Science – Page 9 – Replicated Typo

Evolang Coverage: Simon Fisher: Molecular Windows into Speech and Language

In his clear and engaging plenary talk, Simon Fisher, who is director of the Department “Language & Genetics” at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands, gave a summary of the current state of research on what molecular biology and genetics can contribute to the question of language evolution. Fisher was involved in the discovery of the (in)famous FOXP2 gene, which was found to be linked to hereditary language impairment in an English family. He has also done a lot of subsequent work on this gene, so naturally it was the also main focus of his talk.

But before he dealt with this area, he dispelled what he called the ‘abstract gene myth’. According to Fisher, it cannot be stressed enough that there is no direct relation between genes and behavior and that we have to “mind the gap”, as he put it. There is a long chain of interactions and relations that stand between genes one the one side, and speech and language on the other. DNA is related to the building of proteins, which is related to the development of cells. These in turn are related to neural circuits, which then relate to the human brain as whole, which then are related to speech and language.

So when we try to look at these complex net of relations, what we can say is that there is a subset of children which grow up in normal environments but still do not develop normal language skills. From a genetic perspective it is of interest that of these children, there are cases where these impairments cannot be explained by other transparent impairments like cerebral palsy, hearing loss, etc. Moreover, there are cases in which language disorders are heritable. This suggests that there are genetic factors that play a role in some of these impairments.

The most famous example of such a case of heritable language impairment is the English KE family, where affected members of the family are missing one copy of the FOXP2 gene. These family members exhibit impaired speech development. Specifically, they have difficulty in learning and producing sequences of complex oro-facial movements that underlie speech. However, they do show deficits in a wide range of language-related skills, including spoken and written language. It thus has to be emphasized that the missing FOXP2 gene seems to affect all aspects of linguistic development. It is also important that is not accompanied by general motor dyspraxia.

In general, non-verbal deficits are not central to the disorder. Affected individuals start out with a normal non-nonverbal IQ, but then don’t keep up with their peers, something that is very likely to be related to the fact that possessing non-impaired language opens the door for the enhancement of intelligence in various ways, something which people with only one FOXP2 gene cannot take advantage of to the same degree. In general, deficits in verbal cognition are much more severe and wide-ranging than other possible impairments. It is also important to note that after the FOXP2 gene was discovered in the KE family, researchers found a dozen of cases of a damaged FOXP2 gene that led to language-related problems.

FOXP2 is a so-called transcription factor, which means that it can activate and repress other genes. As Fisher points out, in a way FOXP2 functions as a kind of ‘genetic dimmer switch’ that tunes down the expression of other genes. In this context, it should become clear that FOXP2 is not “the gene for language.” Versions of FOXP2 are found in highly similar form in vertebrae species that lack speech and language. It therefore played very ancient roles in the brain of our common ancestor. Neither is FOXP2 exclusively expressed in the brain. It is also involved in the development of the lung, the intestines and the heart. However, work by Simon Fisher and his colleagues shows that FOXP2 is important for neural connectivity. Interestingly, mice with one damaged FOXP2 copy are absolutely normal in their normal baselines motor behavior. However, they have significant deficits in what Fisher called ‘voluntary motor learning.”

From an evolutionary perspective, it is relevant that there have been very little changes in the gene over the course of vertebrae evolution. However, there seem to have been more changes to the gene since our split from the chimpanzee lineage than there have been since the split from the mouse lineage. This means that when it comes to FOXP2, the protein of a chimpanzee is actually closer to a mouse than to a human.

Overall, what current knowledge about the molecular bases of language tells us is that these uniquely human capacities build on evolutionary ancient system. However, much more work is needed to understand the influence of FOXP2 on the molecular and cellular level and how these are related to the development of neural circuits, the brain, and finally our capacity for fully-formed complex human language.

In Search of the Wild Replicator

The key to the treasure is the treasure.
– John Barth

In view of Sean’s post about Andrew Smith’s take on linguistic replicators I’ve decided to repost this rather longish note from New Savanna. I’d orignally posted it in the Summer of 2010 as part of a run-up to a post on cultural evolution for the National Humanities Center (USA); I’ve collected those notes into a downloadable PDF. Among other things the notes deal with William Croft’s notions (at least as they existed in 2000) and suggests that we’ll find language replicators on the emic side of the emic/etic distinction.

I’ve also appended some remarks I made to John Lawler in the subsequent discussion at New Savanna.

