Why dont 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 ID: 377162
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Slide1
Complexity in Language
Why don’t languages evolve toward efficiency?Slide2
“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.Slide3
What counts as `arbitrary’?
The tale of the human children and the chimp children Slide4
Most linguistic categories match semantic notions
a ‘cat’ is a cat
t
ense is concept of time
p
ronouns map to persons
a
gents and objects are agents and objects
e
t cetera Slide5
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).
e
t ceteraSlide6
Arbitrary categories are not grounded in semantics
Gender
Verb classesSlide7
Gender is the compulsion to place nouns into classes. It is not necessary.
Genders that are putatively based on some semantic notion (e.g.
n
atural sex) collapse into arbitrary assignment fairly early
.
Gender nearly always involves recruiting other categories to display evidence of ‘agreement’
. Slide8
Spanish gender agreement
mesa (fem)
l
a
mesa
amarill
a
m
ano
(fem)
l
a
mano
suci
a
h
ombre (
masc
)
e
l
hombre
guap
o
artista
(
masc
)
e
l
artista
generos
oSlide9
Verb classes
Verb classes are the arbitrary divisions of verbs into groups with different morphology, sometimes startlingly so, that marks the same linguistic category
.Slide10
Some English verb classes
The default past tense affix –
ed
is used with the largest verb class
Smaller classes often share phonological features.
s
wim-swam-swum and its classmates (‘sing’)
b
ring-brought and its classmates (`think’)
Note how these classes are conflated in non-standard dialects:
brang
;
thunkSlide11
What is the past tense of ‘sneak’? (a fun group exercise)Slide12
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.Slide13
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. Slide14
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/present
venitive
Other inflections
:
ambulative
experienced past (tense/evidential)
Other inflections:
reported
past (tense/
evid
)
infinitive/hortative
Valences
:
imperative
(mood)
applicative
future
imperative (
tns
/
mood
)
causative
future
(tense)Slide15
Examples of aspect manipulation
(1)
uu
-
áakhuyáthan-iílóòsk
-
vvʔi
3sg
-burp:
perf
-
iter
/
imperf
-exper.pst
`
He was burping repeatedly.’
(2)
uùnii-wóonis
-
éesti
3p
-
talk:
perf-fut
‘They will have talked.’ (Montgomery-Anderson 2008)Slide16
(3)
ini
- -
wóoniisk
-
óʔi
1du
-talk:
imperf-hab
`You and I talk habitually.’ (Feeling & Pulte 1975)
But,
Cherokee does not have gender!!Slide17
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.Slide18
Pidgins are characterized by radical loss of complexity: syntactic, phonological, and especially morphological.Slide19
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.Slide20
Syntactically and morphologically, pronouns are often reduced to a single form (me, him) while tense and aspect are rendered with adverbs:
‘Him go yesterday.’Slide21
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.Slide22
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.)Slide23
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.’Slide24
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.Slide25
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.Slide26
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.Slide27
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.Slide28
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.