OUTLINE DRAFT The implications of (models of) culture for language Michael Silverstein The University of Chicago My paper comes in four parts, which try to lay out the justification for having added parentheses to the organizers! assigned topic. 1 start with ironies accruing to the topic as assigned. One irony involves the fate of models of culture in recent anthropological theorizing, for better or worse, while another involves the fate of culture in recent linguistic theorizing. Then I move on to a sketch of what I think must be accounted for in any encompassing attempt even at synchronic, or nonhistorical approaches to what is called language. Here,. a functional semiotics. or — semiotic functionalism provides the best guide into the subject matter of the planes of meaningfulness in linguistic signs, and also into the posi tions of traditional folk, philosophical, and methodologically winnowed views of some important matters of linguistic form and function. The third section rapidly discusses a couple of the phenomena which show clearly the ‘cultural'---probably by anybody's definition---nature of lan- guage organization and function, the problem of proper names (in light of universalist assumptions about them), and the problem of illocutionary/ perlocutionary forces (in light of universalist assumptions about them). These are central to supporting the theory of the previous part, Finally, I compare the view thus developed, language as culture, to other views that try to answer the pair of questions, What is language that culture is mindful of it?/ What is culture that language is mindful of it? I, Ironies A. The ‘culture’ models of recent years have been heavily linguisti- cized, that is, modelled quite specifically on aspects of linguistic models in modern linguistic study. 1, Linguistic models have depended on the great formal advances in analysis and description based on a single analogy, that of structural phonemics/phonology. The whole of the linguistic sig- nalling system in traditional linguistics is seen in the image of phonemics/phonology by American descriptivists (including trans- formationalists) and by Praguean componentialist interpretations of Saussure. 2, Linguistic models have secondarily depended on the great advances in specifying the functional or meaningful aspect of language in logical notations for systems of propositional reference and predi- cation, and their inferential and deductive power, as the concep- tual content of the signals. 3:-A mapping of form to meaning constitutes the task of modern linguistics, parochial arguments aside, The implementation of just this mapping in both thought and communication is assumed. 4. More and more, strictly linguistic considerations of language have stressed the ‘thought! aspect of language as a mapping sys- tem, and thereby the particular perspective of the abilities of a—--than..the. structuralization.of higher, meaningful levels of language. speaker (as opposed to hearer) of the language in the literal sense, Similarly, in cultural models, the cognitive, ideational and actor perspectives have loomed large. 5. Hence, perhaps, the large-scale transfer of specific forms of organization---e.g., rules, categories, methods of ‘paradig- matic’ contrast, and other forms of stracture---that make of cul« ture not so much a metaphor of language (and thence, of phonol- ogy), 28 an imitation of it. We must ask to what extent these imitations are justified, 6. The inner irony, then, is that it was the structuralization of Phonemics/phonology achieved by L. Bloomfield and E. Sapir in America, by N, Troubetskoj and R, Jakobson in Europe, rather | as outlined by Saussure, that paved the way for the structural analysis of referential-and-predicational (meaningful) higher lev- els of language, without all that much concern originally for the mapping of linguistic structure onto formalized logic, 7. The outer irony is that this formal structuralization of ref- erence-and-predication, the Saussurean realm of ‘sense relations’ and their expression in linguistic form, is undoubtedly unique to language among symbolic systems. Yet its properties have been | analogically ascribed to some autonomous realm of structure said to lie behind all social action, a realm called ‘culture’, B. The models of language that purport to be anthropological or socio- logical are, ironically, compatible with or based on rather archaic notions of culture and/or society, somewhat. out of touch with modern social anthropological and sociological thought. \, Fundamental orienting points of view can be seen as reflection- ist vs. implementationist on the relationship between linguistic Structure and sociocultural function. That is, the first views lan- guage as a reflection, however indirect, of sociocultural reality because language represents ("symbolizes") it in thought and com- munication, but does not form (effect) it, The second views lan- | guage as an implementation of sociocultural reality by (re)creating it in communicative implementation, and thence thought, and so forms (effects) it. | 2, The struggle of points of view is seen in philosophical treatments in the Frege-Russell-Quine et al. tradition vs. the Wittgenstein (later) -Austin-Searle et al, tradition. Again, in the psychological tradition of behaviorism-mainstream cognitive psychology (includ- ing especially Piaget in developmental terms) vs, Russian function alism (Vygotskij et al.)-social cognitive psychology. In anthro- pology, "cultural" anthropology and standard structural-functional theories-vs. certain more recent "interpretative! trends influenced by phenomenology. 3, Boasian anthropological linguistic traditions, including so-called cognitive anthropology of the 'ethnoscience' movement, are heavily reflectionist, especially as regards one of the traditional problem areas treated here, the relationship of lexicon to culture. For much of this literature, ‘culture! is an atomistic collection of en-tities, which language, especially lexicon, organizes cognitively in some shared fashion in a population of speakers. For a smaller part of this literature, 'culture' is additionally an actor-perspec- tive set of operating rules to produce sequential behavior, on the direct analogy of a (production) grammar. 4, Ethnography of speaking traditions, analyzing events of language use, rely on role-diacritic reflectionist assumptions about how lan- guage functions in an event-by-event treatment. The social organiza- tion of a society is seen through 2 repartition by events of speak- ing in different domains, The social structure of a community is seen through a repartition of role-diacritics of the participants in such speech events. There is a limited use made of the Praguean ——-snodel_of. communicative situations, in terms of which can be form- c. ulated production-oriented models of how to behave in accordance with particular role expectations. 5, Statistical sociolinguistics emphasizes the probabilistic and var- jable reflection of social structure in speaker role-diacritics. In this approach, the results come from correlation of frequencies of linguistic features with a-cultural variables of social measurement {in the most sophisticated versions, using multivariate analysis). This approach started out demonstrating the sociological reflection of the structure of social groups and categories in phonetic aspects of language. It has moved to higher levels of structure, but un- fortunately turned inward in attempting to treat them, emphasizing internal Linguistic co-variability of parts of referential-and-predica- tional structure as part of the processes of language change. 