* * * * *There’s been a fair amount of work done on language from an evolutionary point of view, which is not surprising, as historical linguistics has well-developed treatments of language lineages and taxonomy, the “stuff” of large-scale evolutionary investigation. While this work is directly relevant to a consideration of cultural evolution, however, I will not be reviewing or discussing it. For it doesn’t deal with the theoretical issues that most concern me in these posts, namely, a conceptualization of the genetic and phenotypic entities of culture. This literature is empirically oriented in a way that doesn’t depend on such matters.

The Arbitrariness of the Sign

In particular, I want to deal with the arbitrariness of the sign. Given my approach to memes, that arbitrariness would appear to eliminate the possibility that word meanings could have memetic status. For, as you may recall, I’ve defined memes to be perceptual properties – albeit sometimes very complex and abstract ones – of physical things and events. Memes can be defined over speech sounds, language gestures, or printed words, but not over the meanings of words. Note that by “meaning” I mean the mental or neural event that is the meaning of the word, what Saussure called the signified. I don’t mean the referent of the word, which, in many cases, but by no means all, would have perceptible physical properties. I mean the meaning, the mental event. In this conception, it would seem that that cannot be memetic.

That seems right to me. Language is different from music and drawing and painting and sculpture and dance, it plays a different role in human society and culture. On that basis one would expect it to come out fundamentally different on a memetic analysis.

This, of course, leaves us with a problem. If word meaning is not memetic, then how is it that we can use language to communicate, and very effectively over a wide range of cases? Not only language, of course, but everything that depends on language. Continue reading “In Search of the Wild Replicator”

So, what is it then, this Grammaticalization?

A century ago Antoine Meillet, in his work L’évolution des Formes Grammaticales, coined the term grammaticalization to describe the process through which linguistic forms evolve from a lexical to a grammatical status. Even though knowledge of this process is found in earlier works by French and British philosophers (e.g. Condillac, 1746; Tooke, 1857), as well as in the publications of a long list of nineteenth-century linguists beginning with Franz Bopp (1816) (cf. Heine, 2003), it was Meillet’s term that would come to characterise what is now a whole field of study in historical language change. At a first glance, the concept of grammaticalization might seem fairly straightforward, yet in the proceeding hundred years it has undergone numerous revisions and developments, with many of these issues being brought to the fore at a conference I recently attended in Berlin (yes, there are other conferences we’re interested in than Evolang).

One of the stated aims of the conference was to refine the notion of grammaticalization (click here for the website). I’m not 100% sure this was achieved and, following an excellent talk by Graeme Trousdale, I was even less sure of whether we should keep using the term. We’ll come back to this is in a moment. For now, many linguists will probably agree that one of the most prominent developments is found in the expansion of Meillet’s definition by Kuryłowicz (1965): “[…] grammaticalization is that subset of linguistic changes whereby lexical material in highly constrained pragmatic and morphosyntactic contexts becomes grammatical, and grammatical material becomes more grammatical […]” (Traugott, 1996: 183 [my emphasis]). Under this new definition, grammaticalization takes into account the gradual nature of diachronic change in language, with there being a continuum of various degrees of grammatical status (Winter-Froemel, 2012).

A widely used example of grammaticalization is the development of the periphrastic future be going to. In the time of Shakespeare’s English, be going to had its literal meaning of a subject travelling to a location in order to do something, with the subject position only allowing for a noun phrase denoting “an animate, mobile entity, and the verb following the phrase would have to be a dynamic verb” (Bybee, 2003: 605). Indeed, there were several movement verbs that we could substitute based on the following constructional schema:

(1) [[movement verb + Progressive] + purpose clause (to + infinitive)]

E.g., I am going to see the king

I am travelling to see the king

I am riding to see the king

However, of the above examples, it was only the construction with go in it that underwent grammaticalization so that the motion verb (go) and the purpose clause (to + infinitive) came to express intentionality and future possibility. Of course, these changes did not happen abruptly, but rather they gradually evolved over time, with one prediction being that there was stage of ambiguity where both meanings coexisted (see Hopper’s concept of layering). We might conceive of this as hidden variation due to the inferential capacities entailed in the transmission from speakers to hearers. At some point the use of be going to was used in a construction that has an unambiguous meaning (e.g., I’m going to stay at home; The tree is going to lose its leaves etc), which led to an unmasking of this hidden variation within the speech community. This unmasking further opens up the possibility for these two meanings to become structurally untangled; demonstrated in contracted form of be plus the reduced gonna [gʌnə]. Below is a diagrammatic representation of these changes:

Continue reading “So, what is it then, this Grammaticalization?”

