 Yes, okay, thank you very much for your patience, I think we'll get started. Apologies to Alice, we had some technical problems as well. It's my pleasure and honour to introduce our speaker for today, Alice Mitchell, from the University of Bristol. Prior to that was a postdoc at the University of Hamburg in Africa, working on Datoge, which we'll be hearing a little bit about today. Alice has a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo and I worked with a colleague that many of us know, Jeff Good. I'm very glad to say this as well. Before that, Alice is from SOAS, so yes, homegrown speaker today. Alice did her MA here in the LDD, MA between 2009 and 2010. So yeah, I know she's going to talk to us a little bit about some of her research and then if we have time, a little bit about some of her present research as well or maybe in the question answers and discussion time afterwards. So yes, very jealous, thank you. Thanks very much Hannah, thank you all for coming. So I'm going to be talking about the linguistic expressions that we use to refer to people, otherwise known as person reference in Detogo, which is a nylotic language spoken in Tanzania. And I'm going to start off with a clip of a recording I made last year in which some speakers try and establish reference to someone and it's quite difficult so they take a while and there's lots of person referring expressions so it's quite a nice example for that reason. So this recording was made in a woman's house, the senior wife of this particular compound and you're looking into her sitting room, which is the kind of public room where she receives guests. These are two young relatives of hers who are visiting from another compound and the woman herself is sitting in another room so they're talking through the wall so the recording quality isn't great for her because I didn't have an extra microphone. And another person comes to the door and greets the woman again through the wall and she doesn't know who he is, she can't see him so she asks and then we see an exchange full of person referring expressions so I'll just switch to... Here's a rough transcript of the conversation that you just heard all you really need to pay attention to is the English translation on the right-hand side so I've started the transcription where the woman asked who is it standing at the door and the young man inside tells her it's Ginyngid mother so it gives the name of the person now this doesn't mean anything to the woman so she needs some additional information she asks for his clan and he answers by juta this also doesn't help her much so she then asks Ginyngid a gamania which literally means Ginyngid of whom so who is your father that's the conventional way of asking that and then instead of responding to that the Ginyngid outside asks is the elder of the house at home so he's looking for the head of the household who's not currently in the young man inside tries to answer the question of who Ginyngid's father is but he has some trouble that one of that person what's he called God I've forgotten Ginyngid of and then Ginyngid answers of Gidagutid so she's now got his father's name as well the young man inside repeats it again of Gidagutid she still doesn't acknowledge any recognition of who this is and then in news don't you know that Ginyngid of Gidagutid Gidagutid a Bajuta and gives her a little bit more information another person referring expression about the father now the one who used to live here at Gulaewen and then she tries and thinks oops was it the child who came here the other day was that who this person is no finally they give up on trying to get her to understand or and start talking about something else so this is a nice example that this is Ginyngid himself this tells us a little something about person reference in Dutoga so the first strategy was the name so the birth name was used when she asked who is this she was told it's Ginyngid when this didn't work we then saw the centrality of kinship for identifying who someone is so this is to be expected in a small scale society like this one and he was identified by relations of descent so he was positioned within a clan Bajuta and she was told his father's name so we can see it's a patrilineal society and when none of this information worked either we got an insight into some other important facets of how to identify someone so we got some information about where his father lived and then also she tried to establish how she might know him so referred to an earlier meeting now what's the reason that this this short interaction has so many person referring expressions is because she can't see him humans are amazingly good or most of us at doing facial recognition face to face interaction we don't have to figure out who someone is at them and in this case she couldn't so she had to rely on language to help her figure out who Ginny and Geed was so this is a a kind of nice example with lots of person referring expressions but it's also specific to that context so if a young woman had come to the door or if an elder had come to the door the ways in which they would have identified this person would have been different so the interactional and the interpersonal context of course affects how person reference is achieved so why is any of this interesting you may be wondering why should we study person reference so talking about other people is one of the major functions of language we do it all the time and so we would expect that there are specialized lexical and grammatical resources in languages to do so and we find a reasonable amount of cross-cultural variation strategies for person reference so we find variation in phenomenal systems the existence or non-existence of honorific systems and their complexity variation in naming systems and naming practices so person reference is a really interesting topic from the perspective of socio-linguistic diversity and it's a really important topic for pragmatics it's been particularly prominent in the politeness literature and recently researchers have been trying to look at cross-cultural principles underlying person reference more generally and I'll talk about that in a second for linguistic anthropology and anthropology more generally person reference is an amazingly rich source of information about how different communities categorize people so whether they think about this in terms of gender, kinship profession, age, status or whatever so looking at nice little interactions like the one we just saw tells you a lot about social categories across cultures and also how people use language to negotiate their social relationships so how they position themselves relative to each other so to in short reference to persons is a fundamental phenomenon at the intersection between language and social structure and researchers have proposed two universal pragmatic principles thought to underlie person reference this