6. Cognitive sociology takes a microsociological perspective on an implementationist view of language. It seeks to explain the ‘social construction of reality’ purely in terms of an augmented referen- tial-and-predicational view of language. The augmentation consists of the conversational 'implicatures', the suggested quasi-logical con- nectivity of discourse interpreted richly in propositional terms. It is a theory of the interaction of individuals in encounters, not a theory of comparative societal structure, nor even of the compar- ative structure of interactions. It is close to what is called ‘lin- guistic pragmatics! in strictly linguistic circles, but has the virtue of attempting to go beyond the mere translation of utterances into categories given by explicit performative constructions. 7. Another orienting framework for these views of language is provided by the phrases, Language and culture, Language in cul- ture, Language of culture, Language as culture, ‘and': language is a system distinct from culture; ‘in’: language is a type of social action that is continuous with, and a subpart of social action en- compassed-by-a-cultural-order}-tof': language is one -symbolic/ expressive mode or code ordered by culture; ‘as': language is a microcosm, albeit with its own emphases, with at least all the Properties of culture. Reflectionist views tend to fall into the first two rubrics; implementationist views tend to fall into the last two, In terms of these ironies, it is difficult to take seriously the sug-—-—__simple_Saussurean_proportional_ model, A: B. gested idea of the title assigned that models of culture---in con- temporary times heavily influenced by results in the analysis of referential-and-predicational structure of language itself---have im- portant implications for language. It is equally difficult to sce in currently proposed anthropologically- and sociologically-oriented no- tions of language---which are very un-'cultural! in a modern sense a real influence from some sophisticated cultural theory. All Grammars Leak: The functional semiotics of language form A. The original notion in Sapir's phrase (Language, p.38) refers to formal leakage. It is a measure of the lack of fit of natural lan- guage seen as a referential-and-predicational system to the basic we ENe AL IBN, see HINT: .., (form A is to form B is to ... is to form N is to +++ a8 meaning of A is to meaning of B is to ... is to meaning of Nis to ..."). This model predicts that in the best cases, there is a rule of infinite applicability such that one (difference of) form - one (difference of) function/meaning holds, within a grammatical system, Saussure used this as a measure of the ‘relative motiva- tion’ vs. ‘relative arbitrariness! of lexical expressions, classifying those highly subject to analysis into proportion-obeying elements as falling under the first, those resistant to such analysis as falling onder the second, 1, Note then that true lexical items, the indivisibles of the surface structure of language, are not so much absolutely "arbitrary" or "conventional" in any system-independent way---the inherited nine- teenth-century problem with which Saussure, Boas and others wrestled---but only the most relatively arbitrary of all linguistic signs, since they cannot be so decomposed, being indivisible. 2, There is ‘compositional semantics' underlying this view of leakage, in which, for complex sign C, made up of simpler signs A+B, the meaning of C is a computable function of the meaning of A and the meaning of B plus whatever meaning the grammatical construction contributes. 3, Lexical items, irreducible formal umits, obviously are not com- positional on the formal side. One of the major advances of recent "generative semantics" (taking its cue from formal logics) has been to extend the hypothesis of compositionality from grammatical constructions of the overt type to lexical items, which can then be said to be covertly complex signs obeying compositional regular~ ities. Thus lexical item L has all the semantic value (in a system of sense-relations) of a composite of covert elements A,B,...K in covert grammatical constraction. 4. bexical items are thus’a-prime problen of leakage for any mod- ern linguistic theory derived from Saussurean premises. (One can compare at the phonological level portmanteau morphs; conflation of morphophonemes into a single surface segment; etc.) With few exceptions, Saussurean notions of formal structure mapping sense relations, even with the extensions of "generative semantics,"cannot motivate the existence of specific lexical items used in reference-and-predication, as opposed to grammatical construc- tions, on a cross-linguistic basis. Lexicalization, as opposed to grammaticalization, of some area of reference-and-predication seems to depend on principles not encompassed within (post-) Saussurean understanding of the structure of referential-and- predicational language. Here, the theory of language form leaks. B. Worse leakage is obvious once we carefully consider actual dis- course from the point of view of reference-and-predication. There is much functional leakage as well, that is, meaning relations that violate the compositional semantics upon which the Saussurean view of language rests. _1, Under the Saussurean assumptions, elements of the grammar of a language have ‘sense-relations' one to another, that obey the rules of compositionality once we extend the analysis to encompass lexical items as covert linguistic structures. This is what some writers call the plane of grammar ("langue") as the central core of language structure. 2. Reference-relations of an indexical sort, where entities can be specified only with respect to the context in which an instance of the sign in question ("shifter") occurs, can be said to have ‘sense! in an extended theory only if the relevant factors of the actual con- text of use are represented as part of the notation for its meaning. This is what some writers call the plane of discourse ("parole") as being inherently part of what every natural human language codes. 3. The interaction of non-indexical and indexical functions of refer- ring-and-predicating categories, the same overt form frequently having dual value, already makes language in the traditional view a duplex structure, coding both context-independent (Saussurean) referential-and-predicational content and context-dependent refer- ential-and-predicational content in the very same continuous sur- face sequences. 4. Any otherwise semantic category that is implemented in spec- jal ways in discourse context demonstrates the duplex value we are speaking of, e.g., 'case-marking’ categories that regularly indicate the ordering relationships of referents with respect to some predi- cation (“who does-what-to whom"), are frequently skewed from regular expectations to indicate identity of reference over a speci- fiable span of discourse in special discourse-reference-maintenance systems. C. Further, there is vast functional leakage when we consider the plane of indexicals independent of the function of reference-and-pred cation... This is the realm of pragmatics in.the most useful definition of the term (cf, Bar-Hillel). 1, Any non-referential index of deference relationship between speaker and hearer, or non-referential index of speaker class- affiliation, etc., comes under this rubric. Languages abound in such indexical forms, frequently having surface elements that com-bine such indexical meanings with indexical-referential ones {e-g., "the pronouns of power and solidarity" of Brown & Gilman). 