"... how to understand the native... " - The need for a holistic description of the Trobriand language, culture and mentality

This ethological concept needs some explanation: Every society puts some of its realms, domains and spheres under certain specific taboos. However, the stricter the society is in regard to its observance of these taboos, the more these taboos are ignored. But a society can secure its members' observance of certain taboos, especially of taboos that are important for its social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966), by allowing the discussion of its taboos -- especially of the sociologically less important ones -- as topics of discourse. It may even allow its members to imagine the ignorance of taboos -- in a fictitious way, of course. And this is exactly how and why safety valve customs develop. Texts and utterances that show features of biga gaga are first of all classified as sopa -- as play, as something fictitious in Trobriand society. The biga sopa thus generates a forum where the breaking of taboos -- and thus the use of (milder forms of) “bad language” -- is allowed, if it is done verbally! This forum permits a specially marked way of communication about something “one does not talk about” otherwise.

Thus, the biga sopa variety channels emotions, it keeps aggression under control, and it keeps possibilities of contact open. This concept with it tensionreleasing functions secures harmony in the Trobriand society and contributes to maintaining the Trobriand Islanders' social construction of their reality.

It is obvious that the understanding of this metalinguistic concept is crucial for everybody who wants to learn Kilivila and to use the language situation-adequately in social interactions -- and it goes without saying that this insight also holds for the other situational-intentional varieties of Kilivila mentioned above. The Trobriand Islanders' metalinguistic vocabulary codifies extremely important aspects of their own indigenous or emic theory of their language!

Once I had gained these important insights into the metalinguistics of Kilivila situational-intentional registers and their constitutive text-categories, I systematically collected data illustrating the genres of these varieties and discussed them intensively with my consultants.

In the course of this documentation -- the compilation of my Kilivila corpus inscriptionum which was guided by the Trobianders' own -- emic -- metalinguistic concepts, I also learned much about the conventions, rules and regulations with respect to how the Trobriand Islanders' use their language in social interactions, what kind of meanings their words, phrases and sentences convey in what kind of contexts and what kind of functions the use of language fulfills in and for its speakers' communicative behavior. The acquisition of these pragmatic rules that govern the adequate and appropriate use of Kilivila in different communicative contexts was decisive for reaching my aim to meet Malinowski's (1922: 24f.) claim to "grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world".

My Kilivila corpus inscriptionum -- a brief survey and a critical acclaim

Immediately after I returned from my 1983 fieldtrip I started to compile the grammar and the Kilivila-English / English-Kilivila dictionary (which was published in 1986), because I was convinced that after my 15 months of fieldwork I was at the height of my acquired speech competence in Kilivila. Already in 1901 Georg von der Gabelentz pointed out the following:

Ich wiederhole es, dieser Aufgabe [eine Sprache zu beschreiben] ist nur der gewachsen, der die Sprache praktisch beherrscht: das wissenschaftliche Kennen, das Erkennen und Beurtheilen setzt ein Kцnnen voraus; die wissenschaftliche Darstellung wird nichts Anderes sein, als eine sachgemдЯe Erklдrung dieses Kцnnens. Es ist dies ein Zustand, dessen sich der Grammatiker bewuЯt sein muЯ, und in welchem er sich Eins weiЯ mit dem Volke, dessen Sprache er lehren will (von der Gabelentz 1901: 82)This quote translates as follows [my translation, G.S.]:

"I repeat, only somebody who commands a language can meet this challenging task [to describe a language]: scientific knowledge, recognition and assessing requires competence; the scientific presentation cannot be anything but an appropriate explanation of this competence. This is a condition a grammarian needs to be aware of and in which he is at one with the people whose language he wants to teach."

It was only on the basis of my speech competence in Kilivila that I could collect natural speech data in the Kilivila speech community. The will to learn the local languages and the effort to speak it facilitates the researcher's establishment in her or his field. The gradually growing knowledge of the language opens up insights which are extremely difficult to gain otherwise. If we accept that one of the most important aims of research within the humanities is to understand meaning, than it is obvious that the royal road to reach this aim is speech, communication, verbal interaction. On the basis of my grammar it was easy to enhance the accessibility and analysis of almost all kinds of speech data I collected throughout my research on the Trobriand Islanders' language, culture and cognition. However, it goes without saying that there were some grammatical phenomena which remained problematic for me to describe in an adequate and appropriate way. In Senft (1994) I provide a list of these cases with an explanation why I could not properly cope with them. Among these cases were the four series of possessive pronouns which can also be analyzed as possessive or relational classifiers. On the basis of my publications Matthias Passer re-analyzed the data in his PhD thesis on "The Typology and Diachrony of Nominal Classification" in which he presents -- among many other fascinating research results -- an elegant and convincing model of possessive marking in Kilivila (Passer 2016: 32ff).

During my field trips in 1982/83 and 1989 I especially collected data that documented different forms of ritual communication (see e.g., Senft 2009b) and specific grammatical and semantic phenomena like the system of nominal classification in Kilivila (Senft 1996; 2008b), complex serial verb constructions (Senft 2008c) and the inventory and use of color terms (1987; 2012b). The data on ritual communication fit into the Trobriand Islanders' metalinguistic typology of genres and the speech varieties constituted by them.