is mostly coming out of the conversation analysis literature so these two principles are recognition and economy so recognition people use expressions they think their interlocutors will understand so this could be kind of subsumed under the cooperative principle as a speaker you think about what your interlocutor knows and you choose your linguistic expressions accordingly and the second principle economy means using as minimal or almost possible so you're more likely to use a first name then a first name plus last name in some context and researchers have noticed that recognition always takes precedence over economy so the most important thing is to get someone to know who you're talking about even if actually you end up having to say a lot like in the example we just saw so if you think about this example of Guinea and Guida the initial question who is this person was answered very economically we just got a first name but then when the women didn't understand who the reference was to we got a lot of elaboration so these two principles are a good start for a theory of reference a person reference but they make no reference to interpersonal or relational dynamics so how the social status and the relationship between the interlocutors affect person reference forms and that's what I'm really interested in and so far our theory doesn't really tell us anything about that so Levenson introduced or suggested a third principle which he calls circumspection which he defines as follows show circumspection by not over reducing the set of reference explicitly and he talks about this in the context of his field language where he says people often avoid names they prefer to use more generic expressions like kin terms or descriptions so you show circumspection by not pinpointing a reference precisely with a name I just wanted to say a little bit about how I got interested in this topic and what my goals are research which is very much in progress at the moment so I think many of us who have worked with languages spoken in small scale societies have probably been drawn to the topic of person reference it's very sanian in societies where people have multiple names and you kind of have to figure out which names being used at which time and also often there are very strict rules about how to refer to someone and if you get it wrong it's really bad so I wrote my PhD on the Toga inlaw name avoidance practices I'm going to talk about this quite a bit more later on but I'll just briefly summarise here so if you're familiar with Lonipa it's a very similar phenomenon in Toga where women avoid the names of their senior inlaws and also words that sound similar and related words so there's very extensive name avoidance going on so when you study this kind of thing you can't fail to be struck by the social significance of person reference and even the metaphysical significance so if you refer to someone and you're not only offending the living but you're potentially offending the dead as well which will have consequences so my goal in looking at person reference is to understand the broader context of naming addressing and referring in which inlaw name avoidance operates so I'm very interested in cross-cultural typological study of person reference but I'm looking at it through this lens of avoidance so what can person reference more generally tell us about avoidance specifically oh yeah and this picture was here just to remind me to say something about gesture so gesture is one really important way in which we do person reference so this guy was referring to this person he said this person appointed I'm very much interested in multimodal aspects of person reference I'm not going to talk about that today though but that was just in case Mandana picked me up okay so before I get onto talking about person reference in a bit more detail I'll tell you a little bit about who Dutoga people are a bit about their language so Dutoga are traditionally semi-nomadic pastoralists this lifestyle for many pastoralists has become increasingly difficult and they've had to resort to some agriculture so they now grow maize and beans and their herds are getting smaller and smaller as it becomes more difficult to find sufficient land for grazing their cattle they are patrilineal patrilocal so women go to live with the husband's family when they marry and polygynous society and despite a lot of recent changes in their economy cattle are still of central importance so it's kind of what you could call a classic cattle complex society cattle are important not only in terms of wealth but also culturally and socially given all of what I've just said about the difficulties faced by pastoralists there are high levels of poverty among Dutoga and they're relatively marginalised within Tanzania so people have either not heard of Dutoga often when I tell people about Tanzanians about my research or they're like why would you study that language so relatively marginalised people which also means they have retained quite a lot of their traditions as well so nowadays traditionally Dutoga occupied quite a large part of northern Tanzania nowadays they're spread all over the place you can find them around Morogoro I think you can find them even in the south south of Ubea in the search for pasture my research is based in Maniara region in Bulu district specifically and I've worked in several different villages within that district so just a few words about the language itself Dutoga is a nylotic language belongs to the southern nylotic subfamily so closely related to the Kalanjin languages of Kenya and it's actually a cluster of dialects the sort to be seven dialects there's not a huge amount of research on mutual intelligibility yet but the dialects that I've been working on predominantly are Gisam, Janga and Barabay Dutoga speaker number is quite uncertain the most recent estimate by the languages of Tanzania project was 140,000 speakers although I think it's probably quite a bit higher than that actually in terms of documentation there's a little bit so there's a sketch grammar by Phans Hotland in his big book on the southern nylotic languages and there's quite a few good articles by Holland Keesling at the University of Hamburg as well but not much more than that currently okay I'm going to give you a very brief typological overview so basic word order in Dutoga is BSO this utterance in one Moodulan has brought flower followed by the subject, followed by the object but actually word order is really flexible so VOS, SVO, SOV and OVS are all attested in my corpus so word order seems to be pragmatically conditioned and very flexible as you will have noticed it's a tonal language we don't know a ton about the function of tone in the tone yet but one really important thing is that it marks grammatical relations Keesling has showed that it's a marked nominative language so the basic tone is the accusative tone and then