Greenspeaking English and endangered languages. An ecological perspective

GRAO EN LINGUA E LITERATURA INGLESAS CURSO 2018-2019 Xullo 2019 Greenspeaking English and endangered languages. An ecological perspective. Iria Sánchez Pita Titora: Teresa Moure GRAO EN LINGUA E LITERATURA INGLESAS CURSO 2018-2019 Xullo 2019 Greenspeaking English and endangered languages. An ecological perspective. Iria Sánchez Pita Titora: Teresa Moure Autora: Iria Sánchez Pita !2 LIST OF CONTENTS 0. Título e resumo..………………………….……………..………….……..………………4 1. INTRODUCTION………………….…….……….…………….…….…………………6 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND CONTEXT……….…………………….……10 2. 1. The perspective of Ecolinguistics…………………………………………………10 2. 2. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis……………………………….……….……….……15 2. 3 The Western identity.………………………………………………………………19 2. 3. 1. Empires, progress and power: Linguistic Imperialism and the international projection of the English language……………………….22 2. 3. 2. Capitalism and Globalization…………………………………….…….25 3. GREENSPEAKING ENGLISH………………………….….……..……….……….…29 3. 1. Linguistic diversity and language classification………….….……………..….…30 3. 2. Grammar………………….…………………………….…………..……..…..…34 3. 2. 1. Morphosyntax of the English language…..…………………….….…..37 3. 2. 2. Äiwoo and noun classes……………………..……………..…..………43 3. 2. 3. Evidentials in Tuyuca…………………..…..……………………….… 46 3. 2. 4. Arrernte and kinship………………………………..…….….…………50 3. 3. Lexicon……………………………………………………………….……….…….…52 3. 3. 1. Lexicon of the English Language………………….……….….………54 3. 3. 2. What English has, what English lacks: environmental vocabulary……56 3. 3. 3. Greenlandic, Cherokee and Enga.….…………………………….…….58 4. CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………….…………….61 5. BIBLIOGRPAHY………………………………………………………….…..……….64 6. APPENDIX: Translated quotations……………………………………………………..67 !3 !4 u 1 ACUL"li\L>l lJL IILOLOXÍA o f.S"" n AGo . 1 ¡:. • ·r ,- •. -f'OsTw 1 FACULTAnE DE FILOLOXÍA [s NOV . 2 "l ENTRADA C UBR IR ESTE FORM U LAR IO .. ·-::.::·-::::- __ .J Formulario de delimitación de titulo e resumo Traballo de Fin de Grao curso 2018 / 2019 APELIDOS E NOME : Sá nchez Pita, Iría GRAO EN: Ling ua e Lit eratura In gl esas (NO CASO DE MODERNAS) MENCIÓN EN: TITOR/ A: Teresa Maure Pere iro LIÑA TEMÁTICA AS I GNADA: Linguas e comunicación. Aplicacións SOUCITO a aprobación do seguinte título e resumo: Titulo: Gr ee nspeak in g Eng li sh and endangered languages. An ec ological perspective . Resumo [na lin gua en que se vai redactar o TFG; e ntr e 1000 e 20 00 caracteres]: Eco lin guistics is a discipline that was born in arder to wide the field of Sociolinguistics with the idea of understanding not only the use of language in social context, but al so its effects on the ecological context. The study h as it s basis on the principl es of Eco linguistics which, as mentioned, is a discipline th at st udi es how langua ges influence both our relationship with the environme nt and our fellow speakers. The perspective will be a research on the tradition of the eco lo gy of languages by a comparison between the world vi ew in Eng li sh and severa ll anguages around the world, with the particularity of being endangered or even ext in ct . The aim is to focus on indi genous languages, these n ot being technologized so that the different impli catio ns regarding social and environmental i ssues are evidenced. By taking English as the center of the st udy, the id ea is to understand it s grammar, with emph as is on both morphology and syntax, and its effects on our relations with the human and natur al ecosystem around u s. Being English the internationallanguage of the XX I century, the conclusions taken from its ana ly sis will help us to understand the perspective of the Western world, represented by the vehicular implic ations of the English language. The contrast with the inform ation suggested by the study of different exampl es of endangered languages will a llow the project to define itself as a research on comparative linguistics, with the intention of reaching a deeper understanding of the direct implications of the human language in context. The project will be organized as follows: an introdu ct ion in which the theoretica l framework of Eco lin guistics will be explained, a consideration of the relevance of Eng li sh as the vehicular language of the modern Western world, an overview of the grammatical elements of the Eng li sh language in contrast with exampl es from oth er languages around the world, and th e conclusions tak en from the study. SRA. DECANA DA FACULTADE DE FILOLOXÍA (Presidenta da Comisión de Titulas de Grao) !5 Santiago de Compostela. 05 de Noviembre de 2018. Sinatura do/a interesado/ Visto e prace (sinatura do/a titor/a) Aprobado pota Comisión de Títulos de Grao con data SRA. DECANA DA FACULTADE DE FI LOLOXÍA (Pr esidenta da Comisión de Títulos de Grao) 1. INTRODUCTION In my view, one of the most striking things during these four years studying English and linguistics was the fact that before entering college, I had never been concerned with such a thing as language studies. This is why I began to be interested about what the repercussions of linguistics in the real world were; before entering college I was familiar with Darwin’s theory of evolution or with Einstein’s theory of relativity. I knew the capitals of the world and I more or less understood what happens when someone suffers from a heart attack. However, I never asked myself how many languages there were in the world, or what the word language really meant. After realizing that, I decided that what I wanted to do was to show to the people that surrounded me that language was not only something they used to communicate with their peers, but a very interesting phenomenon that has the potential to change the way we understand the world and, most importantly, that linguistic knowledge was something that should be shared with the general public as it has the ability to suggest solutions to many problems that affect us humans every day in the same way that medicine or physics do. That is the reason why I choose this topic for my project, and it all begins with the idea that languages determine our understanding of the world. Since the formulation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the field of linguistics has assumed (at a higher or lower level) that languages are means to produce realities. Taking this perspective as the basis of the epistemological frame of this project, I will try to prove that, by comparing English with a number of endangered languages, we can find in their lexicon and grammar certain mechanisms that conditioned the relation of the speakers of those languages with the environment. Thus, throughout these pages, it will be shown how the proper !6 knowledge of those linguistic mechanisms would be a key issue for us as a global community to incorporate in our collective fight against the ecological crisis we are facing in the twentyfirst century globalized world. During the last century, the world has suffered from very radical changes that have constituted it as we see it today. The two World Wars, the rise of modern capitalism and the technological revolution were crucial actors in the development of the modern western identity, which was marked by the newest ideals of globalization. After that, the western discourse proposed that the supposedly modern technologized world was the perfect context for the free growth that the economic system was based on. The globalizing discourse exported the ideals of the American Dream to the web of ‘developed countries’ that were trying to engage in the new liberalist economies, cultivating in the population’s collective mind the idea that productivity was the ideal and most democratic criterion for success. Early on, success was understood in terms of consumerism: the more one could afford -and buy-, the better one’s position was within the global society, and thus more power owed over one’s peers. However, the world was -and still isway larger than what the western society was aiming to portray in its ideological tale, and most humans were not represented in the “universal” principles that were constituting the modern world. The imbalances of power that were taking place among the European and North American communities were incomparable to the injustices that these communities were executing in “third world countries” in order to fulfill the requirements of the consumerist life in the West. Coming from the Imperialist era of Europe, the exploitation of resources in America, Asia and Africa increased with the new !7 industrial revolution of the twentieth century, and the mistreating of both lands and human beings in those exploited places became the price to pay for the promised progress. The twenty-first century arrived with the call to senses of a group of professionals in several areas that assured that this way of living, which was the promise of a better life to the people on western countries was destroying the planet. The global alarm of an imminent ecological collapse was -and