Two steps in the Evolution of Language: Merge and Grammaticalization

Elly van GelderenArizona State University

ellyvangelderen@asu.edu

ICHL 18, Montreal, 8 August 2007

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Language 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

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As well as some Micro-CyclesNegative (neg):

neg indefinite/adverb > neg particle > (neg particle)

Definiteness

demonstrative > article > class marker

Agreement

emphatic > pronoun > agreement

Auxiliary

V/A/P > M > T > C

Clausal

pronoun > complementizer

PP/Adv > Topic > C

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• 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?

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First what we know from other sources: migrations

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MtDNA and Migrations

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Areal Linguistics and Early Language?

Nichols, dependent marking: none in Africa, Australia, etc

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World Atlas of Language Structures

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Dryer’s map on Case

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VO and OV

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Reconstruction 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

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Adam Smith, 1767

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Some hypotheses on Proto-Language• Like Smith, Newmeyer suggests that proto-languages may

have been inflectional (2000: 385, n 4)

• Bickerton 1990fossils of proto-lg (aphasia/pidgin): no morphology; no PS

• Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch 2002FLB (CI-SM-Mechanisms for Recursion) – FLN (Recursion)

• Chomsky 2005Merge "`Great Leap Forward' in the evolution of humans"

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What was missing in Proto-language? Merge:

(1)Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. (=Nim)

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And grammaticalization:

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Three separate systems?

symbolic

thematic

pragmatic(?)

+

sounds/vocabulary

+

merge and grammaticalization

= SEM

= PHON

= NS

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From Proto-LgTo Lg:• Merge

• GrammaticalizationPrinciples of Merge Economy lead to grammaticalization:

Merge brought about the first step of linguistic evolution but Cognitive Principles (Chomsky’s `third factor’) were responsible for further language evolution.

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Grammaticalization =Specifier to Head

Subject Cyclea TP b TPDP T’ DP T’pron T VP pron-T VP

Urdu/Hindi, Japanese Coll French

c TP[DP] T’pro agr-T VP

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Specifier to Head

Specifier (je-il) to Head:

(1) Moi, j’ai pas vu ça.

’I, I haven’t 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 doesn’t appreciate politics that way’. (LTSN corpus, p. 15-466)

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Standard 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

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Doubling, 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 French2S go where

(5) nta tu vas travailler Arabic-Frenchyou you go work(from Bentahila and Davies 1983: 313).

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The Subject Cycle

(1) demonstrative > third person pron > clitic > agrmnt(2) oblique > emphatic > first/second pron > clitic > 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.

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English: 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) She’s very good, though I perhaps I shouldn’t say

so.(4) You maybe you've done it but have forgotten.(5) Me, I was flying economy, but the plane, … was

guzzling gas

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Doubling and cliticization(1) Me, I've tucking had it with the small place.(2) %Him, he ....(3) %Her, she shouldn’t 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%) 2722you 1176 162 (=12.1%) 1338he 128 19 (=12.9%) 147

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Loss 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

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Other 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 4:10)Lg Change:(2) Relative pronoun that to complementizer

Demonstrative to articleNegative adverb to negation marker Adverb to aspect markerAdverb to complementizer (e.g. till)

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DP Cycle

a. DP b. DPdem D' D' (=HPP)

D NP D NPart N

c. DP

D'D NP^ N

renewal

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The Negative Cycle

XP

Spec X'

na wiht X YP

not > n’t …

through LM

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Second kind of Grammaticalization:Lexical > Functional/Late Merge

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The 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 MergeNegative objects to negative markersmodals: v > ASP > TVP > CP adverbialsTo: P > ASP > M > C

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After from P > C

(1)Fand þa ðær inn æþelinga gedriht swefan [æfter symblefound 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)

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(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) – presentPP (that) 950 (Lindisfarne) - 1600 (OED 1587)P that 1220 (Lambeth) - 1600 (OED 1611)C 1360 (Wycliff) - present

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A `too much work’ story:

CP

C’

C …

PP

after DP

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From P > C (feature-wise)

PP CP

P DP > CTP

after after[u-phi] [3S] (u-phi)

[ACC] [uACC]

In English, no phi, but Germanic C-agreement.

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From V > AUX

VP TP

V DP > T VP

wolde [uCASE] would V DP[ACC] [phi] [uphi]

[uphi]

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Feature Economy: uF as perfection

Economy of FeaturesMinimize the interpretable features in the

derivation

a.Spec > Head > zerob.semantic > interpretable > uninterpretable

(phi on N) (uphi on T)

This explains the cycles and where non-lexical categories came from.

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Aspect Cycle

a. ASPP b. ASPPASP‘ ASP'

ASP VP ASPVP

up V AP up ...up

c. ASPP

ASP'ASP VP

V APup

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Perfective aspectCycle:(1)adverb > affix > 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.

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Two other principles

Null hypothesis of language acquisitionA 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)

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Renewal 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.

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New 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).

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Conclusions

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.

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2 Thematic > 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.

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3 “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:

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4 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

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Some 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/genetics/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.

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• 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/socce/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 the origin of languages. London [3rd ed].

• Tauli, Valter 1958. The Structural Tendencies of Languages. Helsinki.