William Foley | The University of Sydney (original) (raw)

Papers by William Foley

Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1977

University Microfilms International eBooks, 1976

The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area, 2017

Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association, Jan 23, 2012

This talk: is, like many, autobiographical in origin. It grew out of my experience in study and l... more This talk: is, like many, autobiographical in origin. It grew out of my experience in study and learning an exotic language of New Guinea, Yimas, spoken by about 200 people in a village of the same name in the East Sepik Province. Yimas is a language of a type as far away as could be imagined from my native language English and the other familiar languages of western Europe. To illustrate briefly, Yimas can often express in a single word what would correspond to a sentence in English:(1) ampa-pay-ma-taI]-wura-na-UI) me to you-first- ...

This paper was presented at the 3rd LFG conference in 1998 in Brisbane, Australia. It is an early... more This paper was presented at the 3rd LFG conference in 1998 in Brisbane, Australia. It is an early version of a paper that appeared (in abbreviated form) in 2008 (Foley, William A. 2008. The place of Philippine languages in a typology of voice systems. In Austin, Peter K. & Musgrave, Simon (eds.), <em>Voice and grammatical relations in Austronesian languages</em>, 22–44. Stanford: CSLI Publications).

Explorations of the Syntax-Semantics Interface, 2021

This article is published under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial). ... more This article is published under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial). The licence permits users to use, reproduce, disseminate or display the article provided that the author is attributed as the original creator and that the reuse is restricted to non-commercial purposes i.e. research or educational use. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ______________________________________________________

1. The Herderian equation: linguistic ideology in the West Linguistic ideology can be defined as ... more 1. The Herderian equation: linguistic ideology in the West Linguistic ideology can be defined as that cluster of beliefs that a particular speech community holds about the form and function of language. Speech communities vary in size and network density, and this can be linked to variations in linguistic ideology, a good example being the contrast between most educated laypersons' general prescriptive beliefs about language, eg the standard language is best and to be emulated, with variations from this stigmatized, versus professional linguists' descriptivist views, which value all varieties equally and attempt to describe each without prejudice. Of course, even within a community such as professional linguists, there are subgroups with their own ideological beliefs about language, such as critical discourse analysts versus minimalist grammarians. It is important to understand that ideological beliefs are not theories per se, but rather the background of largely unexamined assumptions that guide the construction of specific theories, be they folk theories or scientific ones. What concerns me here are some of the central ideas about language that have guided European political and educational policies toward language over the last few centuries. These beliefs were clearly articulated by the German Romantic philosopher Herder, who argued for an essential correlation between the language of a community and their mind or spirit (German Geist). This was part of a wider German nationalist project of the 18th and 19th centuries, to forge a unified German nation-state from numerous principalities and kingdoms of central Europe that were German speaking, and this lead to a triple equation: the culture of a people (their mental functioning as a community) is essentially correlated with the language they speak and in turn should ideally correspond to a nation-state. Note that monolingual communities are the ideological focus here. The close correlation between a language and a nation-state was further emphasized during the revolutionary period following 1789. In opposition to the overthrown and discredited notion of the subject under a monarch arose the concept of

All language description and documentation is an exercise in translation. This holds true even fo... more All language description and documentation is an exercise in translation. This holds true even for seeming monolingual tasks in the discipline like a French reference grammar in French or the Oxford English Dictionary, as language forms to be described and analyzed (the object language) must be done so in another from of the language (the metalanguage) in order to be claimed to be elucidated at all. Obviously, in the descriptive and documentary tasks that most field linguists of endangered languages engage in, a more radical form of translation is required: the linguistic forms of the language under study (the object language) are described and analyzed (not to mention providing metadata in the process of documentation) in a completely different language, typically a European metropolitan language like English (the metalanguage). This holds true regardless of whatever theoretical framework one wishes to cast their description in: the framework itself needs to be elucidated, eg requires a metalanguage, and the object language needs to be translated into this metalanguage before any description can take place. In practical terms, field linguists tend to be guided by two heuristic principles in their necessary tasks of translation: effability and the Conduit Metaphor. The first holds that what can be said in one language can be said in any other language, the result of an endowment of universal human reason; and the second that the relationship between a word and its meaning is like that between a container and its contents, i.e. a word or a sentence HAS a meaning, like a glass has water in it. More precisely the Conduit Metaphor can be spelled out as having the following components (Johnson 1987): 1. ideas or thoughts are objects 2. words and sentences are containers for these objects 3. communication consists in finding the right word-container for your idea-object, sending this filled container along a conduit (e.g. writing) or through space (e.g. speech) to the hearer, who must then take the idea-object out of the word-container These two principles gel together so that the task of translation is mainly seen as one in which the translator needs to align the containers in the object language and metalanguage, as effability guarantees that there will be a match up in the contents of these containers across languages. This view of translation, albeit not one often explicitly articulated, but taken as a working methodology, is simply not tenable, as this paper will endeavor to demonstrate. Even if one assumes a principle of effability, Quine (1960, 1969) has pointed out that it is never possible to establish a unique container in the metalanguage to correspond to that of the object language; this is the Quinean principle of the indeterminacy of translation: there is no unique optimal fit of data to analytical metalanguage; rather a range of interpretive conceptual schemes may be entertained as compatible with the data. Fundamental to all of Quine's philosophy is the idea that our sensible experience of the world underdetermines our response to it, in the form of those conceptual schemes we

