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What Drove the Evolution of Language?
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
Kind of sort of yes.
When people migrate, a proto-language or ancestor language will diverge first into mutually intelligible dialects. Then as time passes and these groups of people have little to no contact with each other, the dialects become mutually unintelligible. Because language natrually changes. Eventually these mutually unintelligible dialects become different languages.
Latin as spoken by the common Roman people became Spanish on the Iberian peninsula; Spanish and Portuguese were also once dialects of the same language; Italian, French, Romanian, etc. are all modern mutually unintelligible dialects of Vulgar (common) Latin that are now classified as different languages.
When people migrate, a proto-language or ancestor language will diverge first into mutually intelligible dialects. Then as time passes and these groups of people have little to no contact with each other, the dialects become mutually unintelligible. Because language natrually changes. Eventually these mutually unintelligible dialects become different languages.
Latin as spoken by the common Roman people became Spanish on the Iberian peninsula; Spanish and Portuguese were also once dialects of the same language; Italian, French, Romanian, etc. are all modern mutually unintelligible dialects of Vulgar (common) Latin that are now classified as different languages.
I think Copernicus was referring to human language evolving at all, not different languages. That is, it's one think to look at the development within language families and note how they change, but the question he was addressing was the origins of human language itself.
shawn001
Well-Known Member
Timeline: Evolution of Human Language Research
For centuries, scholars and thinkers have tried to unravel the nature of human language. Our understanding of language has grown immensely, especially in the past 50 years. But there are still huge gaps in our knowledge. Here, a timeline of how experts from fields as diverse as anthropology, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics and artificial intelligence have shaped our thinking about language.
Timeline: Evolution of Human Language Research : NPR
For centuries, scholars and thinkers have tried to unravel the nature of human language. Our understanding of language has grown immensely, especially in the past 50 years. But there are still huge gaps in our knowledge. Here, a timeline of how experts from fields as diverse as anthropology, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics and artificial intelligence have shaped our thinking about language.
Timeline: Evolution of Human Language Research : NPR
I'm not disagreeing with your discussion of the effects of movement of peoples on languages, but doesn't your description miss a lot of the "picture" when it comes to language change? For example, what about the influence different groups of people speaking different languages interacting? Old English was much more similar to German, and English is still classified as "Germanic," but the Norman conquest began a process which, about a century or so later, ended up initiating a massive influx of French into English, and as Middle English evolved it became increasingly dissimilar to other Germanic languages.
Then there the issue of languages changing without movement. Semantic bleaching, grammaticalization, etc. don't require a shift in physical location. Consider the French and English "immediate future, "I am going to do X/Je vais X" or the loss of "shall" in English to indicate the future, or the evolution of both will and shall from verbs of volition and obligation into "bleached" markers of the future.
Some interesting notes about that timeline. First, Marc Hauser was the lead author of the 2002 paper at the end of the timeline. He was dismissed for fraudulent research and the paper has been retracted.
Second, there is a whole movement within cognitive science (including linguists) towards what is called "embodied cognition." One theory shared by most of those who support this view (and some who don't) is a rejection of the "domain-specific" model of classical cognitive science. For linguistics, this means a rejection of the notion that grammar is "innate" in the way Chomsky and others (including Pinker, as mentioned in the timeline) describe.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Apophenia, call systems are not "language" in the sense that English is a language. Humans have a "call system", just like other primates. Such systems consist of vocalizations that we describe as "screaming", "laughing", "cooing", "crying", etc. I believe that all birds have call systems, just as primates do. If you play a recording of a scream or a crying baby to another human, regardless of cultural background, that human will understand what the "calls" mean. Read the link to "call system" that I provided in the post prior to yours.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
I was trained as a generativist by some of Chomsky's students, among others, and I am thoroughly familiar with the field. In fact, I consider myself a "cognitive linguist", although that label encompasses a very broad community. I do not consider myself a "generativist" any longer, but that is another label that can apply to a varied community of scholars. (I reject Chomsky's competence/performance dichotomy.) I am also thoroughly familiar with linguistic typology and universals. No languages lack the noun/verb distinction. All such claims that I have encountered simply do not stand up to scrutiny, and I have looked at a great many languages. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs--the "content morphemes" of language--are very real and very universal. Usually, linguists who claim to discover exceptions are those who study a little-known language and come up with flawed analyses. A paradigm case of this was Whorf's analysis of Hopi. We have looked at thousands of languages in the past couple of centuries, and it is a little hard to believe that there is one or two out there that are truly exceptional in terms of their linguistic parameters.
