Emeneau 1950

Linguistic Society of America
Language and Non-Linguistic Patterns

Author(s): M. B. Emeneau
Source: Language, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1950), pp. 199-209
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
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LANGUAGE AND NON-LINGUISTIC PATTERNS*
M. B. EMENEAU
University of California
An essential part of Bloomfield's definition of linguistic forms and construc-
tions is the attachment to them of stimulus-reaction features, which are his defini-
tion of meaning. The linguistic scholar is still bedeviled by the many problems
involved in talking about meaning, and he still lacks a body of dogma to which
he can refer when meaning is talked about. This paper is an attempt to explore
one of the problems and to establish a postulate which may be added to Bloom-
field's Set of Postulates.'
It is generally recognized that all the forms and constructions of language are
arbitrary in their attachment to their meanings. It must also be recognized that
these meanings of the elements of a language are arbitrarily selected from the
environment, i.e. that the members of the community that communicates by
means of that language are conditioned to react linguistically to arbitrarily de-
limited segments and relations of the environment. The environment, of course,
includes each speaker at the time when he speaks; otherwise he could not speak
of himself and his own internal psycho-physiological processes. It need not be
stressed that the segmentation of the environment in relation to the forms of a
language is arbitrary. The textbooks are full of illustrations meant to instruct
students in this matter. The Eskimo's many forms for various kinds of snow
corresponding to the one word of English is an example. Another is the English
or Latin insistence in the verb on a division of a time stream into past, present,
and future; this contrasts strongly with the Chinook four pasts at successively
more remote periods from the present, a present, and a future,2 or with Viet-
namese (Annamese), which has no obligatory category of tense in its verb sys-
tem."
All this is familiar. I would proceed from this to a matter that is, I think, new
and that is possibly valuable, viz. the assumption that some forms are ordered
in classes or subclasses corresponding to systems or subsystems within the en-
vironment. Some examples will be treated in detail later; for the moment one or
two will be mentioned only. Kinship systems come easily to mind. The numerals
are another example.
Some general considerations must be discussed first to prevent misunder-
standings. That segments of the environment are ordered into patterns or organ-
ized subsystems is obvious. The examples just mentioned, kinship systems and
numerals, could be added to-status systems, the organization of the physical
universe into a chemical system of atoms and molecules, a systematic botany.
* Presidential address, read at the 24th annual
meeting of the Linguistic Society in
Philadelphia, 28 December 1949.
1 Lg. 2.153-64.
2Walter Dyk, A Grammar of Wishram (unpublished Yale dissertation, 1933).
3 Seemy Studies in Vietnamese (Annamese) Grammar, to appear shortly. Other Viet-
namese material presented is treated more fully in that work.
199
200 M. B. EMENEAU
It must be stressed, however, that for our purposes at least, we cannot speak of
an organization of the environment that is universal and transcends communi-
ties. Epistemological considerations are best avoided by us. Yet we shall fall into
a circularity that may in the long run vitiate all our arguments, if we do not
recognize very clearly that each pattern or subsystem of the environment is
tied up with a particular community and is in large part identifiable only through
the labels attached to it in that community's language. The members of that
community are conditioned by education and habit to react to certain stimuli
in a patterned way. It is only by recording and analyzing these stimuli and reac-
tions that the investigator (the scientist, if you will) establishes that such pat-
terns exist for that community. The stimuli and reactions are partly linguistic
(i.e. part of the community's language), partly non-linguistic. Thus, a kinship
system within a community is known to the investigator partly through the
linguistic labels attached to certain classes of persons in the language of the
community, partly through certain actions of the members of the community,
such as a person's preferring to marry one of those persons to whom he would
attach a certain label (e.g. the label which could be represented in English by
the translation 'female cross-cousin'), or a person's failure to marry any of those
persons to whom he would attach certain of the labels in the linguistic side of
the kinship system (e.g. 'mother' or 'sister'), or his failure to hold linguistic
communication with certain particularly labeled persons (e.g. the mother-
in-law taboo). Important as are the non-linguistic stimulus-reaction features
connected with an organized part of the environment, it is doubtful whether we
can find any such pattern or subsystem apart from its linguistic identification
by the community which reacts to it. To investigate the linguistic side of these
patterns is our particular problem, and I shall shy away from the further vexed
and vexing question whether it is philosophically valid to talk at all of the
existence of a pattern apart from its linguistic identification. In any case, for
those of us who are Bloomfieldians in our linguistic discourse, the question need
not be raised; we hold that epistemological matters are to be left to the episte-
mologists and that we can talk about language without raising those matters.
