Sociolinguistic lecture

3/6/2011

Overview
LZ501 Language in society lecture week 19
LANGUAGE EVOLUTION
• How are languages created? – Exploring the origins of language • How do they evolve?
– Evolutionary steps

• What are the theoretical premises of genetic/comparative linguistics?
– The method of linguistic reconstruction – The family tree model

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How did languages begin?
• Myths about languagecreation
– Noah’s ark view: Chinese was probably the primitive language of humankind (John Webb) – Humans learned how to sing and speak from birds (James Burnett Lord Monboddo)

How can one explore the origins of language?
PIDGINS AND CREOLES PSYCHOLOGY ANATOMY & PHYSIOLOGY ETHOLOGY

ARCHAELOGY

ANTHROPOOLGY

EVOLUTION THEORY

LANGUAGE ORIGINS

LINGUISTIC THEORY

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Based onAitchison 1996: 10

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– EXTERNAL EVIDENCE
• • • • • •

How can one explore the origins of language?
origin of species (evolution theory) digging up remains (archaeology) how bodies work (anatomy and physiology) animal behaviour (ethology): human minds (psychology) human societies (anthropology)

Language Evolution
Language evolved from a simple system and gradually becameelaborated (Bickerton 1990, 1995, Jackendoff 1999, 2002) • First Steps: The use of symbols • Second stage: Expansion of vocabulary & concatenation of symbols into larger units • Third stage: Development of rules

– INTERNAL EVIDENCE
• pidgins and creoles: they may show how humans ‘naturally’ devise and elaborate a simple system

Combining the two types Comparison of human language to birdsong
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First steps
• Use of symbols which takes place in a non-situationspecific fashion; kitty may be used to draw attention to a cat, summon a cat etc (Jackendoff 1999) • ‘Naming insight’ (narrowing a name to a single object).
– instinctive cries of pain or joy – involuntary grunts occurring in heaving and hauling – imitation of animal sounds
‘May not some unusually wise ape-like animalhave imitated the growl of a beast of prey, and thus told his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger? This would have been a first step in the formation of language’. (Charles Darwin, cited in Aitchison 1996: 98)
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Second stage
• Open, unlimited class of symbols • Expansion of vocabulary started from nouns and then verbs
– According to Bickerton, these two categories already have amental representation which came to be represented by words (Tallerman 2007)

Evidence for the precedence of nouns
• in all languages it seems to be easier to transform a noun into verb than the other way around (Henry bicycled home, Betty bottled the jam) • most languages have a larger number of nouns than verbs • nouns are more useful as a communication device
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Thirdstage
• Concatenation of symbols into larger units ( ‘Fred apple’, ‘mummy open’)
• at this stage more than one interpretation possible • the words are simply juxtaposed without forming ‘an actual grammar’

• Consistent ordering
– optional orders become preferred choices and these become rules Evidence from chimpanzee experiments Nim Chimpsky (Terrace et al 1979)
– – – – – –
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Apple me eatBanana Nim eat Banana me eat Drink me Nim Eat Nim eat Eat Nim me

Nim Chimpsky

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Comparative linguistics
• Comparative linguistics
– Comparing languages in order to identify and explain the relationships between them – Often historical – Often involves reconstructing ancestor languages to explain historical changes
‘brother’ German Polish Irish Dutch Czech Bruder brat bráthair broerbratr

Some Data
‘dear’ Italian Spanish Portuguese French [karo karo karu
ʃεR

‘night’ German Dutch Ancient Greek Catalan Lithuanian Nacht nacht nyx nit naktis

• Contrastive linguistics
 Also comparing languages, but:  Mostly present-day languages  More often for applications in language teaching

• How exactly are these languages related?
– Are some more closely related than...