still isdenied against scientific fact, but the Academies go on publishing articles that highlight the importance of awareness of the ecosystem we live in; and, of course, linguistics is one of the several disciplines that are proposing short and long term solutions to this problem. And that is where this text comes from: as linguistics is a discipline that studies language in order to find new, true and non-trivial knowledge (what we call theoretical linguistics) in order to apply it to solve real problems in the real world (that is, applied linguistics), the discipline needs to reconsider itself from a more ecologically-friendly perspective. That is what ecolinguistics aimed to do when it proposed the discipline of human language studies to reconsider the point of view from which it was approaching its object of study so that it could fulfill the true necessities of both the discipline itself and the world in which it was being developed. Thus, that way of doing linguistics would not rely anymore in working from the personal offices of a bunch of experts in language and it would reach the world. To fulfill the requirements of a project that follows the lesson of ecolinguistics, I will base my study on the comparison of the English language to several other languages; in that comparison, what will be searched for are the different ways of understanding the world that are linguistically based. Thus, in the first chapter I will develop both the theoretical framework I took for this project (being essentially based on the linguistic relativity !8 hypothesis) and the context in which that theoretical framework together with the perspective of ecolinguistics operates. In chapter number three, I will proceed to the main study of this text, firstly developing the notion of linguistic diversity in order to understand the importance of comparative linguistics; then, I will divide the study into grammar -where some of the most salient characteristics of the English morphosyntax will be explainedand lexicon, and I will provide several examples of other languages that evidence a different worldview from that of the English language. To do so, I will follow the literature on these issues and, in particular, specific examples of both English -as the center of this projectand the rest of the languages that will be explored. !9 (hence the common designation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis as "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”)”. The works of these two authors revolutionized the ideas on the connections between language and reality; Lucy (1997:294) explains that this relationship is based on the idea that “[l]anguage embodies an interpretation of reality and language can influence thought about that reality”. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis thus can be explained, according to Mounin (1972:96-97) as a not-so-new idea about language that suggests that “any language shows an specific analysis of the external world, that imposes on the speaker a particular way of seeing and interpreting the world” . To describe it in the terms that a ecolinguistic reading demands, and following 1 the logics of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, Harré et al (1995:19) stated that our discourse locates us in a specific environment and, furthermore, teaches us how to interact with it. Of course this hypothesis has not always been the most accepted. In the 1960s, it lost popularity among language specialists, “due to a prevalent influence of Chomsky’s ideas emphasizing language and cognition to be separate abilities of the mind” (Perlovsky, 2009:518). However, in the recent years and thanks to the ever more interdisciplinary nature of language studies, the interest in this perspective has increased. Perlovsky (2009:518) explains how the interactions that happen between language and cognition have been proven by brain observation techniques, and that some of these experiments showed how “learning a word ‘rewires’ cognitive circuits in the brain [and] learning a color name moves perception from right to left hemisphere”. The fact that the brain is physiologically affected by language will influence our cognition, our way of thinking; yet, Perlovsky (2009) goes beyond that T. By the Author. The quotations that were not originally written in English can be found in the 1 Appendix section. !16 dimension and assures that those effects have been proven to also affect our emotional response. For example, “Spanish–English bilinguals manifested more intense emotions in psychological interviews conducted in Spanish than in English, irrespective of whether their first language was English or Spanish” (Perlovsky, 2009:518-519). The theory and the evidence that has been produced on this issue guide us to incorporate it in the perspective of ecolinguistics and, more concretely, in the attempts to greenspeak the European languages. This is obvious for the specialists on ecolinguistics; authors such as Harré et al (1995:20) stated that the cultural-historical change of the meaning of natural process and human history, which is so essential for environmental discourse, cannot be understood detached from developments of their semiotic systems that are particular cultural systems themselves. They not only carry and present but also create these meanings, bringing new realities into view. Stibbe (2015) names this way of thinking that has been shaped by language “the stories we live by”, and defines it as “mental models that influence behavior and lie at the heart of the ecological challenges we are facing”. The perspective that connects the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with the interests of the branch of ecolinguistics proposes that language influences our worldview and determines the way we think. Thus, language will be the center of all our interactions with both the environment and our communities. The justification of studying languages from an ecological perspective bearing in mind the linguistic relativity hypothesis is very interestingly defined by Stibbe (2015:1): How we think has an influence on how we act, so language can inspire us to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on. Ecolinguistics, then, is about critiquing forms of language that contribute to ecological destruction, and aiding the search for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world. !17 As languages are such an essential part of our lives and have the ability to modify our thinking, it is easy to understand how, if it were done, greenspeaking them would dramatically change our relationship with the environment; besides, it would also teach us that the fight against the ecological crisis requires efforts that transcend the mere actions of reducing plastics or singing to cows in milk factories. This example comes from 2018, when Spanish company Central Lechera Asturiana launched an advertisement in which farm workers were singing to cows with the aim to show how the cows that produced the milk they sold were well-treated (implying that they were a cruelty-free company). It was a very controversial message, as the discourse was perceived as misleading among the ecological-aware community. Singing to cows as a proof of cruelty-free production is a shallow discourse that hides the fact that the mass production of animal products cannot be ecologically-friendly whatsoever. Although the reason to take the perspective of the linguistic relativity hypothesis as the theoretical framework has been already explained, we must clarify that “[e]ffective comparative investigation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis requires direct linguistic, ethnographic, and psychological research in two or more cultures” (Lucy, 1996:7). That is the reason why this study will focus on the study of the English language in comparison to several other languages. This will help us to properly understand the relevance of different aspects of the worldview of the English language thanks to the effectiveness of comparative linguistics; thus, the process of greenspeaking the English language will be more successful. Up until now we have covered the state of linguistics and ecolinguistics and the theoretical framework taken for this text. However, the objective of this project is to compare !18 the English language -as the vehicular language of the western worldto some endangered or extinct languages of non-technologized communities. When we formulate such a proposal, we must take into account that linguistics is a discipline that operates in a particular context. This means that, if we want to greenspeak the English language, we need to analyze the context in which that process of analysis will take place. That context is the twenty-first century world, with its own characteristics that affect the point of view of the project. In the following section, those aspects will be explained in order to fully contextualize our analysis. 2. 