Ergative languages have subjects. They are languages in which there is object-verb agreement in transitive sentences rather than subject-verb agreement of the kind that English has. There are lots of split-ergative languages. For example, Hindi/Urdu is one of those. Ergative sentences are structurally similar to passive sentences in so-called "accusative languages", but they are still "active sentences" with the subject marked as an oblique case.
I don't buy Chomsky's concept of language universals. There are other ways to explain linguistic universals. Nobody disputes that language is an innate faculty in humans. The question is always which universal features of language are attributable to inheritance and which to environment. I think generativists are barking up the wrong tree structure when they try to separate linguistic production from intuitions of grammaticality. They don't have a good explanation for the relationship between competence and performance.
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Excellent! Then not only can I be more technical, I'm dealing with someone who knows more and with more experience. If I'm wrong or off, I'd be grateful for corrections and (if possible) a source to go to.
I agree. It's an umbrella term that I wouldn't say is clearly demarcated. Also, you bring up an important point when you stated "I consider myself a 'cognitive linguist.'" One of Chomsky's big contributions was to "ground" language in the brain as opposed to other approaches to language, and although some linguists who might be called "generative" were concerned only with formalism, I would bet that most linguists whose approach might fall under that category might call themselves "cognitive linguists" because they, like Chomsky, are most certainly interested in how language is processed in the brain. However, when I use the label "cognitive linguist" I'm referring to the movement which grew out of the work of linguists lke Talmy, Lakoff, and Langacker. Specifically, (as Dirk Geeraerts put it, I believe, in the first issue of the journal Cognitive Linguistics) I am referring to the "theoretical framework" shared by a number of linguists and cognitive scientists who have in common certain views: langauge is domain-general, lexicon and grammar exist along a continuum, a construction grammar approach, the importance of construal, metaphor, prototypes and radial categories, schematicity, etc. Of course, not all views are shared by all who would still say they are cognitive linguistics in the sense I'm using the term (Hudson, I think, would fall under the category despite the difference between his "word grammar" and construction grammars). But the point is that by "cognitive linguistics" I meant a specific approach, rather than linguists who are interested in language from a cognitive perspective.
The only languages I'm familiar with (or rather, I'm familiar with linguists who argue they lack this distinction) are Salish and Makah.
From what I understand from reading certain authors, such as Comrie, Dixon, Croft, Dryer, Anderson, and Langacker, the issue is partly a matter of whether or not the methods used to distinguish the categories end up failing in certain cases. Until recently, all linguistis used "behavior" in order to determine a lexemes category, but invariably issues with this or that syntactic test would fail. Langacker and others who adopt this position in Cognitive Grammar argue that verbs and nouns (among other lexical categories) should be defined semantically. Croft's Radical Construction Grammar denies the existence of any universal lexical categories (replaced by a universal semantic/typological prototype), and maintains that no language contains the classical categories noun, verb, and adjective.
I know what ergative languages are. But how does one define "subject?" As I understand it, the problem of ergative languages was more one of defining subject and object when those terms lost the meaning they had had for centuries.
Right. But linguistis following Klimov argue that "split-ergative" languages aren't ergative at all. They are active/stative languages and lack transitivity as a feature.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
I started out as a generative semanticist with strong exposure to Case Grammar (since Fillmore was my undergrad advisor and something of a mentor). My dissertation was on the lexical semantics of instrumental causatives.
I would nitpick your use of the term "brain" here. We can agree that Chomsky's approach to language is fundamentally psychological, as opposed to social. That turned out to be both a strength and a weakness in his constantly-shifting theory language. He has always tended to be somewhat dismissive of sociolinguistics, which is what I would refer to as his biggest weakness. Also, his theory of "universals" has been misguided in that it has relied too heavily on the performance/competence dichotomy.
