Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on close analyses of conversational speech as well as written fiction and nonfiction, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination.
Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many linguistic phenomena, such as pronouns, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages, such as the historical present and the free indirect style. While the book focuses on English, there are also discussions of the North American Indian language Seneca and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people.
This work offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness that will interest linguists, psychologists, literary scholars, computer scientists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

The extent to which language is inseparable from thought has long been a major subject of debate across linguistics, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines. In this study, Wallace Chafe presents a thought-based theory of language that goes beyond traditional views that semantics, syntax, and sounds are sufficient to account for language design. Language begins with thoughts in the mind of a speaker and ends by affecting thoughts in the mind of a listener. This obvious observation is seldom incorporated in descriptions of language design for two major reasons. First, the role of thought is usually usurped by semantics. But semantic structures are imposed on thought by languages and differ from one language to another. Second, thought does not lend itself to familiar methods of linguistic analysis. Chafe suggests ways of describing thoughts, traces the path languages follow from thoughts to sounds, and explores ways in which thoughts are oriented in time, memory, imagination, reality, and emotions.

Hernando de Soto encountered the Caddos in the sixteenth century, and survivors of Sieur de La Salle's last voyage in the late seventeenth century gave the first full description of them. By 1903, when George A. Dorsey was investigating their customs and beliefs, the Caddos, numbering 530, were living on a reservation in Oklahoma. The Caddoan tribes, found along the Red River and its tributaries in present-day Louisiana and Arkansas, practiced agriculture long before they hunted buffalo. The tales collected for this book, first published in 1905, reflect the women's horticultural practices (supplemented by the men's hunting), village life distinguished by conical grass lodges, family and social relationships, connection to nature, and ceremonies. The tales vibrate with earthly and unearthly forces: Snake-Woman, who distributes seeds; Coyote, who regulates life after death; the Effeminate Man, who brings strife to the tribe; Coward, son of the Moon; the Man and the Dog who become Stars; the Old Woman who kept all the pecans; Splinter-Foot Boy and Medicine-Screech-Owl; water monsters; animal-people; and cannibals.

The Seneca language belongs to the Northern Iroquoian branch of the Iroquoian language family, where its closest relatives are Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora. Seneca holds special typological interest because of its high degree of polysynthesis and fusion. It is historically important because of its central role in the Longhouse religion and its place in the pioneering linguistic work of the 19th century missionary Asher Wright. This grammatical description, which includes four extended texts in several genres, is the culminatin of Chafe's long term study of the language over half a century.

Bilingual Edition in English and Caddo Language Tsa Chayah/How The Turtle Got Its Squares is a traditional Caddo Indian story that reaches back through countless generations into the Caddo past in what is now Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma. In those days much of the entertainment and education of Caddos took the form of stories and songs that were passed from generation to generation in the Caddo language. They explained the natural world, history, and moral lessons. In the late 1950s linguist Wallace Chafe met storyteller Sadie Bedoka Weller, recorded this story and transcribed it in an alphabet customized to the sounds of Caddo. In recent generations the Caddo language has fallen almost completely out of use; stories like Tsa Chayah have rested silently in archives and scholarly books. Now the Kiwat Hasinay Foundation has brought the story to life again, with original illustrations by Caddo artist Robin Michelle Montoya. The text is written in Chafes alphabet, and the actual voice of Sadie Bedoka can be heard on a CD that is available to accompany the book. Tsa Chayah, with its bilingual format and CD, helps children read and write English, read and write Caddo, understand and even speak a sample of spoken Caddo. Above all, it brings the wisdom and culture of the past once again into the present and future of the Caddo people. --Alice Anderton, Intertribal Wordpath Society Retold for the first time in print with Caddo language and English text and delightful illustrations, this charming book introduces a story told by generations of Caddo Indian Nation storytellers to capture the imaginations of their children. The story of How The Turtle Got Its Squares will fascinate andentertain new storytellers and their young listeners alike. --Cecile Elkins Carter, Caddo Historian and Storyteller, Author of Caddo Indians: Where We Come From