2, Linguistic forms generally are not indexical at the surface of language in one-to-one fashion, i.e., there is not a unique in- Gexical function generally coded by a single, uniquely-segmentable surface form (an unwarranted assumption made by a number of scholars), Indexical relationships of linguistic elements at the surface are multifunctional, with multiple, superimposed segmen- tations and structurations of linguistic form entailed by their func- tional values, depending on which particular indewical function is being analyzed. Thus, a single pronoun functions indexically to pick out addressee-as-referent, i.e., to specify the individual in e: e in the communicative context as the entity in_ soi propositional position; in this function it contrasts with other sim- ilar elements in a grammatical system of forms for what is usu- ally called tperson'. At the same time, however, in many lan- guages such a pronoun functions as a discontinuous portion of a formal index of speaker-addressee deference, for example, along with certain grammatical construction types and other, perhaps lexical, machinery implemented in an utterance, Further, it fanc- tions along with other portions of an utterance, such as parallel- ism of construction type, etc., as part of an index of cohesion by maintenance of co-reference in topic-comment structures that constitute coherent text, (Javanese is a good example of a lan- guage with all these systems functionally linked in the same formal surface element.) This is leakage of functional (indexical) types. 3. Im any given use of language, there is an hierarchical organiza- tion of indexical (functional) dominance in terms of which can be organized the dominance of one such formal segmentation over another. This hierarchy of indexical focus upon one or more aspects of the communicative context is dependent upon the pur- posiveness (goal-directedness) of interaction, regimented by cul- evitable formal linkage of different indexical subsystems through formal overlaps (cf.2). The maximally dominant purposive func- tions are instantiated by the maximally creative or performative indexical forms; the minimally dominant parposive funct instantiated by the maximally presupposing indexical forms, Per- formative indexicals are such that given an occurrence of the lin- guistic form, there is entailed the "existence" of some particular aspect(s) of the context. Presupposing indexicals are such that valid ("appropriate") use of an instance depends upon the indepen- dently-established "existence" of some particular aspect(s) of the. context, -Performativity and presupposition are dimensions” of the actual instance ('token') of implementation of indexical ‘types'. Any indexical type has a range of characteristic implementations along this dimension, that depend in the instance on the configura- tion of other co-present indexicals and the dominance hierarchy of purposive functions. Thus, in moving from type to token,there is leakage of functional (indexical) tokens, as these are in- stantiations of particular indexical subsystems (types) in actual configurations of such. 4, Language itself provides the conventional means of cultural con- ceptualization and communication of goal-directedness through the meta-pragmatic referential-and-predicational devices. These allow Speakers reference-to and predication-about the pragmatic (index- ical) famctions of language-in-context. The clearest examples are the verbs of communication (verba dicendi), which are used to describe actors as engaged in pragmatic activity with language. These include as a subset in some languages the so-called "ex- plicit performatives," certain constructions containing which are _-at_once_meta-pragmatic (they describe the speech event in which they are used) and pragmatic (they creatively index the transforma- tion of contextual parameters in which they are used), This is yet another level of functional leakage with duplex surface forms, doubly functioning as "language" and Mmetalanguage." We can dub this function-metafunction leakage. 5. Many languages provide a grammatical device for functional rank-shifting through the productive formation of verbs of communi- cation from quoted instances of purposive pragmatic utterance used as stems of inflectable predicators, e.g., English He 'Good morning!'ed me, Such delocutionary constructions (E. Benveniste) provide an open-ended and infinitely-generative metapragmatic capability in and of themselves. D. The use of metalanguage, language describing itself, is, in fact, the central differentiating property of language as a natural semiotic system among all the semiotic systems encompassed within ‘culture’. The leakage between meta-pragmatic and pragmatic, and between meta. semantic (definitional; analytic!) and referential-and-predicational ("semantic"), is thus ultimately the critical feature of language. Ll. The importance of the continuity of forms across these func- tional planes cannot be overemphasized. Language provides a regimentation of form across functional planes, with metaseman- tics (the capability for true definition) ultimately at the center of organizing principles, that gradually emerges developmentally in mature linguistic usage. (Cf. W.V. Quine's account in The Roots of Reference, or L. S. Vygotskij's account in Thinking and Speak- ing.) 2. Metasemantic usage is an only asymptotically approachable form of equation sentence (this follows from the leakage in A.4. of this section), in which two expressions that can be used in descriptions are equated, relative to some grammatical system for reference- and-predication; thus; English (An) ophthalmologist = [is] (an) eye= doctor. To the extent that lexical items and complex constructions have pragmatic value (something now increasingly playing a role at last!---in philosophical discussions) as well as strictly Saus- surean semantic value, all such definitions will be imperfect equa- tions "salva veritate."!3. Theoretically, the capability of inducing metasemantic equa- tions is equivalent to the property of a system having a Saus- surean-type grammar. (A grammar is Saussurean iff metaseman- tic equation sentences can be induced with its copular construc- tion.) We have already seen that all natural languages violate strict Saussurean principles insofar as they have a pragmatic mean- ing component, and hence are only partially regimentable by meta- semantic equation, Only those aspects of referential-and-predi- cational structure that can be subject to strict Saussurean analy- sis are possible terms of metasemantic equation; indexical-ref- erential devices, for example, are not. 4, Since they employ the copular construction (with some form equivalent to our English verb be), definitions or metasemantic equations in actual natural languages are a set of sentences con- tinuous in form with regular referring-and-predicating sentences, that is, sentences the utterance of which identifies entities or referents as elements of some set, or as the same as some speci- fiable object, etc, in short occasional equation utterances. U. Weinreich observed that there is no natural language which has a special sentence-form uniquely identifying definitional, or meta- semantic, usage as opposed to mere occasional equation of ref- erents of expressions. (One suspects that true definitional usages attempted in a language like Hopi, with a "nomic" or timeless verb inflectional possibility, are at least a bit more apparent at the surface.) Metasemantic usage, an asymptotically successful Parposive