3. The Western Identity In the previous sections we have talked about the perspective that ecolinguistics proposes to study human language, and the paradigm which serves as the basis for this text. As we endeavor to study how the English grammar affects the relationship between the speakers and their environment -and, of course, the rest of the human species-, it will be necessary to analyze the worldview that the English language -as an abstract and ample entityhas developed. We defined English as the vehicular language of western societies. Thus, there must be something in common among the collective mind of the different communities that constitute the western world. All those issues will be covered throughout this section, with a particular emphasis on the notion of identity, and, more specifically, collective identity which, according to Wendt (1994:387) is related to the notion of nationalism, and follows a process of identification through domestic factors, such as language, ethnic relation and culture. In this sense, the collective identity can be succinctly defined as the common aspects of the inner selves of a particular group regarding its own context. !19 As it is a complex task to define a construct such as the western identity, there are several questions that we must answer beforehand. First of all, what can we call a western individual? Can we reduce the diversity of the peoples in the western world to one unified identity? And if it exists, when was the western identity born? First of all, the western individual is ‘easily’ defined as any person who belongs to a western community; people who either were born or grew up in the context of the web of ‘developed’ countries that constitute what has been called ‘the first world’. Although that explanation is remarkably ambiguous and would include hundreds of different peoples -and, of course, would invite a debate on which countries can be included within that label-, we could argue that those millions of people share as many things as necessary to consider them as a wide group. For example, most of the people that live in the western world speak an Indo-European language. Though the particular languages that we speak in western countries are nowadays very different in many ways from what proto Indo-European language might have been, the truth is that it applies another important factor that connects western people: history. As we all know, the evolution of all the languages that come from Indo-European has paralleled the evolution of their speakers. This does not only apply to the languages that originated in the European continent, but it is very interesting to learn how that evolution connected the different peoples that lived in the pre-Europe territories. Taking English as an example -as it constitutes the main focus of this study-, many authors have described it as a language that, at several points in its history, suffered from a process of creolization, meaning that the influence of a language on the system of English was so important as to drastically !20 change the very system. Bernárdez (2004:146) proposes that, in the Old English period, during the coexistence of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian peoples in the territories of currentday Great Britain, the language that was being spoken in the British isles was the result of the combination between Old Norse and Old English; though both languages were highly similar, many differentiated characteristics from Old Norse were introduced into English, causing what many have called a process of creolization of the language. Notwithstanding that, as English was not a pidgin before, the author refuses to use the term creole for the subsequent language that was formed throughout history. To add more detail into this idea, we could argue that English went through a very similar process of creolization after the Norman conquest, leading to a renewed English language that blended characteristics from the Germanic and Romanic branches of languages. Of course, not every expert on the English language agrees with this thesis; Gramley (2012:90) suggests that what happened after the Norman conquest was more a process of relexification rather than creolization, as, as Gramley (2012:89) said, “we cannot overlook the disproportion between massive French influence on vocabulary, little and none on morphology and syntax, and only trivial influence on phonology”. However, these different perspectives should not obscure the reality of the enormous changes that the English language has gone through during the last ten centuries, and, although this is not an issue of discussion for this project, we could close it by saying that this could be a debate on terminology and not on the process itself, as Danchev (1997:80) suggests. In fact, to conclude this issue, Danchev (1997:81) pointed at something that is really relevant for the description of the western identity: The exotic connotations of the terms creolization and creole have probably contributed to the generally sceptical attitude of the English historical linguistics community to the M[iddle] E[nglish] creolization hypothesis. In all likelihood this also reflects the underlying conviction that European languages with a long written tradition and history behind them ought not to be described as creoles. [Emphasis added] !21 The explanation above should serve us to illustrate how the history of the cultural development of European communities has been marked by the influence between different groups. The fact that those connections between European communities in the last centuries are so closely related to language itself is relevant enough to begin a thesis about the collective identity of western peoples. However, we mentioned that history will play a very important part in the development of the modern western identity, and so it will be explained in the following paragraphs. 2. 3. 1. Empires, progress and power: Linguistic Imperialism and the international projection of the English language To understand the current world and how languages are distributed, there is a moment in the external history of European languages that cannot be avoided in this project: in the fifteenth century, according to the legend, three ships arrived on the American continent in search of an alternative route to India. Since that moment onwards, the age of the European empires begun, and, as we now know, that process has continued until modern times. That expansion of European empires is the reason why nowadays European languages are spoken in the totality of continents of the planet, a phenomenon that, according to Crosby (1986:2-3) is unique for the pre-European communities. The exploitation of the ‘newly discovered’ lands established a hierarchy among the different territories of our world that persists today. That hierarchy, in fact, is a decisive point when depicting the western identity; this is because it was the moment of the expansion of ‘Europe’ when the colonizing powers determined what was ‘western’ enough to become part of the pinnacle of the pyramid of ‘progress’. !22 The Imperialist era of Europe brought a new way of understanding the world through the development of new discourses that, though different for each colonial power, shared many similarities between them. Ashcroft et al (1998:37) proposed that a discourse is the system by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by imposing specific knowledges, disciplines and values upon dominated groups. As a social formation it works to constitute reality not only for the objects it appears to represent but also for the subjects who form the community on which it depends. Taking this into account, we could argue that human beings ‘construct’ realities, and then impose them onto other groups as the only option to explain how the world around us is and works. This is an exercise of power that, since the colonial period, became an essential part of the western mind. Following the reasoning of the development of discourses as the basis for the collective identity, Korten (via Stibbe, 2015:3) points at four stories that are in the “heart of the western imperial civilization”: the prosperity story -centered on the materialistic dimension of life-, the biblical story -centered in the afterlife, omitting the relevance of life in the physical world-, the security story -that promotes investing in military forces in order to protect the status quo of the relationships of powerand the secular meaning story -that “reduces life to matter and mechanism”. Those stories, according to the author, complement each other in order to serve a common purpose: to maintain the superiority of the western civilization and, thus, to perpetuate the European supremacy among the whole of the human world throughout history. Up until now we have described two characteristics that compose the western identity: the connection between our languages and the imperialist practices that have been translated into colonialist dominance. Loomba (2007:8) defines colonialism as “the conquest and control of other people’s land and goods”. As it happens with anything that is humanly mediated, !23 colonialist practices have also a linguistic dimension. When