Evolution Of Grammar Research Articles

Story Grammar Analyses Capture Discourse Improvement in the First 2 Years Following a Severe Traumatic Brain Injury.

Narration within a story grammar framework requires speakers to organize characters and events logically. Despite abundant research characterizing narrative deficits following a traumatic brain injury (TBI), the evolution of narrative story grammar over the first 2 years post-TBI has rarely been explored. This study analyzed story grammar in complex narratives of adults with and without severe TBI to (a) examine between-group differences and (b) investigate longitudinal changes over the first 2 years post-TBI. Story grammar analyses of Cinderella narratives from 57 participants with TBI and 57 participants with no brain injury yielded measures of productivity (total number of episodes, total number of story grammar elements), elaboration (total number of elaborated-complete episodes, mean number of episodic elements per episode), and completeness (total number of incomplete episodes). Mann-Whitney U tests compared measures across groups; generalized estimating equation (GEE) models identified predictors of change, including recovery time (3, 6, 9, 12, and 24 months post-TBI) and demographic/injury-related characteristics. Between-group differences were statistically significant for all productivity and elaboration measures at 3, 6, and 9 months post-TBI; one productivity measure and one elaboration measure at 12 months; and none of the measures at 24 months. GEE models showed significant improvements in all productivity and elaboration measures over the first 24 months post-TBI, with educational attainment and duration of posttraumatic amnesia affecting recovery. Incomplete episodes only showed between-group differences at 12 months and did not capture recovery. Productivity and elaboration are key story grammar variables that (a) differentiate complex narration in individuals with and without severe TBI and (b) capture narrative improvements over the first 2 years post-TBI. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25148999.

Grammatical cues to subjecthood are redundant in a majority of simple clauses across languages

Grammatical cues are sometimes redundant with word meanings in natural language. For instance, English word order rules constrain the word order of a sentence like “The dog chewed the bone” even though the status of “dog” as subject and “bone” as object can be inferred from world knowledge and plausibility. Quantifying how often this redundancy occurs, and how the level of redundancy varies across typologically diverse languages, can shed light on the function and evolution of grammar. To that end, we performed a behavioral experiment in English and Russian and a cross-linguistic computational analysis measuring the redundancy of grammatical cues in transitive clauses extracted from corpus text. English and Russian speakers (n = 484) were presented with subjects, verbs, and objects (in random order and with morphological markings removed) extracted from naturally occurring sentences and were asked to identify which noun is the subject of the action. Accuracy was high in both languages (∼89% in English, ∼87% in Russian). Next, we trained a neural network machine classifier on a similar task: predicting which nominal in a subject-verb-object triad is the subject. Across 30 languages from eight language families, performance was consistently high: a median accuracy of 87%, comparable to the accuracy observed in the human experiments. The conclusion is that grammatical cues such as word order are necessary to convey subjecthood and objecthood in a minority of naturally occurring transitive clauses; nevertheless, they can (a) provide an important source of redundancy and (b) are crucial for conveying intended meaning that cannot be inferred from the words alone, including descriptions of human interactions, where roles are often reversible (e.g., Ray helped Lu/Lu helped Ray), and expressing non-prototypical meanings (e.g., “The bone chewed the dog.”).

Detecting directional forces in the evolution of grammar: A case study of the English perfect with intransitives across EEBO, COHA, and Google Books

Languages have diverse characteristics that have emerged through evolution. In modern English grammar, the perfect is formed with have+PP (past participle), but in earlier English, the be+PP form also existed. It is widely recognised that the auxiliary verb BE was replaced by HAVE throughout evolution, except for some special cases. However, whether this evolution was caused by natural selection or random drift is still unclear. Here we examined directional forces in the evolution of the English perfect with intransitive by combining three large-scale data sources: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and Google Books. We found that most intransitive verbs exhibited an apparent transition from be+PP to have+PP, most of which were classified as ‘selection’ by a deep neural network-based model. These results suggest that the English perfect could have evolved through natural selection rather than random drift, and provide insights into the cultural evolution of grammar.

Transition to language: From agent perception to event representation.