This may sound uncompromisingly behavioristic; yet it seems that we can
profitably say something without trespassing further on the philosopher's terri-
tory.
Our insistence that an organization of the environment is a matter connected
with a certain community and that such organization is to be identified through
the language of that community, implies that any ordering that may be found
is as arbitrary as the linguistic labels attached to segments of the environment.
A kinship system or a status system or any other system that can be found in
the social relations of the individuals of a community will easily be recognized
as arbitrary, i.e. as peculiar to a particular community. Is this true too of the
systems worked out and described by the natural sciences? Perhaps, we may
naively say, there is a difference, and perhaps there is an underlying subject
matter which the chemist or the physicist describes, and which possesses a
greater degree of reality or a different type of reality from the relations described
by the social scientist. Again, this question is best left to the epistemologist.
LANGUAGE AND NON-LINGUISTIC PATTERNS 201
The fact that changes occur in the natural scientists' descriptions is sufficient
indication that they are proceeding by the methods of abstractions and hypothe-
ses and that the philosophical question of reality must be raised by them too."3
To pass on to mathematics, it is well known that this highly abstract discipline
does not pretend to be dealing with reality. It is clear, moreover, that once
there has taken place the initial cutting on which the mathematician bases his
units, his combinations thereafter are as arbitrary as can be, leading to innumera-
ble different arithmetics and geometries.
These considerations having been summarily cleared out of the way, we can
proceed to our linguistic discussion.
One of the most clear-cut instances of a systematic organization of the envi-
ronment being paralleled by linguistic organization is to be found in chemical
terminology. In English (and, in fact, in most of the European languages, which
here have borrowed structure freely back and forth from one another) the
chemist in inventing names for newly discovered and newly analyzed chemi-
cal compounds uses names made up of morphemes that show a one-to-one cor-
respondence with the elements of the chemical analysis, and he combines these
morphemes in constructions that show a close relationship to the structure at-
tributed to the chemical compounds. Most of us, even if we are not chemists,
are superficially acquainted with the implications of such morphemes as ferr-,
-ous, -ic, ox-, -ide, meth-, eth-, -yl, -ane, etc., and with the fact that a difference
of chemical structure is shown by the variant order in molybdenum chromate
(Mo2(CrO4)3)and chromiummolybdate(Cr2(MoO4)3), whose meaning is different
though both names contain exactly the same morphemes (molybdenum and
molybd-, chromium and chrom-, -ate). Numerous other such pairs occur in the
expositions of the inorganic chemist. The organic chemist also finds that his
system of nomenclature leads to such pairs; e.g. ethylene dichloride
cl\
H-C-C-
/C1\
H and dichloroethylene / H\ C C /H\ ,both based on ethylene
H/
H\ /\H benzenehexobromideand hexobromobenzene,or dipheny amine
H),benzene hexobromideand hexobromobenzene,or diphenyl amine
\H/ \H
3a At this point Y. R. Chao provides me with a footnote alluding to 'de Broglie's proving
that waves and particles are quite equivalent descriptions of the same phenomenon, about
the philosophical import of which physicists differ. But most of them regard the difference
as only linguistic, until and unless the two descriptions lead to some operationally different
results.'
He has also rewritten the end of the paragraph in the text as follows: 'To pass on to
mathematics, it is well known that this highly abstract discipline does not pretend to be
dealing with reality, but only with self-consistent systems of abstract terms in abstract
relations capable of one or more interpretations, if any at all. But once there has taken place
the initial interpretation, in terms of actual things, of the terms and postulates on which
the mathematician bases his deductive system, his combinations thereafter will follow by
logical necessity. So long, however, as the mathematician is building up his "pure" mathe-
matics (even though personally he may be interested in finding possible actual interpreta-
tions), he can and does to some extent make his constructions as arbitrary as can be, leading
to innumerable different arithmetics and geometries.' I must in honesty keep this out of
the text, since my ignorance in these matters could not have allowed me to write it.