function of linguistic communication, thus overlaps in form with occasional equation and other types of referential-and- predicational purposive functions. Thus, there is fanction-meta- function leakage here as well. 5, Observe that the function-metafunction leakage in the realm of semantics-metasemantics is different from that in the realm of pragmatics-metapragmatics (discussed in C.4-5.). In the latter, we have explicit performative constructions, like English I promise (you) that 5, where S stands for some proposition-coding syn- tactic clause. These include a verb of saying (or communication) in basically unmarked inflectional form with first person agentive subject and second person recipient object, or their equivalent, a discontinuous referring-and-predicating syntactic schema that is a description of some contextualized use of language. So meta- pragmatic function is part of referring-and-predicating fanction, circumscribed by the domain of reference-and-predication, namely the instances of contextualized use of language. In the particular case of the explicit performative, when it is used the instance is the-very-one-in progress, as indicated-by the-indexical-referen- tial agent and recipient pronouns for the speaker and addressee. But the explicit performative utterance has a pragmatic dimen- sion of function as well; it indexes (presupposes) that certain particular features of the situation of use are so independent of its use, and indexes (entails) certain particular features of thesituation of use are so because of its use, Which features of the context are so indexed is coded principally in the verb stem used (and its associated syntactic machinery}, Observe that such forms can be used in regular metapragmatic descrip- tion of past, future, habitual, etc. events of speaking as well, e.g., English I promised him that S. Here, the fact of meta- pragmatic transparency, where the description of the pragmatic- ally-effective speech event includes (partly duplicates) the very signal used to accomplish it---in our example, promise...that--- is very much akin to the delocutionary form of description of speech events, predication of an instance of which as an event (with all its pragmatic dimensions) is accomplished by using the very signal, the Linguistic form, specifically. or_character. istically used in such an event, e.g., English to 'Good morning! someone, Metapragmatic transparency obviously comes in degrees, and it is just a particular language-specific happenstance that there are sets of lexical items in such languages as English that are totally transparent, such that the metapragmatic descrip- tor and the pragmatic signal coincide (the happenstance nature is exaggerated; there are good reasons why). By contrast, the semantic-metasemantic leakage is 2 systematic identity of form which alternates, but does not combine, functions, except if we make the assumption of extensionality, which, as Putnam and others have recently re-emphasized, is not in general justifiable in terms of "intension"' determining "extension." E. The formation of a native metalinguistic ideology, or ethnometa- linguistice, is closely related to, and seems to depend in interesting ways on, the rule-governed regimentation of language functions of the indexical sort through purposive functions, expressed by partic- ular language forms, with referential-and-predicational structure at the center of the system(s). 1, Such an ethnometalinguistics provides the modes of discourse for native rationalizing about, and conscious planning of, the ef- fectiveness of language (the particular instance and the general capacities), in relation to other cultural realities, 2. Actual communication is a dialectic of functional structure and functional ideology in the microcosm of realtime (actor or partici- pant experiential) events; this is called synchrony. Pragmatic rules of use are formulated at the ‘type! level, giving conditions of "appropriate" indexical relationship of some linguistic form(s) to a presupposed contextual configuration. But the actual prag- matic entailments of any particular indexical linguistic ‘token' cannot be so encompassed, except as these then become avail- able for- presupposition by subsequent indexicals in the ongoing communication. 3, Native participant coordinated communication is thus partly recapitulative, inasmuch as an interpretative understanding of the interaction essentially involves the ethnometapragmatic grasp of signals, and partly projective, inasmuch as a generative strategy-10- for participation in the interaction essentially involves the ethno- metalinguistic grasp of purposive functions with signals, But both are inaccurate to the extent that ideology and actuality di- verge. Given the limitations on ideological formations (which even for reference-and-predication, Whorf was among the clearest to emphasize), this seems almost inevitable. 4, Linguistic history is a dialectic of functional structure and functional ideology in the macrocosm of systemic realtime; this is called diachrony. At this level, it is the forces of institu tionalization of particular structure-ideology relationships that determine the directionality of change (as emphasized at least by the facts investigated by Labov and associates), but the tenden- cies are exactly the same as those operative in microcosm, __ 5. We might call this dialectic in microcosm the leakage of im- plementation, and in macrocosm the leakage of history. F. It is particularly in the areas of leakage that language makes contact with the rest of social reality. The semantic system of sense-relations in the narrowest Saussurean(-...-Chomskian) view is autonomous; there is, however, a question as to its existence. The rest of language (viewed here from the functional, not formal Perspective) shows the intimate relationship of form to communica- Hion-in-context, and thus has all the properties of an interlocking set of action systems which encompasses its own ideation, ap to and inclading its emergent properties while “in play. 1, There is a theoretical ideal metasemantic system which under- lies and is equivalent to the property of having form (grammar ) in the strictly Saussurean sense. The actual attempts at meta~ semantic usage asymptotically approach this ideal system. We deal here with linguistic functional systems that are manifested by actual discourse, not idealized discourse; thus the first level is the semantic system of sense-relations instantiated in refer- ring-and-predicating, 2, The semantic system is the realm of defining form in the tra- ditional way. Yet here, the leakage of fundamental irregularities (Bloomfield), the lexical items in their peculiar surface- structure non-compositional semanticity, threaten the regularities of form. Lexicalization can only be grounded in the level of pragmatics, in that every lexical item (as opposed to "semantically equivalent grammatical construction) has both semantic content and presup- posing indexical (pragmatic) content which differentiates it from any complex expression. Thus, the key to the existence of lex- icalization for any domain of denotation is the investigation of the sociocultural presuppositions on use encoded by the lexicalization. 3.-‘The pragmatic system is-the basic realm of (indexicat) fune= tion in the traditional way. Yet here the leakage of multifanction- ality at the type level (which threatens to make the notion of ‘in- dexical' vacuous) can only be grounded in the level of purposive function, which defines the hierarchy of pragmatic focus for par- ticular configurations of form-in-context. At the center of the system of purposive functions is the coding of such in metaprag-le matic forms of language itself, in terms of which regimenta- tion into referring-and-predicating form natives seem basically to conceptualize the use of language. 