Spoken language, as we have it, requires specific capacities-at its most basic advanced vocal control and complex social cognition. In humans, vocal control is the basis for speech, achieved through coordinated interactions of larynx activity and rapid changes in vocal tract configurations. Most likely, speech evolved in response to early humans perceiving reality in increasingly complex ways, to the effect that primate-like signaling became unsustainable as a sole communication device. However, in what ways did and do humans see the world in more complex ways compared to other species? Although animal signals can refer to external events, in contrast to humans, they usually refer to the agents only, sometimes in compositional ways, but never together with patients. It may be difficult for animals to comprehend events as part of larger social scripts, with antecedent causes and future consequences, which are more typically tie the patient into the event. Human brain enlargement over the last million years probably has provided the cognitive resources to represent social interactions as part of bigger social scripts, which enabled humans to go beyond an agent-focus to refer to agent-patient relations, the likely foundation for the evolution of grammar. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Linguistics > Evolution of Language Psychology > Comparative.

A Diachronic Study of the Phenomena of Degree Adverbs Modifying Nouns in Southeast Asia <i>Huayu</i>

China has a long history of overseas migration, and Southeast Asia has been the traditional main destination of our overseas migration because of its geographical advantage. In the context of the global spread of the <i>Huayu</i>, it is of great significance to explore the evolutionary process of <i>Huayu</i> development in Southeast Asia as a relay station for the spread and radiation of the <i>Huayu</i> to the world. The overall situation of <i>Huayu</i> studies is that there are more lexical studies and less grammatical studies, and less attention has been paid to the development of <i>Huayu</i> in its historical plane, including its formation process and the facts of its development and evolution since then. It can be seen that the overall research is not balanced, and grammar itself is very important. Due to the lack of grammar research, the overall understanding of <i>Huayu</i> has been affected. The study of <i>Huayu</i> has developed rapidly, and various studies are being carried out. Relatively speaking, grammar is lagging behind and needs to catch up quickly. The article takes the phenomenon of degree adverb modifying nouns as an entry point to investigate the development and evolution of grammar in Southeast Asia <i>Huayu</i>. It is found that degree adverbs modifying nouns have shown an upward trend in the centuries-old <i>Huayu</i>, as evidenced by the fact that degree adverbs can be combined with more abstract nouns and the range of nouns modified has also been expanded. In addition, investigating the use of this linguistic phenomenon in <i>Huayu</i>, Putonghua, and Mandarin in a global perspective, it can be found that the three maintain a greater consistency.

What are the guiding principles in the evolution of language: Paradigmatics or syntagmatics?

AbstractThe main designs of modern theories of syntax assume a process of syntagmatic organization. However, research on first language acquisition leaves no doubt that the structured combination of single lexical items cannot begin until a critical mass of lexical items has been acquired such that the lexicon is structured hierarchically on the basis of hierarchical feature bundling. Independent of a decision between the main views about the design of a proto language (the grammarless “Holophrastic view”,Arbib &amp; Bickerton 2010: 1,Bickerton 2014) or the ‘Compositional View’ as taken byRizzi (2010),Carstairs-McCarthy (2010), and others. What seems to be the minimal offset for language is the existence of grammatical categories like verb and noun, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, functional categories as needed for the expression of all kinds of agreement between the distinct categories to form recursively structured complexes. I follow the different stages of complexification asking whether there is paradigmatic next to syntagmatic organization and what its added value is for the evolution of grammar. The conclusion will be that paradigmatics is an indismissible part of the organization of early language in that it structures the lexicon so as to make primary and secondary syntactic merge possible and, consequently, is also a prerequisite for movement. The guiding idea of this position is Roman Jakobson’s insistence on the twofold organization of language and grammar. The two organizational designs, syntagmatics and paradigmatics, are manifest within each module: in the phonetic, the morphological, the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic form (consider Jakobson’s1971a,breiterated argument).

The intruder in the book Bergstrasher Development Grammar Critical study

The study of the study of the intruder of the Abyssinian in Bergstrasher's book The Evolution of Grammar, has been addressedThe study of six words mentioned by Bergstrasher (Nafq, cleft, Tribune, Mihrab, Mushaf, Al-Hawari)The German Schwarzenegger Bergstrasher tries to remove everythingArabic and non-Arabic, and Bergstrasher's claims have been answered with conclusive evidenceWhich shows the authenticity of the original Arab heritage.

The History of the Spanish Preposition Mediante. Beyond the Theory of Grammaticalization

The most generally accepted diachrony of mediante assumes a grammaticalization path that started in an absolute clause, which first evolved into a preposition, and later into conjunction. However, data reveals that its development is not connected to an evolution in terms of grammaticalization. Indeed, mediante was introduced in Spanish in the fourteenth century as a consequence of syntactic borrowing from Medieval Latin. More specifically, this borrowing entered Old Spanish through Aragonese and Catalan (languages spoken in the east of the Iberian Peninsula). Since its first examples, mediante has acted as a preposition, and its form, connected to present participles, would give texts a cultured and Latinising air that was well-suited to the rhetorical guidelines of the European Renaissance and pre-Renaissance. Thus, this paper shows that the writer and rhetorical rules have become a key factor in the evolution of grammar.