202 M. B. EMENEAU
and aminodiphenyl.4Further discussion of this instance will be deferred until

we see more clearly what problems are involved.
Another very clear instance, we will all feel, is the numerals. The mathemati-
cian, beginning with a unit defined in his terms, adds unit to unit until he has a
series which in English is named by the words one, two, three, four, etc. This
seems to be a clear instance of a linguistic organization paralleling in a one-to-
one fashion the mathematician's organization. And so it is in English until we
reach ten. Each member in the series of the mathematician is paralleled by an
unanalyzable morpheme. From then on, however, English uses forms which are
almost all of them analyzable into smaller morphemes; e.g. fourteen, sixteen,
thirty, forty. Linguistic analysis shows easily enough that English cuts up the
mathematician's series into groups of ten and names the members of the series
by combining the names of the first nine members of the whole series with a few
other morphemes in a certain order. This too parallels one of the mathematician's
arithmetics, namely, that one founded on the decimal system. Many other
languages have numerals that parallel the decimal system. Other arithmetics,
it seems, may be paralleled, e.g. duodecimal, vigesimal, hexad, and other sys-
tems.5 The arbitrariness of the choice of an arithmetic is obvious. Moreover,
everyone will be able to make the further remark that each language is arbitrary
in the extent to which the parallelism is perfectly kept. In English, eleven and
twelve seem to depart from the decimal system of arithmetic in the direction
of a duodecimal system. In French, though the system followed is in general the
decimal one, it seems that a vigesimal arithmetic is represented in the numerals
from 60 to 99.
Most of us will feel uncomfortable if we rely only on meaning and neglect
form in the linguistic discussion of this problem. In fact, the numerals provide a
neat example of our usual type of analysis. In English, the numerals are a class
with easily definable marks. They occur as a subclass of attribute words, oc-
cupying a certain position with reference to other subclasses of attributes, so
that e.g. we can analyze very exactly such phrases as five good apples, those last
six white elephants.6They also occur in non-attributive constructions, such as
are seen in He broughtme six, and in the counting construction of successive
* The organic chemist exhibits less tolerance for these pairs, varying only in the order of
the morphemes, than does the inorganic chemist. Reasons given are that the organic chemist
deals with a much greater number of compounds, and such pairs are harder to remember;
they therefore are regarded as the mark of a bad nomenclature system. Apparently, soon
after it is realized that a section of the nomenclature will abound in such pairs, the method
of making up the terms is systematically reformed so as to avoid them. Thus, ethylene
dichlorideis now usually replaced by dichloroethane,benzenehexobromideby hexobromocyclo-
hexane, aminodiphenylby aminobiphenyl.The term used for the discarded names is trivial,
defined as 'not completely systematic', though one of my informants thought that he would
rather call them 'bad form' and reserve trivial for the popular use of chemical terms such
as is seen in aspirin, benzene,etc. I am indebted for instruction in these matters to my col-
leagues in the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley, especially
to Professor William D. Gwinn. All responsibility for the interpretation and use of the in-
formation given me is of course mine.
6 Theodor Kluge's works reviewed by Rahder in Lg. 23.181-5.
6 Cf. Bloomfield, Language 201-6 (New York, 1933).
minor predications one, two, three,four ... . It is this last construction, of course,
which is the outstanding parallel to the non-linguistic system of the mathemati-
cian. Other languages allow similar formal analyses of the numerals. Thus in
Vietnamese, with a decimal system that has fewer irregularities of morpheme
than has English, the central feature of analysis of the numerals is the construc-
tion numeral plus classifier plus head noun for most head nouns, and numeral
plus head noun for a small class of head nouns.
Can we produce a formal analysis that will identify the chemist's morphemes
as a subclass different from all other subclasses of morphemes in the language?
