One outstanding question in linguistics includes the place of non-referential or expressive language in grammar and in conveying meaning. What are the boundaries of grammar, and where do the lines between grammatical and communicative competence get blurred? This talk speaks to these questions from the perspective of language documentation and ethnography, and particularly, in light of speech play and verbal art (henceforth SPVA) (Kiparsky 1973; Sherzer 2002; Epps, Webster, and Woodbury 2017), examining “salient” language based on speaker intuitions of what counts as expressive. SPVA may include structures, contexts, and phenomena such as ideophones, puns, profanity, language games, echo forms, honorifics, humor, ritual genres, and sound symbolism. Analyses of SPVA have revealed patterns about linguistic structure that otherwise might not be uncovered (Sapir 1915; Yip 1982; Woodbury 1987; Hale et al 1992; Nevins & Vaux 2003). The empirical question remains to what extent SPVA forms build from regular grammatical processes (Kiparsky 1973), and how they are processes that operate at different representations of the grammar (Zwicky 1987; Potts 2007).
This talk explores the interplay of grammar and SPVA through the lens of Naso, a Chibchan language spoken in Panama. The questions I focus on areː What areas of language are more accessible to variance, and how do they relate to meta-pragmatic awareness (Silverstein 1981)? I argue that in SPVA, Naso speakers manipulate the variable categories and features of the language in order to create saliency (in line with Kiparsky), but I add that the reverse is also true: some features stretch and violate the rules of the language. I examine Naso ideophones and a lexical class of verbal art called tjlõkwo rong ‘profound words’ within the broader patterns of Naso grammar and society.
I show how variable derivational morphology, NP coordination, and the coda position of syllables are particularly prone to manipulation. ‘Profound words’ exploit noun derivation and coordination to produce a large class of poetic couplets, but stretch their grammaticality by manipulating the reduplication of lexical and prosodic elements. The combination of these processes aligns with speaker intuitions that ‘profound words’ are semantically non-compositional and inherently ineffable. The grammatical analysis is connected to the social history of ‘profound word’ lexicon, which shows borrowing from other languages in contact (Bribri, Cabécar, Mískitu, English Creole) which heighten their association with prestige and impenetrability. The ordinary grammar can influence the patterns of SPVA, but the interplay can also occur in the opposite direction. Beyond their productive tendency towards relative sound symbolism patterns (Dingemanse 2012), areal diffusion from African languages via Mískitu and English Creole, blending of different sensory perceptions (Nuckolls et al 2016), and conventionalization into other language-internal word categories (Samarin 1965), Naso ideophones also behave in ways that show attention to coda position, including voiceless sibilants.
The typological question of how languages may vary in the encoding of expressivity remains, and ethnographically-informed language documentation is one way to address it.
