Complexity in Language
description
Transcript of Complexity in Language
![Page 1: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Complexity in Language
Why don’t languages evolve toward efficiency?
![Page 2: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
“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.
![Page 3: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
What counts as `arbitrary’?
• The tale of the human children and the chimp children
![Page 4: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
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
![Page 5: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
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
![Page 6: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Arbitrary categories are not grounded in semantics
• Gender• Verb classes
![Page 7: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
• 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’.
![Page 8: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Spanish gender agreement
• mesa (fem)• la mesa amarilla • mano (fem)• la mano sucia• hombre (masc)• el hombre guapo• artista (masc)• el artista generoso
![Page 9: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
Verb classes
• Verb classes are the arbitrary divisions of verbs into groups with different morphology, sometimes startlingly so, that marks the same linguistic category.
![Page 10: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
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
![Page 11: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
• What is the past tense of ‘sneak’? (a fun group exercise)
![Page 12: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
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.
![Page 13: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
• 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.
![Page 14: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
• 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)
![Page 15: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
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)
![Page 16: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
• (3) ini- -wóoniisk -óʔi• 1DU-talk:IMPERF-HAB• `You and I talk habitually.’ (Feeling &
Pulte 1975)
• But, Cherokee does not have gender!!
![Page 17: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
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.
![Page 18: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
• Pidgins are characterized by radical loss of complexity: syntactic, phonological, and especially morphological.
![Page 19: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/19.jpg)
• 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.
![Page 20: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/20.jpg)
• Syntactically and morphologically, pronouns are often reduced to a single form (me, him) while tense and aspect are rendered with adverbs:
• ‘Him go yesterday.’
![Page 21: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/21.jpg)
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.
![Page 22: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
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.)
![Page 23: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/23.jpg)
• 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.’
![Page 24: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/24.jpg)
• 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.
![Page 25: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/25.jpg)
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.
![Page 26: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/26.jpg)
• 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.
![Page 27: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/27.jpg)
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.
![Page 28: Complexity in Language](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/568164a0550346895dd691c9/html5/thumbnails/28.jpg)
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.