This is not so easy as in the case of the numerals. The morphemes that have
been listed before as examples of those used by the English-speaking chemist do
not differ in their shape or the way in which they are combined from other
English morphemes that occur in nouns and adjectives: ferrous oxide is not easily
to be distinguished formally from odorousliquid. However, as so often in linguistic
analysis, features of selection can be invoked as the distinguishing factor in
identifying this subclass. Some of the morphemes involved occur only in the
chemist's vocabulary; others, though they occur otherwise, have a special mean-
ing in the chemist's vocabulary and there only. And these morphemes, with these
meanings, occur only in combinations with one another, i.e., to use Bloomfield's
words,' 'the features of selection are often highly arbitrary and whimsical. ...
[Certain forms] belong to a form-class from which [certain other forms] are
excluded.' The stem meth- occurs only within the chemist's vocabulary with such
suffixes as -yl, -ylene, -ene, -ide, -ane, and -oxyl; the suffix -ane occurs with such
stems as meth-, eth-, camph-, diox-, which also take some of the other suffixes
that meth- does. The stems urb-, hum-, mund-, etc., which occur with suffix -ane,
do not occur with the other suffixes that meth- is found with; they consequently
belong to a different subclass from the stem meth-, i.e. they are not part of the
chemist's vocabulary. Examples of the type of forms that occur only in the
chemist's vocabulary are ferr-, which occurs with suffixes -ate, -atin, -ic, -ite,
-ous (the other stem forms ferri- and ferro- are used both in the chemist's vo-
cabulary and elsewhere); ox- in oxide, oxacetic, methoxyl; eth- in ethyl, ethoxyl,
ethane, ethide; meth- in methyl, methoxyl, methane,methide; -ide in oxide, chloride,
ethide; -yl in ethyl, methyl, acetyl, butyl, phenyl. Examples of the type of forms
that occur both in the chemist's vocabulary and elsewhere are citr- in citric,
citral, citrate (alongside citr- with a different meaning in citrus and citron); -ous
in ferrous, chlorous (alongside -ous with a different meaning in such words as
tremendous, bibulous, herbivorous,righteous); -ic in ferric, chloric, hydrochloric
(alongside -ic with a different meaning in such words as public, domestic, poetic,
epic, rustic); -ane in methane, ethane, camphane, dioxane (alongside -ane with a
different meaning in such words as urbane, humane, mundane). So few full-
fledged grammars have been written that we have few examples of the applica-
tion of Bloomfield's principle of selection to the framing of a complete gram-
matical analysis of a vocabulary; I suggest that it is vitally necessary that it be
used in establishing subclasses of the kind that we are dealing with at the moment.
We have been dealing with linguistic material that parallels scientific and
7 Op.cit. 165.
204 M. B. EMENEAU
mathematical analysis, and this may be discounted as too technical to be very

representative of linguistic material in general. Certainly, most sections of the
ordinary vocabulary of a language hardly show organization of the sort that we
are interested in--e.g. the ordinary names of animals, plants, and features of the
landscape. However, the section of a language that deals with social structure
may show something of the kind that we are looking for. This is likely to be
particularly true if the ethnologists are on the right track who have flirted with,
or perhaps even engaged seriously in, attempts to describe particular cultures
in terms of minimum units and their relations. Voegelin has recently pointed
out the theoretical difficulties involved in this,8 and it ill behooves one who is
not an ethnologist to engage in the controversy that evidently divides the
ethnologists on the subject. It does, however, impress the linguist that some
parts of the ethnologist's material are stateable in terms very like the linguist's
minimum units. Surely this is true of kinship systems.
In the environment of a member of a community there are certain persons
who are related to him by biologically definable blood ties. He classes these
persons into a number of classes smaller than the number of biological relation-
ships. The members of each class are in an arbitrary 'relationship' to him, the
relationship being definable in terms of his reactions to them. Thus, in an English-
speaking community of the American sub-community, a man is in a definable
relationship to those individuals whom he classes and labels by the term sister.
