Meaning in Warlpiri
In English, then, the one verb ‘mean’ is used to describe reference, linguistic meaning, intention, and general significance. Given the frequency with which, in English, we use this verb to talk about the relations between language, intention and the world, it may be surprising to discover that there are languages which do not make use of any similar notion in order to talk about situations like those in (5)–(6) above. One such language is Warlpiri, a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in central Australia. In a sense, Warlpiri has no equivalent for the verb mean, and the links between reference, linguistic equivalence, intention, and general significance are quite differently constituted.
In Warlpiri, the most common way of asking about the ‘meaning’ of a word does not involve any verb. For example, to ask about the meaning of the word karnta (‘woman’), one would simply say (12):
This could be translated as either ‘what does karnta mean?’ or as ‘what is a karnta?’. And when the meaning of a word is explained or defined, once again no separate verb meaning ‘mean’ is involved. In the following example, for instance, the speaker is explaining the meaning of the word ngalyarra:
The absence of the specific verb ‘mean’ is characteristic of a wider set of contexts in Warlpiri; there is also very often no separate verb that would be the equivalent of ‘is’ in English, as the following examples show:
The result of this is that Warlpiri makes less of a distinction than English between what a word means, and what its referent actually is. To say what a word means is simply to describe the object or situation it refers to. Language world relations are described in the same way as world–world ones.
Warlpiri does, however, have a way of explicitly mentioning the language user, as can be seen in the following example:
But the verb used here, ngarri-rni, which simply means ‘call’, does not make any reference to the speaker’s intentions, an important component of the notion of ‘meaning’ in English. The literal meaning of (16) is some thing like ‘we call far things mirni, whereas we call close things mirnimpa.’ This is simply a fact about language use: ngarrirni ‘call’ makes no reference to any intention of the speaker, and the verb manngi-nyanyi ‘think, intend’, is not typically used to refer to the meaning of words.