to put nouns in the nominative case you change the tone pattern it's an agglutinating language so it's got extensive inflectional and derivational morphology nouns but particularly on verbs and Keesling's identified fives different suffix slots on the verbs with functions like de-transitifising suffixes, proactional motion of various different kinds and applicative suffixes so here's an example just to illustrate the use of one of these suffixes in number two you've got a sentence that means I avoid my father-in-law llawer o asti rhai am fasil i'r denu and then in three we've added the what Keesling calls the anticasmive so it removes the object you've got that suffix there so that turns it into a sentence meaning I avoid or I practice avoidance and as you may be able to spot we've also got things like viral harmony going on so rich, rich morphology in this language but that's not what I'm going to talk about today in terms of language contact it's actually surprisingly easy to find monolingual de-toga speakers quite unusually for Africa there are many many many monolinguals the area that I work in so this is a map of the Rift Valley area the most likely second language would be Iraq which is the Cushiti language or Swahili if the person's been to school and most de-toga will know a simple Swahili so moving on now to strategies of person reference in de-toga I'm going to start by looking at the most circumspect from the most indirect ways of referring so I'm going to start with pronouns then look at descriptions then kinship terms and then finally we'll look at names and name avoidance so de-toga has quite a simple system of independent pronouns relative distinctions are just person and then number, singular or plural and then it also has a set of pronominal prefixes which are slightly different in that there's no number distinction in the third person so independent pronouns are optional so it's a so-called pro-drop language so where they do occur seems to emphasise the third person for example in number seven and he was hiding inside we've got a third singular pronoun there but much more commonly there's no independent pronoun with person reference most of the time people are just going to use they're not going to have explicitly expressing the person they just rely on the pronominal prefixes so here's an example from my corpus a grandmother asked her grandson to give her a name which is the name of his mother so he uses a name in initial reference and then the subsequent reference you only have a pronominal prefix she's in that house so slightly less or slightly more direct strategy of person reference is to give a description of the person that you're referring to so you might use a word like elder or woman or child for example so in the extract at the beginning you might remember that Ginyngid said is the elder of this house at home so in referring to the head of the household he chose to use a sort of generic noun elder modified by of this house rather than using the elder's name and this use of word for elder is very common use it to refer to their husbands very frequently or if a neighbour comes to visit they'll say is the elder at home like you see in this example so we can explain this kind of use in terms of Levinson's circumspection principle so it's the set of possible references included in elder is a lot broader than if Ginyngid had used the elder's name for example so it's a more indirect circumspect way of referring to someone and it's very common another example of a generic noun would be the noun for person seed which is often used to refer to people so again it's achieving respect through indirectness so in this example this was actually from the recording that I showed you so the young man sitting by the camera said come on let's talk the person is recording which is very thoughtful of him so he could have referred to me as the white person or the woman or your guest but he just said the person and that's very common so again we're seeing circumspection seems to be underlying that kind of generic noun use so the nice thing about descriptions is that they allow you to be creative kinship terms names you can't be super creative but descriptions you can be and often descriptions are used as a way to be ironically indirect so this utterance comes from an example where there were two women talking and one of the women had expected the other woman to bring her some soap the previous week and she had failed to do this so the woman who was expecting the soap said I didn't meet the girl with the black mark under her eye and her address C the one who was supposed to bring the soap has quite a visible dark coloured birthmark under her eye so she's obviously referring to her address C but she does it indirectly rather than saying you or using her name and makes a pointed gybe at her address C by coming up with this creative way of referring to her and I'm sure we can all think of tons of examples in English too where we use this kind of indirect ironic indirectness so another common form of personal reference is to use a kinship term I'm not going to go through the entire kinship terminology but here's a straightforward example where someone was referred to just as his son so they'd already established reference to the father and they talk about his son only in this way with a kinship term and a possessive suffix so you refer to someone just by positioning them within the kinship system and there's lots of reasons that you might do this so in some cases it doesn't actually matter who the person is in this example some elders were talking about a man's funeral and they were just commenting that his son was far away, it didn't really matter who this person was, it was just his son and he should have been at the funeral another reason you might use kinship terms is you know, like in Arginia in the example you're just trying to identify someone or you might be practising circumspection again so one common way of referring to people in Dutoga and like many African languages is to use a technonym so mother or father or child's name so this is more circumspect in that you don't name the person directly you name them via a relationship to their child and kinship terms are often a good option in case of forgetting someone's name so there's quite a bit of psychological research on how we're terrible at remembering names there's something weird about names and here's an example from an elder so I'll just read the English he's trying to pinpoint someone that elder who grew old here who was the father of the wife of God, what was his name and finally he remembers so he'd used a couple of different strategies that elder who grew old, he came first then he tried to fix him in the kinship system and then finally remembered his name so moving on now to the most direct way of referring to someone I'm going to talk about names as person referring expressions so