Title: Two steps in the Evolution of Language: Merge and Grammaticalization
1Two steps in the Evolution of Language Merge and
Grammaticalization
- Elly van Gelderen
- Arizona State University
- ellyvangelderen_at_asu.edu
- ICHL 18, Montreal, 8 August 2007
2Language Evolution my aims
- Some background on what we know from genetics,
areal linguistics, etc. - Discuss the two steps in the development of the
Computational System (CS) - Argue that change is triggered by cognitive
processes - Explain
- the Macro-Cycle Synthetic Analytic
3As well as some Micro-Cycles
- Negative (neg)
- neg indefinite/adverb gt neg particle gt (neg
particle) - Definiteness
- demonstrative gt article gt class marker
- Agreement
- emphatic gt pronoun gt agreement
- Auxiliary
- V/A/P gt M gt T gt C
- Clausal
- pronoun gt complementizer
- PP/Adv gt Topic gt C
4- What we know
- 50,000-150,000art/tools
- how people/languages spread archeology and
language-gene connection - What can areal linguistics and reconstruction
tell us? - Nichols and WALS
- Greenberg
- What can (historical) syntax tell us?
5First what we know from other sources migrations
6MtDNA and Migrations
7Areal Linguistics and Early Language?
- Nichols, dependent marking none in Africa,
Australia, etc
8World Atlas of Language Structures
9Dryers map on Case
10VO and OV
11Reconstruction and Early Language
- What works general picture of migrations but not
the actual shape of the language - Greenberg/Ruhlen
- Campbell (1988)detrimental effect on the
field, misleads. - Therefore we need to look at syntax for insight
into evolutionary stages
12Adam Smith, 1767
13Some hypotheses on Proto-Language
- Like Smith, Newmeyer suggests that
proto-languages may have been inflectional (2000
385, n 4) - Bickerton 1990
- fossils of proto-lg (aphasia/pidgin) no
morphology no PS - Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch 2002
- FLB (CI-SM-Mechanisms for Recursion) FLN
(Recursion) - Chomsky 2005
- Merge "Great Leap Forward' in the evolution of
humans"
14What was missing in Proto-language? Merge
- (1)Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange
give me eat orange give me you. (Nim)
15And grammaticalization
16Three separate systems?
- symbolic
- thematic
- pragmatic(?)
-
- sounds/vocabulary
-
- merge and grammaticalization
17From Proto-LgTo Lg
- Merge
-
- Grammaticalization
- Principles of Merge Economy lead to
grammaticalization - Merge brought about the first step of linguistic
evolution but Cognitive Principles (Chomskys
third factor) were responsible for further
language evolution.
18Grammaticalization Specifier to HeadSubject
Cycle
- a TP b TP
- DP T DP T
- pron T VP pron-T VP
- Urdu/Hindi, Japanese Coll French
- c TP
- DP T
- pro agr-T VP
-
19Specifier to Head
- Specifier (je-il) to Head
- (1) Moi, jai pas vu ça.
- I, I havent seen that.
- (2) Et toi, tu aimes le rap?
- (3) on voit que lui il n'apprécie pas tellement
la politique - one sees that him he not-appreciates not so the
politics - and it can be seen that he doesnt appreciate
politics that way. (LTSN corpus, p. 15-466)
20Standard to Colloquial French
- (a) Modification, (b) coordination, (c) position,
(d) doubling, (e) loss of V-movement, (f) Code
switching - (1) et c'est moi qui ..
- (2) Je et tu ...
- (3) je lis et ecris
21Doubling, loss of V-movement and code switching
- (1) une omelette elle est comme ça Swiss Spoken
- an omelette she is like this
- (2) c'est que chacun il a sa manière de ...
Swiss Spoken - it is that everyone he has his way of
- (Fonseca-Greber 2000 335 338).
- (3) Alors pourquoi moi aussi je n'aurais pas le
droit d'enfumer les autres quelques minutes
dans un bar? - Then why me also I not-have not the right to
fill-with-smoke the others some minutes in a bar - (4) tu vas où Colloquial French
- 2S go where
- (5) nta tu vas travailler Arabic-French
- you you go work
- (from Bentahila and Davies 1983 313).
22The Subject Cycle
- (1) demonstrative gt third person pron gt clitic gt
agrmnt - (2) oblique gt emphatic gt first/second pron gt
clitic gt agrmnt - Basque verbal prefixes n-, g-, z- pronouns ni
I, gu we, and zu you. - Pama-Nyungan, inflectional markers are derived
from independent pronouns. - Iroquoian and Uto-Aztecan agreement markers
derive from Proto-Iroquoian pronouns - Cree verbal markers ni-, ki-, o-/ø pronouns
niya, kiya, wiya.
