Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on analyses of conversational speech, written fiction and nonfiction, the North American Indian language Seneca, and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination. Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many topics of linguistic importance, such as anaphora, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages such as the historical present and free indirect style. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness for linguists, psychologists, literary scholars, computer scientists, anthropologists, and philosophers.
The Seneca language belongs to the Northern Iroquoian branch of the Iroquoian language family, where its closest relatives are Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora. Seneca holds special typological interest because of its high degree of polysynthesis and fusion. It is historically important because of its central role in the Longhouse religion and its place in the pioneering linguistic work of the 19th century missionary Asher Wright. This grammatical description, which includes four extended texts in several genres, is the culminatin of Chafe’s long term study of the language over half a century.
The Seneca language is a member of the Iroquoian language family. Seneca is a seriously endangered language spoken in upper New York State and Southern Ontario. This book consists of 3 parts. Section I, on orthography, describes a way of writing Seneca words consistently and without omitting features that are significant. Various spelling systems have been used, and are being used, for the writing of Seneca by missionaries, anthropologists, and the speakers of the language themselves. Section II, on grammar, is concerned with the structure of Seneca words. Section III is a brief glossary of the Seneca language.
The thesis of this book is that neither laughter nor humor can be understood apart from the feeling that underlies them. This feeling is a mental state in which people exclude some situation from their knowledge of how the world really is, thereby inhibiting seriousness where seriousness would be counterproductive. Laughter is viewed as an expression of this feeling, and humor as a set of devices designed to trigger it because it is so pleasant and distracting. Beginning with phonetic analyses of laughter, the book examines ways in which the feeling behind the laughter is elicited by both humorous and nonhumorous situations. It discusses properties of this feeling that justify its inclusion in the repertoire of human emotions. Against this background it illustrates the creation of humor in several folklore genres and across several cultures. Finally, it reconciles this understanding with various already familiar ways of explaining humor and laughter.
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