Evolang coverage: Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language

Are there more differences or more similarities between human language and other animal communication systems? And what exactly does it tell us if we find precursors and convergent evolution of aspects similar to human language? These were some of the key questions at this year’s Evolang’s Animal Communication and Language Evolution Workshop (proceedings for all workshops here).

As Johan Bolhuis pointed out, ever since Darwin (1871), comparing apes and humans’ seemed like the most logical thing to do when trying to find out more about the evolution of traits presumed to be special to humans. Apes and especially chimpanzees, so the reasoning goes, are after all our closest relatives and serve as the best models for the capacities of our prelinguistic hominid ancestors. The comparative aspects of language have gained new attention since the controversial Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch (2002) paper in Science. For example, their claim that the capacity for producing and understanding recursive embedding of a certain kind is uniquely human was taken up by some researchers (including Hauser and Fitch themselves) who looked for syntactic abilities in other animals. More recently, songbirds have also become a centre of attention in the animal communication literature, with pretty much everything being quite controversial, however.

What is important here, according to the second workshop organizer Kazuo Okanoya, is that when doing research and theorizing, we should not treat humans as a special case, but as on a continuum with animals. And this also holds for language. In explaining language evolution, we don’t want to speak of a sudden burst that gave us something that is wholly different from anything else in the animal kingdom, but more of a continuous transition and emergence of language. For this it is, important to study other animals in closer details if we are to arrive at a continuous explanation of language emergence. Granted, humans are special. But simply saying they are special isn’t scientific. We need to detail in what ways humans are special.

Regarding the central question whether there are more differences or similarities between language and animal communication, and what exactly these similarities and differences are, opinions of course differ. After the first speaker didn’t turn up Irene Pepperberg gave an impromptu talk on her work with parrots. Taking the example of a complex exclusion task, she argued that symbol-trained animals can do things other animals simply cannot, and that this might be tied to the complex cognitive processing that occurs during language (and vocal) learning. She also stressed that birds can serve as good models for the evolution of some aspects underlying language because they developed broadly similar vocal learning capacities like humans in a process referred to as parallel evolution, convergence, or analogy. Responding to other prevalent criticism, Pepperberg counters the view that animals like Alex and Kanzi are simply exceptional and unique, just like not every human is a Picasso or a Beethoven. What Picasso and Beethoven show us is what humans can be capable of, and the same holds for animals and Alex and Kanzi. No one would argue that animals have language in the sense that humans do. But given that they have the brain structures and cognitive capacities to allow a more complicated vocal learning and complicated cognitive processing means we can use them as a model of how these processes might have got started. There is still much work to be done, especially questions like what animals like parrots actually need and use these complex vocal and cognitive capacities for in the wild.

Whereas Dominic Mitchell argued in his talk that there is indeed a discontinuity between animal communication and human language with reference to animal signaling theory (e.g. Krebs & Dawkins 1984), Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho after him focused more on the similarities. Specifically, he showed quite convincingly that statistical patterns in language, like Zipf’s law, the law of brevity, the law that more frequent words are shorter, and the Menzerath-Altmann law (the longer the words the shorter the syllables) can also be found in the communicative behaviours of other animals. Zipf’s law for word frequencies, for example, can also be observed in the whistles of bottlenose dolphins. A criticism of Zipf’s law in the Chomskyan tradition holds that it just as well applies to random typing and rolling the dice, but Ferrer-i-Cancho showed that it is simply not the case by plotting the actual distribution of random typing and rolling the dice which is actually quite different from the logarithmic distribution of Zipf’s law if you look at it in any detail. The law that more frequent words are shorter can also be found in Chickadee calls, Formosan macaques and Common marmosets. There is some controversy whether this law really holds for all of these species, especially common marmosets, but Ferrer-i-Cancho presented a reanalysis of criticism in which he showed that what there are no “true exceptions” to the law. He proposes an information theoretic explanation for these kinds of behavioural universals where communicative solutions converge on a local optimum of differing communicative demands. He also proposes that considerations like this should lead us to change our perspective and concepts of universals quite radically, and that instead of looking only for linguistic universals we should also look for universals of communicative behavior and universal principles beyond human language such as cognitive effort minimization and mean code length minimization.