I shall not attempt to analyze all the reactions that are involved here. Some are
easily stated: he shows certain attitudes of affectionate care towards a sister;
he avoids sexual relationships, whether in acts or words, whether legalized or
non-legal, with a sister; he exercizes a vaguely defined censorship over his sister's
suitors and is supposed to fight at the drop of a hat in defense of his sister's
sexual reputation. Many other reactions may be involved; in this particular
community there is so much variation that we say 'Family ties are loose' or
'The family is losing out as an effective social unit.' In many other communities
definition is easier. And, as before, we find that the number and biological
membership of the classes differs widely from community to community; kinship
groupings are, in a word, arbitrary.
It is almost a dogma of the ethnologist that in any one community kinship
classes as determined by reactions ('functions') and their linguistic labels will
be in a one-to-one relationship.9 This is seldom demonstrated, but I am willing
to accept it at the moment. Our question, then, is: do the linguistic labels of a
kinship system show a linguistic organization parallel to the organization of the
total set of social reactions (of which the linguistic reactions form one part)?
We shall usually, perhaps always, find that the kinship terms all belong to the
same part of speech. We are not likely to find often that they all belong to the
same morphological subclass of that part of speech. The Sanskrit situation, in
8 Word 5.36-42.
E.g. Robert H. Lowie, Social Organization 67 (New York, 1948): '... we are warranted
in defending a correspondence between social phenomena and the designation of relatives.
It would certainly be rash to contend ... that social conditions rigorously determine
nomenclature .... But ... we shall constantly discover an interrelation of terminology and
structure or custom.'
which a group of them have the same declensional type (though not all of them
belong to this type and though some other nouns belong to it), is seldom paral-
leled in the Indo-European languages. Some languages in which possession is
indicated by a set of possessive affixes to the noun, require that most, if not all,
of the kinship terms be always accompanied by the possessive affixes; these
languages, in probably all instances, have besides the kinship terms other nouns
which have this morphological characteristic. In Toda1oa number of the kinship
terms have morpheme alternants which occur with a prefixed morpheme that is
used with these nouns by a speaker in addressing kin who are of an ascending
generation or who are older in the same generation, in certain social situations
(e.g. ey- 'father' : tyV1?;mun 'mother's brother' : ty•t?; okn 'elder sister' : tyoka?);
this affixed morpheme is also used in the same social situations with certain
other nouns, denoting not kin but other members of the Toda community.
For those languages, like English, where no morphological or syntactic features
mark off the kinship terms as a subclass, we must again look to the feature of
selection as a criterion for the subclass. And the criterion will be the fact of
selection of these terms in reference to the larger linguistic or non-linguistic
context. It may be possible that the linguistic context will nearly always provide
the evidence needed. For instance, a sufficient sample of discourse between two
people who are related as brother and sister will undoubtedly yield reciprocal
use of the terms brotherand sister.
Certain other patterns of social relationship, whether analyzable in unit terms
or not, are paralleled by linguistic patterns.
The very point at which language shows itself to be a prime factor in social
structure, its use as a communication system, shows in most languages, if not in
all, an organized subclass of forms paralleling the social communication situa-
tion. This situation consists of a speaker and a hearer (or hearers). Most lan-
guages have morphemes representing these, and in most languages these mor-
phemes form a subclass definitely marked off from others by form, whether
morphological or syntactic. Few languages keep these nuclear personal pronouns
separate from morphemes denoting other segments of the environment. Probably
in all, demonstrative and anaphoric pronouns are combined in one way or an-
other with personal pronouns. Many languages, for example, have personal
pronouns denoting respectively 'I, the speaker, plus you, the hearer or hearers'
and 'I, the speaker, plus one or more environmental units anaphorically referred
to'. English, rather insensitively, combines both of these in one morpheme we.
Other factors tend to disturb the personal pronoun system as a close parallel to
the communication situation. English, for instance, does not have morphemes
distinguishing between one person addressed and several persons addressed.
Some languages have several morphemes distinguishing not merely the number
of persons addressed, but also the relative status of the persons on the two sides
of the communication situation. German goes so far as to use the anaphoric
plural pronoun as a polite morpheme for the person addressed.
The status situation, already referred to as represented in the German pro-
nouns, turns up elsewhere with linguistic parallels. Swedish is very like German
in its pronouns; French, Italian, Spanish all show something of the same sort.
10Language, Culture, and Personality (Sapir Volume) 178 (Menasha, Wis., 1941).
