Linguists find historical context and language development link
We use language to communicate with each other. But while thousands of languages have emerged over the years, the intricacies of their development have remained a puzzle for many ... until now. A new study led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands reveals that word orders in languages from diverse language families develop in varied ways. The findings, presented in the journal Nature, demonstrate that languages do not primarily follow innate rules of language processing in the brain. On the contrary, the historical context in which a language develops determines sentence structure. Do restrictions on languages exist? Researchers say they do, despite their diversity. The ultimate aim of linguistics is to describe the diversity of human languages and elucidate existing constraints on that diversity. They primarily look for recurring patterns in the structure of language. Although sounds and sentence structure patterns abound, linguistic 'chaos' is restricted. Experts say individual language patterns repeat themselves. In some languages, for instance, the verb is placed at the start of the sentence while in others it is placed either in the middle or at the end. Words in any language are formed under certain principles. For the purposes of this study, the team led by Michael Dunn and Stephen Levinson at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics assessed 301 languages from 4 major language families: Austronesian, Indo-European, Bantu and Uto-Aztecan. 'Understanding this diversity and the systematic constraints on it is the central goal of linguistics. The generative approach to linguistic variation has held that linguistic diversity can be explained by changes in parameter settings,' the authors write. 'Each of these parameters controls a number of specific linguistic traits.' The team paid particular attention to the order of various sentence parts including 'preposition-noun', 'genitive-noun', 'object-verb' or 'relative clause-noun'. They also looked at whether their position in the sentence influenced the other parts of the sentence. Doing this allowed the team to determine whether the position of the verb has other syntactic consequences. A case in point: if the verb precedes the object ('The player kicks the ball'), is the preposition simultaneously placed before the noun (into the goal')? This type of pattern is seen in a number of languages, but is it a guaranteed feature of how languages develop? 'Our study shows that different processes occur in different language families,' Dr Dunn says. 'The evolution of language does not follow one universal set of rules.' The 'verb-object' pattern has an impact on the 'preposition-noun' pattern in both the Austronesian and Indo-European languages, for example. It should be noted, however, that it is neither influenced in the same way nor does it impact the other two language families. The US linguist Noam Chomsky believes that there are universal similarities between all languages. According to him, this is because of an innate language faculty that functions according to the same principle in all humans. But the linguist Joseph Greenberg believes in a 'universal word-order', whereby the general mechanisms of language-processing in the brain accordingly determine word-order and sentence structure. The findings of the Max Planck study are inconsistent with both of these views. 'Our study suggests that cultural evolution has much more influence on language development than universal factors,' Professor Levinson explains. 'Language structure is apparently not so much biologically determined as it is shaped by its ancestry,' he adds. 'These findings support the view that - at least with respect to word order - cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states,' the authors write. What's next on the list? The researchers will investigate the evolutionary processes governing language structure in other language families, they say. They will also evaluate the differences of other linguistic features within this evolutionary perspective. Experts from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and the University of Auckland in New Zealand contributed to this study.For more information, please visit: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics:http://www.mpi.nl/Nature:http://www.nature.com/
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