Returning to birds, Johan J. Bolhius picked the issue of similarities and differences up again and showed that there is in fact a staggering amount of similarities between birds and humans. For example, songbirds also learn their songs from a tutor (most often their father) and make almost perfect copies of their songs. As Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch 2002 have already pointed out, this signal copying seems not to be present in apes and monkeys. But the similarities go even further than that: Songbirds “babble” before they can sing properly (a period called ‘subsong’) and they also have a sensitive period for learning. And there are not only behavioural, but also neural similarities. In fact, songbirds seem to have a neural organization, broadly similar to the human separation between Broca’s area (mostly concerned with production, although this simple view of course is not the whole story, as James, for example, has shown) and Wernicke’s area (mostly concerned with understanding). So there seem to be regions that are exclusively activated when animals hears songs (kinda Wernicke-Type region) and regions with neuronal activation when animals sing, something which is called the ‘song system. Interestingly, this activation is also related to how much the animal has learned about that particular song it is hearing, so the better it knows the song the more activation is there. This means that this regions might be related to song memory. In lesion studies, where these regions involved in listening to a known song were damaged, recognition of the songs were indeed impaired but not wholly wiped out. Song production, on the other hand was completely unimpaired, mirroring the results from patients with lesions to either Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas. Zebra finches also show some degree of lateralization in that there is stronger activation in the left hemisphere when they hear the song they know, but not when the song they hear is unfamiliar. Although FOXP2 is not a “language gene”, which can’t be stressed enough, it is interesting that songbirds in which the bird-FOXP2-gene was “knocked out” show incomplete learning of the tutor songs.

Overall, Bolhuis concludes that what we can learn from looking at birdsong is that there are three significant factors evolved in the evolution of language:

Homology in the neural and genetic mechanisms due to our shared evolutionary past with birds.

Convergences or parallel evolution of auditory-vocal learning

And last specialisations, specifically human language syntax, which as Bolhuis argued in a paper with Bob Berwick and Kazuo Okanoya is still vastly different in complexity and hierarchical embedding from everything in songbird vocal behavior.

This focus on syntactic ability stems of course from a generativist perspective on these issues, and future research, especially from new and up-and-coming linguistic schools like Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar (cf. Hurford 2012) is sure to bring more light into the matter of how exactly human language works, what kinds of elements and constructions it is made of, and how these compare to what is found in animals, and whether there really a single unitary thing like the fabled “syntactic ability” of humans (cf. e.g.work by Ewa Dabrowska)

Evolang Previews: Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be posting a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot.

Michael Pleyer Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition Poster Session 1, 17:20-19:20, “Hall” (2F), 14th March

Perspective-taking and -setting in language, cognition and interaction is crucial to the creation of meaning and to how people share knowledge and experiences. As I’ve already written about on this blog (e.g. here, here, here), it probably also played an important part in the story of how human language and cognition came to be. In my poster presentation I argue that a particular school of linguistic thought, Cognitive Linguistics (e.g. Croft & Cruse 2004; Evans & Green 2006; Geeraerts & Cuyckens 2007; Ungerer & Schmid 2006), has quite a lot to say about the structure and cognitive foundations of perspective-taking and -setting in language.

Therefore an interdisciplinary dialogue between Cognitive Linguistics and research on the evolution of language might prove highly profitable. To illustrate this point, I offer an example of one potential candidate for such an interdisciplinary dialogue, so-called Blending Theory (e.g. Fauconnier & Turner 2002), which, I argue, can serve as a useful model for the kind of representational apparatus that needed to evolve in the human lineage to support linguistic interaction. In this post I will not say much about Blending Theory (go see my poster for that 😉 or browse here ), but I want to elaborate a bit on Cognitive Linguistics and why it is a promising school of thought for language evolution research, something which I also elaborate on in my proceedings paper.

So what is Cognitive Linguistics?

Evans & Green (2006: 50), define Cognitive Linguistics as

“the study of language in a way that is compatible with what is known about the human mind, treating language as reflecting and revealing the mind.”

Cognitive Linguistics sees language as tightly integrated with human cognition. What is more, a core assumption of Cognitive Linguistics is that principles inherent in language can be seen as instantiations of more general principles of human cognition. This means that language is seen as drawing on mechanisms and principles that are not language-specific but general to cognition, like conceptualisation, categorization, entrenchment, routinization, and so forth.

