Pragmatics
At least one Salish language, Lillooet Salish, differs from Indo-European languages in terms of pragmatics. ‘Pragmatics’ loosely deals with the role that context plays in meaning. Lillooet Salish doesn’t allow presuppositions about a hearer’s beliefs or knowledge during a conversation. To demonstrate, it’s useful to compare Lillooet Salish determiners with English determiners. English determiners take the form of the articles ‘a,’ ‘an’ and ‘the.’ The indefinite articles ‘a’ and ‘an’ refer to an object that is unfamiliar or that has not been previously referenced in conversation.
The definite article ‘the’ refers to a familiar object about which both the speaker and the listener share a common understanding. Lillooet Salish and several other Salish languages use the same determiner to refer to both familiar and unfamiliar objects in conversation. For example, when discussing a woman, Lillooet Salish speakers used (with serving as the determiner and meaning ‘woman’) to refer to the woman both when initially introducing her and again when referencing her later on in the conversation. Thus, no distinction is made between a unique object and a familiar one.
This absence of varying determiners is a manifestation of the lack of presuppositions about a listener in Salish. Using a definite article would presuppose a mental state of the listener: familiarity with the object in question. Similarly, a Salishan language equivalent of the English sentence “It was John who called” would not require the assumption that the listener knows that someone called. In English, such a sentence implies that someone called and serves to clarify who the caller was. In Salish, the sentence would be void of any implication regarding the listener’s knowledge. Rather, only the speaker’s knowledge about previous events is expressed.
The absence of presuppositions extends even to elements that seem to inherently trigger some kind of implication, such as ‘again,’ ‘more,’ ‘stop,’ and ‘also.’ For example, in English, beginning a conversation with a sentence like “It also rained yesterday” would probably be met with confusion from the listener. The word ‘also’ signifies an addition to some previously discussed topic about which both the speaker and the listener are aware. However, in Salish, a statement like “It also rained yesterday” is not met with the same kind of bewilderment. The listener’s prior knowledge (or lack thereof) is not conventionally regarded by either party in a conversation. Only the speaker’s knowledge is relevant.
The use of pronouns illustrates the disregard for presuppositions as well. For example, a sentence like “She walked there, and then Brenda left” would be acceptable on its own in Lillooet Salish. The pronoun ‘she’ can refer to Brenda and be used without the introduction that would be necessary in English. It’s key to note that presuppositions do exist in Salishan languages; they simply don’t have to be shared between the speaker and listener the way they do in English and other Indo-European languages. The above examples demonstrate that presuppositions are present, but the fact that the listener doesn’t necessarily have to be aware of them signifies that the presuppositions only matter to the speaker. They are indicative of prior information that the speaker alone may be aware of, and his/her speech reflects merely his/her perspective on a situation without taking into account the listener’s knowledge. While English values a common ground between a listener and speaker and thus requires that some presuppositions about another person’s knowledge be made, Salish does not share this pragmatic convention.
Read more about this topic: Salishan Languages