we talk about the shape that colonialism takes from a linguistic perspective, we use the notion of linguistic imperialism, which is described by Phillipson (1997:238) as a theoretical construct, devised to account for linguistic hierarchization, to address issues of why some languages come to be used more and others less, what structures and ideologies facilitate such processes, and the role of language professionals. In this sense, we use the concept of linguistic imperialism to point to those processes that, by means of power hierarchy, some languages impose over other languages. This, though not new in the age of the European empires, took on a new relevance since the colonial era. But the relevance of this factor has increased since the technological revolution of the twentieth century, as the globalizing process that took place in the last several decades triggered the search for a universal language to communicate in the international framework of the economic system. In this quest, some languages have managed to lead the race and, as Bernárdez (2004:113) said, though many European languages -such as Spanish or Frenchhave long imperialistic traditions, none of those -or any other language in the worldis comparable to English when talking about the death of languages due to linguistic imperialism. As Bernárdez (2004:112) affirmed “the English language seems to feel aversion to other languages being spoken within its territories” . 2 Many authors have studied the phenomenon of the English language being an ‘assassin’ of a worrying number of languages. Phillipson (1993:47) defined English linguistic imperialism as “the dominance of English [as] asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other T. By A. View the appendix section. 2 !24 languages”, and follows by explaining that legitimizing English linguistic imperialism served us to establish two mechanisms that are crucial to the development of the notion of western identity: anglocentricity and professionalism. For Phillipson (1993:47-48), anglocentricity is a term created by means of analogy with the notion of ethnocentricity, and expresses how the worldview of the English language is transported to other parts of the world by considering the English -language, culture, politics, economy…- as the highest option for progress and success; on the other hand, the author proposes the term professionalism to represent the ‘professionalization’ of the English language in terms of teaching English as a foreign language. This, the fact that the English language has been consolidated not only in the number of speakers -both native and foreignbut also in the mechanisms to keep widening it, (if possible, indefinitely), situate it as the language of prestige of the whole world, and that will have direct environmental and societal repercussions. 2. 3. 2. Capitalism and Globalization We cannot finish this section without mentioning another crucial element that defines the western identity: capitalism. The expansion of the European empires and the colonial era led to the birth of a new and highly profitable international market that would set the basis for the economic system that rules our world today. Ashcroft et al (1998:40-41) claimed that [t]he fact that European post-Renaissance colonial expansion was coterminous with the development of a modern capitalist system of economic exchange […] meant that the perception of the colonies as primarily established to provide raw materials for the burgeoning economies of the colonial powers was greatly strengthened and institutionalized. It also meant that the relation between the colonizer and colonized was locked into a rigid hierarchy of difference deeply resistant to fair and equitable exchanges, whether economic, cultural or social. !25 similitudes between them, the breaking point, has been said, comes from the works of English judge Sir William Jones, who while living and working in Calcutta realized that Sanskrit -a language that was no longer spoken in India but was used as a vehicular language for literature and scholarship, as it happened with Latin in many European countriesand some European languages seemed to have many characteristics in common (Renfrew, 1990:9). From that moment onwards, several schools of linguistics would call that the Indo-European family of languages . 3 Of course, as we are not sure about how many languages have ever existed, we are not sure about how many linguistic families exist -or existed in the past-. But that is not the only reason why nowadays the genealogical criteria to classify languages does not work as it used to. Throughout its history, the genealogical classification of languages has been criticized for not being as scientifically accurate as it aimed to be. The main problem with this system is that it does not necessarily work for any given language; for example Basque is a language that is not genetically related to any other known language -it is what we call an isolated language-, and that is the case for many other languages. Besides, throughout history, many changes have taken place, as languages which were thought to belong to a particular family happened to belong to any other family, and even entire linguistic families disappeared from the classification as some languages were studied more deeply. This is why this is not a very helpful classification to account for linguistic diversity and to allow the scientific community to work better with its object of study. But what we can affirm about this classification is that the Indo-European family of languages is one of the most studied, and it is the one to which English belongs, in particular to the Germanic branch of languages. Nowadays, however, the idea that it was Sir William Jones who introduced Sanskrit in western 3 linguistics is debated, as evidence points to earlier contacts. !32 The other system of classification of languages that was highlighted before was the typological, and while the development of the notion of linguistic family was taking place, A. W. Schlegel and W. von Humboldt were working on what would be called the morphological typology of languages (Bernárdez, 2016:59). In this sort of typology, languages are classified according to their morphological features, which can be divided into two major types: analytic -or isolatinglanguages and synthetic languages. The first type shows a onecategory-one-word way of structuring information, and thus word order becomes a very important requirement to identify the word category; this is the case of the English language - though in the past, as we will see later, it was not the case-; on the other hand, we call synthetic languages those which might show more than one category per word. Synthetic languages are often divided between agglutinative languages -those which show one category per morphemeand inflectional languages -which allow more than one category and function for morpheme-. Of course morphological typology has its problems, but it helped the experts on human language to change the perspective from which languages should be understood. As time went on, the morphological typology lost space in favor on Greenberg’s syntactic typology (Bernárdez, 2016:72), which classified languages according to word order. Taking this criterion into consideration, English would belong to the SVO type of languages. This classification is also controversial nowadays, as many issues regarding the universality of this approach remain unsolved; for example, we can ask ourselves whether we can classify languages according to a syntactic criterion knowing that we are taking into consideration syntactic categories that have no universal relevance . 4 Which, for example, happens with the notion of Subject (Keenan, 1976) 4 !33 As we said in the previous paragraphs, genealogical classifications of languages were not accurate enough, and the several problems of typological classifications included the increase of racist thoughts among the community, as it continued on with ideas about the existence of better and worse languages. There are other classifications of languages that correspond, for example, to phonetic criteria. However, for the purpose of this project, we have covered enough information for the following instances of linguistic description of different languages. We know now that languages can be classified -with higher or lower successaccording to the similitudes or differences they show between them. Now, we are going to explore some of the rules that govern the English language in relation to other languages so that we can see the repercussion of those rules in our ways of understanding the world. 3. 