in the literature names are considered the most efficient form of person reference they fulfil both the principles of recognition and economy, they're short and they should establish reference pretty quickly like we saw was attempted in the guinean geed example so that's all well and good, but what about in a society where people have lots of different names which name do you use and this is true for Datoge so I'll just describe to you some of the different names first of all we've got birth names which is the name given to a child shortly after they're born and again as in many African languages it describes some circumstance of the child's birth so with our guinean geed example for example that comes from the now guinean geed wedding so that child was born during a wedding around the time of a wedding so that's the birth name and often people have more than one birth name if your grandfather names you something and your mother names you something else you might continue to have both of those names throughout your life second probably most important name after the birth name is what I call the domestic name it's literally called the children's name in Datoge but that's kind of confusing in English so it's the name which children can use to address adults including their own parents but it's also used among adults of the same compound and neighbours and relatives so that's why I call it a domestic name women receive this name when they get married and there seem to be a smaller set of possible names than with the birth name so the birth name you can really be called anything whereas domestic names there's quite a few that you hear regularly for example damungan it means guinea fawl so it's something that's seen to be beautiful sometimes women are named after some circumstance of the marriage so I like this one means she didn't hurry so she wasn't in a rush to arrive for example and often the names have a form that seems to be so that it's easy for a child to say so you get names like la la ye ye so women there's kind of an appointed time when they're given a domestic name men there's no formal occasion on which they get named it can happen at any time when the name is felt to be necessary so if a man gets married and his younger siblings no longer feel like calling him by his birth name they come up with a domestic name then there's the marital name which is only for women and this is given at the same time as the domestic name in Detoba literally it's the husband's name and this is the name that a husband can call his wife and a husband's brothers but no one else unless they're joking and then as I mentioned we have techninims as well so this is very common to refer to an adult you'll say mother of guinea fawl or father of guinea fawl so those are the main types of names and then there are others too so some people have christian names adolescents give each other names as well a mother-in-law will give a son-in-law a special name that lasts only one day so there are other names but these ones here in bold are the most important clearly there's a lot more going on than just recognition and economy in person reference otherwise everyone would only have one name so how do people choose which name to use when well I've already talked about this a little bit so as a child you're going to use a domestic name rather than a birth name only husbands and their brothers are going to use the marital name no one else and another major reason that you wouldn't use a birth name is because you are somebody's daughter-in-law or you're a junior female-in-law and for you then the birth names of your in-laws are completely taboo and I'll talk about this a little bit more now so like in many many many societies across the world both men and women practice some kind of avoidance towards their in-laws for women it's far more extensive than for men partly probably because women live with their husbands family so they practice physical avoidance avoidance of eye contact all this kind of thing not touching father-in-law's belongings an extensive kind of linguistic avoidance so to tell the women avoid three kinds of words so they avoid the names of their senior in-laws and as I said names are all meaningful and derive from ordinary words so they also avoid the words from which the names derive and they avoid near homophones of the names so I'll just give you an example let's say your father-in-law is called gyda ropt ropt means rain so was born while it was raining if that's the name of your father-in-law you're going to avoid the name regardless of the bearer of that name so if your brother happens to also be called gyda ropt you can no longer use that name you're going to avoid the noun for rain and word forms of that lexime and you're going to avoid for example the word roba deid sounds too similar to the name so you're going to avoid near homophones so this isn't just one or two names that women are avoiding it's quite an enormous set the exact set of people that you avoid varies from household to household but the maximal set described to me was three ascending generations of in-laws so your father-in-law and his brothers grandfather-in-law and his brothers great-grandfather-in-law and his brothers and remember this is a polygynes society so there are lots of brothers also mother-in-law and her sisters and then a couple of other kinship categories too so you're potentially avoiding dozens and dozens of names and all the words that you consider to sound similar so what do women do in the face of all these taboos well over time women have developed a special conventionalised avoidance vocabulary with alternative words for anything that they might need to avoid so for example if you can't say rain, ropt you can say gyda gyda and pretty much everyone will know that that's an avoidance word and means rain the origin of the word gyda gyda gyda is not known but often there's quite a transparent relationship between the avoidance term and its ordinary counterpart so for example if you can't say snake then you can say long animal if you avoid the word for water you can use this term which means something like coldness derives from the adjective cold usually there are multiple avoidance equivalents for a single word because this might be taboo for you too this might sound like the name of your mother or for example so as you can see concerns about how to refer to other people have a massive impact on women's speech even when they're not actually referring to a senior in law so I had a video for you which is not going to play technical issues this was an example where two women are talking this woman so they live in different villages this woman asks her whether she's had rain in her area and avoids the word for rain uses that form you just saw gyda gyda and this woman replies no we've not had rain now she uses the ordinary word for rain because it depends your avoidance patterns