Yes, we are referring to the same "cognitive linguistic" school, and it is still very eclectic, just as generative semantics was. I have an autographed copy of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. I told George that it "read like a ripe banana" at the time it came out. He got a good chuckle out of that.
Do you know Jim Hoard? I'm currently living in the Seattle area.
You are mixing some very different approaches. Croft is an interesting linguist, but I wouldn't say his approach is popular among linguists (not that that should matter). His main influence was Greenberg, who essentially founded linguistic typology independently of the generative school. Generativists tended to mean something very different when they spoke of "universals". I am not much impressed by Croft's ideas on lexical categories, but I do agree that syntax is fundamentally linked to semantics, a view that Chomsky has always resisted. One of my favorite linguists (and friends) was Jim McCawley. Langacker is someone I have always had profound respect for, and Len Talmy is a friend. He is just brilliant.
Not all cognitive grammarians reject the traditional lexical categories of noun/verb/adjective/adverb, but there are hierarchies of overlap in terms of syntactic behavior. It is just that the boundaries are relatively easy to spot when a word crosses over from one type of usage to another.
I really think that ergativity has more to do with how subjects interact with verbs, usually at a morphological level. There are other syntactic properties associated with subjects that seem to operate normally even in ergative languages--e.g. in the interpretation of reflexives, the structure of embedded sentences, the assignment of case/thematic roles, etc. Look, you get some very strange things going on in the evolution of languages. The differences between ergative and accusative languages are more cosmetic than fundamental, in my opinion.
I didn't say that split-ergative languages were ergative. They seem to be stuck between the two types of verb-NP interactions, and I see them as evidence that the two language types aren't all that different.
Fillmore was your advisor? I am extremely envious. Not only did a lot of work in Cognitive Linguistics began with generative semanticists (Fillmore being one), but his case grammar combined with his analysis of idioms was one foundation for construction grammars.
I would agree. I would add (or perhaps specificy) that both the dismissal of sociolinguistics (and the use of tools like corpora for linguistic research) combined with his focus on "universals" prevented a great many linguists from focusing on the effect of usage on grammar, which has become (I think) increasingly an object of study (e.g. Bybee's fairly recent Language, Usage, and Cognition).
And you've meant George Lakoff. Meanwhile almost everyone I work with (Alfonso Caramazza is the head of my lab) tends to reject anything to do with "embodied cognition" and while the lab does some work with language, it's mostly semantic representation and distinction between parts of speech in the brain. Just about every cognitive science or linguistics department in MA (or at least in and around Boston) is headed by someone who either explicitly rejects work in cognitive linguistics or largely ignores it.
I don't. But I'm realizing more and more that I need to move.
Croft is himself a mix of approaches. I haven't read much by Greenberg (and what I have read was simply because it was referenced in one of Croft's work), but I have read a pretty diverse range of typological research (from work like Greenberg and Comrie to typological analyses of proto-indo-european by Helena Kurzová and Brigitte Bauer). Croft seems heavily influenced by Langacker as well, and at least as early as his 1991 book Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations he was trying to mix/meld typology with cognitive linguistics, and Radical Construction Grammar was the eventual result.
Although what seems to have changed, especially with the advent of minimalism (which it seems like a lot of linguists who had formerly supported Chomsky objected to).
I am not familiar with Jim McCawley's work. Anything you'd care to recommend? Talmy I need to read more of. I've only read a paper or two by him, yet he is referenced everywhere and I know he was (and is) hugely influential in the development of cognitive linguistics.
Is there a linguist (or some publications) which you'd say best captured your view on lexical categorization?
That is what I'm interested in. Under one analysis (e.g. Dixon), they are exactly as you describe. Under another, they aren't. However, most of the literature I've read on active lanuages concerns reconstructing proto-(or Pre-)indo-european. And the only language I've studied which had any relationship to this type (because of its use of animacy) is Navajo.
Yes, languages are influenced by languages of the area speakers move into. I was giving a simplistic description of a language diverging into dialects then further into a different language.
French is Latin spoken on a Celtic substrate; Spanish is Latin spoken on an Iberian substrate; English is indeed Germanic, but after the Norman Conquest, many Latin words came into English via Norman French.
Then you have the issue of loan words: coffee in different languages is not cognate (having a common ancestor), it is a loanword. Loanwoards can become so entrenched in a language their origins are often unknown.