Interclausal relations in Papuan languages and in particular their prototyical clause chaining st... more Interclausal relations in Papuan languages and in particular their prototyical clause chaining structures have long presented serious descriptive problems. These have been analyzed variously as instances of subordination, coordination, and even a third unique type of relationship, cosubordination. This paper argues that clause chaining structures are actually a type of coordination, but distinguished from familiar types of coordination by the type of constituent coordinated, S versus IP. The parametric variation found in clause chaining constructions across Papuan languages is in turn accounted for in terms of the types of functional heads of verbal inflections, negation, mood, tense, illocutionary force, which head the individual IPs conjoined in clause chains. This paper presents a revision of the theory of clause linkage, in particular the theory of nexus, first developed in Foley and Van Valin (1984) and restated in Van Valin and La Polla (1997) and Van Valin (2005). The original theory proposed three categories of nexus, the traditional ones of subordination and coordination and a new type, cosubordination. Subordination and coordination were distinguished along the traditional lines of embedded versus non-embedded. For our purposes here, we will define an embedded clause as one which functions as a constituent, either core or oblique (Andrews 2007; Foley 2007), of another clause, the main or matrix clause. Conventionally, grammarians have called embedded subordinate clauses which function as core arguments complements, and those which function as oblique constituents, adverbial clauses, but in our view this is not the most perspicacious terminology because it obscures their overall similarity, a similarity clearly brought out in the structure of many Papuan languages. For that reason, in this paper we will refer to both types simply as subordinate clauses and note the level of embedding, core versus oblique. Clauses linked in a coordinate nexus are not in an asymmetrical relationship of embedded versus matrix clause, but rather are joined at the same level, strung along rather like beads on a string. Designating a clause by the exocentric category S (Bresnan 2001), we can represent the contrast between subordinate and coordinate nexus as Figure 1:

Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1977

University Microfilms International eBooks, 1976

The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area, 2017

Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association, Jan 23, 2012

This talk: is, like many, autobiographical in origin. It grew out of my experience in study and l... more This talk: is, like many, autobiographical in origin. It grew out of my experience in study and learning an exotic language of New Guinea, Yimas, spoken by about 200 people in a village of the same name in the East Sepik Province. Yimas is a language of a type as far away as could be imagined from my native language English and the other familiar languages of western Europe. To illustrate briefly, Yimas can often express in a single word what would correspond to a sentence in English:(1) ampa-pay-ma-taI]-wura-na-UI) me to you-first- ...

This paper was presented at the 3rd LFG conference in 1998 in Brisbane, Australia. It is an early... more This paper was presented at the 3rd LFG conference in 1998 in Brisbane, Australia. It is an early version of a paper that appeared (in abbreviated form) in 2008 (Foley, William A. 2008. The place of Philippine languages in a typology of voice systems. In Austin, Peter K. & Musgrave, Simon (eds.), <em>Voice and grammatical relations in Austronesian languages</em>, 22–44. Stanford: CSLI Publications).

Explorations of the Syntax-Semantics Interface, 2021

This article is published under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial). ... more This article is published under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial). The licence permits users to use, reproduce, disseminate or display the article provided that the author is attributed as the original creator and that the reuse is restricted to non-commercial purposes i.e. research or educational use. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ______________________________________________________

1. The Herderian equation: linguistic ideology in the West Linguistic ideology can be defined as ... more 1. The Herderian equation: linguistic ideology in the West Linguistic ideology can be defined as that cluster of beliefs that a particular speech community holds about the form and function of language. Speech communities vary in size and network density, and this can be linked to variations in linguistic ideology, a good example being the contrast between most educated laypersons' general prescriptive beliefs about language, eg the standard language is best and to be emulated, with variations from this stigmatized, versus professional linguists' descriptivist views, which value all varieties equally and attempt to describe each without prejudice. Of course, even within a community such as professional linguists, there are subgroups with their own ideological beliefs about language, such as critical discourse analysts versus minimalist grammarians. It is important to understand that ideological beliefs are not theories per se, but rather the background of largely unexamined assumptions that guide the construction of specific theories, be they folk theories or scientific ones. What concerns me here are some of the central ideas about language that have guided European political and educational policies toward language over the last few centuries. These beliefs were clearly articulated by the German Romantic philosopher Herder, who argued for an essential correlation between the language of a community and their mind or spirit (German Geist). This was part of a wider German nationalist project of the 18th and 19th centuries, to forge a unified German nation-state from numerous principalities and kingdoms of central Europe that were German speaking, and this lead to a triple equation: the culture of a people (their mental functioning as a community) is essentially correlated with the language they speak and in turn should ideally correspond to a nation-state. Note that monolingual communities are the ideological focus here. The close correlation between a language and a nation-state was further emphasized during the revolutionary period following 1789. In opposition to the overthrown and discredited notion of the subject under a monarch arose the concept of