depend on the names of your in-laws so it's a very extensive name of avoidance where you also have near homophone avoidance is unusual but there are a couple of other documented cases elsewhere in Africa so the best known example is Launipa in Osan and Zulu we also find very similar phenomenon incredibly similar it's really striking in several highland east Coshitic languages of Ethiopia it's very similar again in the Acusa, Bantu language of Tanzania which is not in contact with the Tova and then outside of Africa it's also been documented in Mongolian although no longer no longer found there all of these societies are patrulunil, patrulocal most of them are also pastoralist but the historical relationship between them all is unknown at this point so how do women refer to in-laws whose names are taboo then well there's several different options so there are what are called avoidance names so the conventionalised avoidance vocabulary that I told you about you can just use that to switch for example roped in someone's name with good and then you get an avoidance equivalent of the name and that's okay you can then refer to your father in law with that name so that's one option and that's what you're also going to do in that example I gave you where your brother also happens to have the same name as your father in law then you'll refer to your brother with this avoidance version of the name another option is to use the domestic name so that's the name that's used by children so for example this is an attrance from my corpus a daughter in law refers to her father in law with his children's name jargid and that's completely fine so it's only the birth name that's taboo and you might also use kinship terms you can say my father in law or generic nouns you might use like the elder for example so if we think about the kinship terms and the gerineric nouns so saying something like my father in law we can use leavenson's circumspection principle to account for that but with avoidance names domestic names which are the more common way of referring to a taboo in law these are still names a domestic name is surely just as direct and specific as a birth name so this idea of using a more generic term doesn't really hold up in the case of name avoidance so we might think then well are certain names more circumspect or more indirect than other names if I call Hannah Dr Gibson I'm being more circumspect than if I say Hannah possibly could be think of a continuum to explain the domestic name is somehow a little bit more circumspect than a birth name but actually I don't think this really works for the toga the domestic name is quite personal it's quite affectionate it's the name that you use to refer to someone on a day to day basis at home so I think there's something some difference between a birth name and other kinds of names that we can't really capture with this idea of circumspection so I think we need to draw a distinction between circumspection and name tabooing so circumspection would be a pragmatically conditioned avoidance of name as a whole class of words where you're avoiding actually just naming as a strategy as opposed to name tabooing where you have a prescriptive avoidance of a particular kind of name in this case a birth name other names are fine so only the birth name is something special about the birth name so as I mentioned at the beginning I'm interested in looking at person reference to try and better understand name avoidance to understand the broader context of naming and referring so one way to think about this might be to ask if a community has major name tabooing practices like to Toga do speakers also practice circumspection with respect to names as they're kind of more general avoidance of names as a thing in addition to name tabooing and I started looking this in a very preliminary way and I'll this is all still a work in progress so I took that single recording that you saw in the beginning the clip from it's only 20 minutes, 1600 words and coded the person reference strategies in that recording and I only included third person and specific reference so often people talk about people in general I didn't include those, it was only when they were specifically pinpointing someone so here's some descriptive statistics about what I found so unsurprisingly the vast majority well actually a lesson half of the person referring expressions are phenomenal markings so that's not surprising and most of these probably occur in subsequent mention to a person so you've established that you're talking about gynion gyd and then maybe talk about it for a minute and every single reference after that is just going to rely on phenomenal marking on the verb but then we see that descriptions or generic nouns or MPs are the next most common strategy so almost a quarter of persons referring expressions are descriptions names are not used a great deal so of the 219 there were 35 names used as person referring expressions and kinship terms were used even less which might have just been the topic of this particular conversation obviously I would need to do this over a much larger sample but this does suggest that names might be being avoided in favour of descriptions that there might be this kind of broader pattern in the society so as I said I'm planning to do this over a much larger sample of my corpus and the other thing I want to do is break down this name category so which name is being used when we might find that actually of those most of them were domestic names not birth names and then we might have a nice pattern for more general avoidance of names ok tying up so I hope to have shown that person reference is a really rich topic for exploring language and social organisation especially so in de Togo recognition and economy these 2 principles that have been proposed we can see that they are at play in de Togo person reference but there's so much more that's going on and that we need to explain Levenson's principle of circumspection which was kind of an addition to these 2 initial principles is certainly useful and it helped to understand why people would say elder for example but as currently formulated it can't explain in-law name avoidance because people are still using names it's not a names or a problem it's a specific kind of name so there's something special about a birth name I have some ideas about what that is but I don't have a good handle on it so the birth name is called the big name in de Togo it's the name that accompanies you throughout your whole life from birth to death and after death so it's how people will refer to you once you're dead although people also use domestic names so I think birth names perhaps have they differ from other names and there's something more elemental about them and I think that name tabooing probably has more to do with the anthropological concept of taboo than with pragmatic principles of person reference per se