Language In Relation To A Unified Theory Of The Structure Of Human Behaviour

"The book is incredibly large and the most common use to which I’ve seen it put is as a doorstop and paperweight. Kenneth Pike was my first professor in linguistics and he taught me how to do the monolingual field demonstrations that I do in different places. I’m not saying it’s the best written book. I don’t like it because every word is a jewel and couldn’t possibly be removed—it could be removed by thirty percent and would pretty much say the same thing. But what Pike does is offer an integrated theory—I prefer to think of it as suggestive ideas rather than a theory—about how our understanding of language could serve as a basis for the understanding of culture. So, language is designed or language has features – Pike was a theist so he did believe language was designed and many parts of language in his theory have triune effects, I think that the trinity affects his thought in there. If you take “John sees Bill”: John is the subject as an actor so he has a slot; he has a semantic role: actor; the slot has subject, and he has a category: he’s a noun-phrase. “Sees” is the same thing: it’s a verb-phrase as a predicate in the predicate position, and then you have the object which is also a noun-phrase which is an undergoer. This is his basic theory of language – these are fundamental components – but he says let’s look at culture and see that if I’m an interviewee, I’m playing a certain role. I have other roles that I play and I have a certain category that I belong to, however we choose to do this. Pike said that this idea that language has slots and fillers that can then be arranged in a matrix and looked at statically or dynamically works for culture too. I don’t think he worked it out really well. In fact that’s largely the basis of my new book. I use Pike’s theory – the key idea that Pike had was emicization. I’ll give you the etymology: phonetics is the study of physical properties of sounds; phonemics is the study of the sounds that are meaningful to the speakers. Pike took the ends off those words – etic and emic – and this has become incredibly influential in anthropology though much less so in linguistics, ironically. The basic idea is ‘etic’ is the perspective of the outsider: I go and I can say ok, here are the sounds that I hear in the language – I’m a phonetician – I don’t know what these mean to the speaker until I do some analysis . Once I’ve done the analysis, I’ve got the perspective of the insider and now I’m doing phonemics. So etics is the outsider, emics is the insider, and emicization is the process of going from alien to insider. Yes, participant observation but more than that because I become part of it; my judgements become native judgements. So think of a child – that’s the ultimate participant observer – the child is born an alien and within a period of time not only learns language but learns culture, learns values. This entire concept of culture as a process of turning people into insiders, making them part of a group, and how this works with language and culture to me is probably the most important idea of language, as Pike wrote. You see it in Marvin Harris (the anthropologist) and in Clifford Geertz (another anthropologist) who have been somewhat influenced by Pike’s view. Anthropologists really find this idea of outsider-insider useful and they’ve tried to systematise it. Pike did systematise it in linguistics which is how it has become a popular anthropology. It’s similar to Chomsky’s view…"