Glossogenetic Emergence

Mark AronoffStony Brook University

University of HaifaSaint Catherine’s College, University of Oxford

(with Irit Meir, Carol Padden, and Wendy Sandler)Newcastle University

21 11 12

The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language Research Group

Irit MeirWendy Sandler

Carol Padden

Mark Aronoff

Glossogenetics• Thanks to Hurford, linguists now distinguish the

evolution of the language faculty from the evolution of languages (glossogenetics)

• Language and languages are distinct but interdependent

• It is very difficult to learn anything about the evolution of the language faculty

• Within glossogenetics, we may distinguish language change from language emergence

• Independent language emergence is rare

Imperfection and the evolution of languages

• If languages evolve by competition through chance and necessity, then they should also always be in the process of evolving

• Languages should therefore include partially organized imperfect subsystems

• All grammars leak (Edward Sapir)

Two examples of imperfect systems in languages

1. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is an emerging language

1. It has emerged autochthonously over the last 75 years2. We have been able to watch it emerge3. Today I will concentrate on the organization of compounds in

ABSL2. There have been two distinct ways to form the

comparative construction in English since before the language was recorded

1. The distribution of the two systems has never been settled 2. I will discuss recent findings

The forbidden experiment

Herodotus: King Psammetichus and the forbidden experiment

Now the Egyptians, before the reign of their king Psammetichus, believed themselves to be the most ancient of mankind. Since Psammetichus, however, made an attempt to discover who were actually the primitive race, they have been of opinion that while they surpass all other nations, the Phrygians surpass them in antiquity. This king, finding it impossible to make out by dint of inquiry what men were the most ancient, contrived the following method of discovery:- He took two children of the common sort, and gave them over to a herdsman to bring up at his folds, strictly charging him to let no one utter a word in their presence, but to keep them in a sequestered cottage, and from time to time introduce goats to their apartment, see that they got their fill of milk, and in all other respects look after them. His object herein was to know, after the indistinct babblings of infancy were over, what word they would first articulate. It happened as he had anticipated. The herdsman obeyed his orders for two years, and at the end of that time, on his one day opening the door of their room and going in, the children both ran up to him with outstretched arms, and distinctly said "Becos." When this first happened the herdsman took no notice; but afterwards when he observed, on coming often to see after them, that the word was constantly in their mouths, he informed his lord, and by his command brought the children into his presence. Psammetichus then himself heard them say the word, upon which he proceeded to make inquiry what people there was who called anything "becos," and hereupon he learnt that "becos" was the Phrygian name for bread. In consideration of this circumstance the Egyptians yielded their claims, and admitted the greater antiquity of the Phrygians.

Herodotus, Histories, 345 BC

Village Sign Languages

Village sign languages as a window into the nature of language

• Village sign languages are new• Village sign languages are autochthonous• Village sign languages have no influence from other

sign languages• Village sign languages arise in a pre-existing cultural

environment• Village sign languages show very little influence

from the surrounding spoken language• Village sign languages are as close as we can

ethically get to the forbidden experiment

Village sign languages around the world

• The following villages have sign languages that have been described to some extent (village sign language project, University of Central Lancashire). Others are known but not described

• Adamorobe: a village in Eastern Ghana• Ban Khor: a village in northeastern Thailand• Desa Kolok: a village in Bali with a large long-standing

deaf population• Ghardaia: an isolated trading town in the Algerian

Sahara whose Jewish population was cut off from other Jewish communities for hundreds of years

Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language

•Community founded ca. 1820 near Beer-Sheva in Negev Desert (Israel) by a couple from Egypt•Deaf members of the community descended from two of founder’s five sons (Scott et al 1995)•Deafness did not emerge until the fifth generation•Four Deaf siblings born ca 75 years ago•Now ~150 deaf people in the 3,500-member community

Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language

• ABSL is currently in its fourth generation• all members of first generation deceased• ABSL widely used by deaf and hearing (Kisch 2004)

• second language of community after Arabic• arose with little or no outside influence (Al Fityani & Padden 2010)

