Wallace L. Chafe

The pear stories : cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production

The study of narrative discourse, as exemplified in the essays in this book, treats the unfolding of narrative and the expression of this unfolding narrative in words.1 The opening scene is set, characters and objects introduced, and events described, as the narrative shifts from scene to scene. In approaching this phenomenon, one may choose to examine the portioning of narrative content into discourse units (Chafe, Chapter 1), the selection of a prominent referent to take on the role of subject in a clause (Bernardo, Chapter 6), or the influence of the larger cultural context on the expression of events and evaluations (Tannen, Chapter 2). Or, one may focus on a phenomenon of narrower scope: the verbalization of characters and objects within the discourse. This is the domain of the essays that Downing and Clancy contributed to this book and of the present chapter. Though apparently narrow, the topic has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, one may consider the static aspect of nominal verbalization. The speaker is confronted by an object whose semantic substance requires expression. He must draw on his cultural knowledge and his understanding of his addressee in order to decide what is salient and hence worthy of verbalization, and he employs his semantic knowledge in the expression of the appropriate categorization. Downing deals with this facet ofthe problem. But

Punctuation and the Prosody of Written Language

Introspection suggests that both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonation, accents, and hesitations. The suggestion here is that certain important aspects of this “covert prosody” of written language are reflected in punctuation. In order to study systematically the degree to which punctuation reflects the covert prosody of written language, one would like to find independent ways of uncovering that prosody. Two such ways are explored here: reading aloud and “repunctuating” (inserting punctuation in passages from which the authors punctuation has been removed). The article focuses especially on the relation between “punctuation units” (stretches of language between punctuation marks) and the “intonation units” of speech, and the variations in this relation that are found among different authors and different styles. It explores the degree to which different pieces of writing are prosodically spokenlike, and the degree to which they capture the prosodic imagery of ordinary readers. “Close” and “open” punctuation are discussed, as are selected grammatical sites at which there is a discrepancy between punctuation and prosody. It is suggested that an awareness of prosodic imagery is an important ingredient of “good writing.”

The Ordering of Phonological Rules

1. An acceptance of the validity of phonological rules as a means of describing certain aspects of a languages structure, together with a recognition that such rules must be at least partially ordered with respect to each other, raises certain problems which have never been fully aired in the linguistic literature. I wish in this paper to mention some of these problems as they have come to my attention during work on the phonological systems of several languages. The paper is so organized that it progresses from what I think are relatively sound considerations through an ever-increasing range of speculativeness to some extremely tentative suggestions at the end.1 Let us begin by establishing the term

Internal Reconstruction in Seneca

2. Only three papers concerned primarily with the theory of internal reconstruction have appeared in this country in relatively recent years;2 two of these were earlier and later treatments of the same subject by the same author. A few additional papers have dealt with the internal reconstruction of specific features in specific languages, on a more or less ad hoc theoretical basis.3 I shall comment only on certain aspects of the papers by Hoenigswald (1946) and Marchand.

Estimates regarding the Present Speakers of North American Indian Languages

1. Early in 1959, at a meeting held in the headquarters of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia to discuss support for future research in American Indian languages, it was suggested by William C. Sturtevant that there was need for a census to determine at least roughly the present number of speakers of these languages. The idea met with approval, and Clyde Kluckhohn, then Chairman of the Phillips Fund Subcommittee of the A.P.S., accepted primary responsibility for carrying it through. When I came to the Bureau of American Ethnology later in the year, I discussed with Sturtevant my own ideas about how such information might be most easily obtained, and in the course of events which included Kluckhohns tragic death in 1960, the project fell, for better or for worse, almost entirely into my hands. The value which was seen in a survey of this nature has several facets. For one thing, knowledge concerning the number of speakers of the worlds languages is a significant part of general linguistic knowledge. For another, comparison with past and possible future studies could yield important insights into processes of acculturation and persistence.l Furthermore, on a

Prehistoric Divergences and Recontacts between Cayuga, Seneca, and the Other Northern Iroquoian Languages

