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Vol. 54, no. 3 (Fall 2012)

Contents

Abstracts

The Historical Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan Agriculture

William L. Merrill
Smithsonian Institution

Abstract. The Uto-Aztecan language family figures prominently in research on early agriculture in western North America. A central issue is the role that the members of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community might have played in the diffusion of maize agriculture from Mesoamerica to the southwestern United States. Key to addressing this issue is determining whether an agricultural lexicon can be reconstructed for Proto-Uto-Aztecan, but despite several comparative studies of the agricultural lexica of the Uto-Aztecan languages, consensus remains elusive. A detailed reanalysis of these lexica indicates that an agriculture-related vocabulary can be reconstructed only for Proto– Southern Uto-Aztecan, supporting the conclusion that maize agriculture entered the Uto-Aztecan world after the division of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community into southern and northern branches. Additional lexical and biogeographical data suggest that the Proto–Southern Uto-Aztecan speech community was located near the modern Arizona-Sonora border when its members began cultivating maize, a development that may have occurred around four thousand years ago, when the earliest evidence of maize agriculture appears in the archaeological record of the North American Southwest.

Sociocultural Identity and Arab Women’s and Men’s Code-Choice in the Context of Patriarchy

Manal A. Ismail
King Saud University

Abstract. This article investigates young women’s and men’s speech in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during a formal interview. Women frequently employed vernacular pronunciation and showed greater use of dialectal Arabic lexicon, often distinctively more localized. Men, on the other hand, approximated more closely to Standard Arabic speech. In the context of Arab patriarchy, it is argued that each gender’s preference for code choice can be explained by social and cultural norms that impose differential entitlements to the public sphere. Social meaning conveyed by speakers’ code choices is described in relation to the social indexical effect of each variety.

Logophoric Discourse and First Person Reporting in Wan (West Africa)

Tatiana Nikitina
LLACAN, CNRS, France

Abstract. The distinction between direct and indirect reporting is commonly assumed to be a universal underlying principle of discourse representation. This article surveys a system of reporting that is based on an alternative principle. It argues that the choice of a reporting strategy in Wan (Mande, Côte d’Ivoire) depends not on the information properties of the report (form vs. content, de re vs. de dicto), but rather on discourse properties of the participants involved. The difference between discourse reporting in Wan and in European languages is related to a difference in the dominant means of transmitting knowledge (oral vs. written).

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