206 M. B. EMENEAU
Grierson has reported" for Maithili dialects of Bihari in North India that the
second and the third persons of the transitive verb have each four forms, this
being the number of combinations necessary to specify high and low status for
the subject and the object of the verb; the first person has only two forms, dis-
tinguishing high and low status only for the object, the speaker presumably
always politely referring to himself in the same way, i.e. as of low status. In
Javanese,12 to state it in the sketchiest way, in speaking to a person of high status
by age or rank, whether the speaker is himself inferior or superior, a special
vocabulary (called krama) is used; it seems that a few derivational morphemes
have special krama forms.
One of the most involuted instances of a status system with a linguistic sys-
tem paralleling it is to be seen in the Vietnamese (Annamese) language; this is
discussed here in some detail.
The members of this community have (or had until recently and perhaps
still have, in spite of a new political situation) a strongly developed status sys-
tem. Not all details are known to me, but it is clear that more or less conspicuous
reactions of politeness are demanded from a person, whether male or female,
confronted by an elder person of either sex or by an official. The greater the
disparity in age or rank, the greater the marks of politeness in the inferior's
behavior. Between persons of approximately equal age and also between persons
whose social status is not too disparate, politeness is also the rule, certainly in
speech and probably in action also to some extent. In addition, the male has
higher status than the female, and the married than the unmarried.
Some of this is paralleled in the kinship terms.'3 In what follows it should be
kept in mind that we are dealing with a classificatory system (to use the ethnol-
ogist's term)-all sibling terms also include cousins, e.g. 'elder brother' includes
also elder male cousins, 'father's elder brother' includes also father's elder male
cousins. Those persons superior to EGOare carefully graded by generation, sex,
and age relative to EGOor, if they are male siblings of EGO'Sfather, age relative
to EGO'Sfather: anh 'elder brother', chi 'elder sister', bdc 'father's elder brother',
ch~i 'father's younger brother', c6 'father's sister', cau 'mother's brother', di
'mother's sister', 6ng 'grandfather', bd 'grandmother'. Careful gradation among
persons inferior to EGOis not found; sex is not a category in the terms, and in
the first and second descending generations no distinction is made, except be-
tween EGO'Sown children and all others: em 'younger sibling', con 'child', chdu
'any relative in the first and second descending generations except EGO'Schild,
i.e. grandchild, nephew or niece, grandnephew or grandniece'. Terms are found
for relatives in higher ascending and lower descending generations, but no differ-
ent principles are involved. These kinship terms, like the English ones discussed
earlier, are marked off as a subclass by features of selection, not by any morpho-
logical or syntactic feature.
The Vietnamese person and status pronouns, corresponding in general to Eng-
11
Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5, Part 2, 25-9 (Calcutta, 1903); Seven Grammars of
the Dialects and Sub-dialects of the Bihari Language (Calcutta, 1883-7).
12 Edwin M.
Loeb, JAOS 64.113-26 (1944).
13
See Robert F. Spencer, The Annamese Kinship System, Southwestern Journal of
Anthropology 1.284-310 (1945).
LANGUAGEAND NON-LINGUISTICPATTERNS 207
lish personal pronouns, all have, besides their substitute meaning, a status mean-
ing. They fall into two classes, differentiated formally on the basis of the words
with which they combine to denote plurals. Ordinary nouns are pluralized by a
construction in which the noun follows a numerator nhi'ng; they fall into two
classes depending on whether or not a classifier comes between the numerator
and the noun. Of the personal and status pronouns, the members of one class
are pluralized by being placed in an attributive construction following the noun
chuzng'a group'; those of the other class are pluralized by a preceding cdc.
The members of the first group, those pluralized with chzing, denote person
(1st, 2nd, 3rd) and status; they are called status personal pronouns. Several
of them have the status meaning 'superiority on the part of the speaker toward
the hearer or the person spoken of': tao is 1st personal and is used by an elder
speaking to a child, a master speaking to a household servant, a superior to an
inferior in arrogance, or by a person quarreling angrily with another; chzing tao
'we' excludes the person spoken to and has the same status usage as tao. When
tao is used for 1st person, may is used for 2nd person, with a plural chzng mdy,
alongside of which there is a word bay used as plural (occasionally even chzing
bay). N6 is 3rd person and means 'an object which is thing, animal, or child,
i.e. anything but an adult person'; its plural is ching n6, which can also refer to
a group of adult persons to whom slighting or contemptuous reference is made.
