Meaning in linguistic forms

linguists postulate on the basis of distributional factors. Similar arguments were later used by generative linguists to argue for abstract or “deep” structures to represent certain types of relations between different elements of a sentence (Chomsky 1957, 1965).

6.3.2Emic and etic in anthropology

When a sound difference between two words produces a meaning difference, linguists say that there is a phonemic difference between the two words. When a sound difference between two words does not produce a meaning difference, we say there is a phonetic difference. As shown above, the role of aspiration in English is phonetic whereas in Korean it is phonemic. In Korean, aspiration has an effect on the referential or denotational meaning of a word, but in English it does not. From this distinction, Kenneth Pike (1954–56, 1966, 1971) introduced the terms emic and etic for talking about behavior that is significant and behavior that is not significant for the people who engage in it.

It proves convenient – though partially arbitrary – to describe behavior from two different standpoints, which lead to results which shade into one another. The etic viewpoint studies behavior from outside of a particular system, and as an essential initial approach to an alien system. The emic viewpoint results from studying behavior as from inside the system. (Pike 1971: 37)

This distinction became very important in anthropology in the 1960s, when fieldworkers were encouraged to distinguish between an emic and an etic perspective in their descriptions. The emic perspective is one that favors the point of view of the members of the community under study and hence tries to describe how members assign meaning to a given act or to the difference between two different acts. The etic perspective is one which is instead culture-independent and simply provides a classification of behaviors on the basis of a set of features devised by the observer/researcher. Etic grids are lists of features of a given phenomenon that can be used in comparative work. Not all features might apply to all situations or communities. Hymes’s model of the components of a speech act – Situation, Participants, Ends, Act sequences, etc. (see section 9.2) – is an example of an etic grid.

As pointed out by Keesing (1972), there are different versions of the emic/etic distinctions. Emic is sometimes seen as equivalent to “mental” or “ideational” and hence not directly accessible while etic is identified with behavioral and hence with visible acts. Other times, emic is simply the point of view of the members of a group and etic is the point of view of the observer. If the observer is an anthropologist who has studied or read about other communities, the observer’s

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6.3 Basic properties of linguistic sounds

perspective is likely to include a list of likely features – sometimes cast as a set of potential universals of human culture.

Different approaches within anthropology have tended to favor one perspective over the other. In the “New Ethnography” School, which included Goodenough’s and Frake’s notion of a cultural grammar (see section 2.2), the goal of ethnography is to describe a culture in emic terms. For example, in his work on Subanum cultural activities, Frake (1964) argued that we cannot rely on a crosscultural (i.e. etic) list of criteria to find out what counts as “religious behavior” for a particular group. We must instead find out how certain behaviors are interpreted and conceptualized by the members of the group. Cultural materialists like Marvin Harris argued against this position by recasting the distinction between emic and etic in terms of participants’ vs. observers’ categories.

If behavioral events are described in terms of categories and relationships that arise from the observer’s strategic criteria of similarity, difference, and significance, they are etic; if they are described in terms of criteria elicited from an informant, they are emic. (Harris 1976: 340)

Some of the problems with the emic/etic distinction have to do with the fact that it relies on two problematic homologies, one between language and culture and the other between anthropological goals and methods and linguistic goals and methods, especially those developed by formal grammarians.

Language is part of culture but definitely not all of it. How a woman feels about her children and how she conceives of her relationship with her husband can be certainly talked about but includes more than the verbal strategies through which such feelings and relationships are represented or negotiated. The sense of “respect” implicit in a man’s behavior toward certain individuals in his community includes a range of acts, stances, and beliefs of which language is only a part. The products of human labor, including the artifacts that are such an important part of the definition of what a person thinks of “home” or “workplace” or “temple” are a fundamental component of the cultural context through which lives are lived and meanings are assigned to them. And yet such artifacts have a life that is often complementary to and certainly not identical with linguistic expressions. As we start to think about the relation between language and culture, we realize that what we say depends on our notions and theories of what language and culture are (see chapters 2 and 3). Nevertheless, the two domains are not identical and any homology between the two must take into consideration such a lack of identity.

Grammarians tend to assume a considerable number of shared principles and rules across languages. Whether or not one accepts Chomsky’s notion of

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