The problem of syntax has people on all sides of the issue “desperately” hoping a solution will somehow appear, University of Maryland syntactician Juan Uriagereka told an Evolang-conference audience in Barcelona this afternoon. Most accounts of language origins simply ignore the rise of syntax (of the formal, Chomskyan sort), while those that glance at syntax still do not offer any hint as to how humans evolved the powerful system we enjoy.
Scholars and apes have different interests, but how similar is the form of their thoughts?
The thinking that supports a sentence’s basic, two-part structure of topic and comment may be much older than either humanity, the great apes, or even primates, suggests James R. Hurford in a paper in the March issue of Lingua (abstract here, paper here).
Over 40 years ago, as part of a search for linguistic universals, Charles Hocket wrote that
Every human language has a common clause type with bipartite structure in which the constituents can be reasonably be termed ‘topic’ and ‘comment.’
In English, topics and comments are generally united in a sentence that divides into a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP); e.g., The president [topic] lied [comment]; General Sherman, on his March to the Sea, [topic] occasionally showed a little mercy [comment]. A few languages, Hurford cites the Polynesian language of Tonga, do not distinguish between nouns and verbs and therefore cannot have NPs and VPs, but they too use the topic + comment structure.
Hurford’s paper builds on the observation that a full sentence can be turned into a topic: e.g., The lying president…, Sherman’s occasional mercy on his March to the Sea…. In these phrases the topic + comment of the earlier sentence has turned into a solitary topic. Hurford examines the reason that
language has evolved in such a way that in actual English [The president lied] exists alongside [The lying president…].
That existence of two ways of stating the same proposition is the central issue of Hurford’s paper and in the course of proposing an explanation he breaks with a very old philosophical and theological tradition that says the function of language is to state the truth.
Photo: Well, at least the whites of their eyes are still white. (An important point on this blog, see e.g., Savanna Eyes)
Last week’s New Yorker carried an article by John Colapinto (“The Interpreter,” photo summary here) that challenges every view of human nature that says something absolute about language.
A whole range of expressions, known technically as root small clauses, may be living fossils, vestiges of a period before speech used full sentences, Dr. Ljiljana Progovac of Wayne State University told a conference of the International Linguistic Association this past March 31.
For many American’s Mad magazine’s What me worry? slogan is the best known American language example of a root small clause (RootSC). If her hypothesis is true, it will go a long way toward justifying the study of speech origins and its evolution. An evolutionary account, Dr. Progovac says can “shed light on the very nature of syntax, including why every sentence is built upon a small clause … [and] why [root small clauses exist today] only in marginalized roles.”
Is mathematics the anti-language? I’ve wondered that off and on over many years and wonder again in response to a portrait of the Fields Medal winner Terrence Tao that appeared in last Tuesday’s New York Times (story here). My question comes up because in the story of a fellow who had learned to read at age 2 and was taking college math classes at age 9 (PhD age 20) we also get this information:
“I never really got the hang of [writing essays for school],” he said. “These very vague, undefined questions. I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.” Assigned to write a story about what was going on at home, Terry went from room to room and made detailed lists of the contents.
The evolution of syntax and a speaker’s ability to articulate sounds may have overlapped, Karin Stromswold told a conference on biolinguistics held in Santo Domingo from Feb. 23 to 25. Linguistics normally separates phonology and syntax into separate areas with distinct rules, but Stromswold’s research suggests the rules have some genetic overlap. Equally surprising perhaps was the fact that there appears to be very little genetic overlap between the ability to articulate sounds and the ability to use words. We can sort words, sounds, and syntax into two piles with words on one side and sounds together with syntax on the other. How are we to make sense of these facts? Stromswold proposes a way.
The adaptive value of syntax—that is to say, the survival advantages that made syntax universal among humans—may never be known, reported Dr. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini to a biolinguistics conference held in the Dominican Republic last weekend. In a survey of both biological and linguistic reasons to question “classical adaptionism” he suggested that if you think of understanding the evolution of sytnax as involving a 1000 details, ideas about survival advantages will only explain around 5 or 6, leaving investigators with no idea how to proceed. Ultimately, he concluded, investigators do want to make sense of the “Full Monty” (the language faculty as it is broadly understood), but that understanding may not have much to say about survival. He made a strong case, although I suspect that if he wins it he will have destroyed all hope of ever getting the general public to be interested in the origins of syntax.
Continue reading "Drifting Along with the Tumbling Tumble Weed" »
The Simpler Syntax discussed on the blog all this week appears to been developed in response to
overwhelming evidence from comparative ethology [i.e., animal psychology] that the behavior of many animals must be governed by combinatorial computation [i.e., putting 2 and 2 together]. … Thought [may be] highly structured in our nonlinguistic relatives—they just cannot express it. Combinatorial thought could well have served as a crucial preadaption for the evolution of … human language. (p. 416)
This week Babel’s Dawn has been looking at an article titled “The Simpler Syntax Hypothesis” that appeared in the September issue of Trends in Cognitive Science (abstract here). It points towards solutions for several issues of interest on this blog, notably the evolution of syntax (discussed yesterday) and certain technical problems connected with unspoken meanings.
There is an old lyric sung by Andy Williams and Julie Andrews, “Not a word need be spoken in our language of love.” Very romantic, but obviously something of a problem in theories of language that say words are the pilots of attention.
Yesterday’s post (here) discussed an essay (abstract here) in the in the September issue of Trends in Cognitive Science that sets forth a theory called "Simpler Syntax" as a rival to the dominant, Chomsky-inspired theory of a syntax rich enough to capture all meanings not covered by the bare words themselves. Today I want to look at Simpler Syntax's implications for the evolutionary origins of syntax.
Standard theory (as illustrated at the recent Stellenbosch conference) imagines a preliminary protolanguage with one or more evolutionary jumps leading to syntactical speech. Protolanguage might consist of single words or a couple of words joined together in no particular order. In short, it’s what we see in children today. Around their first year they start speaking single words; half a year or so later they begin adding two words together. That last seems so natural that most parents don’t even notice when it begins. By age three they are lumping three or more words together in a loose order, when suddenly they begin speaking in true sentences.
Recent Comments