A signer of the first generation

QuickTime™ and aH.264 decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

ABSL Grammar

• Basic word order in sentences is SOV• In syntactic phrases below the sentence level,

modifiers come after the head– In Arabic, adjectives follow but most numerals precede

the head• There are complex sentences but there are no

overt markers of complexity– I figure we put ‘em all on this island, less chance they can

pass it on. (Dennis Lehane, Mystic River)

• There is no morphology outside compounds

Compound Constructions

• Meir, Irit, Mark Aronoff, Wendy Sandler, and Carol Padden. 2010. Sign languages and compounding. In Cross-Disciplinary Issues on Compounding (ed. by Sergio Scalise and Irene Vogel). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 301-322.

• The degree of variability found in the forms of compound nouns in the ABSL community is such that there are hardly any cases where all or even most signers use precisely the same compound form

• When signers are presented with a concept or an object that they do not have a word for, they may produce a string of words that are semantically related to that concept

• The object in question may be very common in the environment but the signers may not have much occasion to refer to it

• Signers do not hesitate when producing these strings

Some ABSL signers’ responses to a picture of a calendar

• TIME+SEE+COUNT-ROWS+WRITE+TIME+CONTINUE+FLIP+SEE +COUNT-ROWS

• WRITE+ROW+MONTH+ROW+WRITE• NUMBERS+ROW+MONTH+FLAT-ON-WALL+FLIP• FLIP+WRITE+FLIP

Conventionalization

• In our data we do not have any one compound that is signed uniformly by all signers in the study

• But some signs are conventionalized within a family, like the sign KETTLE (see below)

Signs for ‘counter-top gas cooker’

• This is a common object, found in most houses in Al-Sayyid

• There is no general agreement on a sign for it

Signs for ‘counter-top gas cooker’

• Signers draw on a few lexical items: COOK, TURN, WIDE-OBJECT, INSERT, FIRE, BURNER

• TURN∧COOK∧WIDE-OBJECT• TURN∧FIRE∧4∧BURNER∧FIRE• TURN∧WIDE-OBJECT• COOK∧INSERT• COOK∧WIDE-OBJECT

Family signs for KETTLE

a. CUP^POUR-FROM-HANDLE as signed uniformly by all three members taped from one family

b. CUP^ROUND-OBJECT as signed uniformly by all five members taped from a different family

a.b.

Structural regularity in ABSL Compounds

• Strong generalization in syntax: head-modifier order in all phrases

• General (but weaker) tendency in compounds: modifier-head order in (endocentric) compounds containing a head and a modifier (opposite of phrase)

• Specific (but strong) tendency: The Size And Shape Specifier (SASS) comes last in a SASS compound

• The tendency is strongest in the SASS subset

Some ‘regular’endocentric compounds

• PRAY^HOUSE 'mosque’ • SCREW-IN^LIGHT 'light-bulb’• BABY^CLOTHES 'baby clothes’ • COFFEE^POT 'coffee pot’

Some SASS compounds in ABSL

• Two SASS compounds: – a. WRITE^LONG-THIN-OBJECT ‘pencil’ – b. TV^RECTANGULAR-OBJECT ‘remote control’

More SASS compounds

• DRINK-TEA^ROUNDED-OBJECT ‘kettle’• WATER^ROUNDED-OBJECT ‘pitcher’• CUCUMBER^LONG-THIN-OBJECT ‘cucumber’• PHOTO^FLAT-OBJECT ‘photograph’• CHICKEN^ SMALL-OVAL-OBJECT 'egg’ • COLD^BIG-RECTANGLE ‘refrigerator’

Modifier-head orderin endocentric compounds

SASS is last

The organization of compound nouns in ABSL

• There are few fixed compound words in ABSL• There is a tendency for the head of a

compound to be final• This contrasts with noun phrases, where the

head is initial• The tendency is strongest in a subset of

compounds, those whose head is a SASS• Individual noun compounds may become fixed

in ‘familylects’

Part IIUnresolved competition

• It is hard to describe the contribution of roots to linguistic systems within traditional analyses because roots cannot be understood in terms of (compositional) functions

• The second system we will look at is semantically compositional but not deterministic: for a given input there may be two competing outputs