4, The metapragmatic system is the basic realm of purposive function, in terms of which generation and interpretation of action by natives can be rationalized. Yet here, the leakage of imple- mentation at the token level is such that there is an emergent quality of communication, produced by a dialectic relationship between ideation and action. The "life of language" as also the “growth of language" (Whitney) lie in this dialectic process. HI. The ‘cultural! foundations of some cherished autonomies of language. If the majority of the cultural content of language is in the 'leakag various points of view, then it is interesting to examine some specific examples of where this cultural leakage is to be found, particularly in what have traditionally been cherished as autonomies of the linguistic system, A. Take the case of proper names. In every society, there seem to be certain linguistic items which pick out entities in a seemingly one-to-one fashion, The philosophical notion of a true proper name as a definite singular referring expression ad hoc, i.e., unsystematic in relation to its (unique individual) referent, is an asymptote of what is found in natural situations. In the difference between what is ideal and what is actually found lies the calturally-relative basis of what proper names are really about. 1, The so-called "causal theory of reference" now associated with Kripke, Putnam, et al. is essentially a cultural theory that ref- erence grows out of reference (i.e., occasions of reference) in an “historical" sequence, and not out of 'sense!-relations applied in particular acts of reference. On the face of it, this theory is a stronger claim than even the original sense-reference theory that proper names, being applied in an initial "baptism" of an en- tity, and then in a chain of further uses, show the universal pre- cultural nature of the apprehension of individuals and of "natural types," and thence, their labelling. 2, Examining the claims a bit more carefully in terms of actual Personal naming data, however, we find the facts for such a system as that of the Worora (Northern Kimberley, Western Australia) to be as follows, The set of proper names consists of duplex refer- ring forms, that are at once pragmatic---their use depends on indexical relations between instance of use of the name and the Kinship specifications of speaker—hearer—referent in the context in which they are used---and metapragmatic---their reference harkens back to, and. encapsulates, the first, “baptismal” fixing of reference to a certain individual with that expression of ref- erence. Thus, to account for their pragmatic dimension, we must describe the indexical relationships between usage of the name and the context of use; to account for their metapragmatic dimen- sion, we must describe the first, performative nomination as aning are_specifiable with a reduced classification of types of indi “12. historical event and the (perhaps regular) chain of other events, at least in logical reconstruction, of referring with the proper name subsequently, leading to an instance we claim refers as a quasi-"delocutionary" (cf. I1.C.5.) usage. 3. All this is "cultural" description of the most central sort, involving notions of the contextual parameters of action-events, the nature of the individuation of events in some space-time reckoning schema, and the nature of the individuation of per- Sons, on the basis of which both the pragmatic and melaprag- matic dimensions of naming must be specified. For the Worora, the pragmatic dimensions of referential use of names shows its basis in the system of kinship reckoning; the contexts for nam- viduals from the perspective of speaker-centric kin relationships generated by an "Omaha"'-like marriage rule. The metaprag- matic dimensions of initial baptism draw on this kinship system as well as on the system of geographical individuation of place that plots events in myth-time onto the cultural space in which this society functioned, as the basis of the individuation of events creating and transforming the individual referent of the proper name. (I have described the system in detail elsewhere.) 4. More generally, all naming systems seem to show these char- acteristics. Naming systems differ in the extent to which there is high vs. low metapragmatic coding of historical events of bap- tism, and high vs. low pragmatic coding of events of referring with the name, That is, there might be explicit "baptism," or bestowal of a mame in public events at one extreme, to automatic recruitment of a referent to a name in terms of some other kind of historical event like what the weather was like at birth of a (human) referent. Also, there might be explicit rules of who can and cannot be named under specifiable social circumstances in- volving specifiable speakers, at one extreme, to informal tenden- cies merely to presuppose that speaker and hearer can be made to share (not necessarily that they do share) some particular discourse-relevant definite description of the individual, at the other extreme (the way American English appears to work, thus giving the wrong impression to the ethnographically naive). For personal proper names, there are also variations as to the recruit- ment of objects-to-be-named, starting with the core of fully soc- ialized individual actors in the society (at some stage of the life cycle), and moving out to immature or not fully socialized, and Post-socialized (dead) individuals, then to other species (e.g pets), and to other social forms (e.g., spirits and gods), includ- ing sometimes marginally agentive ones (e.g., houses), 5. As if this referential variability in cultural terms were not bad enough, there is pragmatic—metapragmatic variability in yet other functional realms. In some societies, e.g., those of the North- west Coast of North America, including the Chinookans with whom I worked, tmames! are like our antiques or lineage heirlooms,“Be each referring-to-someone-by-means-of-which constitutes an occasion of display of the antique. In Northwest Coast socie- ties, in general, every name is ranked with respect to every | other, and the use of the name for reference presupposes that | the utterer (more correctly, the name of the utterer) has validated the right of the referent to bear that name (note the pun!) by attendance at a "'potlatch" in which utterer (or a previous bear- er of bis own name) has received ceremonially-valuated wealth | (or witnessed destruction of such wealth) for such validation. A scratch on the antique, i.e., a lowering of its value through the bad conduct of a particular individual bearer, obligates the Kinship line to withdraw it from circulation, rather than ever bestowing it upon someone further down the line when its earlier bearer dies or takes another name. Such culture-specific func- tions in addition to referring-and-predicating directly speak to the relationship between individual and social structure in real- time. 6. The cultural importance of this kind of cross-linguistic func- tional variability in proper name systems is this: our very no- tion of having ‘individuals! as members of society rests heavily on our own culture's view of the ability to "extend! (in the philo- sophical sense) the set of individuals through a naming procedure or its equivalent (cf. the "genealogical method" in traditional social anthropological practice). But to use our own notions of what Proper names are, without a comparative cultural analysis of Proper-name reference in its full pragmatic and metapragmatic complexity in other societies, ascribes to "individuals" in other societies’ properties not necessarily encapsulated or coded in that society's proper names, and thus may well violate precisely what "personhood" is all about there. The fact is, the social Properties that locally define the "individual"! in every society are differently mobilized in what is perhaps the most directly | connected expression of what it means to "extend" actors in a society through language, the indexes of personhood we can now define as proper names. 