Ranking of Participants in Kinyarwanda: The Limitations of Arbitrariness in Language  

Oleh:

Contini-Morava, Ellen

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Anthropological Linguistics (ada di JSTOR) vol. 25 no. 4 (1983), page 425-435.
Fulltext: 30027686.pdf (1.43MB)

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Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/ALI/25 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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This paper concerns some apparently puzzling restrictions on the order and interpretation of pronominal object prefixes in Kinyarwanda, a Bantu language of central Africa. Some pronoun sequences are acceptable while others are not. Of the acceptable sequences, some appear to provide information about the respective participant roles of the pronouns' referents, while others are ambiguous as to participant role. It is suggested that both the restrictions on ordering possibilities and the interpretations of acceptable sequences can be explained in terms of two alternate strategies for the ranking of participants in a reported event: ranking according to degree of empathic distance from ego (egocentricity) and ranking according to degree of potency in bringing about the event (contribution). Ambiguous pronoun sequences are cases where there is a potential conflict between these ranking strategies; unacceptable sequences violate the ranking according to egocentricity. While some of the rules of Kinyarwanda pronoun usage must be viewed as arbitrary facts, others are motivated by extra-linguistic factors and are thus not entirely arbitrary. It is argued that arbitrariness in language must be viewed as a scale, with Saussure's linguistic sign representing one extreme and psychological universals the other.

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