Imperial grammar.pdf - Roger Blench

Roger Blench: Imperial grammar and grassroots categories Circulation draft
How can the orientation of field linguists be changed? Going to the field without a fixed view of what is
interesting might help. Listening to communities might help. If we must do linguistics through the medium
of the doctoral thesis it would be helpful to have a broader range of topics on the agenda. We can produce a
much enriched description of African languages by enquiring more widely. Even our view of familiar topics
such as phonology and morphology has been constrained by sketchy approaches to the lexicon.
Dialogue of the two worlds
Grammar is about generalisation, real verbal behaviour is full of exceptions that you ‘just have to know’.
Languages are rich with exceptions, but the normalising process of grammar writing tends to iron these out
(as does literacy). For some languages (or phyla) this overflows into morphology or phonology and becomes
more evident (for example number marking in Nilo-Saharan). However, exceptionality is undoubtedly part
of a sociolinguistic process, erecting barriers with other languages or between subsets of society. We often
associate this principally with lexicon (cf. Oceania and Australia), but it occurs across the entire spectrum of
verbal behaviour. Dictionaries and grammars are often kept apart on the shelves in case contagion might
spread from one to another, and indeed it should.
8. Conclusions
Much of the material emerging from academia supposedly describing African languages is a travesty of
what people say and do. It is as much top-down as the Latinate grammars written by priests in the Congo in
the 17th century, albeit dressed up in postcolonial rhetoric. Languages are more complex and have many
more categories than we would like; they cannot be easily packaged. Extended dictionaries could interface
more directly with the grammars that some of us write. We will need better ways of talking about
‘intermediate’ speech behaviours such as idioms, which don’t fit neatly into either dictionaries or grammars.
Probably we need to extend our concept of ‘parts of speech’ to a larger, more locally engaged category, a
linguistically informed ‘ethnography of speech’. Methodologically, it would consist of folding text analysis
and semi-structured elicitation into a series of feedback loops, working from hints in existing materials
towards new categories. And similarly restructuring relations with informants.
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