7, The linguistic Importance of this kind of cultural variability in naming systems is this: it shows that naturally occurring proper names, all too often drawn into theoretical discussions of ref- erence and sense, do not support any positivist or logical atom- ist assumptions about the asymptotic character of “logically proper names" as almost pre-linguistically getting to the "reality" of individuals out there, Proper names in the naturally occurring cases incorporate a functional leakage in language, whereby this seemingly-unitary-formal class of signs can be functionally defined only by making precise the cultural bases of at least four kinds of meaningfulness, (1) the cultural classes from which namable objects are recruited in events of baptism of various sorts, as | the essential condition for their metapragmatic meaningfulness |4. under the "causal"! theory; (2) the semantic systematicity, if any, of describable classes of objects and occurrences, mem- bership in which is coded in the name of the referent (e.g., gender in American English given names, with few exceptions); (3) the cultural classes from which appropriate speaker, hearer, referent relationships are constituted for use of the names in speech acts of reference using the name; (4) the ethnometaprag- matic regimentation of the various semiotic functions in addi- tion to reference which are understood to be performatively involved in the use of proper names (e.g., deference, kinship status-marking, etc.). B. A second example concerns the variability in cultural understand- ing of how language is used at the explicit vs. implicit levels of representation. Given that the explicit ethnometapragmatics is vital to understanding the dialectic of usage, this variability among lan- guages concerns altimately the planning and execution of speech by native speakers as a social action understood in certain specific ways. L, Consider the problem of reporting speech, i.e., of giving an account of some speech event involving a speaker, a hearer, a referent, a message, some language (in the semantic-grammatical sense), etc., at some time, in some given locus and spatial ar- rangement. A language like English regularly regiments such a report into a propositional sentence-form something like "Speaker said/asked/warned/explained/.... (to) hearer, '...'.!" There is a whole taxonomy of terms which can be substituted for any of these exemplary verbs that predicate some interaction between speaker and hearer, and it is the meanings of these metapragmatic predications (cf, I1.C.4,,I1.D,5.) that now concern us. 2. If we consider such metapragmatic predications as mappings of the variables of the speech situation (the very same ones, note, that are involved in indexical relationships described by the prag- matics of speech) into particular linguistic forms, we find that there is no one-to-one relationship at either of two levels. There is no uniformity of particular presupposed contextual configura- tions being mapped onto particular metapragmatic predicate. And there is no constant mapping of all the relevant attributes of the speaker onto the linguistic form |agentive subject of the sentence) that refers-to the speaker; no constant mapping of features of the hearer onto the linguistic form (recipient object of the sen- tence) that refers-to the hearer; nor any constant mapping of any other features of the speech situation identifiable or localizable in some particular component onto a single denotational lexical expression. Thus, there is no neat partition of types of "speech acts" (seenas. types of-presupposing and. creative indexical rela~ tionships between contextual variable(s) and speech form(s)) by forms of metapragmatic descriptors, in particular the metaprag- matic verbs, e.g., promise, declare, order, christen, etc. in English (a problem that various ordinary language philosophers have yet to come to grips with in some adequate way). 3. An attempt at taxonomizing metapragmatic verbs with the-15- usual "ethnoscience" approaches, then, just will not be of any interest to the study of the cultural understanding of how lan- guage functions. Alternative strategies are necessary. I have developed a method for examining metapragmatic narrative text for this purpose, which scores the discourse-cohesive properties of metapragmatic framing devices, that is, of text elements of the general form "A said-to/ordered/asked/... B, '...'," so as to yield data on the episodic and event continuity/discontinuity patterns represented by the reported acts of using language. In this way, data are generated on what are the presuppositions of the context of speaking, and the entailments of having spoken a particular type of message, that are framed by particular meta- pragmatic verb forms. These data can be examined for patterns oF significant presuppositions/entailments in the narrated (reported) contexts narrative characters are described as being in. We can interpret these patterns to yield insight into the kinds of culturally-interpreted transformations of context characteristically described by certain metapragmatic descriptors. 4. [have applied this method to narratives of Lower Chinook (Columbia River, North America), and the data seem to show a bipartition of verbs of metapragmatic framing into two classes of significant pragmatic events. One set of verbs reports speak~ ex's self-expression through verbal display, and the other set of Verbs reports the more specific case of speaker-hearer social relationships presupposed and changed by language use, in short, speaker-hearer illocutionary relationships realized through lan- guage. The set of metapragmatic frames that involve "mere at- terance" are characteristically used at episode boundaries, to report initiation or denial (hence, conclusion) of interaction. The indexical function is broadly (self-)expressive, focusing on speaker. The set of metapragmatic frames that involve Millo- cutionary" and "perlocutionary" effect are characteristically used episode-internally, to report ongoing speech interactions that presuppose the prior negotiation of social relations. (Note that Chinookan society was exquisitely rank-conscious, in which vir- tually every social dyad could be evaluated for relative rank.) The indexical function is broadly interpersonal, focusing on speaker-hearer social relationship, either presupposed by the speech event as normally accruing to such-and-such status n-ads of persons, or presupposed from the narrative-specific role- relations. 