From the point of view of the speaker, the most important function of language is that it expresses conceptualizations, i.e. mental representations. From the point of view of the hearer, linguistic utterances then serve as prompts for the dynamic construction of a mental representation. Crucially, this process of constructing a mental representation is fundamentally tied to human cognition and our knowledge of the world around us. Continue reading “Evolang Previews: Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition”

Evolang Previews: The Evolution of Morphological Agreement

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot.

Richard Littauer The Evolution of Morphological Agreement
Every lecture theatre but Lecture Theatre 1, all times except 14:45-15:05, and certainly not on Friday 16th

In this talk I’m basically outlining the debate as I see it about the evolution of morphology, focusing on agreement as a syntactic phenomenon. There are three main camps: Heine and Kuteva forward grammaticalisation, and say that agreement comes last in the process, and therefore probably last in evolution; Hurford basically states that agreement is part of semantic neural mapping in the brain, and evolved at the same time as protomorphology and protosyntax; and then there’s another, larger camp who basically view agreement as the detritus of complex language. I agree with Hurford, and I propose in this paper that it had to be there earlier, as, quite simply put, there is too much evidence for the use of agreement than for its lack. Unfortunately, I don’t have any empirical or experimental results or studies – this is all purely theoretical – and so this is both a work in progress and a call to arms. Which is to say: theoretical.

First, I define agreement and explain that I’m using Corbett’s (who wrote the book Agreement) terms. This becomes relevant up later. Then I go on to cite Carstairs-McCarthy, saying that basically there’s no point looking at a single language’s agreement for functions, as it is such varied functions. It is best to look at all languages. So, I go on to talk about various functions: pro-drop, redundancy, as an aid in parsing, and syntactic marking, etc.

Carstairs-McCarthy is also important for my talk in that he states that historical analyses of agreement can only go so far, because grammaticalisation basically means that we have to show the roots of agreement in modern languages in the phonology and syntax, as this is where they culturally evolve from in today’s languages. I agree with this – and I also think that basically this means that we can’t use modern diachronic analyses to look at proto-agreement. I think this is the case mainly due to Lupyan and Dale, and other such researchers like Wray, who talk about esoteric and exoteric languages. Essentially, smaller communities tend to have larger morphological inventories. Why is this the case? Because they don’t have as many second language learners, for one, and there’s less dialectical variation. I think that today we’ve crossed a kind of Fosbury Flop in languages that are too large, and I think that this is shown in the theories of syntacticians, who tend to delegate morphology wherever it can’t bother their theories. I’m aware I’m using a lot of ‘I think’ statements – in the talk, I’ll do my best to back these up with actual research.

Now, why is it that morphology, and in particular agreement morphology, which is incredibly redundant and helpful for learners, is pushed back after syntax? Well, part of the reason is that pidgins and creoles don’t really have any. I argue that this doesn’t reflect early languages, which always had an n-1 generation (I’m a creeper, not a jerk*), as opposed to pidgins. I also quote some child studies which show that kids can pick up morphology just as fast as syntax, nullifying that argument. There’s also a pathological case that supports my position on this.

Going back to Corbett, I try to show that canonical agreement – the clearest cases, but not necessarily the most distributed cases – would be helpful on all counts for the hearer. I’d really like to back this up with empirical studies, and perhaps in the future I’ll be able to. I got through some of the key points of Corbett’s hierarchy, and even give my one morphological trilinear gloss example (I’m short on time, and remember, historical analyses don’t help us much here.) I briefly mention Daumé and Campbell, as well, and Greenberg, to mention typological distribution – but I discount this as good evidence, given the exoteric languages that are most common, and complexity and cultural byproducts that would muddy up the data. I actually make an error in my abstract about this, so here’s my first apology for that (I made one in my laryngeal abstract, as well, misusing the word opaque. One could argue Sean isn’t really losing his edge.)

So, after all that, what are we left with? No solid proof against the evolution of morphology early, but a lot of functions that would seem to stand it firmly in the semantic neural mapping phase, tied to proto-morphology, which would have to be simultaneous to protosyntax. What I would love to do after this is run simulations about using invisible syntax versus visible morphological agreement for marking grammatical relations. The problem, of course, is that simulations probably won’t help for long distance dependencies, I don’t know how I’d frame that experiment, and using human subjects would be biased towards syntax, as we all are used to using that more than morphology, now, anyway. It’s a tough pickle to crack (I’m mixing my metaphors, aren’t I?)

