Fwd: metaphorical uses of 'yumi'

[Bill Palmer]

Hi Miriam, John, Mihalic listers

Yumi - an interesting debate that began about a specific feature of TP, and 
has turned into something that seems to me to have broader typological 
interest.

First, let me add that a similar situation exists in Solomons Pijin to that 
described for Bislama. I as the fieldworker could happily be included in 
iumi when the speaker was talking, for example, about his life experiences 
as a man, or about something pertaining to the village in a reasonably 
immediate sense (as opposed to a community related issue of considerable 
time depth or cultural significance), and so on.

So I'm wondering, Miriam, what you mean by "literally include the 
addressee". It seems to me that the issue is simply one of group membership 
- an inherently fluid thing. I can be included in iumi if I can be perceived 
in some way as belonging to a relevant group. For example, I can be told 
'Iumi mekim wan fisti' when I am not involved in preparing the feast, and 
may not have known about it before, but it will involve the whole community 
in the village at that point, and as an albeit temporary resident I am 
included in that community for the purposes of the feast. Iumi is not merely 
used to make me feel included, but because for the purposes at reference I 
am in fact included. In a similar way a speaker can refer to the habitual 
activities of expatriates in the capital who I have never met by using 
iufala istead of olketa - an observation may be being made that the speaker 
feels is a generalisation white people in general so I am included.

The point I am rambling towards is that I question the idea of iumi/yumi 
being used metaphorically. It seems to me that it is consistently used 
"literally", and that what varies is not the basis on which iumi/yumi is 
being used, but the (nonlinguistic) issue of the nature and manipulability 
of group membership. It seems to me that what is really being discussed here 
is not unusual or aberrant or metaphorical uses of iumi/yumi, but the 
semantics of the linguistic category of first person inclusive.

cheers
Bill Palmer


>From: Miriam Meyerhoff <mhoff at mailserver.Hawaii.EDU>
>To: Multiple recipients of list <MIHALIC at anu.edu.au>
>Subject: metaphorical uses of 'yumi'
>Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 11:57:14 -1000
>
>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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