5. What is interesting in all this from the point of view of a 'eultural' approach is that there is no "locutionary" partition of framing devices, akin to our English set.He stated that.../He asserted that... /He declared that.../..., that focus on the prop- ositional content (referring-and-predicating in the truth-functional understanding) of the utterance as the functional purpose or goal of the event of speaking. To be sure, there is a referential- and-predicational level of meaning in Chinookan, which we can6. The_cultural importance of this kind of functional variability in =16- and must postulate for analytic purposes, and the existence of which is demonstrated by the existence of mechanisms of so-called "indirect discourse" (cf, English, He said, 'The book is right here !' vs, He said that the book was right there!). But there is no explicit lexicalization which permits framing such propositional content ag the performative or illocutionary intent of a speech event; there is no class of metapragmatic devices (cf. modalizers in European languages) that single out this level as critical to the conduct of social life reported in traditional narratives; and there is no evidence so far located in narrative discourse through mechanisms coding the coherence of action that this level plays a role in the cultural presentation of language as social action, metapragmatic framing devices (of which explicit performatives- cf, U.C.4,---are a subclass) is this: our very notion of the range of uses of speech for certain social ends (what I have called the purposive function or goal-directed function of language) is heavily dependent on winnowed folk theory, or ethnometaprag- matics, that is couched in terms of what metapragmatic framing devices are systematically used to report speech events in some regimented fashion, Western European views (what Whorf felici- tously called "Standard Average European") are heavily reliant on the native theory of truth-valuated referential-and-predicational language, sharply separating language as social action from other media of such. In philosophical as well as rhetorical circles, this has required considerable ingenuity to derive other social uses of speech on an analogy from this, or as an extension of this (cf. the literature on "speech acts" and "non-natural mean- ing" and the like), It is important to see that other societies can construct perfectly adequate views of the (linguistic) social world along internally-coherent interpretative lines that essentially ig- nore this level of linguistic function; here it is necessary to see j that conduct and interpretation of language use from the natives! Point of view would be in very different terms from our own (cf. Geertz on Javanese notions of “linguistic etiquette"). 7. This is most emphatically not to deny that referential-and- | predicational evaluation and analysis of language provides the most powerful cross-linguistic organizing principles for approaching language structure in both universal and particular terms, given our knowledge of the phenomenon so far. To the contrary, just as for Whorf the whole interest of languages was in calibrating" linguistic systems for reference-and-predication one against another to show that languages systematically differ in what ‘pure Semantic’ and ‘mixed semantic-pragmatic' and 'pure pragmatic! categories ultimately achieve isofunctional reference-and-predi- cation (having the exact equivalence in "extensional" power), and then in comparing native awareness of, and task-directed reas- oning using, such different linguistic structures, so the interest here is in "calibrating" the variations in explicit vs. implicit-17- purposive functions of language more broadly, to see how there is differential native understanding of ultimately isofunctional pragmatic machinery that interacts differently with these differ- ent metapragmatic structures in the dialectic conduct of social life through language. In short, the aim is to investigate the cultural variability in the outcomes of speaking even with prag- matic systems of ultimately equivalent overall power (even with the assumption of universal human pragmatic competence). 8, The linguistic importance of this kind of cultural variability in metapragmatic systems is this: it shows that the usual assump- tions about the (purposive) functional uniformity of languages that have gone into ethnography of speaking, or into philosophical accounts of conversation, are far wide of the mark. M matic descriptors in the naturally occurring case show functional leakage in language whereby the emergent dialectic ambiguity of language use (what our philosophers attempt to encompass with the illocution/perlocution distinction) in any actual instance of use under consideration, can be functionally defined only by making precise the cultural bases of (I) an analysis of direct vs. indirect indexing of the parameters of the context by language forms, in- cluding sensitivity to the presupposing vs. creative value of in- dexicals; (2) an analysis of the cultural classes of purposive func- tions of language use as evidenced for example in the text-prag- matics (discourse-cohesive properties, etc.) of the explicit vs. implicit metapragmatic devices of language; (3) an analysis of the interaction of these that, by its nature, underdetermines the outcome of any specific act, In such functional "leakage of im- plementation" lies the essential creativity of the medium. G. I could give many more examples of these sorts, which establish leakage of language form and function across the planes of analysis set up in I, Neither is language a closed formal system, were we to try to hold constant purposive function, indexical function, ref- erence-and-predication, and their implementation in a specific acti nor is language a closed functional system in implementation, were we to try to hold constant form, purposive function, indexical func- tion, reference-and-predication. The full analysis of language re- quires all the assumptions, methods, and admissions of only asymp- totically-achievable theoretical comprehension in the best of all pos- sible cases, as does the full analysis of social action with some schema of understanding called ‘cuttare'. IV. Language AS culture: a new nexus needed A. What I have been engaged in here is implicitly an argument with various traditional" approaches: to-the problem of the relationship. of ‘language’ to 'culturet that emerge from assumptions about the formal and functional boundaries of language. These approaches, summed up in I.B.3.-7., may be considered more carefully now as views of “language AND culture," “language IN culture," “language OF culture 1, Language and culture points of view, evidenced in traditionalBoasian anthropological linguistics, and in modern derivatives | such as “ethnoscience" (including the specific hypotheses of "com- ponential analysis of kinship terminology") and misguided (pro or con) pseudo-Whorfianism, see language as basically a ref- erential-and-predicational mechanism, the formal elements of which, especially lexical items and grammatical constructions of these, denote sets of objects, events, etc. in the non-linguis- tic "real" world. Thus, language is the reflection, or represen- | tation, however inadequate or skewed with respect to the "real | (modern scientifically-known) world, of the objects, events, etc. that it refers-to and predicates-states-of-affairs-about. The crux of these studies is to find the classifications underlying the mode of representation, such that each time language is | "used, the (relersing-and-predicating) use Grésupposes the GA>— | plicit conventional agreement of the speakers on kinds of clas- | sifications of the "real" world, and on kinds of formal signals | that express this classification. Language is here, culture is there, and there is a complicated mapping relationship between them. ‘This view