Transcript Marcia Haag: Linguistics talk

Complexity in Language
Why don’t languages evolve toward
efficiency?
“As they evolve, things become more
efficient.”
• Efficient operations, tools, methods, etc.
should drive out those that are difficult and
costly.
• Language has been around long enough that it
should have shed arbitrary, encumbering,
opaque, redundant, and just plain weird
features and honed those that contribute to
precision and clarity.
What counts as `arbitrary’?
• The tale of the human children and the chimp
children
Most linguistic categories match
semantic notions
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a ‘cat’ is a cat
tense is concept of time
pronouns map to persons
agents and objects are agents and objects
et cetera
Languages choose and differ in which
categories will be required
• Some languages mark tense (actual time:
English) while others mark aspect (the way
time unfolds: Yoruba).
• Some languages build into words the relations
between agent and object (English) while
others mark them overtly (Salish).
• et cetera
Arbitrary categories are not grounded
in semantics
• Gender
• Verb classes
• Gender is the compulsion to place nouns into
classes. It is not necessary.
• Genders that are putatively based on some
semantic notion (e.g. natural sex) collapse into
arbitrary assignment fairly early.
• Gender nearly always involves recruiting other
categories to display evidence of ‘agreement’.
Spanish gender agreement
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mesa (fem)
la mesa amarilla
mano (fem)
la mano sucia
hombre (masc)
el hombre guapo
artista (masc)
el artista generoso
Verb classes
• Verb classes are the arbitrary divisions of
verbs into groups with different morphology,
sometimes startlingly so, that marks the same
linguistic category.
Some English verb classes
• The default past tense affix –ed is used with
the largest verb class
• Smaller classes often share phonological
features.
• swim-swam-swum and its classmates (‘sing’)
• bring-brought and its classmates (`think’)
• Note how these classes are conflated in nonstandard dialects: brang; thunk
• What is the past tense of ‘sneak’? (a fun group
exercise)
Cherokee is scary
• Cherokee has an impressive amount of
arbitrary complexity.
• Phonologically: tone, nasalization, vowel
length, stress, besides funky consonant
clusters.
• Morphologically: 10 person/number pronoun
distinctions with more than 30 outputs based
on subject-object relations and conjugation
class.
• 5 verb stem classes yielding 28 alternations
(depends on which linguist is counting)
• Position affixes reproduce 5 stem classes
• Change of pronoun type depending on verb class,
conjugation class, and type of tense marker.
(These are clearly independent semantically.)
• Operations are marked by using TOGETHER tone
+ stem class + conjugation class + type of affix +
position of affix.
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Position 1 = lexical root
+ Position 2
+Position 3 (optional)
+Position 4
Aspects:
Aspects:
Aspect:
imperfective
andative
habitual
perfective
duplicative
punctual
incipient
Fused aspect:
iterative
punctual past
Fused aspect:
completive
imperfective/presentvenitive
Other inflections:
• ambulative
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• Other inflections:
• infinitive/hortative Valences:
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applicative
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causative
experienced past (tense/evidential)
reported past (tense/evid)
imperative (mood)
future imperative (tns/mood)
future (tense)
Examples of aspect manipulation
• (1) uu- áakhuyáthan-iílóòsk
-vvʔi
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3SG-burp:PERF -ITER/IMPERF-EXPER.PST
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`He was burping repeatedly.’
• (2) uùnii-wóonis -éesti
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3P -talk:PERF-FUT
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‘They will have talked.’ (MontgomeryAnderson 2008)
• (3) ini- -wóoniisk -óʔi
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1DU-talk:IMPERF-HAB
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`You and I talk habitually.’ (Feeling &
Pulte 1975)
• But, Cherokee does not have gender!!
Evidence from pidgins and creoles
• A pidgin is a language that is created quickly, by
force, and by ADULTS.
• Speakers retain some grammatical and
phonological features of their native (substrate)
language, replacing vocabulary with the
dominant (superstrate) language.
• In modern times, pidgins arose due to the slave
trade, giving us a chance to examine what
happens to human language in a peculiar
laboratory.
• Pidgins are characterized by radical loss of
complexity: syntactic, phonological, and
especially morphological.
• A creole is a pidgin that has evolved, gaining
child speakers.
• While very many African languages have tone,
no creole does. Tone is an example of highly
complex phonology.
• Creole languages have fewer vowels than
either their substrate or superstrate
languages.
• Syntactically and morphologically, pronouns
are often reduced to a single form (me, him)
while tense and aspect are rendered with
adverbs:
• ‘Him go yesterday.’
Clawing back?
• Research question: are creoles gaining
complexity?
• Answer so far: not much, not yet.
• Children will perfectly acquire any language
that they are exposed to. Including pidgins.
• Hypothesis: Creoles don’t gain arbitrary
categories because they have achieved
efficiency.
The social dimension
• Adults can’t acquire languages efficiently, but
they are great inventors of minutiae.
• Adults, especially young ones, seek to imitate
those they perceive to be powerful, attractive,
and correct.
• Example: the pronunciation of ‘Iranian’ in the
US.
• That god-awful creaky voice that young
women use. (Alert – spreading to young men.)
• While phonology and vocabulary change at a
rapid rate, morphological and syntactic change is
much slower.
• However, an innovative (read ‘incorrect’) form
introduced by a person/group of status may gain
currency and exist in tandem with an older form.
• Very often, an older form becomes less used and
may eventually disappear, even becoming
`wrong.’
• English borrowed the Cornish (Celtic) use of an
auxiliary ‘do’, eventually making it mandatory in both
questions and negation, radically changing surface
word order.
• Old form: Knowest thou John?
• New form: Do you know John?
• Old form: I know him not.
• New form: I do not know him.
• Adults did this. It probably took several centuries. The
actual syntactic difference is smaller than it looks.
Some inferences
• We hypothesize that there is a limit to the
complexity of natural language that children
can acquire, but we haven’t found it yet.
• Deep arbitrary complexity is a sign of a very
old language.
• There’s no reason to get rid of complexity if
children are the ones who learn a language.
• Speakers, especially adults, will incrementally
change a language through serendipitous
means, sustained by social pressure.
• When groups gain large numbers of adults
who speak another language, there is
pressure to lose arbitrary complexity.
Predictions
• Creole languages will gain complexity, some of
it arbitrary, slowly.
• Some very old language families (Algonquian,
Iroquoian) will lose arbitrary complexity as
child speakers become fewer and innovation
disappears, while in-mixing of other groups
becomes common.
• Very old but isolated languages (Georgian) will
retain mind-boggling complexity.
New research question
• Efficiency is not especially relevant to human
language once it is acquired and is used by
persons who speak the same one.