2. Grammar According to Crystal (2008:217) grammar is a “central term in linguistics” that can be approached from many different perspectives. The author proposes, for example, that grammar serves to define the general description of linguistic codes or, bearing in mind a diachronic perspective, grammar is the term that was used in the pre-linguistic era to describe the studies on language. However, for the purposes of this project, grammar should be understood as the level of structural organization which can be studied independently of phonology and semantics, and generally divided into the branches of syntax and morphology. In this sense, grammar is the study of the way words, and their component parts, combine to form sentences [Emphasis added]. (Crystal, 2008:218) !34 By following that definition, it will be assumed in this text that grammar refers to what we can term the structural dimension of language, which consists of the particular set of rules that govern a particular language. As was mentioned in the previous section, languages have very diverse ways of structuring their elements, and that has been a key element throughout the history of modern linguistics to approach the studies on human language from different perspectives. As Crystal’s quotation indicates, that structural dimension of languages -what we call grammaris normally divided into morphology and syntax, two components that many times are studied in relation to each other under the name of morphosyntax. The reason for that is that they complement each other, and many times the borderlines between them are very blurred. However, definitions and descriptions for both of them can be provided in order to understand what we mean when the notion of grammar is referred to. Starting with morphology, according to Crystal’s dictionary (2008:314), it is [t]he branch of grammar which studies the structure or forms of words, primarily through the use of the morpheme construct. It is traditionally distinguished from syntax, which deals with the rules governing the combination of words in sentences. It is generally divided into two fields: the study of inflections (inflectional morphology) and of wordformation (lexical or derivational morphology). [Emphasis added] Morphology thus is commonly defined as the set of rules that govern the structural relations that form and create words. However, when we are talking from the perspective of general linguistics, the term word may be not as illustrative as we might think. The reason for that is the difficulty of finding a definition of the term word that suits the necessities of the morphological mechanisms of all languages; in other words, we could say that the notion of !35 word is not a linguistic universal in the strict sense, and the fact that we use it in the definition of morphology -as we can read in Crystal’s quotationresponds to the influence of the “orthographical convention of using spaces to indicate word boundaries” (Booij, 2012:5), which, of course, does not correspond to a characteristic of natural language but to a convention of arbitrary relations among signs; in fact, that influence of writing on the definition of morphology comes from an Eurocentric way of understanding the study of language, which is in fact the perspective that ecolinguistics is trying to avoid. Thus, we must base our definition of morphology on what Booij (2012:8) defines as a “morpheme-based approach”, in which what we study is “the syntax of morphemes”, where morphemes “are defined as the minimal linguistic units with a lexical or grammatical meaning”. In this perspective, what morphology will govern is the set of rules that connect the different categories (both grammatical -for instance, notions such as gender or numberand lexical or semantical) within a piece of discourse. On the other hand, Crystal (2008:471) defines syntax as [a] traditional term for the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language. In this use, syntax is opposed to morphology, the study of word structure. An alternative definition (avoiding the concept of ‘word’) is the study of the interrelationships between elements of sentence structure, and of the rules governing the arrangement of sentences in sequences. Crystal uses the notion of morphology to oppose it to syntax and, if we said that morphology dealt with the rules of word formation, syntax operates in a very similar way; the only difference lies in the fact that syntax works at sentence level. In this sense, syntax will serve as the model from which the different elements of the transitivity structure of the verb take their place at the sentence level. The transitivity structure of the verb makes reference to !36 the set of arguments that are required by a particular verb and that are dependent of it, giving us several categories among which can be highlighted (Crystal, 2008:494): •transitive structures -those which demand a direct object as the verb see, which requires something to be seen-. One example would be the construction I saw Jon, composed by Subject - verb - Direct Object •intransitive structures, the ones that do not require a direct object as, for example, the verb arrive in the construction I arrived early (Subject - verb - Time Adjunct) •ditransitive structures: those that require both a direct and an indirect object, as it happens with the verb give, for which we need something to be given and someone to give it to; for example, I gave it to you (Subject - verb - Direct Object - Indirect Object) In the following paragraphs of this chapter we are going to explore the morphology and the syntax of the English language; in other words, we will study the ways in which linguistic categories are combined in order to form what we call the words of English, and the rules that are necessary to combine those words at the sentence level. In addition to that, I am going to study the morphology and syntax of typologically and genetically different languages that use a different set of rules at the word and sentence level, so that we are able to understand how differences in language -at any levelaffect our understanding of the world. 3. 2. 1. Morphosyntax of the English language In the previous paragraphs it has been explained that both morphological and syntactic mechanisms belong to the structural level of languages, and that the sum of both components constitute the grammar of any given language. As it happens in any other languages, English can be defined in terms of morphology and syntax separately, but it is key to really understand !37 the grammar of English to bear in mind the idea that those two components of the language are highly interrelated and that one is affected by the other. In this section I am going to explain how the the basic morphology and syntax of English work, but also the relation that exists between them. Recalling the distinction among the different types of languages according to morphological typology we can say that English is what we call an isolating or analytic language. Those types of languages, as it was explained before, are characterized by the lack - or a very reduced systemof inflectional morphology. This means that in the English language, in general terms, one word corresponds to one category, and thus word order will be key for the understanding of the relations among entities in the linguistic production. In this sense, the English word want only provides the semantic implications of the verb, but it does not concrete any further -grammaticalinformation such as type of word, person or number, as it would happen if we took, for example, the Spanish counterpart for that word, which would be the verb querer; in this particular form, the Spanish verb contains the information of person (impersonal form, infinitive) and the conjugation it belongs to (all marked by the suffix -er). It must be clarified that English, even though it was defined as an analytic language, does allow some inflections for its nouns and verbs. For example, we could suffix the word of our example (the verb want) with the particle -ing, which marks gerund, or with a final -s, which would indicate 3rd person singular. But in general terms, in Present Day English, inflectional marks are just remains from a past filled with a richer inflectional system. This means that the paradigm of a regular verb in the English language can be simplified in the following forms: !38 Those instances of inflectional marks for the verbs in English, as explained above, are remains of the past system of inflectional morphology of the English language, but if we wanted to indicate other forms or tenses, we would need to add separate particles; for example, to indicate the infinitive we would use the particle to before the verb, and the formation of the future tense in English requires the use of auxiliar particles such as will or even complete constructions (be going to). If we compare the formation of future in English with its counterpart in an inflectional language such as Spanish, we can see how those different mechanisms produce similar meanings: (1) I will eat Subject (1st person singular) - plural marker - main verb (2) Com-e-ré-Ø root of the main verb - thematic vowel - time+aspect+mood - 1st person singular On the other hand, English nouns also allow some instances of inflection, but only for the category of number. Present Day English shows two categories of number, singular and plural, marked in regular nouns with the suffix -(e)s. Thus, the plural of dog would be dogs and the plural