so what I mean by that is in-law name avoidance isn't motivated at this point in time at least by kind of conscious pragmatic assessment of the context that you're in but rather by something deeper, something more emotional where birth names they're a taboo object that you don't touch it's not that names themselves are a problem but if you guys have any ideas about what's special about birth names I'd be very interested to hear and that's all thank you very much thank you very much others for having time for questions or comments I was kind of struck by this theory that equanimity play a role maybe in personal reference but I wonder whether it's useful to look at names under this umbrella because at least in my research area everybody gets the name of a dead person it's a very small set of names and hence people need to get multiple names to speak your reference because there are about 120 people so have you tried to separate those two so look at personal reference which is how people use names and the motivations for people to give names and different types of names so that's a really interesting example where you actually have this small set of names that would be a very good reason to have multiple names in Totoya that's not the case so these birth names really can I mean there are, there is overlap certainly there are some common common names but they really there's an unlimited set of names I would say so that explanation wouldn't necessarily work in this case so I guess that's kind of the conclusion I came to there was actually naming and personal reference we might need to treat differently but I haven't looked in huge detail yet at these different types of names good question so in the literature on other avoidance registers it's often reported that once women pass child bearing age then they can kind of use their avoidance patterns some de Togo women have told me that too when a woman has had a number of male sons then she's okay she doesn't need to be quite so respectful but in practice so other women have told me no you do it till you die and in my own observation very elderly women still practice avoidance and I think you've got up to the point where it's so embedded in your linguistic practice and your habit of switching back would be difficult Yvonne Trice who's written about the combata avoidance register has this nice example where women became Christian and they were discouraged from practicing avoidance and one woman found it really hard to actually use ordinary words again because she was so used to the avoidance words that just is a grab bag of other principles for example a taboo avoidance which you mentioned but it can be also I can imagine things like shared experience I call this person stinky because we went on a camping trip once and together and you know throughout he was smelly or something and people's names change you have a primary school name and a senior school name and a university name and you have cohorts of people who would know you by one name because of certain experiences I think in addition to the socio-centric and the ego-centric that is kinship based and socio-centric based clan and so on there's also experiential century but you can play around with those to get all sorts of different effects so one of the things I'm just thinking about where I work in Lombok technically me is very common but it really emphasises a 35 year old male but you haven't got a technical name so clearly there's something wrong with you so people will use that and it's kind of a big comment and so I think it's so conspection it's just a grab bag which is the outcome of a bunch of other things that are operating yeah I wouldn't call it a principle so for Levinson it's this idea of using a more generic class of word I think than a name so it can't really explain the variation in the use of different kinds of names but I think you're definitely right about this shared experience bringing forth names so there's lots of really nice examples in the PNG literature people call each other my cola nats for example because they ate a cola nats together and the other important thing he mentioned is these names will change potentially quite rapidly in nick names I think one thing about some of this literature is the end of the scale and actually there's obviously the intimacy end of the scale too where we're using names to create intimacy between people and Michael Silverstein uses the concept of what he calls a baptismal event which is it may be like somebody gets married and therefore as you were telling us the women changed their names but a whole range of different practices could be enshrined through naming and be baptismal events Do you know if there's any relationship between people and the supernatural so for example among Roma the name that the mother gets the child is unknown to evil spirits and there's also so the baptismal name or depending on the religion sort of a religious name is safe because being sanctioned by the spirit circle and then there's also this of having outside outsiders and insiders names so among travelers in this country the name that is known to outsiders is not known by insiders so it means that when the police come everyone knows who they're looking for so if there's anything going on like that So that's something I'm really interested in I remember reading a similar thing in Mongolia and so names are given to babies to protect them from evil spirits so they're named after ugly things right instead of pretty things because it protects them like an evil spirit would want to come and take an ugly thing I've sort of poked into that and inquired a bit Tatoga aren't usually named after dead so there's no I mean occasionally they'll be named if there was a really important funeral going on they might be named after that elder but it's not really a metaphysical spiritual connection between the two and I think there certainly are some relevant connections so if you're if you have several babies who die then you might name a very different strategy of name and you definitely wouldn't repeat the name of the child because you want to protect it from that but nothing quite as obvious as your example It's a wonderful combination with the taboo and the metaphysical Yeah absolutely so I'm often trying to look for a nice explanation like that about why these birth names are so special and sacred is it because no they're part of this person's spirit or something but how do you make an argument for that I mean it's certainly not something that Tatoga person would explain to me in those terms so it's a very interesting topic it's a question of how do you get at that you know You were seems to be mentioning there or making a face of something when you pointed out it's a patlinial society is that distinction matlinial society that you're comparing it with in some way or something So in terms of the avoidance that matters in the sense