Languages tend to become more simplified over time. English has lost almost all its cases; the thou/you difference has collapsed into 'you'; who/whom is collapsing into 'who'; English has only a past and non-past tense. All other "tenses" and "moods" are periphrastic (I will go) and modals (I would go), whereas in Italian, and many othr languages, there are differentiated tenses and moods: Andró (I will go); andrei (I would go); Voglio che tu vada, lit. I want that you go (subjunctive) = I want you to go. Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek and many others are still highly inflected. Whereas English uses prepositions, Sanskrit, for example changes the stem ending (example Rām- ):
Nominative rā́maḥ = referring to Rāma
Accusative rā́mam = I worship Rāma (direct object)
Instrumental rā́mena = Rāma writes with a pen (or performs any action)
Dative rā́māya = To/for Rāma
Ablative rā́māt = Away from Rāma
Genitive rā́masya = Rāma's, of Rāma, belonging to Rāma
Locative rā́me = by, near with Rāma
Vocative rā́ma = O Rāma!
God gave man the gift of language and the ability to coin new words. (Genesis 2:16-20) The first man could understand speech and speak himself.
That assumes that inflection and verbal paradigms are more "complex" than adpositional systems or verbal systems which use modals. The issue of the change is discussed in Hewson & Bubenik's From Case to Adposition: The Development of Configurational Syntax in Indo-European Languages. But which is more complex is debatable. And that's one language group, and even it has exceptions (Russian still has 8 cases and the germanic languages have retained case systems). That's not even getting into verbal systems, or language change in other language families. The issue of how languages change (and whether they tend to change in one direction) is still under debate.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
I don't know what you mean by "Iberian substrate". Basque? The fact is that there was a rather heavy Celtic influence on at least Portugeuese and the Spanish of northern Spain, perhaps largely because of Celtic migrations from Britain. As for English loan words from French, the majority come from the Parisian dialect, not Norman French, contrary to what you would expect. Norman French came to be considered a backwater dialect, and large numbers of loan words entered English after the nobility had come to view Paris as the center of French culture. Technically, the Normans were vassals of the French King.
This is false for a number of reasons. First of all, you cannot generalize about natural language trends from historical changes that took place in English or even the Indo-European language family. You have to look at how languages change over time in all places and cultures. Generally speaking, all languages (with some exceptional types such as pidgins and creoles) are of equal linguistic complexity. Where some areas of grammatical and lexical structure appear to simplify, other areas tend to get more complex. When languages stop marking grammatical roles by suffixation, they tend to spread the need to express them to another part of the grammar, e.g. prepositions or postpositions. If this were not the case, then human languages would have acquired pretty much the same (simplified) structure by now.
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Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Fillmore was never really a generative semanticist, and he was somewhat chagrined by the fact that others called him one. Chomsky initially dismissed Case Grammar and Fillmore (although Fillmore had been a major contributor to tranformational grammar, having first proposed the transformational cycle). But Chomsky was later forced to accept the reality of case roles, preferring to use the terminology of Jeffrey Gruber--"thematic roles"--because Gruber was MIT-approved. Basically, what Fillmore was trying to do in those days was explore the limits on simple clause structure across all languages.
I haven't really been keeping up since I branched out into computational linguistics, so I haven't read Bybee's latest. I don't know if you are familiar with Stampe's Natural Phonology, but she once tried to develop a "Generative Natural Phonology" (which was confused with Stampe's very different and IMO more insightful) theory.
Yes. I first met him at an antiwar rally in the 1960s. After that, I got to know him better at conferences. He has always been one of my favorite linguists.
Comrie and I have had a mutual interest in Soviet linguistic theories, but I am no longer active in the field and haven't spoken with him in a while. Langacker's book was difficult for me to get into at first, until I realized how absolutely brilliant it was. I had, of course, been using his earlier works on transformational theory to teach classes with, so I didn't expect that kind of work from him.
Generative grammar always took the official position that the linguistic system should be neutral between production and perception, but I have always regarded it as more partial to perceptual strategies. Minimalism strikes me as a natural outcome of that bias. My own bias is that language systems are fundamentally tied to language production--the "construction" process. There is no ambiguity in the mind of the speaker, but the speaker still has to follow strategies for avoiding ambiguity. That is, we really need a maximalist approach to grammar, not a minimalist one.