• Deciding which competing output wins for any given input is a matter of probability, not certainty

Complementary distribution• Complementary distribution is a hallmark of certain

fully organized linguistic systems• Complementary distribution was first recognized in

phonology, where it was central to the structuralist notion of the phoneme

• The allophones of a phoneme are in complementary distribution

• Complementary distribution in morphology was first recognized explicitly in the 1970’s, with the device of blocking in Aronoff 1974/1976

• Blocking was originally used only for word formation and is not directly comparable to allophony

Complementary distribution in inflectional morphology

• Inflection is a mapping between two very different kinds of sets of objects: syntax and phonology

• Inflection is the realization of syntactic objects as phonological forms

• Inflectional realization systems often exhibit allomorphy, analogous to allophony in phonology

• Inflectional allomorphs are normally organized in terms of complementary distribution, just as allophones are in phonology (though the mappings are very different)

• All modern realizational accounts of morphological systems are couched in terms of complementary distribution

Complementary distribution as default inheritance in network morphology

• Brown and Hippisley (2012) provide a computationally implementable general account of complementary distribution in inflectional morphology

• The most important mechanism in this account is default inheritance within a network

• Default inheritance encodes the system of defaults very elegantly within network morphology

• More specific variants or lexical specifications override the default

• the default emerges where it is not overridden

Noncomplementary distribution

• The existence of noncomplementary distribution (NCD) has been recognized since the late 1960’s

• The importance of NCD was first recognized by Bill Labov in his work on sociolinguistic variation

• Labov originally emphasized the role of NCD in ‘sound change in progress’.

• The idea that NCD and variation are more generally characteristic of languages has gained importance in the study of dialects generally

Noncomplementary distribution in ‘standard’ languages

• There has been very little work on noncomplementary distribution in ‘standard’ languages

• This may be because of a notion that variation is more characteristic of nonstandard languages

• In a series of studies, Anna Thornton has discussed the concepts of ‘overabundance’ and ‘cell-mates’ in Modern Standard Italian

A case of noncomplementary distribution in inflection: The English comparative

• The comparison of adjectives (degree) in English is famously expressible by two means, the suffixes –er, -est and the adverbs more, most

• Degree is usually considered to be syntactic rather than lexemic and hence inflectional (Zwicky 1989)

• the adverbial expressions of degree is accordingly termed periphrastic morphology

• Periphrastic forms are usually treated as filling cells in a lexemic paradigm alongside affixed forms– Latin perfect passive– Romance perfect

The distribution of the rival realizations of degree in English

• The two means of expressing the comparative/superlative degrees in English appear at first glance to be in complementary distribution, like other competing inflectional realizations:

1. Words of one syllable generally take –er/-est2. Two-syllable words ending in-y take -er/-est: sillier,

livelier, but *foolisher, *rampanter• Predicate-only adjectives take only the periphrastic

form: *awarer, *afraider, *contenter 1. Elsewhere, only periphrastic forms occur, notably with

adjectives of more than two syllables

Not so simple

• There are many exceptions and uncertainties• Some one-syllable words avoid –er: ?apter

• Clearly borrowed words avoid –er/-est: *loucher

• Most exceptions and uncertainties occur among two-syllable words– Some two syllable words ending in unstressed syllables

other than –y also prefer -er/-est: narrow, noble, simple, clever

– But some words of this type prefer periphrasis: vapid, callow

Linguists differ about individual words

• Zwicky (1989) says that disyllables with tense vowels in their final syllable take -er/-est:– profound, polite, sincere, obscure,

shallow • My intuition:– disyllables with tense vowels in their final syllable

accept both forms– There is some lexical preference for one form or

the other• See below

Not so simple• Zwicky quotes Evans and Evans (1957): “But this is a description of

what usually happens, not of what must happen. Mark Twain wrote: the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud.”

• Jespersen (1949, p. 347) writes that “a good deal is left to the taste of the individual speaker or writer” and that the “rules given in ordinary grammars are often too dogmatic.”

