A Descriptive Technique for the Treatment of Meaning

0. The purpose of this paper' is to test the validity of the oft-repeated proposition that we can not handle meaning linguistically, by attempting to evolve an empirical procedure for the processing of semantic field data, which can then be evaluated in terms of the criteria of consistency, exhaustiveness, and simplicity.2 This procedure will be applied to a minimum semantic contrast in grammar-the difference in grammatical meaning correlated with the presence or the absence of a single paradigmatic morpheme. I shall call this correlation a GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY, and the contrasting morphemic units the GRAMMATICAL FORMS of this category. The language concerned is Kutenai,3 spoken by about 500 Indians in Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia. The grammatical category has by Boas4 been called OBVIATION, by false analogy with a grammatical category in Algonquian; the grammatical forms of this category will be called OBVIATIVE FORMS (or FORMS IN THE OBVIATIVE) if they contain the OBVIATIVE SUFFIX (to be described below), ABSOLUTE FORMS (or FORMS IN THE ABSOLUTE) if they do not. The choice of an exotic language has been deliberate, in order to eliminate as far as possible any 'intuitive feel' for meanings and to rely instead on a verifiable procedure. I have selected obviation to exemplify the general problem, partly because of its intrinsic interest, partly because it serves to illustrate rather conspicuously some of the operational difficulties. As will become clear below, obviation has extremely wide distribution within the language, both in terms of sequential possibilities and in terms of frequency of occurrence; its function (and meaning) can therefore be considered central to the structure. It has no equivalent, either distributionally or semantically, in any one Indo-European grammatical category. There is no immediately apparent correlation between obviation and any feature of external reality or of Kutenai nonlinguistic culture, and direct translations of obviative as opposed to absolute forms are extremely difficult to obtain.