metaphorical uses of 'yumi'

[Miriam Meyerhoff]

Bambi Schieffelin and Gillian Sankoff have sen me copies of some 
recent correspondence on this topic, and I have subscribed to the 
list in order to weigh in now in person and try and answer some of 
the open questions from the prior postings I have seen, specifically 
some points raised by John Lynch in this message, such as WHO uses 
Bislama 'yumi' when the event or state described does not literally 
include the addressee(s) and when.

The summary of my work that Courtney Handman provided was very good, 
and I didn't mean to be obfuscatory about where I did my work. I 
recorded all my tokens (tape and informally) in a village on Malo 
island and in Santo township. As I have noted, the majority of tokens 
of 'yumi' used metaphorically occurred in the village data. I have 
suggested that this is because the Ni-Vanuatu/expatriate intergroup 
distinction in town is generally so salient that it is only under a 
few circumstances that it can be overridden. For example, my landlord 
saying to me "ol risej we yumi mekem" when referring specifically to 
a survey he did of malaria transmission in the Banks/Torres region. 
Here, I think he can use the 'yumi' felicitiously because he knew 
that the reason I was in Vanuatu was to do research on linguistics, 
so our shared identity as researchers was (topically) salient enough 
to override ethnic factors.

However, John Lynch is quite right that generally Bislama speakers 
use 'yumi/mifala' in their truth conditional senses. In my 
transcribed corpus, the majority of uses of 'yumi' do index 
situations where the speaker and addressee were co-participants. Only 
14/61 tokens of 'yumi' (i.e. 23%) were what I am calling metaphorical 
uses.

Since most of the people who used it with me (as I have noted 
elsewhere) we women, and most of the women I hung around with on Malo 
were "woman nara aelan", I'm talking about people with a variety of 
L1s:Raga (Pentecost), North Maewo , Aneityum, Nakanamaga (Emae) and 
one L1 speaker of Bislama (and then there was also my male landlord 
from the Banks). But there were also a good number of people from 
Malo (Tamambo speakers) who used the form with me, including the 
tokens from men that I have discussed when some other intergroup 
distinction seemed to be more topically more salient than gender 
(e.g. the contrast between people "daon" and people "antap"). Some of 
the women I have tokens from were Bislama dominant even though 
Bislama was technically their L2.

What you'll notice though is that there is a bias towards speakers 
from northern islands though in my sample. I don't know if that 
accounts for the differences in my observations and John's 
observations in Vila (and Aneityum, John?). When I mentioned my 
interest in this to Terry Crowley though, his response was along the 
lines of "yeah sure, of course 'inclusive' can be used to signal 
attitude", which I took to me that he was familiar with the 
phenomenon in Bislama too. Terry, I assume you're out there, would it 
be fair to say you're also mainly a south and central Vanuatu person? 
Perhaps this is one feature that is emerging as a genuine regional 
dialect difference in Bislama.

When I talked to speakers of Bislama about this, they also seemed to 
be unsurprised at what I was looking at. That is, their awareness of 
this strategy is reasonably high, or can be easily activated. I did a 
workshop on linguistics at Matevulu college in 1995 with a Year 10 
class, and when we discussed this, I said I had noticed that I heard 
it more from women than to men. Lots of students volunteered that 
this was because I was a woman (sort of "duh, Miriam..."). I also 
talked about it with a few people on Malo when I was back there in 
1998. I hardly explained the phenomenon when one of the men I was 
talking to jumped in saying something like "yes, yes, we do that in 
Tamambo too. You don't want people to feel left out". (Aside: it's 
interesting that this is the same motivation people usually give for 
using Bislama in a linguistically mixed group. The concern is 
obviously pretty pervasive in constraining linguistic choices.) That 
people are aware of it at this kind of level, doesn't surprise me 
since if my data is representative, even though it's not the 
(statistically) normative way to use 'yumi', it occurs something like 
one in five times the inclusive pronoun is used.

Interestingly, though, I asked Dorothy Jauncey, who did absolutely 
WONDERFUL fieldwork on Tamambo on Malo and whose grammar is based on 
a lot of conversation as well as the usual sorts of elicited texts, 
whether she had come across this use of the Tamambo equivalent 
'hinda-'. She went through her transcripts and found only a tiny 
number of 'hinda-' used metaphorically as a proportion of the total 
uses of 'hinda-'. This leaves some interesting questions about how to 
resolve the comment by the guy who told me that he recognised the 
Bislama strategy from Tamambo, with Jauncey's data on (his and 
others') metaphorical use of the inclusive. One possible answer might 
be that in Tamambo, different intergroup boundaries are attended to 
and salient most of the time than the ones I observed (e.g. gender, 
clan membership), but I really don't know. More fieldwork needed, 
maybe next summer....

When I was first looking at this I did try and find if there were 
analogous uses of 'yumi' in Tok Pisin and drew a blank. since I've 
missed the start of this thread, if anyone would care to send me 
(privately) references to work that has come out since I last looked 
or that in work in progress (either for Tok Pisin, or any language 
for that matter) I'd really welcome it.

For those who really want to haul my data over the coals, here are 
some references to places where I have discussed it (each one does 
make different points about the phenomenon):

2001	Dynamics of differentiation: On social psychology and cases 
of language variation. In Nikolas Coupland, Christopher Candlin and 
Srikant Sarangi (eds) Sociolinguistics and Social Theory. London: 
Longman. 61-87.
[still in page proofs at the moment, should be out by April next yr]

1998	Accommodating your data: The use and misuse of accommodation 
theory in sociolinguistics. Language and Communication. 18. 205-225.

1996	My place or yours: constructing intergroup boundaries in 
Bislama. In Belief Systems: Proceedings of the 1996 Berkeley Women 
and Language Conference. Women and Language Group: University of 
California. 509-518.

best, mm


TO 31 DECEMBER, 2000:                   FROM 1 JANUARY, 2000

Miriam Meyerhoff
Department of Linguistics	        Department of Theoretical
University of Hawai'i at Manoa                 and Applied Linguistics
1890 East-West Rd		        University of Edinburgh
Honolulu, HI 96822			40 George Square
                                         Edinburgh EH 8 9LL

808 956-3236               (ph)         (+44) 131 650-3961
808 956-9166               (fax)        (+44) 131 650-3962

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~mhoff/
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