There are two other members of this group, both 1st personal-ta and t6i. Ta
is used when there is no distinction of social status, either real or assumed, be-
tween speaker and hearer, i.e. when all distinctions of superior and inferior are
neutralized. In a society where status is so highly developed and ramified as in
the Vietnamese, there is only one real context of this kind, namely, when a per-
son is talking to himself; and in fact ta is used in soliloquies or in reporting what
purport to be a person's thoughts. Otherwise, when the hearer is included with
the speaker in 1st personal reference (1st person inclusive), politeness demands
that no distinction of status be admitted; there are rare uses of ta as 1st person
inclusive, the plural phrase chzing ta is the usual form. The other 1st personal
word t6i is used with a status meaning of inferiority; it is the same word as t6i
'servant, subject of a king', found in very few constructions, which are, however,
different from those of the pronoun (e.g. vua toi 'the king and his subjects').
The range of usage of t6i is hard to delimit. It is not used between relatives, nor
by children speaking to elders; it is generally used by servants or shopkeepers
in speaking to their masters or clients (though there are other, optional ways,
more deferential, for them to refer to themselves), and it is used generally by all
others, friends or strangers. The plural of t6i is chAngt6i, and, being deferential,
it does not include the hearer (1st person exclusive deferential, contrasting with
chazngtao, 1st person exclusive arrogant).
The members of the second group of personal and status pronouns, those
pluralized by a preceding cdc, denote only status, and are called status pronouns.
They do not carry the category of person, which is left to be inferred from the
context, either linguistic or non-linguistic. Most of the members of this group
are the kinship terms discussed above. They differ formally from these nouns
used as kinship terms in several constructions, including that in which they are
numerated by the serial numerals. As nouns, they are preceded by classifiers
208 M. B. EMENEAU
when so numerated (numerator plus classifier plus noun; e.g. hai ngu'6'i anh
'two elder brothers'); as pronouns they are numerated without classifiers (nu-
merator plus pronoun; e.g. hai anh 'the two of you').
These status pronouns are used in two contexts, to denote substitution and
status within a real kinship relationship, and to denote substitution and status
outside such a relationship. Within the kinship context the following terms are
used: anh 'elder brother', bd 'grandmother', bdc 'father's elder brother',
'mother's brother', con 'child', c6 'father's sister', chdu 'any relative in the first
cq.u
or second descending generation except a child of EGO's',chi 'elder sister', chi
'father's younger brother', em 'younger sibling', me 'mother', 6ng 'grandfather',
th'dy 'father' (a noun meaning 'master' replacing in this use cha 'father'), and
probably di 'mother's sister' and several others for other descending generations.
As used as substitutes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons these frequently form re-
ciprocal pairs, e.g. con-th'dy 'I-you' and 'you-I' depending on which is
speaking. E.g. th'dy' ldm2 o'n' k 4 chuyen5cho6con7nghes 'Father, please tell me
a story!' (master [= you]' do' favor' narrate4story5 give to6 child [= me]7 who
will hear8); c6 ngu'd'i' ndo' dg'n4 hpi6 th'dy6,thi'bho8srng9, th'dy
?0 ,1 nhib26ngq
ly14 nhe!15'If anyone comes and enquires after me, tell them that I am at the
mayor's house, won't you?' (there is' any' person2 who arrives4 asks after5
master [= me]6, then7 tells say as follows9, master [= I]10 am at" house12 of
respected elder"3of village'4, I assume you will15). Certain displacements are
found within this system. Thus, while a child is small, con is the reciprocal term
in the child-parents situation; when the child becomes adult, terms from the
first ascending generation are used-c4u 'mother's brother' for the son, c6
'father's sister' for the daughter. Similarly, a man uses to his wife's brother and
his wife's brother's wife cau and c6 respectively, though he has used a brother
term to his wife's brother before the latter's marriage. It is clear that in both
instances the individual's status is raised, and this is reflected in the new terms
used. The rationale for the use of these particular terms, as well as for those used
in other similar displacements, will be discussed elsewhere. Another displacement
is seen in the most usual reciprocal pair used by husband and wife to one another.
