Complexity in Language

Why don’t languages evolve toward efficiency?

“As they evolve, things become more efficient.”

• Efficient operations, tools, methods, etc. should drive out those that are difficult and costly.

• Language has been around long enough that it should have shed arbitrary, encumbering, opaque, redundant, and just plain weird features and honed those that contribute to precision and clarity.

What counts as `arbitrary’?

• The tale of the human children and the chimp children

Most linguistic categories match semantic notions

• a ‘cat’ is a cat• tense is concept of time• pronouns map to persons• agents and objects are agents and objects• et cetera

Languages choose and differ in which categories will be required

• Some languages mark tense (actual time: English) while others mark aspect (the way time unfolds: Yoruba).

• Some languages build into words the relations between agent and object (English) while others mark them overtly (Salish).

• et cetera

Arbitrary categories are not grounded in semantics

• Gender• Verb classes

• Gender is the compulsion to place nouns into classes. It is not necessary.

• Genders that are putatively based on some semantic notion (e.g. natural sex) collapse into arbitrary assignment fairly early.

• Gender nearly always involves recruiting other categories to display evidence of ‘agreement’.

Spanish gender agreement

• mesa (fem)• la mesa amarilla • mano (fem)• la mano sucia• hombre (masc)• el hombre guapo• artista (masc)• el artista generoso

Verb classes

• Verb classes are the arbitrary divisions of verbs into groups with different morphology, sometimes startlingly so, that marks the same linguistic category.

Some English verb classes

• The default past tense affix –ed is used with the largest verb class

• Smaller classes often share phonological features.

• swim-swam-swum and its classmates (‘sing’)• bring-brought and its classmates (`think’)• Note how these classes are conflated in non-

standard dialects: brang; thunk

• What is the past tense of ‘sneak’? (a fun group exercise)

Cherokee is scary

• Cherokee has an impressive amount of arbitrary complexity.

• Phonologically: tone, nasalization, vowel length, stress, besides funky consonant clusters.

• Morphologically: 10 person/number pronoun distinctions with more than 30 outputs based on subject-object relations and conjugation class.

• 5 verb stem classes yielding 28 alternations (depends on which linguist is counting)

• Position affixes reproduce 5 stem classes• Change of pronoun type depending on verb class,

conjugation class, and type of tense marker. (These are clearly independent semantically.)

• Operations are marked by using TOGETHER tone + stem class + conjugation class + type of affix + position of affix.

• Position 1 = lexical root• + Position 2 +Position 3 (optional) +Position 4• Aspects: Aspects: Aspect:• imperfective andative habitual • perfective duplicative• punctual incipient Fused aspect: • iterative punctual past• Fused aspect: completive • imperfective/present venitive Other inflections:

• ambulative• experienced past (tense/evidential)

• Other inflections: reported past (tense/evid)• infinitive/hortative Valences: imperative (mood)• applicative future imperative

(tns/mood) • causative future (tense)

Examples of aspect manipulation

• (1) uu- áakhuyáthan-iílóòsk -vvʔi• 3SG-burp:PERF -ITER/IMPERF-

EXPER.PST• `He was burping repeatedly.’• (2) uùnii-wóonis -éesti• 3P -talk:PERF-FUT• ‘They will have talked.’ (Montgomery-

Anderson 2008)

• (3) ini- -wóoniisk -óʔi• 1DU-talk:IMPERF-HAB• `You and I talk habitually.’ (Feeling &

Pulte 1975)

• But, Cherokee does not have gender!!

Evidence from pidgins and creoles

• A pidgin is a language that is created quickly, by force, and by ADULTS.

• Speakers retain some grammatical and phonological features of their native (substrate) language, replacing vocabulary with the dominant (superstrate) language.

• In modern times, pidgins arose due to the slave trade, giving us a chance to examine what happens to human language in a peculiar laboratory.

• Pidgins are characterized by radical loss of complexity: syntactic, phonological, and especially morphological.

• A creole is a pidgin that has evolved, gaining child speakers.

• While very many African languages have tone, no creole does. Tone is an example of highly complex phonology.

• Creole languages have fewer vowels than either their substrate or superstrate languages.

• Syntactically and morphologically, pronouns are often reduced to a single form (me, him) while tense and aspect are rendered with adverbs:

• ‘Him go yesterday.’

Clawing back?

• Research question: are creoles gaining complexity?

• Answer so far: not much, not yet.• Children will perfectly acquire any language

that they are exposed to. Including pidgins.• Hypothesis: Creoles don’t gain arbitrary

categories because they have achieved efficiency.

The social dimension

• Adults can’t acquire languages efficiently, but they are great inventors of minutiae.

• Adults, especially young ones, seek to imitate those they perceive to be powerful, attractive, and correct.

• Example: the pronunciation of ‘Iranian’ in the US.

• That god-awful creaky voice that young women use. (Alert – spreading to young men.)

• While phonology and vocabulary change at a rapid rate, morphological and syntactic change is much slower.

• However, an innovative (read ‘incorrect’) form introduced by a person/group of status may gain currency and exist in tandem with an older form.

• Very often, an older form becomes less used and may eventually disappear, even becoming `wrong.’

• English borrowed the Cornish (Celtic) use of an auxiliary ‘do’, eventually making it mandatory in both questions and negation, radically changing surface word order.

• Old form: Knowest thou John?• New form: Do you know John?• Old form: I know him not.• New form: I do not know him.• Adults did this. It probably took several centuries. The

actual syntactic difference is smaller than it looks.

Some inferences

• We hypothesize that there is a limit to the complexity of natural language that children can acquire, but we haven’t found it yet.

• Deep arbitrary complexity is a sign of a very old language.

• There’s no reason to get rid of complexity if children are the ones who learn a language.

• Speakers, especially adults, will incrementally change a language through serendipitous means, sustained by social pressure.

• When groups gain large numbers of adults who speak another language, there is pressure to lose arbitrary complexity.

Predictions

• Creole languages will gain complexity, some of it arbitrary, slowly.

• Some very old language families (Algonquian, Iroquoian) will lose arbitrary complexity as child speakers become fewer and innovation disappears, while in-mixing of other groups becomes common.

• Very old but isolated languages (Georgian) will retain mind-boggling complexity.

New research question

• Efficiency is not especially relevant to human language once it is acquired and is used by persons who speak the same one.