With the exception of the genres 'yakala' -- 'litigations' (which I could not observe during my field research) and 'kavala' -- 'intimate personal speeches', and '-kasemwala- ' -- 'propositioning, seducing' (which I did not even try to document because of ethical reasons), I have illustrated all the other genres and thus the situational-intentional varieties of Kilivila in my Kilivila corpus inscriptionum.

As pointed out above and elsewhere (see Senft 2010: 276ff), speakers of Kilivila recognize speech genres because of their specific linguistic and/or contextual features and because of their being embedded in specific situative contexts, and they have no difficulties whatsoever in noting when a speaker is shifting from one genre to the other. Whoever wants to speak and understand Kilivila properly must acquire this ability to recognize these genres, to assign them to the situational-intentional variety which they (co)-constitute and to understand their pragmatic function in, and for, the Trobriand Islanders' speech community.

To my knowledge, the Trobriand Islanders' typology of situational-intentional varieties and their constitutive genres documented in my published and/or accessible parts of my Kilivila corpus is as exhaustive as possible.See my list of publications: https://www.mpi.nl/people/senft-gunter/publications and especially Senft (2010). However, I want to emphasize here that this claim of 'exhaustiveness' only refers to varieties and genres that are metalinguistically labeled in Kilivila. Malinowski pointed out that the Trobriand Islanders realize the difference between myth and historic account, although they do not mark the difference with specific metalinguistic terms. That is to say, the realized difference between myth and historic account is not articulated in emic categories. During my long-term fieldwork I have also collected a number of descriptions of how to do certain things (like building a canoe, making a sail, burning lime, making a grass-skirt, etc.) and I have documented how mothers talk with their babies; these 'ways of speaking' are not differentiated by specific metalinguistic labels from other forms of talk in Kilivila, either. Thus, I am aware of the fact that my description of the Kilivila 'ways of speaking' purely in terms of emic genres is not complete in the strict sense of the term (see also Sherzer 1983:16). I am also aware of the fact that Duranti's (1988: 220) critical assessment of the ethnography of speaking paradigm applies to my approach as well:

A possible criticism of speech-event analysis is that it tends to select strips of interaction that are labeled by a culture, but it may overlook those interactions which are not recognized as units of some sort by the members. It should be mentioned here that, although the presence of a lexical term for a given activity or `strip of interaction' is only one level of local organization of experience -- perhaps the most obviously ideological -- the lack of a term for any given such `strip' is an interesting clue for fieldworkers.

However, my corpus inscriptionum for Kilivila provides such a great variety of `ways of speaking' and kinds of speech that I think I can live with this criticism, especially given the fact that I am aware of the limits of my endeavor.

Besides my guided collection of speech data which illustrate the Trobriand Islanders' metalinguistic typology of registers and their constitutive text categories I also collected data on specific grammatical phenomena like “nominal classification” and “serial verb constructions” as well as data at the interface of language, culture and cognition manifest in semantic domains like “space and spatial conceptualization” (Senft 2001) and in domains characterized by so-called 'ineffables' like “the emotions” (Senft 2017a&b) and “the senses” (Senft 2011). These research projects provided important insights into the relationship between language, culture and cognition within the Kilivila speech community.

With respect to the discussion of my Kilivila corpus inscriptionum it is also interesting to note that there are no proverbs in Kilivila, that there are no poems, either (despite the fact that some of the songs, especially the `wosi milamala' are highly poetic), and that there are no forms of drama (despite the fact that singing the `wosi gilikiti' during a game of Trobriand cricket is a highly staged event and a kind of dramatic performance).

Finally, I want to emphasize once more that with the situational-intentional varieties and their constitutive genres I documented in my published data and my overall Kilivila corpus, I have provided the Trobriand Islanders' indigenous -- emicSee footnote 8 above. -- framework for, and at the same time illustrated, the corpus inscriptionum Kiriwiniensium Malinowski asked for (and partly founded himself). I have also described the functions these varieties and their constituting genres fulfill with respect to the Trobriand Islanders social construction of reality. The salient relevance of these situational-intentional varieties and the genres that constitute them is so important for the speech community that it is one of the most important characteristics of the language to be recognized in anthropological linguistic field research. To repeat it once more: whoever wants to learn, speak and describe Kilivila properly has to grasp them, because the understanding of these concepts is compulsory for the adequate use and understanding of this language. All speakers of a natural language must learn and acquire the rules of the verbal and nonverbal communicative behavior that are valid in, and hold for, their speech community. In the course of this learning process one of the most important objectives is to understand and to duplicate the construction of the speech community's common social reality (see Senft 2014: 86ff). Thus, whoever wants to research the role of language, culture and cognition in social interaction must know how the researched society constructs its reality. Researchers need to be on `common ground' with the researched communities, and this common ground knowledge is the prerequisite for any successful research on language, culture and cognition manifest in social interaction. An as exhaustive as possible corpus inscriptionum of a language provides a sound basis for anybody who wants to -- or needs to -- acquire this common ground status. This is the most important prerequisite for all attempts “to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world” (Malinowski 1922: 24 f).

REFERENCES

Baldwin, Bernard. 1971. Dokonikani. Cannibal Tales of the Wild Western Pacific. Pekina: Typoscript. <http://trobriandsindepth.com/myths.html>

Berger, Peter L. & Luckmann, Thomas. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.