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Brazil’s Pirahã Tribe | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5521 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 9 of 17 01 December 2009 at 8:45am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, no. The second clause is obviously dependent on the first. Just because there isn't a subjunction that doesn't mean that the phrase isn't subordinate. In this case, the action in the second clause is to take place AFTER the action in the first, which certainly wouldn't be clear if the second clause was read on its own. Chinese, especially Classical, has similar constructions. The fact that the second clause happens to be a sentence on its own is not relevant, because it wouldn't be the same sentence. The simple fact that it is said straight after the first clause, and possibly using special prosody, will make it a subordinate clause. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 17 01 December 2009 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If the second sentence is actually said with a special prosody then it might be seen as a marker just as inverted word order or a conjunction might be in other languages. If you just take two utterances and put one after the other then it is NOT subordination, but just a juxtaposition that happens to coincide with a logical order (though I would be hesitant to predict what the Pirahã might conceive as a logical order).
There are some cases in European languages where two similar expressions are juxtaposed ("comme ci, comme ça"), but this is only seen as one construction because these two always occur together. If the Pirahã regularly express causality by letting two complete sentences of a certain type follow each other then the the two sentences might be seen as one compound expression - but still not as a case of subordination. Edited by Iversen on 01 December 2009 at 6:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5521 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 11 of 17 01 December 2009 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
If they are indeed correct in saying that "I do X, I do Y" means "I do X, then I will do Y", how could anyone argue that this is not subordination? If it weren't, the sentence would mean that the speaker is doing both X and Y at the same time. If the definition of subordination is so formal that this wouldn't count, it is not a very interesting definition. What I mean is, if they can convey the same meaning using something that for some obscure reason doesn't formally count as subordination, then the fact that they lack subordination is quite irrelevant. I can't see what "comme ci, comme ça" has to do with this, in what way would that be subordination, or even something similar? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 17 01 December 2009 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you are indeed correct in saying that "I do X, I do Y" means "I do X, then I will do Y", then it means that the Piranãs express logical consequences through juxtaposition or simple concatenation, not through subordination. And that is in fact a support for Everett's position.
Subordination is a grammatical term, not something that describes the logical analysis of the message, so it is totally irrelevant to infer that there is subordination in Pirahã just because speakers of Western European languages use subordination to express a similar thought (if it is a similar thought, which in this case is more than doubtful). Subordination has to be proven through structures in the language you are studying, and a structure like "I do X, I do Y" spells juxtaposition or concatenation, not subordination. I mentioned "comme ci, comme ça" because it is a comparison that is expressed in a Western European language without the use of subordination. But you don't even need this minimum of syntactical organization: "Boum! Some one had lit a candle". Here the logical order is as clear as anything, but there is not a trace of subordination - and the consequence is even expressed before the cause. Subordination is not necessary, it is just very practical. Edited by Iversen on 01 December 2009 at 11:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5696 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 13 of 17 01 December 2009 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In my Indo-European class we learned that PIE lacked subordination, using juxtaposition (in the way that Iversen outlined above) instead. So it seems to me that the lack of subordination can't be all that atypical typologically. Rather, I think the more shocking claim is that Pirahã lacks recursion, which is much more fundamental to theory.
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| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5521 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 14 of 17 02 December 2009 at 12:10am | IP Logged | |||||
OK, so you mean that it is only called subordination when there is a subjunction? Fair enough, but in that case their lacking subordination is quite uninteresting, since they don't need it. Obviously the prosody will be different when you are using juxtaposition to express consequence or sequence, versus when the two phrases are equal and epress simultaneous activity, so there is no fundamental difference from English where you use subjunctions and/or word order. It is also clear that the meaning of the second phrase is not the same as when it appears in isolation. In that sense, it is not the same phrase, it just looks the same (disregarding prosody, which you can't really disregard). Since the second phrase in the combined expression means "and then I will do Y", you actually can't use it on it's own. It just happens to have the same OUTER FORM as a phrase that can be used independently. So it seems I still don't agree! As to recursion, wouldn't the construction above be an example of recursion? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5696 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 15 of 17 02 December 2009 at 2:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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To be honest, I don't have very complete knowledge of his claims:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.ht ml But I think for these purposes, recursion means that you can always replace a phrase X with another phrase that contains X and perhaps something else, such that you can make arbitrarily long chains. e.g. "I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate" where noun phrases can contain yet more noun phrases ad infinitum. This is often posited as a fundamental property of natural languages. Everett claims that the Pirahã don't have phrases like this: "Pirahã doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house". You can say "John's house", you can say "John's brother", but if you want to say "John's brother's house", you have to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house"..." He further goes on to claim that because of this lack of recursion, they don't have a concept of numbers. A discussion at language log goes into his claims on embedded/subordinate clauses which may be more relevant: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003162.h tml 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 17 02 December 2009 at 10:27am | IP Logged | |||||
That's exactly my point. They may have the idea that some things depend on others, but apparently they live without having a grammatical mechanism to formalize it in their language. I wouldn't call this uninteresting, but it is only a problem for those that believe that such a mechanism is universal in all human languages. About recursion. I saw this quote from Everett in the article mentioned by Egill "If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories. So my idea is that recursion is absolutely essential to the human brain, and it's a part of the fact that humans have larger brains than other species." The pivotal information here is that he - the best speaker of Pirahã outside the tribe (maybe except his wife) - doesn't know a grammatical mechanism in the language that can be seen as recursive. But the Pirahãs can think in narrative structures which are recursive, according to the quote. At this point I should probably add that their lack of a category for second- or thirdhand information and their lack of fixed numbers might be a sign of a culture that is fundamentally uninterested in recursion in a philosophical sense - i.e. uninterested in anything that lies beyond the immediate concerns of the tribe members and uninterested in following thoughts through a number of steps. This may sound improbable, but it is not more improbable than the attested total break-down in attempts to get the tribe members to count 1,2 3... One interesting aspect of this is the question whether the ancestors of the Pirahã had recursive and subordinating structures (including counting) which got lost because of a genuine lack of interest in the things these mechanisms normally are used to express. I would also very much like to know whether other tribes in the area have similar tendencies in their languages, though maybe not to the same extent. There must be scores of tribes that live under the same circumstances, but who just didn't get an Everett to investigate their language. Edited by Iversen on 02 December 2009 at 10:32am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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