Meanings of cultural importance are found not only in words but also in the very grammar of a language. This exciting collection presents eleven original studies of the relationship between grammar, culture, and cognition, with data from languages and cultures from around the world. Contributors discuss a wide variety of grammatical phenomena. This book shows that the study of culture can help to understand how and why languages differ in the ways they do.

• Part I: Ethnosyntax: Theory and Scope


• 1: N. J. Enfield: Ethnosyntax: Introduction


• 2: Anthony V. N. Diller and Wilaiwan Khanittanan: Syntactic Enquiry as a Cultural Activity


• 3: Cliff Goddard: Ethnosyntax, Ethnopragmatics, Sign-Functions, and Culture


• 4: John Newman: Culture, Cognition, and the Grammar of 'Give' Clauses


• Part II: Culture, Semantics, and Grammar


• 5: Wallace Chafe: Masculine and Feminine in the Northern Iroquoian Languages


• 6: Andrew Pawley: Using He and She for Inanimate Referents in English: Questions of Grammar and World View


• 7: Ronald W. Langacker: A Study in Unified Diversity: English and Mixtec Locatives


• 8: Anna Wierzbicka: Enlgish Causative Constructions in an Ethnosyntactic Perspective: Focusing on 'LET'


• Part III: Culture, Pragmatics, and Grammaticalisation


• 9: Kate Burridge: Changes within Pennsylvania German Grammar as Enactments of Anabaptist World View


• 10: N. J. Enfield: Cultural Logic and Syntactic Productivity: Associated Posture Constructions in Lao


• 11: Alan Rumsey: Aspects of Ku Waru Ethnosyntax and Social Life


• 12: Jane Simpson: From Common Ground to Syntactic Construction: Associated Path in Warlpiri

N. J. Enfield is a staff member in the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. His work in semantic and grammatical description, contact and areal linguistics, gesture, and linguistic anthropology is based upon ongoing fieldwork in mainland Southeast Asia.