The Metalinguistic Vocabulary of a Speech Community in the Highlands of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea)

Abstract

Like experiments in psycholinguistics, languages being described for the first time can serve as testing grounds for general linguistic hypotheses and theories.¹ A basic assumption of works written within the transformational generative paradigm is that a grammar “is descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker. The structural descriptions assigned to sentences by the grammar, the distinctions that it makes between well-formed and deviant, and so on, must, for descriptive adequacy, correspond to the linguistic intuition of the native speaker” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 24). The primary facts, then, upon which these grammars are based, are the native speaker’s tacit knowledge of his language, knowledge which can be made explicit through judgments of grammaticality and acceptability of well-formed and deviant sentences. This assumption is evident in some psycholinguistic work. To quote only one example (Brown, Cazden, & Bellugi, 1971, p. 383), research on the development of grammar in children is “directed at two general questions: What does the child know of the structure of English at successive points in his development? By what processes does he acquire his knowledge?” According to Brown, et al.,the possibility of answering these questions is intimately linked to acceptance of the generative model: “The most demanding form in which to pose the question of the child’s knowledge of structure at any time is to ask for a generative grammar that represents his knowledge” (p. 383).