that you avoid more male roles than you do females but I wasn't drawing any particular I mean I think you don't find this kind of near homophone avoidance or I don't know probably name avoidance in in any matlinial society I don't know I don't have an explanation for that it's just an observation that these kinds of special avoidance registers are only found in societies where women live with their husbands family and patlinial descent system so if you have an explanation for that I mean the one that I did with my wife is a Tanzanian who is certainly in a matlinial system which I'm rather familiar with they always take their names on the matlinial side they have nothing to do with their names at all and they're quite they prefer to them by any name for the potential a proxy of any avoidance register really so I think some some anthropological literature has looked at if it's a matlinial system and you'll have son in your mother in your avoidance as you would expect whereas it's patlinial and you'll have daughter in your father in your avoidance but obviously there are exceptions the only thing that's very clear is that they have these birth names which are absolutely secret but no you don't have to avoid your mother in your or maybe no one of us tells you so I was just wondering you mentioned earlier about how sometimes names that aren't appropriate for a certain shall encounter a use for a sort of comic or a ironic effect I was just wondering how often do you see this happening is it quite restricted for certain kinds of relationships yeah I don't actually know how often it is quantitatively I would certainly say that it's only going to be when you're talking to your peers that you can make these kind of jokes there aren't any formalised joking relationships in Totova so often in societies where you have this kind of extreme father in or avoidance you have a joking relationship on the other side so your mother's brother that you can joke with that's not true in this case but yeah generally if you're speaking to a senior person you're well actually that's not quite true so grandparents you can joke with so someone of that age in relationship to you then perhaps you can mess about with names a little bit but any more formal encounter with elders you're unlikely to practice that kind of creativity my grandmother also would de-handle yeah exactly that would be bad yeah I have no examples where a woman actually utters the name of her father and that would be a very transgressive yeah exactly so in my phd I looked at I found that breaking the name taboo is really bad breaking the word taboo so the word that sounds similar actually isn't that bad but I was going to notice but yeah to say the name of your father it's still shocking to them and they're appalled if they would hear someone from a different ethnic group do that but good question that's how those informal relationships are forged partly through joking via person reference what happens if you do mistake is so if you say someone's name by mistake you are supposed to bite on your necklace to show that you did it unintentionally so in other societies you spit but the toad women bite on their necklaces and occasionally if I really needed to know the name of someone's father nor she would like put her necklace in her mouth and tell me the name through the necklace and that was okay I think if you were purposefully breaking this taboo be set home to your natal family but I don't think it happens I think women are really respectful of this taboo in the name and when they actually use words that sound similar in general I don't think people don't notice maybe when a woman first marries everyone's kind of ready to hear the mistakes unfortunately I've never been able to document a new wife joining her household and her speech patterns you probably wouldn't be very keen on that but people are probably more sensitive of that very initial stage so when you're talking about circumspection you're kind of talking about the difference between names as a category and then other words as being less specific but it seems to me that there's also something within names you spoke of the marriage names as being in some ways less specific because there's less of them and they're more and the same with the house names the domestic names and so I wonder if there could be something to that in people's choice of using a slightly more generic name for it taboo there's obviously a lot more going on there it's certainly true that these different types of names have different index associations of who uses them in what context and so a domestic name has particular connotations of I think probably informality but also being junior a little bit because it's used by children but you're right, that's an interesting point there are any given domestic names probably five women in the vicinity who have that name so it is less specific in that sense, yeah that's interesting, I'll think about that and may I ask how this knowledge about names is transmitted to women so when they grow up so are there special occasions when family members sit down with each other and it's just about teaching each other the names of the family members or because I was wondering whether there are cases when you don't know the name of certain family members yeah so in some of the other documented cases there is a formal occasion in which you're told every single name that you must avoid that's not the case, you might get some informal info from your mother-in-law especially if you say it to be worse that's wrong, don't say that but there's no time at which they go through the whole genealogy of the husband but yeah I have a really nice example during an interview I'm asking the senior wife of the household who they avoid and she's like oh we also avoid the father-in-law's mother's father and the junior wife's like what do we? well that's stupid, why do we do that but she did avoid that word as well because she just was copying the practice of the senior wife so actually she was avoiding something that she didn't even know whose name it related to she just knew that she should so you're absolutely right, often they won't actually know some of these far back relatives why they're avoiding them in terms of the avoidance vocabulary itself that's just learnt in the course of being at a toga so kids know this terminology children actually they spend most time with their mother or sometimes use avoidance words instead of ordinary words because that's what her mother uses that's the word they might acquire first and then they're told that's your mother's word not your word is it called something, is it called avoidance because for example here I think people practice although they might not sometimes realise they practice where to be but they might not know what that's called maybe academics know that like when you say I'm going to powder my nose that's avoidance but