10 - Speaking of Speaking: Tenejapa Tzeltal Metalinguistics

Summary

The intent of this paper is to present a picture of the ways that Tzeltal (Maya) speakers themselves categorize their world of verbal communication, the ways that they talk about speech events occurring in their own cultural matrix. Instead of outlining a tightly defined and highly structured cultural domain and analyzing it exhaustively in terms of defining components on each level of contrast, I want to let the native terms and their glosses along with some explanation speak for themselves. There are two reasons for adopting this expository stance.

The first is that the meanings of the native terms as glossed embody the attributes of communicative events that we must assume the Tzeltal speakers single out as relevant and significant in specific situations. Thus, by simple inspection we can see what kinds of events the Tzeltal have chosen to label, what components and functions of speaking are focused on (cf. Hymes 1962), and what attributes of individual speech and speaking style are considered important enough to deserve names. In other words, I have not sought a single grammatical or social frame for generating a universe of discourse and analysis because a priori levels of organization are unnecessary at this point for an understanding of fundamental Tzeltal conceptualizations of verbal interaction.

The second, and more important reason, is that elicitation frames and abstract analysis would be more likely to obscure than to clarify the metalinguistic picture under consideration.