23English in transition
- (a) Modification, (b) coordination, (c) position,
- (d) doubling, (e) loss of V-movement, (f) Code
switching - Coordination (and Case)
- (1) Kitty and me were to spend the day.
- (2) while he and she went across the hall.
- Position
- (3) Shes very good, though I perhaps I shouldnt
say so. - (4) You maybe you've done it but have forgotten.
- (5) Me, I was flying economy, but the plane,
was guzzling gas
24Doubling and cliticization
- (1) Me, I've tucking had it with the small place.
- (2) Him, he ....
- (3) Her, she shouldnt do that (not attested
in the BNC) - (4) As for a dog, it should be happy.
- CSE-FAC
- uncliticized cliticized total
- I 2037 685 (25) 2722
- you 1176 162 (12.1) 1338
- he 128 19 (12.9) 147
25Loss of V-movement and Code switching
- (5) What I'm go'n do?
- What am I going to do'
- (6) How she's doing?
- How is she doing
- (7) He ging weg he went away Dutch-English CS
- (8) The neighbor ging weg
26Other instances of the Head Preference Principle
(HPP)
- Be a head, rather than a phrase/specifier
- Acquisition
- (1) those little things that you play with (Adam
410) - Lg Change
- (2) Relative pronoun that to complementizer
- Demonstrative to article
- Negative adverb to negation marker
- Adverb to aspect marker
- Adverb to complementizer (e.g. till)
27DP Cycle
- a. DP b. DP
- dem D' ? D' (HPP)
- D NP D NP
- art N
- ? ?
- c. DP
- D'
- D NP
- N
- renewal
28The Negative Cycle
- XP
- Spec X'
- na wiht X YP
- not gt nt
-
- through LM
29Second kind of GrammaticalizationLexical gt
Functional/Late Merge
30The preposition like as C
- Acquisition
- (1) like a cookie (Abe, 3.7)
- (2) no the monster crashed the planes down like
this like that (Abe, 3.7) - (3) Daddy do you teach like you do // like
how they do in your school? (Abe, 4.10) - Language change
- (4) People have never been down and out like they
are today - (5) So the other girl goes like Getting an
autograph is like, be brave and ask for it'. So I
got it. I just went up to him and he like. O.K
... - (6) 3on man is lyke out of his mynd (Dunbar
Poems, xix, 19). - Other cases of Late Merge
- Negative objects to negative markers
- modals v gt ASP gt T
- VP gt CP adverbials
- To P gt ASP gt M gt C
31After from P gt C
- (1)Fand þa ðær inn æþelinga gedriht swefan æfter
symble - found then there in noble company sleeping
after feast (Beowulf 118-9) - (2) æfter þissum gefeohte cuom micel sumorlida.
- after this fight, there came a large
summer-force' (Chronicle A, anno 871) - (3) Æfter þysan com Thomas to Cantwarebyri
- After this, Thomas came to Canterbury'.
- (Chronicle A, anno 1070)
32- (1) After that the king hadde brent the volum
- (Wyclyf 1382, taken over in Coverdale 1535 and
KJV 1611, from the OED). - (2) Aftir he hadde take þe hooli Goost (c1360
Wyclif De Dot. Eccl. 22). - (3) After thei han slayn them (1366
Mandeville174). - Four stages
- PP PP 900 (Chronicle A) present
- PP (that) 950 (Lindisfarne) - 1600 (OED 1587)
- P that 1220 (Lambeth) - 1600 (OED 1611)
- C 1360 (Wycliff) - present
33A too much work story
34From P gt C (feature-wise)
- PP CP
- P DP gt C TP
- after after
- u-phi 3S (u-phi)
- ACC uACC
- In English, no phi, but Germanic C-agreement.
35From V gt AUX
- VP TP
- V DP gt T VP
- wolde uCASE would V DP
- ACC phi uphi
- uphi
36Feature Economy uF as perfection
- Economy of Features
- Minimize the interpretable features in the
derivation - a. Spec gt Head gt zero
- b. semantic gt interpretable gt uninterpretable (p
hi on N) (uphi on T) - This explains the cycles and where non-lexical
categories came from.
37Aspect Cycle
- a. ASPP b. ASPP
- ASP ASP'
- ASP VP ? ASP VP
- up V AP up ...
- up
- ? ?