of inch would be inches. There are also remains of other plural markers in English that come from the past inflectional system of Old English as, for example, is the case of the following pairs: (3) Mouse - mice (4) Tooth - teeth !39 Tab. 1 Paradigm of regular verbs in English Present (I, you, we, you, they) want (He, she, it) wants Past/Participle (I, you, we, you, they) wanted (He, she, it) wanted (5) Man - men All these examples taken from Burridge and Bergs (2017:83) show instances of i-mutated plurals, which according to these scholars are “remains of an earlier pronunciation rule […] whereby the stem vowel of the word harmonized with the vowel of the i-plural ending”. To understand this process, we can take a look on the evolution of example (3): However, as it has been said, those are only remains of the past of the language, but the mechanism of i-mutation is no longer productive in the English language, so new plural forms cannot be created by this mechanism. From a diachronic perspective, as it has been introduced in the example of plurals, Old English was a completely different language attending to morphological criteria; it would have been classified as an inflectional language, as it showed a richer and more complete system of inflections for both nouns and verbs. On the one hand, the inflectional marks that NPs showed in the English language responded to the categories of case (Old English distinguished four cases, nominative, accusative, genitive and dative) , gender (with 5 inflections for masculine, feminine and neuter) and number (which, although it also only had 6 singular and plural, had different morphemes depending on the declension of a particular Case in Present Day English is reflected in the Saxon genitive (Gramley, 2012) 5 Examples of gender in Present Day English can be found in the system of pronouns. 6 !40 Tab. 2. Adapted from Burridge and Bergs (2017:83) PERIOD SINGULAR PLURAL Proto-Germanic *mūs- *mūsiz Old English mūs mȳs Middle English mus mis Modern English mouse mice noun). On the other hand, Old English verbs also showed inflectional morphology, and were marked with different inflections for time and person. The fact that a shift from a synthetic towards an analytic language took place serves as an example of how those classifications, though illustrative, do not represent exact types, but a continuum in which a particular language can move through historical evolution. Moreover, those categories cannot be understood as strictly as we might like because of the complexity of language change. Changes at one level of language affect the other component. The history of morphological change of the English language is a very good example of that, as the changes in the sound system (the weakening of unstressed vowels into /Ə/) affected the system of inflections because they tend to appear in unstressed syllables, and unstressed vowels have the tendency to disappear. The morphological changes also affected the syntax of the English language, as it will explained in the following paragraphs. The syntax of the English language, as explained above, corresponds to the typological classification of SVO, which means that unmarked -or canonicalconstructions in English will follow that order of verbal arguments, and it shows a highly strict word order. As happens with morphological typology, that classification does not represent fully-closed categories, but a way of categorizing the canonical structure of the language. As it has been said several times now, both syntax and morphology work together in structuring the language, and the repercussions of that interconnection among language components in English is very obvious if we take into account a diachronic point of view as, according to Givón (2001:23), [w]hile synchronic grammatical structure and its typological diversity can and should be studied on its own terms, a profound understanding of the principles that govern typological variation in grammar cannot be arrived at without studying the diachronic process of grammaticalization. !41 These examples show the differences between adding elements that provide with a particular semantic meaning (such as the examples of English given before) and the grammatical implications of inflectional markers. In the case of Tuyuca’s evidentials, that information is not provided by choice, but by basic inflection of the verb, and thus cannot be avoided by speakers. The implications of evidentials in the environmental discourse are very interesting. The reason for that is that, by the use of evidentials, speakers are forced to imply the level of reliability of any given statement, which has a direct repercussion on the degree of commitment that a particular speaker shows towards a particular proposition and thus, it also affects the way listeners would take that particular statement as true or, at least, somewhat reliable. Thus, the interesting point of the Tuyuca example regarding environmental issues is not the particular evidential categories that this particular language shows but the hierarchy among them. !48 Tab. 4. Adapted from Barnes (1984:257) Evidential category Example Translation Grammatical implications Visual (1) diiga apé-wi ‘He played soccer’ I saw him play Nonvisual (2) diiga apé-ti ‘He played soccer’ I heard the game and him, but I didn’t see it or him Apparent (3) diiga apé-yi ‘He played soccer’ I have seen evidence that he played (for example, his distinctive shoe print on the playing field), but I did not see him play Secondhand (4) diiga apé-yigɨ ‘He played soccer’ I obtained the information from someone else Assumed (5) diiga apé-hĩyi ‘He played soccer’ It is reasonable to assume that he did According to Barnes (1984:263) the use of evidentials is open to choice in the sense that speakers may have and share some knowledge that they might have perceived with any sense other than vision -in which case, it would correspond a nonvisual evidential marker-, but that might have also been explained to the speaker by someone else who did witness the facts visually -and thus it would correspond the use of a secondhand evidential-; in that case, the speaker must choose between those two perspectives and, as Barnes (1984:263) pointed at, speakers of Tuyuca prefer their “own nonvisual report to a secondhand report, even if the secondhand report is given by someone who saw the state or event”. This indicates us that vision appears to be the most trusted way of getting to know anything but only when that visual information is firsthand. If not, speakers of Tuyuca would trust more any other senses than a secondhand information, and thus, what is valued is the degree of certainty of the speaker himself, as the speaker has to be the most reliable source for the statement he makes. In consequence, “there is a hierarchy of preferred evidentials, the preferred ones being visual, followed by nonvisual, apparent, secondhand, and, last, assumed” (Barnes 1984:268). In a language such as Tuyuca, speakers need to commit to the statements that they produce, and the information of the source can never be omitted because grammar forces them to include that information -if not, it would be grammatically (and not semantically) incomplete-. That makes it more complicated to be ambiguous or even to lie about certain things, as it is the speakers who are the only ones responsible for their own statements. This connects with Stibbe’s (2015:28) analysis of destructive -regarding the environmentdiscourses; this scholar proposes that damaging discourses can only be fought against through what he calls resistance, that “consists of raising awareness that the ideology conveyed by the discourse is just a story, and that the story has harmful effects”. For example, Donald Trump’s tweets regarding environmental issues are well known by most of us; he has been tweeting !49 about climate change since pre-presidential times, and those tweets are nowadays studied from many perspectives. I want to use the following example to show how important it would be for the reliability of this tweet if English used evidentials: In this tweet (which was published in 2012 but still shows interactions in the social network) affirms that global warming is not a thing. If the current president of the United States of America -one of the leading countries of the world, and also the most responsible country for the increase of the global temperature (Matthews et al, 2014:3)- were forced to indicate his source of information, the repercussion of that statement would be a bit different; that would not necessarily be because of the commitment of Trump towards his statement but because of the receivers of that message. If English speakers (and, most concretely, the American voters) were used to a system of evidentials that created a hierarchy of reliability of the sources of the speaker, people might take less seriously statements that deny global warming -as Trump, if we take literally the system of evidentials of Tuyuca, would have never been able to make such a statement using the visual category-. 3. 2. 