Jim, George Lakoff, and John R (Haj) Ross were to founders of Generative Semantics. McCawley died several years ago, unfortunately, but he did more than anyone to argue for a semantic basis to syntax. That is, he came to see Chomsky's "deep structure" as fundamentally a type of logical representation. He took Lakoff's transformationalist approach in his dissertation and generalized it to propose what was then called "predicate raising"--a transformational rule that essentially collapsed semantic/syntactic structure prior to selection of words. My dissertation relied heavily on an extension of that approach to verbs that incorporate information about means of causation--so-called "instrumental causatives". I never really took it anywhere after that, primarily because the school of Generative Semantics got superseded by other approaches and a lot of theoretical linguists lost interest in it.
No. I published a few papers on the subject, but they are way out of date. I am still very much enamored of Jim's basic ideas about collapsing semantic structure into syntactic structure--a kind of "crystallization" of the thought process. And, of course, I find Lakoff's work on metaphor to be a fundamental insight into the structure of word meanings.
I studied both Sanskrit and Hindi. The experience of trying to construct Hindi sentences has been my primary exposure to mixed ergative-accusative languages. You have object or subject agreement, depending on whether you use perfective or imperfective participles. Anyway, I prefer Dixon's analysis of ergatives.
The native or invasive language(s) spoken on the Iberian peninsula, including Celtic, before the Romans gained a foothold and Latin became the common language. Languages of Iberia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Any, most, or all of these languages made some contribution to the dialect of Latin that became Spanish and later Portuguese when they diverged.
Perhap, but everything I've ever read referred to it as Norman French. Maybe because it was the version of French used by the Normans, based on the Parisian dialect.
True, all languages are equally complex, and effective. But for the purposes of this layman's thread generalizations should suffice. If two people can understand each other, the language works. Simplification of a language v. its growing more complex is a matter of perspective. Did English simplify by losing its grammatical cases, or did it become more complex by adding prepostitions? Is English more or less simplified by becoming pro-drop and dropping verbs in certain cases? "Where Jeannie?" "went to the store"; "You eaten?" "No, not hungry". But we understand those sentences, if you can call them sentences, lazy as they may be.
Chinese languages are some of the most "simple" in having no number, gender or tense. Yet one could say it's complex as hell because they're tonal languages. Four tones for one morpheme and/or word, giving a completely different meaning to it. Languages change at different rates for different reasons. Some are purposely preserved, even though they are living languages. Using Sanskrit again as an example, Sanskrit is a living spoken language, having living descendants, yet Sanskrit is preserved unchanged because of its liturgical standing.
The Neo Nerd
Well-Known Member
Songbird
She rules her life like a bird in flight
Maybe hallucinogens:
Mushroom Theory - The origins of religion
and
Terence McKenna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From the second link:
"The mushroom, according to McKenna, had also given humans their first truly religious experiences (which, as he believed, were the basis for the foundation of all subsequent religions to date). Another factor that McKenna talked about was the mushroom's potency to promote linguistic thinking. This would have promoted vocalisation, which in turn would have acted in cleansing the brain (based on a scientific theory that vibrations from speaking cause the precipitation of impurities from the brain to the cerebrospinal fluid), which would further mutate the brain. All these factors according to McKenna were the most important factors that promoted evolution towards the Homo sapiens species. After this transformation took place, the species would have begun moving out of Africa to populate the rest of the planet [22]."
Mushroom Theory - The origins of religion
and
Terence McKenna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From the second link:
"The mushroom, according to McKenna, had also given humans their first truly religious experiences (which, as he believed, were the basis for the foundation of all subsequent religions to date). Another factor that McKenna talked about was the mushroom's potency to promote linguistic thinking. This would have promoted vocalisation, which in turn would have acted in cleansing the brain (based on a scientific theory that vibrations from speaking cause the precipitation of impurities from the brain to the cerebrospinal fluid), which would further mutate the brain. All these factors according to McKenna were the most important factors that promoted evolution towards the Homo sapiens species. After this transformation took place, the species would have begun moving out of Africa to populate the rest of the planet [22]."