The husband's term is anh 'elder brother' and the wife's em 'younger sibling'.
The explanation is as follows. All the kinship terms given above refer to blood
relatives. Affines are variously referred to and addressed. Relevant to the present
problem is the fact that EGo, in addressing a spouse's blood relatives, uses the
same terms that the spouse would use. Thus, a man calls his wife's elder brother
anh, and a wife calls her husband's elder brother anh (i.e. before the displace-
ments caused by the elder brother's marriage, already referred to). As a conse-
quence of this, the spouse, not being one's own blood relative, is addressed by
the term that will fit him or her properly into the total system of his or her blood
relatives, or more specifically, of his or her siblings, as addressed by the spouse;
it is always kept in view, of course, that the husband has higher status than the
wife. The terms, in short, are anh for the husband and em for the wife.'4
In the second context only five of the kinship terms are used as pronouns.
14 Discussion with my colleague Mary R. Haas has led me to this analysis of the terms
used by husband and wife.
They are all terms that in the kinship system carry higher status; in their use as
pronouns they have 2nd and 3rd person substitution values and carry a status
meaning of deference toward the hearer or the person referred to. The reciprocal
1st person is t6i, which we have given above. The terms used reflect the two status
factors of age and married state. They are anh 'man up to about forty years of
age' (as a kinship term 'elder brother'), 6ng 'man over the age of forty' ('grand-
father'), c6 'woman up to about the age of forty if unmarried' ('father's sister'),
chi 'woman up to about the age of forty if married' ('elder sister'), bd 'woman
over the age of forty' ('grandmother'). When these terms are used as pronouns,
no attention is paid to the relative ages of the speaker and the person addressed
or referred to; e.g. two men under forty call each other anh, no matter which is
the elder. It would be impolite for either to call the other by the term of inferior
status em 'younger sibling'. These terms are used essentially to people equal to
or not much different from the speaker in social status; they are also used to
servants, shopkeepers, and other inferiors in general, in normally polite situa-
tions; they are used to superiors except for the very highest, to whom ngdi (a
member of this same subclass, but not a kinship term) is used. Age status is the
most important factor determining which of these five is used, but there is a
tendency to lower the age at which 6ng and bd become appropriate, if there is
any other status factor, official, professional, or the like, to give the necessary
extra amount of dignity and respectability, or if the occasion is one of great
ceremony.15
Other usages of these status pronouns are found, all stateable in terms of
comparatively refined shades of status. The Vietnamese pronominal system,
then, contains as one of its parts a set of personal and status pronouns. This is
divided into a set of status personal pronouns which parallel both the basic
social communication situation and the Vietnamese status system, and a set of
status pronouns which parallel in a most minute way the status system, but
leave the communication system (1st, 2nd, and 3rd person) unstated. Through
a great part of the pronominal system, person is, rather startlingly even for a
linguistic scholar, unexpressed and to be gathered from the context, usually the
non-linguistic context.
Other examples of parallelism between linguistic classes or subclasses and
non-linguistic systems or subsystems are doubtless to be found. They will all
undoubtedly show the same somewhat imperfect fit that the examples discussed
have shown; sometimes, as in the case of the numerals or the Vietnamese pro-
nouns, a seemingly imperfect fit is due to an adjustment between two non-
linguistic systems. I end then by stating again the assumption that may be
added to our fundamental postulates: some forms are ordered in classes or sub-
classes corresponding to systems or subsystems within the environment.
15 To attribute age, with its concomitant status, to a Vietnamese, whether man or woman,
is more pleasing than the attribution of youth-the reverse of the usual American situa-
tion. It need hardly be pointed out how relative cultural values are.

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Linguistic Society of America

Language and Non-Linguistic Patterns

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and aminodiphenyl.4Further discussion of this instance will be deferred until

mathematical analysis, and this may be discounted as too technical to be very

used by husband and wife.

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