4. Arrernte and kinship Mparntwe Arrernte is a language spoken in Aranda -Australia- (Wilkins, 1989:1); according to Ethnologue, it had 1.910 speakers in 2016. It belongs to the group of Arandic languages, a subgroup of the Pama-Nyungan family of languages (Wilkins, 1989:6). One of the most salient characteristics of this family of languages is that a dramatic sound change led to a !50 “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” (@realDonaldTrump) change in vocabulary that differentiated them from other Australian Aboriginal languages. Of course, those changes affected grammar and, for example, verbs lost their conjugations (Wilkins, 1989:6). However, in these paragraphs I will develop another salient -and very famouscharacteristic of this language: kinship terms and their marking. Harré et al (1995:156) discussed that some grammatical characteristics of this Australian language “reinforce the aboriginal belief in the unity between nonpersons and persons, the interdependency between country, kin and totemic beings”. This is done through the development of kinship terms that are grammatically marked. Arrernte classifies human relationships into 8 subsections which “are: Peltharre, Kemarre, Mpetyane, Pengarte, Kngwarreye, Angale (or Ngale), Perrwerle and Penangke” (Wilkins, 1989:34). Besides this subsections, Arrernte is also famous for its kin terms, which are marked morphologically by elements such as especial markers for possession. According to Wilkins (1989:133) “[t]here are two ways of marking kin possession, as opposed to any other type of possession” which are made through possessor suffixes and a dative form for possessor. The following table shows those specific possessor suffixes -only in singular formfor kin terms: By using those suffixes, a Mparntwe Arrernte speaker could take the word for ‘sister’ and form yay-atye, which means ‘my sister’ (Wilkins, 1989:34). !51 Tab. 5. Adapted from Wilkins (1989:133) Suffix Grammatical meaning Implied semantic meaning -atye 1 kin POSS ‘my relation’ -angkwe 2 kin POSS ‘your relation’ -ikwe 3 kin POSS ‘his/her/its relation’ The fact that speakers use different markers for kin relations than for any other form of possession is interesting enough; speakers of English would use the same markers to express possession of objects and possession of humans (there is no difference between saying my brother and my pencil, as if the possession of humans was comparable at any level with the possession of writing instruments). But if those differences in the possessive markers already suggest a different worldview regarding human relationships, Harré et al (1995:156) signaled that in this language, some of the “pronominal kin possessive suffixes attach to both kin terms and the two terms: altyerrre (dreaming country, dreaming totem) and pmere (land which one is responsible for and bound to by Dreamtime law)”. In this sense, Arrernte speakers understand that the environment can be part of their kin; that shows instances of collaborative visions of nature, in which humans understand the earth not as a consumption good but as a part of their ecosystem, as a source of life -for humans within their ecosystem and not as external parts of it-. 3. 3. Lexicon The previous section explored the repercussion of grammatical mechanisms in our ways of perceiving and portraying reality. The examples previously provided suggested that some morphosyntactic characteristics of several languages -in comparison to their counterparts in Englishhave a direct impact in our relationship with the environment. However, we cannot finish this project without mentioning another component of languages that also has a direct impact in our way of approaching environmental issues: the lexicon; it is, according to Crystal (2008:278), “[i]n its most general sense, […] synonymous with vocabulary”; in this sense, when we mention lexicon, we will be referring to the inventory of words of a particular !52 language. So, what it is going to be dealt with in this section is the particular words (lexicon) and their meaning implications (their semantics) of particular languages. We focused before on grammar because it represents the basic structure of any given language, and thus remains fixed in that particular language for a long period of time. However, as many scholars (Harré et al, 1995; Stibbe, 2015; Burridge and Bergs, 2017) have suggested, lexicon is a very interesting feature of language when we want to talk about changes in the world of the speakers; in the words of Sapir in Fill and Mühlhäusler (2001:14): [i]t is the vocabulary of a language that most clearly reflects the physical and social environment of its speakers. The complete vocabulary of a language may indeed be looked upon as a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests, and occupations that take up the attention of the community. 12 In this sense, the repertoire of words of a language -specially of those that are spoken in areas of rapid technological development such as Englishis in constant flux. Some words are created or borrowed, some words are lost, and that can happen due to internal processes of languages -such as compounding or derivationor thanks to language contact and changes in the world of the speakers (Burridge and Bergs, 2017:28-46). That is why the lexicon of a particular language can be also studied in terms of its ecological adequacy, as it will be developed in the following paragraphs. This is the most traditional view on the worldview studies, but it must not be taken dogmatically; 12 though average speakers might be more lexicon-aware than grammar-aware, both elements have direct repercussions on our way of perceiving the world, as it is being discussed in this project. !53 3. 3. 1. Lexicon of the English Language Of course, making a descriptive analysis of the lexicon of English (or any other language) is not as ‘easy’ as a study on grammar could be. The reason for that is that lexicon and semantics are the less systematic components of language -if we compare them with grammar or phoneticsand thus their study must follow different paths (Burridge and Bergs, 2017:28-69). However, the history of the English lexicon is very interesting due to the traces of linguistic contact, so this exploration of the English lexicon will begin with the words of Old English. Old English had a vocabulary inherited almost entirely from Germanic or formed by compounding or derivation from Germanic elements. There were Latin loan words, mainly to do with philosophy, religion and medicine, and some compounds calqued on Latin forms. (Denison, 2014:10) As Denison explains in this quotation, Old English lexicon showed what would have been expected in a Germanic language. However, it was already in this period when English started to actively borrow words from other languages, particularly Celtic words -everyday words and place namesand, in greater numbers, Latin loans, which included “new names to many local objects and experiences, and introduced several fresh concepts” (Crystal, 2019:8). But borrowing did not end there; according to Crystal (2019:24), “[t]he history of English vocabulary is one of repeated invasions” and, before the Middle English times, two additional sources of borrowing must be highlighted: a second wave of Latin loanwords -coming form the Christianization process of the British islesand a considerable amount of borrowing from Old Norse after the Scandinavian invasions (Crystal, 2019:24-25). !54 We could argue that one of the most important moments of vocabulary expansion of the English language derived from the Norman conquest in the Middle English period. In fact, as mentioned in section 2.3. of this text, many times it has been argued that, due to French influence, English suffered from a process of creolization. It was also mentioned that not every scholar agreed on this perspective, and that Gramley (2012:90) rejected that idea and proposed that what happened after the Norman conquest in the English language was a process of relexification. Whether or not current English is the subsequent language of a process of creolization, the truth is that this relexification that Gramley mentioned seems to be true; according to Crystal (2019:46) several thousands of words were introduced from French into English during that period. However, the English lexicon had only started to grow at that time; “[i]t has been estimated that the period between 1530 and the Restoration (1660) displayed the fastest lexical growth in the history of the language” (Crystal, 2019:76). The elaboration of dictionaries and the contact of English with non-European languages (this is the moment of the Imperialistic Europe) kept widening the English vocabulary up until modern days. The lexicon of current English, as it has been traditionally said, is one of the largest among all existing languages in the world. Counting that number of words -taking into account all that has been said until this moment in this text about linguistic diversityis probably impossible, but what can be asserted is that the English language nowadays boasts an impressive number of words. But deciding what is a word (as it was explained in section 3.1.) is not that easy; to solve this problem -in order to make an estimation of the number of words that exist in the language-, we can compare several dictionaries of English; according to Crystal (2019:129) the biggest dictionaries of English “include over half a million lexemes”; an example of these large dictionaries of English would be the Oxford English !55 Dictionary, which in 2018 showed over 600.000 entries (Crystal, 2019:129). After the brief history of the English vocabulary that has been made in this section, we can imagine that this wide lexicon of English is the result of an amalgamation of the original Germanic vocabulary with borrowings of a considerable number of languages. 