—

And that sums up what my talk will be doing. Comments welcomed, particularly before the talk, as I can then adjust accordingly. I wrote this fast, because I’ll probably misspeak during the talk as well – so if you see anything weird here, call me out on it. Cheers.

*I believe in a gradual evolution of language, not a catastrophic one. Thank Hurford for this awesome phrase.

Selected References

Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (2010). The Evolution of Morphology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Corbett, G. (2006). Agreement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Heine, B., and Kuteva, T. (2007). The Genesis of Grammar. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Hurford, J.R. (2002). The Roles of Expression and Representation in Language Evolution. In A. Wray (Ed.) The Transition to Language (pp. 311–334). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Lupan, G. & Dale, R (2009). Language structure is partly determined by social structure Social and Linguistic Structure.

Phonemic Diversity and Vanishing Phonemes: Looking for Alternative Hypotheses

In my last post on the vanishing phonemes debate I briefly mentioned Atkinson’s two major theoretical points: (i) that there is a link between phoneme inventory sizes, mechanisms of cultural transmission and the underlying demographic processes supporting these changes; (ii) we could develop a Serial Founder Effect (SFE) model from Africa based on the phoneme inventory size. I also made the point that more work was needed on the details of the first claim before we went ahead and tested the second. To me at least, it seems slightly odd to assume the first model is correct, without really going to any great lengths to disprove it, and then go ahead and commit the statistical version of the narrative fallacy – you find a model that fits the past and use it to tell a story. Still, I guess the best way to get in the New York Times is to come up with a Human Origins story, and leave the boring phonemes as a periphery detail.

Unrealistic Assumptions?

One problem with these unrealistic assumptions is they lead us to believe there is a linear relationship between a linguistic variable (e.g. phoneme inventories) and a socio-demographic variable (e.g. population size). The reality is far more complicated. For instance, Atkinson (2011) and Lupyan & Dale (2010) both consider population size as a variable. Where the two differ is in their theoretical rationale for the application of this variable: whereas the former is interested in how these population dynamics impact upon the distribution of variation, the latter sees social structure as a substantial feature of the linguistic environment in which a language adapts. It is sometimes useful to tell simple stories, and abstract away from the messy complexities of life, yet for the relationships being discussed here, I think we’re still missing some vital points.

Continue reading “Phonemic Diversity and Vanishing Phonemes: Looking for Alternative Hypotheses”

A Cautionary Tale: Linguists are a powerful force of change (for phoneme inventories at least)

I’ve been reading through an earlier draft of my dissertation and noticed a few paragraphs that were omitted due to word length. Despite not making the final cut, it serves as nice reminder about where our data is coming from: that is, when we dive into WALS or UPSID, take a particular inventory and look at one of its phonemes, then we’re viewing something that’s been ascribed by the investigators/observers of said language. Anyway, it’s basically about the Wichí language — a member of the Matacoan language familyspoken in parts of South America’s Chaco region — and the various reports on its phoneme inventory size. N.B. The source is a PhD thesis by Megan Avram (2008).

Even if we accept the theoretical justification for the concept of a phoneme, then there is still an additional problem of how these representations are measured and recorded. These problems are neatly highlighted in the debates surrounding the Wichí language and its phoneme inventory. For instance, back in 1981 Antonio Tovar published an article showing the Wichí had 22 consonants, whereas if you were to jump forward 13 years to 1994, then Kenneth Claesson’s paper would tell you that they are down to just 16 consonants. This is quite a big difference. In WALS terms, Wichí has gone from having an average consonant inventory to a moderately small one. Great news then for those of you searching for a correlation between small communities (Wichí has approximately 25,000 speakers) and phoneme inventory inventory size. Not so great on the reliability front.

Short of conspiracy to bring the number of phonemes down (but see here), reasons for these differences are broad and varied. Some instances could be genuine differences between speech communities in the form of dialectal variation. Other reasons are more likely to be theoretically motivated. Take, as one of many examples, Claesson’s choice to omit glottalized consonants from his description of Wichí. His rationale being that these “are actually consonant clusters of a stop followed by a glottal stop” (Avram, 2008: 37-38). In summary, both sources of data are at the whims of subjectivity: for each language, or dialect, the study is reliant on the choices of potentially one researcher, at a very specific point in time, and with only a finite amount of resources (for a similar discussion, see the comments on Everett and recursion).

