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World View-1, though largely independent of language by Hale’s reckoning, is not distinct from language. Its relation to language is not based on the grammar but on meaning. World View-1 is elaborated in the lexicon, for example, in the now-mythic, yea cultic, status of the supposed dozens (or scores or even hundreds!) of “Inuit words for snow” (see Martin 1986 for a far more realistic and investigative view of this arctic notion), where a culture’s ways and concerns are coded in the words used to speak of issues significant to the members of a specific culture. The meanings are “out there” in the eyes and minds of beholders, even when the language itself starts to slip away and gets replaced by a majority “monster” language like English or Spanish. We might consider this phenomenon similarly to that of a deaf child growing up in a hearing society. Although she doesn’t have the benefit of the assimilative power of spoken language, this does not mean that she is not an active and comprehending member of the society as she assimilates the culture in ways beyond spoken language itself. So language lays down a template of meaning in the world, and World View-1 picks up and understands much of the template, even without fluency in the language. Navajo youth honor their grandparents in cultural ritual and respect even without Navajo fluency. Of course, if form follows function, even these cultural rituals may be lost as young people shift their language usage toward English where the new language doesn’t support time-honored traditions.

      Still, language is complex because the world is complex. A language must have the resources (grammatical, phonological, and semantic) to express all that is culturally significant to its speakers. But even when speakers begin to shift their language use to a second language (L2), the real-life complexity of their first-language (L1) world is still out there for them to participate in and to describe (Hale’s World View-1), albeit now less convincingly, and probably less ably, in an L2. I say “less ably” on the assumption that the language that best describes a series of integrated cultural phenomena (like the respect shown to Navajo elders as mentioned above) would necessarily be the native language of the people to whom these phenomena are personal, meaningful, and pervasive—like snow and related categories to the Inuit.

      On the other hand, Hale’s World View-2 is necessarily and automatically shared by all native speakers as a by-product of learning to speak natively one’s heart language. This is very different from World View-1, which is only loosely tied to language, and it means that World View-2 is shared communally because the group’s native language is shared communally. World View-2 has an intimate relationship to the grammar far beyond the mere accumulation of entries into a cultural dictionary. Hale’s notion of World View-2 is as that part of culture that we absorb in the learning of the grammatical distinctions and requirements made in our native languages, like Boroditsky’s German and Spanish friends as they learned about bridges as either grammatically masculine or feminine. A bridge is a bridge, but culture always rubs off.

      World View-2 deals not with the simple naming of cultural phenomena (not that this is necessarily all that simple), nor with the content of history or ritual, but rather in the way the grammar privileges certain recurrent themes that are instantiated in various grammatical structures or on different grammatical levels, say the morphology and syntax.6 Hale claims that World View-2 is necessarily shared by all L1 C1 (native language and native culture) members of the society since these broad themes are acquired in the very process of learning one’s first language. It is clearly not autonomous of the grammar but rather is co-referential with it in that the internalizing of these grammatical categories is how World View-2 is acquired.

      Anna Wierzbicka shows to some degree how this works out in English. She concedes that clearly, words carry cultural meaning, but, she says, “certain meanings are so important to communities of speakers that they become not just lexicalized (linked with individual words, WMC) but grammaticalized, that is, embodied in the language’s deep structural patterns” (2002:162).

      She talks about the legacy of English in the world and the parallel practice of democracy in many English-speaking countries, particularly in the United States. She says that as industry developed in the US, the need to get people to do things and follow orders became increasingly important. In the meantime, the growth of democracy taught citizens that just as their individual votes were worth as much as the individual votes of the wealthy, so their dignity and equality are commensurate with that of others. So at the same time that grammatical imperatives would seem the way to communicate orders, Wierzbicka suggests that other strategies needed to be adapted that reflect the day-to-day ideology of democracy. “The cultural emphasis on personal autonomy, characteristic of the modern Anglo society…is no doubt closely related to the expansion of causative constructions in modern English” (2002:166).

      She says that, compared to other languages, English is loaded with watered-down imperative constructions. Instead of just telling someone to do something, which, on occasion, we do in fact do, Wierzbicka says that “the growing avoidance of the straight imperative, is an unparalleled phenomenon in modern American English” (2002:167). She cites constructions like would you do something, could you do something, that someone should do something, to have someone do something, to persuade them do it, to get someone to do it, along with a number of “let” constructions: “Let’s think of a better solution,” “Let’s not do that,” etc. Additionally, there are all kinds of indirect strategies such as asking a question (“Can you pass the guacamole?”) rather than simply and blatantly demanding that the guacamole be passed—or the use of just the bare noun in “Guacamole, please,” where the presence of “please” shows us that the use of the noun is really and truly an imperative, although it doesn’t carry the same social heaviness of a straight-up, demanding imperative. This, latter “bare noun” strategy parallels the situation where a friend comes to the door and buzzes you. You answer, “Yes?” “It’s John,” he says. Here the imperative is simply a name, and you interpret the pragmatics of the situation to let John in. “It’s John” operates as a veiled imperative. The so-called whimperatives (a term derived from wh-imperative—not from “wimpy” imperatives)—are imperatives that masquerade as questions (questions are often called wh-structures in linguistics since so many question words (in English) begin with wh-: when why, who, where, etc.). These whimperatives are also called stealth imperatives by Steven Pinker (2007), which are structures with imperative force that don’t “look like” imperatives. Some examples of whimperative are: “Why don’t we do it like this?” “If you would be so kind,” “So, when do you plan to finish your homework?”

      To these constructions I add a few additional ones. Recently I had a plumber and an HVAC technician (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) come to our home to give us some advice. The plumber said, “A fellow could cut this off here and ‘tee’ into the main line over there.” The other said, “You might could consider not doing anything until fall.” These are clearly muted imperatives, on par with one could… and one might…, which are perhaps used more extensively. In any event, there are a lot of options in English for telling people what to do, without really telling them. It’s the linguistic analog of the iron fist in the velvet glove.

      Wierzbicka goes to all this trouble in order to show some kind of relationship between culture and grammar, not necessarily causation, which is very hard to prove (although, like Boroditsky, she makes a strong case). But she does show at the very least a clear pattern both in the grammatical data and the cultural, observations. Not only are there lots of grammatical options for indirect imperatives in English, but the number of constructions seems to be growing, as I reported regarding my own observations from my very own basement in Ohio. Wierzbicka claims that not only are there many more constructions of this sort in English when compared to other languages across the board (not just European languages), but that their usage in English is very high as well. She points out that such grammatical options (and their actual use in day-to-day discourse) tell us something about the culture of people that use these grammatical strategies, in this case, the importance of respecting others’ esteem by not being obviously and blatantly demanding.

      Saying that the egalitarianism of US culture is behind the use of these constructions may seem like common sense, but such a pronouncement is fraught with peril. Perhaps it is the other way around, that language precedes culture, and we have grown egalitarian because of the abundance of expressions we have to express such a notion. The use

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