3. 3. 2. What English has, what English lacks: environmental vocabulary Harré et al (1995) propose that it is in lexicon where more rapid changes could be introduced in order to make general population more ecologically-aware through language. Because of that, these scholars argued that environmental terms in English might suffer from semantic vagueness -as, for example, with terms such as progress or primitive-, semantic underdifferentiation -as it happens with terms like growth, that might refer to several different phenomena (such as natural growth or dangerous growth of diseases)- and misleading encoding -as it happens with the term fertilizers, “which can render soil infertile”- (Harré et al, 1995:29). If we say that vocabulary has a very obvious and direct impact in the way speakers of a particular language conceptualize the world, and if the analysis of English environmental vocabulary shows that it is ambiguous and misleading, what shape would a truly green discourse have? The above mentioned scholars are not the only ones that proposed that the terms that English shows to talk about environmental issues are not as clear as the environment might need. According to Schultz in Fill and Muhlhausler (2001:109) “[p]eople who promote the protection of the natural environment also use the language of exploitation”, which is supposed, in western societies, to portray an earth that can be sold and thus treated as a commercial product. In this sense, she distinguishes some terms that, though neutral, show !56 connotations that favor exploitations -for example, the word develop is normally connected with positive ideas of expansion and economic growth, but to be considered environmentally friendly requires the modifier sustainable- (Schultz in Fill and Muhlhausler 2001:110); the author also argued that “the language of the resource development industries is replete with euphemisms that portray their activities as benign, or even actually beneficial to the natural environment” -as it would happen with the word clearing which is used in environmental contexts, refers to the removal of native vegetation of a piece of land- (Schultz in Fill and Muhlhausler 2001:111). In this sense, this author proposed that we should revise this use of words in order to be more accurate and thus more aware of our ecological responsibility; she proposed examples of alternatives for those terms that she considers ambiguous in the English language; some of those examples can be read in the following table: These examples make very clear what is the worldview of English regarding environmental issues: land belongs to landlords and thus it is a product for exploitation. In this sense, the last example (sterilized land/land protected from destructive exploitation) shows us how sometimes the terms that are used to designate elements that are good for the environment are generally associated to stigmatized ideas in our society. In her reasoning, Schultz in Fill and Muhlhausler (2001:109-121) proposes that the view of the environment of English speakers is thus fully affected by the neoliberal values that were explained in section 2.3. But could we have other words that would be less ambiguous in ecological terms? !57 Tab. 6. Examples taken from Schultz in Fill and Muhlhausler (2001:113-114) Conventional words and expressions of the English language Proposed alternatives Controlled burning Authorized burning Degenerate tree Old or ancient tree Greenhouse effect (Human-induced) climatic dislocation Sterilized land Land protected from destructive exploitation 5. BIBLIOGRAPHY (1) ACUÑA-FARIÑA, Juan Carlos (2009). “The linguistics and psycolinguistics of agreement: a tutorial overview”. In Lingua, vol. 119, pp. 389-424 (2) AIKHENVALD, Alexandra Y. (2003). “Evidentiality in typological perspective”. Typological Studies in Language, 54, 1-32 (3) ASHCROFT, Bill et al (1998). Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London & NY: Routledge (4) BARNES, Janet (1984). “Evidentials in the Tuyuca verb”. International journal of American linguistics, 50(3), 255-271 (5) BERNÁRDEZ, Enrique (2004). ¿Qué son las lenguas? Madrid: Alianza Editorial (6) BERNÁRDEZ, Enrique (2016). Viaje Lingüístico por el Mundo: Iniciación a la Tipología de las Lenguas. Madrid: Alianza Editorial (7) BOOIJ, Geert. (2012). The grammar of words: An introduction to linguistic morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press (8) BURRIDGE, Kate and BERGS, Alexander (2017). Understanding language change. London: Routeledge (9) CRYSTAL, David (2008). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing (10)CRYSTAL, David (2019). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (11)CROSBY, Alfred W. (1986). Ecological Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (12)DANCHEV, Andrei (1997). “The Middle English creolization hypothesis revisited”. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs. Vol. 103, pp. 79-108 (13)DENISON, David (2014). English Historical Syntax. Abington and New York: Routledge (14)FILL, Alwin; MÜHLHÄUSLER, Peter (eds.) (2001). Ecolinguistics reader: Language, ecology and environment. London and New York: Continuum (15)GIVÓN, Talmy (2001). Syntax: an introduction. Vol. 1. John Benjamins Publishing !64 (16)GRAMLEY, Stephan (2012). The History of English: An Introduction. USA and Canada: Routledge (17)HARRÉ et al. (1995). Greenspeak: A study of environmental discourse. United States of America: SAGE publications (18)KEENAN, Edward L (1976). Towards a universal definition of “Subject” (19)KHUN, Thomas S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (20)KRAUSS, Michael (1992). “The world’s languages in crisis”. Language, 68 (1), pp. 4-10 (21)LOOMBA, Ania (2007). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. USA and Canada: Routledge (22)LUCY, John (1996). Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (23)LUCY, John (1997). “Linguistic Relativity”. En Annu. Rev. Anthropol, vol. 26, pp. 291-312 (24)MATTHEWS et al (2014). “National contributions to observed global warming”. Environmental Research Letters, 9(1) (25)MORENO CABRERA, Juan Carlos (2008). El Nacionalismo Lingüístico: Una ideología destructiva. Barcelona: Ediciones Península (26)MOUNIN, Georges (1972). La lingüística del siglo XX. Madrid: Editorial Gredos (27)MOURE, Teresa (2019). Linguística eco-: O estudo das línguas no Antropoceno. Santiago de Compostela: Através Editora (28)NÆSS, Åshild. (2006). “Bound Nominal Elements in Äiwoo (Reefs): A Reappraisal of the" Multiple Noun Class Systems”". Oceanic Linguistics, 45(2), 269-296 (29)NÆSS, Åshild. (2013). “From Austronesian voice to Oceanic transitivity: Äiwoo as the" missing link”". Oceanic Linguistics, 52(1), 106-124 !65 (30)PERLOVSKY, Leonid (2009). “Language and emotions: Emotional Sapir–Whorf hypothesis”. Neural Networks, 22, pp. 518-526 (31)PHILLIPSON, Robert (1993). Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press (32)PHILLIPSON, Robert (1997). “Realities and myths of linguistic imperialism”. Journal of multilinguial and multicultural development. 18, pp. 238-248 (33)RENFREW, Colin (1990). Archeology and language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press (34)ROSS, Malcolm; NÆSS, Åshild (2007). “An Oceanic origin for Äiwoo, the language of the Reef Islands?”. Oceanic Linguistics, 2007, p. 456-498 (35)SIMONS, Gary F. (editor) (2019). Ethnologue. Online version, available in https:// www.ethnologue.com (36)STIBBE, Arran (2010). “Ecolinguistics and Globalization”. In Coupland, Nikolas (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization. John Wiley & Sons, cap. 18, pp. 406-425 (37)STIBBE, Arran (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Abington, New York: Routledge (38)WENDT, Alexander (1994). “Collective identity formation and the international state”. The American Political Science Review. 88 (2), pp. 384-396 (39)WILKINS, David P. (1989). Mparntwe Arrernte (Aranda): Studies in the structure and semantics of grammar. Canberra: The Australian National University !66 6. APPENDIX TRANSLATED QUOTATIONS 1. “[T]oda lengua manifiesta un análisis del mundo exterior que le es específico, que impone al hablante una manera de ver y de interpretar este mundo”. Mounin (1972:96-97) 4. “[E]l inglés parece tener aversión a que se hablen otras lenguas en su territorio”. Bernárdez (2004:112) !67 !68