rarely have any other meaning. Kinship group names, by contrast, are shared by hundreds or even thousands of others. Thus, given names are highly individualizing while kinship group names are not. Searching for ways to preserve tradition and to symbolize their ethnicity, some Mandes want to give their children “real” Mande names. However, is it more traditional to find a new name that has never been used before, or to seek a traditional name where the tradition has been to find something new?

GEORGE PETER MURDOCK (Ed.). Social Structure in Southeast Asia. (Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 29.) Pp. ix, 182. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960.

GEORGE PETER MURDOCK (Ed.). Social Structure in Southeast Asia. (Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 29.) Pp. ix, 182. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960.

5.00

5.00. The ten essays, by as many authors, which form this book grew out of a symposium organized by the editor for the Ninth Pacific Science Congress, held in Bangkok, Thailand late in 1957. The authors examine the kinship systems of a series of societies in different parts of Southeast Asia and Ceylon. Except for the Javanese and Sinhalese, all of those