• “Disyllabic words have always been subject to more variation.” (Kyto and Romaine 2000, p. 180)

• Frequency plays an important role among two-syllable words (Graziano-King 1999)

• A number of authors say that there are stylistic differences between the two, with the periphrastic form more common in written registers, but this has not been established

How long has this been going on?

• The two strategies are very old• Latin had both, with the periphrastic

expressions magis and plus used for participles and other forms

• Romance lost the suffixed forms fairly early on• Other Germanic languages, including Modern

German, have only the suffixed forms, except for participles

How long has this been going on?• There are Old English examples of the periphrastic

construction with the adverbs ma,bet, and swiđor:– Θaet hi syn sylfe ma gode đonne ođre men – “that they themselves are more good than other men”

• There are even examples of double periphrastics in OE• OE examples of these adverbs with participles (usually

past) in predicate position are attested• The periphrastic use of more increased in Middle

English, with support from French and Medieval Latin• The modern distribution developed gradually over a

period of centuries (Kyto and Romaine (1997)

Victorina González-DiazEnglish Adjective Comparison: A

Historical Perspective

• This 2008 corpus-based study is the most comprehensive synchronic and diachronic description of the rivalry between the two forms

• G-D concludes that, though one predominates in certain environments, the distribution is not discrete and has never been

Type Adjective Inflectional Periphrastic-ly class

lonely 11 (73%) 4 (27%)

lively 55 (60%) 37 (40%)lowly 6 (46%) 7 (54%)friendly 47 (41%) 67 (59%)

-y class shaky 7 (88%) 1 (22%)weighty 19 (76%) 6 (24%)clumsy 12 (75%) 4 (25%)glossy 7 (70%) 3 (30%)empty 11 (68%) 5 (32%)cosy 20 (59%) 14 (41%)scary 8 (57%) 6 (43%)angry 38 (57%) 29 (43%)risky 39 (49%) 41 (51%)sleepy 3 (33%) 6 (67%)ready 23 (31%) 52 (69%)cloudy 3 (27%) 8 (73%)

Syllabic /l/ class noble 20 (65%) 11 (35%)feeble 11 (61%) 7 (39%)

Total 340 (53%) 308 (47%)

Distribution of two strategies for disyllables in BNC

(from González-Dias)

Syntactic function and second term of comparison, cross-tabulation

Google Books counts

• We compared pairs with the two rival comparative forms using Google books

• We used a window of 1900 – present in order to control for diachronic effects

• We consider only the 937 pairs in which each member reaches at least 500 hits in the corpus

• We have only begun to explore the data and it is a little dirty – yiddisher, slaver, boarder, forester, stomacher,

networker, supplier,

Google Books counts• The largest difference tends to appear with monosyllables,

which strongly favor –er, though frequency may also be a factor here

• Disyllables not ending in –y rarely make the threshold but go both ways– Examples: handsome, beautiful, hollow, stupid, pleasant,

divine, clever, unkind, sublime, civil, minute, remote,– See Zwicky’s disyllables

• Even some monosyllables go the other way, e.g. more prone > proner (log 2.667)– Prone appears almost exclusively in predicate position, supporting

the importance of this effect, which needs further exploration

Google Books counts

• Disyllables ending in –y tend to have the most balanced distribution– Blocky, leaky, grainy, lonely, scaly,

haughty are among the 10 most balanced

• Many monosyllables are among the most balanced– Sour, lewd, sly, ripe, odd, cute, stark,

mute, frank, deaf, blunt, lush, lame

Zwicky’s disyllables

• Zwicky’s disyllables are among the few that take –er, but more predominates even with these

Non-discrete grammar

1. -er is much more likely with monosyllables but not with very infrequent or phonologically marked forms

2. The two systems are both found with disyllables ending in –y but with clear lexical effects

3. -er is much more likely in attributive position4. -er is much less likely in predicative position5. This distribution has been fairly stable for a millennium6. There is no complementary distribution and no general

default

Conclusion

• Languages contain partially organized subsystems

• Some of these subsystems consist of patterns of partially motivated signs

• Some of these subsystems consist of unresolved but stable competitions between rival expressions

• If we believe that languages are discrete we will be blind to regularities of these types