It’s straight out of phoneme inventories 101, but from time to time these little examples are useful as cautionary tales about the sources of data we often take for granted.

The Forgotten Linguist: Mikołaj Kruszewski

In the process of writing the first in a series of posts on the theoretical plausibility of the vanishing phonemes debate, I’ve found myself drawn into reading Daniel Silverman‘s excellent two-part article (part one and part two) on Mikołaj Kruszewski (1851-1887). You might call him one of the many forgotten linguists who, along with other notable absentees in the linguistic hall of fame, such as Erwin Esper, could have been highly influential had their ideas reached a wider audience. Although it is difficult to assess his impact on the historical development of linguistics, Kruszewksi theoretical insights certainly prefigured a lot of later work, especially regarding listener-based exemplar modelling and probability matching, as evident in this quote:

In the course of time, the sounds of a language depend on the gradual change of its articulation. We can pronounce a sound only when our memory retains an imprint of its articulation for us. If all our articulations of a given sound were reflected in this imprint in equal measure, and if the imprint represented an average of all these articulations, we, with this guidance, would always perform the articulation in question approximately the same way. But the most recent (in time) articulations, together with their fortuitous deviations, are retained by the memory far more forcefully than the earlier ones. Thus, neglibible deviations acquire the capacity to grow progressively greater…

Silverman goes on to mention some of Kruszewski’s other major insights, such as: (1) the arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning, (2) the non-teleological nature of the linguistic system, (3) the generative or creative character of language, (4) the connectionist organisation of the lexicon, and (5) the optimality-theoretic-esque proposal that linguistic systems may be analysed as the product of pressures and constraints in inherent conflict with one another. There is also a brief mention of Darwin’s influence on Kruszewski’s work (as we can see in his non-teleological stance).

The story ends on somewhat of a sad note, with Kruszweski suffering from a debilitating neurological and mental illness that cut short his promising career at the age of 36 — making his depth of scholarship and theoretical insight all the more impressive given it was produced in just eight years.

Anyway, you should take a look at the two articles, if only for an historical perspective on linguistics, but I would also suggest having a gander at some of Silverman’s other papers. He’s got his own ideas and insights that are worth considering (if you can wait, I’ll be discussing some of these in one of my next posts).

Everett, Pirahã and Recursion: The Latest

Discussing the concept of recursion is like a rite of passage for anyone interested in language evolution: you go through it once, take a position and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you. As Hannah pointed out last year, there are two definitions of recursion:

(1) embeddedness of phrases within other phrases, which entails keeping track of long-distance dependencies among phrases;

(2) the speciﬁcation of the computed output string itself, including meta-recursion, where recursion is both the recipe for an utterance and the overarching process that creates and executes the recipe.

The case of grammatical recursion (see definition 1) is perhaps most famously associated with Noam Chomsky. Not only does he claim all human languages are recursive, but also that this ability is biologically hardwired as part of our genetic makeup. Countering Chomsky’s first claim is the debate surrounding a small Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã: even though they show signs of recursion, such as the ability to recursively embed structures within stories, the Pirahã grammar is claimed not to recursively embed phrases within other phrases. If true, then are numerous implications for a wide variety of fields in linguistics, but this is still an unsubstantiated claim: for the most part, we are relying on one specific researcher (Daniel Everett) who, despite having dedicated a large portion of his life to studying the tribe, could very well have been misled. That said, I retain a large amount of respect for Everett, having watched him speak at Edinburgh a few years ago and read his book on the topic: Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.

So, why am I rambling on about recursion? Well, besides its obvious relevance, — and perhaps under-representation on this blog (deserved or not, I’ll let you decide) — Everrett has recently published a series of slides about a corpus study of Pirahã grammar (see below).

[gview file=”http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/piantadosi_et_al_piraha_lsa_2012.pdf”]

His tentative conclusion: there is no strong evidence for recursion among relative clauses, complement clauses, possessive structures and conjunctions/disjunctions. However, there is possible evidence of recursive structure in topics/repeated arguments. He also posits cultural pressures for longer or shorter sentences, such as writing systems (as I mentioned way back in 2009).

I’m sure this debate will be brought to the fore at this year’s EvoLang, with ~~Chomsky~~ ~~Berwick~~ Piattelli-Palmarini and many of the Biolinguistic crowd in attendance, and it’s a shame I’ll almost certainly miss it (unless someone wants to pay for my ticket… Just hit the donate button in the left-hand corner 😉 ).

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