All language description and documentation is an exercise in translation. This holds true even fo... more All language description and documentation is an exercise in translation. This holds true even for seeming monolingual tasks in the discipline like a French reference grammar in French or the Oxford English Dictionary, as language forms to be described and analyzed (the object language) must be done so in another from of the language (the metalanguage) in order to be claimed to be elucidated at all. Obviously, in the descriptive and documentary tasks that most field linguists of endangered languages engage in, a more radical form of translation is required: the linguistic forms of the language under study (the object language) are described and analyzed (not to mention providing metadata in the process of documentation) in a completely different language, typically a European metropolitan language like English (the metalanguage). This holds true regardless of whatever theoretical framework one wishes to cast their description in: the framework itself needs to be elucidated, eg requires a metalanguage, and the object language needs to be translated into this metalanguage before any description can take place. In practical terms, field linguists tend to be guided by two heuristic principles in their necessary tasks of translation: effability and the Conduit Metaphor. The first holds that what can be said in one language can be said in any other language, the result of an endowment of universal human reason; and the second that the relationship between a word and its meaning is like that between a container and its contents, i.e. a word or a sentence HAS a meaning, like a glass has water in it. More precisely the Conduit Metaphor can be spelled out as having the following components (Johnson 1987): 1. ideas or thoughts are objects 2. words and sentences are containers for these objects 3. communication consists in finding the right word-container for your idea-object, sending this filled container along a conduit (e.g. writing) or through space (e.g. speech) to the hearer, who must then take the idea-object out of the word-container These two principles gel together so that the task of translation is mainly seen as one in which the translator needs to align the containers in the object language and metalanguage, as effability guarantees that there will be a match up in the contents of these containers across languages. This view of translation, albeit not one often explicitly articulated, but taken as a working methodology, is simply not tenable, as this paper will endeavor to demonstrate. Even if one assumes a principle of effability, Quine (1960, 1969) has pointed out that it is never possible to establish a unique container in the metalanguage to correspond to that of the object language; this is the Quinean principle of the indeterminacy of translation: there is no unique optimal fit of data to analytical metalanguage; rather a range of interpretive conceptual schemes may be entertained as compatible with the data. Fundamental to all of Quine's philosophy is the idea that our sensible experience of the world underdetermines our response to it, in the form of those conceptual schemes we

Interclausal relations in Papuan languages and in particular their prototyical clause chaining st... more Interclausal relations in Papuan languages and in particular their prototyical clause chaining structures have long presented serious descriptive problems. These have been analyzed variously as instances of subordination, coordination, and even a third unique type of relationship, cosubordination. This paper argues that clause chaining structures are actually a type of coordination, but distinguished from familiar types of coordination by the type of constituent coordinated, S versus IP. The parametric variation found in clause chaining constructions across Papuan languages is in turn accounted for in terms of the types of functional heads of verbal inflections, negation, mood, tense, illocutionary force, which head the individual IPs conjoined in clause chains. This paper presents a revision of the theory of clause linkage, in particular the theory of nexus, first developed in Foley and Van Valin (1984) and restated in Van Valin and La Polla (1997) and Van Valin (2005). The original theory proposed three categories of nexus, the traditional ones of subordination and coordination and a new type, cosubordination. Subordination and coordination were distinguished along the traditional lines of embedded versus non-embedded. For our purposes here, we will define an embedded clause as one which functions as a constituent, either core or oblique (Andrews 2007; Foley 2007), of another clause, the main or matrix clause. Conventionally, grammarians have called embedded subordinate clauses which function as core arguments complements, and those which function as oblique constituents, adverbial clauses, but in our view this is not the most perspicacious terminology because it obscures their overall similarity, a similarity clearly brought out in the structure of many Papuan languages. For that reason, in this paper we will refer to both types simply as subordinate clauses and note the level of embedding, core versus oblique. Clauses linked in a coordinate nexus are not in an asymmetrical relationship of embedded versus matrix clause, but rather are joined at the same level, strung along rather like beads on a string. Designating a clause by the exocentric category S (Bresnan 2001), we can represent the contrast between subordinate and coordinate nexus as Figure 1:

Cambridge studies in linguistics, Jan 1, 1984

Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. WA FOLEY, RD Jr VAN VALIN Cambridge Studies in Linguisti... more Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. WA FOLEY, RD Jr VAN VALIN Cambridge Studies in Linguistics London 38, 1984. A partir d'exemples d'une centaine de langues, les AA. montrent l'apport du ...

This is the first comprehensive textbook in anthropological linguistics to be published for very ... more This is the first comprehensive textbook in anthropological linguistics to be published for very many years. It provides a remarkably complete and authoritative review of research questions which span the disciplines of linguinitics and anthropology, yet presents a coherent, unified, biologically based view of this cross disciplinary field.