it's not called anything for the what you call people but do they have a although I think people are familiar with euphemism but to tell you they have I didn't actually mention this so there's a noun the practice of avoidance and then to refer to the language itself there's a related noun that refers to the avoidance of vocabulary so it's very much they're very much aware of this practice and they can reflect on it and they can say actually in the example I showed you with Ginyengid later on the woman says something like she says are you cooking something and she means are you brewing something it's the avoidance word and the guy outside has no idea what she's saying and the guy inside says she's using Ginyu actually so it's something they talk about quite openly have a metapragmatic label for whether they, I mean of course there's all kinds of other euphemism in the language whether they have a term for that probably not, so yeah Can I ask you about the avoidance we have the typical thing that you get in other avoidance situations is polysemy one to many replacements otherwise you're having to deal with tens of thousands of complex themes Is that true here? Yeah to some extent so not like Dixon's example but yeah so there might be one equivalent for names of trees things like that but not on the scale that you see in some of the Australian avoidance registers where you really have a reduced avoidance vocabulary it's pretty Some of them have one which is Yes absolutely, no it's not like that at all so I've so far got 650 words of avoidance so it's not on the scale of the ordinary vocabulary but it's still pretty large Can I ask a question Is there a one to one mapping between who you would use this avoidance register with and other strategies so like by contact, nothing in a room with, yeah There are other ways No because so you avoid this huge set of people that I showed you linguistically but the only person so your mother-in-law I think you ideally wouldn't touch her but it wouldn't be a big deal if you did and you can certainly sit with her and mother-in-law and daughter-in-law have a pretty relaxed relationship compared to the father-in-law so the kind of non-linguistic avoidance doesn't map on to the linguistic avoidance so the most extreme avoidance is for father-in-law he's really the prototypical person and then you would also physically avoid his brothers his immediate brothers but having said that I did find that actually people made more of an effort to linguistically avoid father-in-law than they did mother-in-law for example so you do see some kind of a different degrees of avoidance that reflect or so that non-linguistic avoidance Just because you had the photo and then daughter is not here it's about gesture I kind of does an extension of Hannah's question is there I mean we have conscious if not actually enacted avoidance of directly avoiding people in generally linguistic culture is there a similar thing happening? So I've been told that pointing is rude by deterver speakers and I certainly so that particular photo he was pointing and that was obviously fine in that particular situation but probably it wasn't like so yeah I think pointing is quite taboo So you can't point to somebody saying their name? Well that would be handy if you could maybe use a different part of your body right because there are gradations in pointing right like if you used a whole hand as opposed to a finger it's better but yeah I don't know not that I have spotted In the clip you showed I was a bit confused because is the woman not looking outside? No she's sitting in the next room which is not open to the outside so yeah that was quite quite important so she couldn't see the person and they also couldn't hear each other very well Yeah Is there a reason she stayed in the room or is it just that she didn't want to get up? So in some cases it would women want to sit separately those were her two quite close relatives so there was no reason for her to be in there really which I think she might have been cooking or something I'm curious if you said that there's words for this practice and I'm wondering if people talk about it and if anybody has rejected this practice and looked me in or if it's Yeah so there is some change so more educated to Toga and especially those who've converted to Christianity no longer practice avoidance they do still avoid the names of I think at least father in law that is still taboo but I think that's quite standard in other languages too As for I mean most of the women I talk to I get the impression they still really value it if they talk about other ethnic groups who don't do it that's they have a very negative view of that but I do wonder if it's decreasing in use so I noticed a lot of the families I work with I only avoided two generations rather than four or three generations and I don't know whether that's a sign of change or whether there was always that kind of variation I mean no doubt it will disappear no doubt Yeah absolutely so one of my best consultants works at a hospital and it's completely I mean yeah it's really problematic because a woman can't say where she lives because it's the name of her father in law's house so usually other people will speak for her but more and more they will just have to put the beans in their mouth and say these names absolutely yeah it doesn't work very well So would they be listed in the register which name would be chosen for them Is there any pattern to that So a woman I think it's difficult so men it's very straightforward it's your birth name, your father's name and your clan name with women it's I think it would probably be your in a kind of hospital setting your first name and then your it might be your husband's name if he has his own compound in which case there's no problem or it'll be your father in law's name because he's the owner of the compound so that's where the problem will start I can't say that that name yeah and and then other other contexts I'm not sure but yeah absolutely it will have implications Just tell me a little anecdote ahead of us Balani's student and in Bali people are named there are five birth order names and then you have a personal name and he and his wife turned up at immigration with a baby and he was by an arca his wife was a little Arctinian and the child was a kid to Tagara you know they didn't share a single name in common a very up there very up there interesting yeah maybe one last if there is a transformation who is more likely to admonish to be a woman or be a man I don't have any natural data on that but I think it would be mother in law she's kind of responsible for daughter in law so yeah I think we could probably continue this conversation for a lot longer there's a very rich talk but maybe we can continue the conversation in our traditional game of the Institute of Education and they encourage you all to join us and before we do thank you