0. We attempt here to reconstruct from linguistic evidence a series of splits and recontacts which we hypothesize to have taken place among the ancestors of the Northern Iroquoian peoples: the Tuscarora, Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Huron. The reconstructed events we describe account for the complex web of shared and partially shared features which are found among these languages, and we have been unable to construct any other sequence that would explain them as well. Our first goal has been to unravel the especially tangled relationships to be found among various phonological and morphological features of Seneca and Cayuga, the two westernmost of the Five Nations languages, for it is here that the greatest challenges to this sort of reconstruction are found. In the course of our exposition, however, we present what we believe is a plausible subgrouping of all the Northern Iroquoian languages for which extensive data are

Some thoughts on schemata

I will try to summarize here a few ideas and questions that have arisen from efforts over the past few years to develop a model of what I call verbalization: the set of processes by which a person converts nonverbal knowledge into a verbal output. I have been thinking mainly in terms of a person who has experienced somethin~ which he later decides to tell about, although the examples given below will be of verbalizations of secondhand experience, acquired from hearing someone else tell about it. Even in the latter cases, however, I will assume that much of the knowledge being talked about has been stored in nonverbal form, so that the same kinds of verbalization processes must be applied.

Beyond bartlett: Narratives and remembering

Abstract This paper explores some of the ways in which narratives can shed light on mental processes, particularly those involved in remembering. Information appears to be stored in the mind in the form of minimal ‘ideas’ of referents, events, and states. At a particular time during the production of a narrative a particular idea may be active, semi-active, or inactive in the mind of the speaker. Ideas that are already active are typically verbalized with pronouns and low pitch, newly activated ideas with full noun or verb phrases and intonation peaks. Combinations of ideas appear linguistically as intonation units, whose properties are discussed. The typical intonation unit in English has the form of an independent clause which is linked to the preceding intonation unit with ‘and’, and ends with a clause-final intonation. When sentence-final intonation occurs, it typically signals the boundary of a coherent sequence of intonation units. Often the coherence is that of a paragraph-like unit, distinguished by a coherent location, coherent temporal sequence, coherent character configuration, and coherent event structure. Just as intonation units shed light on the capacity of the mind to handle active information, so these paragraph-like units help us to understand the nature of peripheral memory.

Are adjectives universal? The case of Northern Iroquoian

Adjectives exhibit conspicuously different properties from one language to another. They sometimes show properties in common with nouns, sometimes with verbs, and sometimes with neither, and their inventory ranges from many to few or even none. Skepticism with regard to their universality was earlier raised by R. M. W. Dixon, but his later shift in favor of universality has brought the issue back into the foreground. The Northern Iroquoian languages are challenging in this regard, since they have resisted attempts to define even an adjectival subclass of verb roots. After a discussion of adjective function that aims at explaining their varying manifestations across languages, eight possible ways of characterizing an adjective class in one of the Northern Iroquoian languages, Seneca, are examined and each is found problematic. The only Southern Iroquoian language, Cherokee, does exhibit an adjective class that evidently arose subsequent to the north-south split.

Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan

Apart from the Algonquian, Muskogean, and Gulf languages, the three language families that will be discussed in this chapter account for most of the aboriginal languages spoken in North America east of the Rocky Mountains. They are treated under a single heading because of the likelihood that they are remotely related, forming a linguistic unit which might be referred to as ‘Macro-Siouan’. The first part of the chapter will be taken up with discussions of the work that has been done so far on the languages of these families. The Caddoan languages will be discussed first, then the Iroquoian, and finally the Siouan. The author is more directly familiar with the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages and with past and present linguistic work conducted in those areas. For that reason it is possible that his treatment of the Siouan languages is less complete, and he would be happy to be informed of relevant information that he has not included. The latter part of the chapter is concerned with remote relationships, particularly the Macro-Siouan hypothesis, and presents for the first time certain evidence tending to link Caddoan with both Siouan and Iroquoian.