- c. ASPP
- ASP'
- ASP VP
- V AP
- up
38Perfective aspect
- Cycle
- (1) adverb gt affix gt 0
- One stage
- (2)a. Elizabeth's accession allowed him to
receive back his wife (BNC-GTB938) - b. a husband who changed his mind to receive his
wife back without ceremony (BNC-HTX2122). - - Pattern (a) has become more frequent in the
recent period (Davies 2005), even with definite
nominals - In the 100-million British National Corpus,
receive occurs nine times in constructions such
as (2a) and four times in constructions such as
(2b) (twice with a pronoun and twice with a DP) -
- - The use of pronominal objects, typical for the
first order, with these verbs has gone down too.
39Two other principles
- Null hypothesis of language acquisition
- A string is a word with lexical content
- (Faarlund 2007)
- Specifier Incorporation (SIP)
- When possible, be a specifier if you are a
phrase/adjunct - (van Gelderen 2007)
40Renewal at the end of the cycle
- Newmeyer 2006 notes that some grammaticalizations
from noun/verb to affix can take as little as
1000 years, and wonders how there can be anything
left to grammaticalize if this is the right
scenario. - Late Merge (Feature Economy), however, provides
an answer for what the source of the
replenishments are, namely lexical elements from
lower in the tree. There are also borrowings and
creative inventions through SIP.
41New specifiers
- (1) a laide de Dieu notre Seigneur, Qui vous
douit bonne vie et longue. - With the help of God, our Lord, who gives us
a good and long life' (Bekynton, from Rydén, p.
131). - (2) be the grace of God, who haue yow in kepyng
- by the grace of God, who keeps you' (Paston
Letters 410).
42Conclusions
- 1 Evolution as Grammaticalization
- After the introduction of Merge, the emergence
of syntax would have followed the path that
current grammaticalization follows one that
children use. Cognitive Economy Principles, from
which grammaticalization and language change
follow.
43 2 Thematic gt Discourse
- Chomsky (2002 113) sees the semantic component
as expressing thematic as well as discourse
information. If thematic structure was already
present in proto-language (Bickerton 1990), the
evolutionary change of Merge made them
linguistic. What was added through
grammaticalization is the morphology, the second
layer of semantic information.
443 Language is a Perfect Solution to Interface
Conditions
- the conflict between computational efficiency
and ease of communication is resolved to
satisfy the CI interface (2006 9). -
- That would mean an analytic stage is preferred,
but there is no evidence of that! - Therefore
454 Analytic ? Synthetic
- Cycle goes from (a) to (b) to (a)
- a) Movement links two positions and is thereby
economical (synthetic) uninterpretable/EPP - b) Avoid syncretism Iconicity is economical
(analytic) semantic and interpretable features
46Some References
- Bickerton, Derek 1990. Language and Species.
Chicago University of Chicago Press. - Carstairs-McCarthy, A., 1999. Origins of complex
language. OUP. - Chomsky, Noam 2002. On Nature and Language. CUP.
- Chomsky, Noam 2005. Three factors in Language
design. Linguistic Inquiry 36.1 1-22. - Chomsky, Noam 2006. Approaching UG from below.
ms. - Dryer, Matthew n.d. http//linguistics.buffalo.edu
/people/faculty/dryer. - Faarlund, Jan Terje 2007. to appear in EyÞórrson.
- Forster, Peter http//www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/genet
ics/mtDNAworld/one.html. - Gelderen, Elly van 2004. Grammaticalization as
Economy. Benjamins. - Gelderen, Elly van 2007. The Linguistics Cycle.
to appear in EyÞórrson. - Haspelmath, Martin et al. 2005. The World Atlas
of Language Structures - Hauser, Marc, Noam Chomsky, Tecumseh Fitch
2002. The Faculty of Language what is it, who
has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298
1569-79.
47- Kuczaj, S. 1976. -Ing, -s, -ed A study of the
acquisition of certain verb inflections.
University of Minnesota PhD. - Newmeyer, Frederick 2000. On the Reconstruction
of 'Proto-World' Word Order. In Chris Knight et
al (eds) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language,
372-388. CUP. - Newmeyer, Frederick 2006. What can
Grammaticalization tell us about the Origins of
Language?. Abstract, http//www.tech.plym.ac.uk/so
cce/evolang6/newmeyer.doc - Nichols, Johanna 1992. Linguistic diversity in
space and time. Univ of Chicago Press. - Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo Juan Uriagereka
2005. The Evolution of the Narrow Faculty of
Language. Lingue e Linguaggio, 1-52. - Smith, Adam. 1767. The theory of moral
sentiments. To which is added a dissertation on
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