easily accomodates the cherished ideology of naive empirical realism, in which can be formulated doctrines of "cor- rect" referential-and-predicational, extensionally-verifiable lan- guage achievable in scientific discourse. The problems entailed in this particular subvariety are so well known that it is un- necessary to review them here; the recent history of philosophy is testimony enough to them. Moreover, this view of language and culture also easily accomodates a nominalism of the post- Saussrean type, in which language structure, especially in lex- ical expression, is autonomous and generative of the "real' world to which it refers. Quine’s famous doctrine of "ontolog- ical relativity" may be read as a curse of plague on both these houses, which are both built on the shaky foundation of this view of language-and-culture, But even without the assumption of the regimentability of natural languages into scientific extensional forms, we have a host of problems with this view of language and culture. These can be cast in particularly sharp relief from the point of view of try- ing to answer developmental questions, such as: Where do the categories of representation in language come from? How is the contextual specificity of reference-and-predication learned in terms of, or generalized to, systems of 'sense!-relations at the in- tensional level of language? How do context-creative uses of language (where the "real"! world is established as a context for language. through utterance). come about? No real answers have yet been forthcoming in this view of language and culture, nor, I would argue, will they be. 2. Language in culture points of view, evidenced in curious form by post-Austinian speech act theory, by ethnography-of-speaking anthropology of language, and even by most sociolinguistics, see language as a system of "appropriate" usage that represents, ina19- essentially indexical fashion, aspects of the context in which it is implemented. Thus, given 2 communicative context, in- cluding, in philosophical accounts, various internal intentional states of speaker, hearer, etc., certain conventional forms of language are appropriate expressions of the dimensions of that context, Clearly, this view of language incorporates many of the significant relationships I have discussed in Il above, but there are many problems that arise from limiting our view of language to them. There is no attempt, for example, to expli- cate the systematicity of recruitment of certain referring-and- predicating forms to certain kinds of contexts, i.e., providing an account of the systematicity of the relationship between struc- tures analyzed under view L @and structures at issue in 2. in the process of using language. (The very multifunctionality of most linguistic forms in both these modes should be argu- ment enough for the necessity of doing so; and the cross-lin- guistic regularity of such multifunctional relationships is strong evidence that such functional leakage is inherent in all natural languages.) There is no systematic analytic perspective in this view on the nature of what counts as specific kinds of speech acts, im relation to specific kinds of indexical relationships, i.e. no segmentation of occurring discourse into sequential or hier- archical domains of relevant form such that language as social action can be seen to have a coherence as structured speech act, structured role-diacritic, etc. over stretches of recog- nizable complexity, And most critically, there is really no account in this view of the functional Leakage of implementation, in truly "creative" indexical usage, where language indexes parameters of the context which its very use brings into being for the participants, generally unawares. That is, there is no real understanding of the relationship between culturally-informed norms for the conduct of speech and the possibility of analyzing specific instances of speech use, no dynamics of types and tokens that I find absolutely essential to appreciating how lan- guage works. (Such distinctions as illocution vs. perlocution, which can be phrased in terms of intensional conventionality of language-as-social-action vs. extensional actuality of language- as-behavior, or plain vs. metaphorical appropriateness of role~ diacritics in relation to indexed context, merely restate the problem as a dichotomous gap, rather than present a mechanism of implementation.) 3, Language of culture points of view, evidenced in many struc- turalized and linguisticizeé models of culture, as well as in certain extreme forms of. linguistic functionalism (e.g: Malin= owski), see language as basically a happenstance secondary code, the primary to which is the "cultural code." Here, language itself seems to lose all internal self-sufficiency, and just hap- pens to be an institutionalized channel of certain principles of social form (the structure of society) externalized, e.g., clas--20- sifications established when myths “think themselves" through people, categories of personhood established when people inter- act, etc,, for which sometimes---though not particularly sys- tematically---language is the method of instantiation. (Typically this view is the view of anthropologists in contradistinction to linguists, for whom Linguistic evidence is conveniently approp- riated in an analysis of social forms in certain realms, but is never approached in and of itself.) This view is neutral with regard to reflectionist or implemen- tationist attributions about language, for language itself is of no inherent functional value, This view lends itself to univer- salizing the "cultural" symbolic structures, at the same time as denying or seeing as irrelevant the systematicity of referential-_ and-predicational structure in language, and the institutionalized contextualization of linguistic indexical functions, Language as such disappears, and so we no longer have a language-culture problematic, But in another sense, we still have all the prob- lems mentioned under L. and 2. left to explain, insofar as they show any balance of systematic variability and uniformity across societies. B. We can have no argument with approaches that understand the limitations on their assumptions about language form and function, and do not seek to find the essence of language by false extension from this core in an attempt to cover the rest. The argument here is that linguistic communication unites all of the aspects of what we traditionally seek to explain in cultural accounts of social behavior, and hence has all the complexities thereof. Language is not merely referential-and-predicational representation, useful for rational thought, Language is not merely an indexical system in which to communicate certain conventional regularities of role-relationships. Language is not merely a system of signals for conventionally expressing intentions about valuated manipulation of self and of others. Language is not merely a vehicle for symbolic structures to find expression in external form during interaction. Language is all of the above, and we are beginning to see regular- ities cross-culturally in how it is all of the above. So ingeniously and, I would argue, necessarily are all these woven together into @ seemingly continuous formal fabric, that we must search for seams (semes?) in specific languages and subject our conclusions about the interrelationships of functional threads at points of leakage to comparative test, before we can "calibrate! languages to find the regularities. These regularities will, I propose, be indistinguishable from those we-call culture's