Restructuring of Proto-Omagua-Kukama kin terms

Abstract This article reconstructs the system of kin terms in Proto-Omagua-Kukama (POK), the ancestral language of the Omagua and Kukama-Kukamiria, and compares it to Tupinambá, a former language of the Brazilian Atlantic coast and their closest relative in the Tupí-Guaraní language family. I identify semantic shifts, analogy-based innovations, calques, and borrowings. I suggest that some of these changes are likely due to concomitant changes in pre-POK social structure. The identification of borrowings is potentially fruitful in determining which languages contributed to the setting that gave rise to POK. Detailed study of the evolution of the divergent grammar and lexicon of POK is crucial to understanding this social and linguistic history.

THE MOSAIC EVOLUTION OF LEFT DISLOCATION IN XHOSA

This paper demonstrates that the status of Clitic LD in Xhosa is a result of the mosaic evolution of Xhosa grammar. It emerges as an accumulation and combination of two more individual, distinct and, at least, initially separated developments and characteristics – LD sensu stricto and Object Agreement. This view enables the authors to propose a possible solution to the problem of whether the Clitic LD structure in Xhosa (and Nguni) is an instantiation of LD (and its prototypical function as posited by Westbury (2014)) or fronting (and its topical and focal functions). The Clitic LD structure is employed to accomplish the two tasks. The former is derived from the original LD construction, while the latter arose due to the Object Agreement cycle. The mosaic character of LD in Xhosa, in turn, demonstrates the situatedness of LD. LD is determined not only by its own evolutionary baggage (the source from which it has developed) but also by the dynamics of the environment in which it has been embedded (the properties of other constructions).

Agent-based models for the emergence and evolution of grammar.

Human languages are extraordinarily complex adaptive systems. They feature intricate hierarchical sound structures, are able to express elaborate meanings and use sophisticated syntactic and semantic structures to relate sound to meaning. What are the cognitive mechanisms that speakers and listeners need to create and sustain such a remarkable system? What is the collective evolutionary dynamics that allows a language to self-organize, become more complex and adapt to changing challenges in expressive power? This paper focuses on grammar. It presents a basic cycle observed in the historical language record, whereby meanings move from lexical to syntactic and then to a morphological mode of expression before returning to a lexical mode, and discusses how we can discover and validate mechanisms that can cause these shifts using agent-based models.This article is part of the themed issue 'The major synthetic evolutionary transitions'.

Semantic Connotation of Hadith and the Emergence of Arabic Schools of Grammar

Scholars focused the contributions of the Qur’ān to the evolution of Arabic Grammar, but few of them focused on the effect of prophetic tradition on the area. This paper, therefore, focuses on semantic connotation of prophetic traditions: “Guide your brother, he has gone astray” and “Divergent opinion of my followers is a blessing” These sayings of the prophet led to the evolution of Arabic grammatical studies and the establishment of its schools that enriched Arabic grammar. It opens with the grammarians’ contribution to the development of Arabic grammar such as Abul-Aswad Addu’alī (d.69 A.H), Seyyid ‘Ali b. Abī Talib, al-Khalīl ibn Ahmad al-Farāhidī and so on. Although, There were five major schools of Arabic grammar namely: al-Madhhab al-Basra, al-Madhhab al- Kūfa, alMadhhab al-Bagdād, al-Madhhab al- Andalusī and al-Madhhab al- Misrī but this paper, mainly focuses on the two prominent schools - Basran and Kūfan. It analyses the conflict of theory in Arabic grammar on some topics and other terms, grammatical debates between notable scholars of the two schools with their divergent opinions. The discussion ends with the justification of analogical deduction employed by the two schools in their analysis as a commendable exercise.

Toward more accountability: Modeling ternary genitive variation in Late Modern English

AbstractWhereas the alternation between thes-genitive (the New Year's message) and theof-genitive (the message of the New Year) is well documented, our study offers a more accountable analysis of genitive variation by including noun-noun (NN)-genitives (the New Year message). We consider four different variable contexts (sversusof, NN versusof, NN versuss, and NN versussversusof ), which we analyze using regression analysis. The dataset consists of 10,054 variable genitives drawn from theRepresentative Corpus of Historical English Registers. The material covers the period between 1650 and 2000, thus enabling us to track the evolution of variable genitive grammar in real time. We report that there is an overall drift toward the NN-genitive, which is preferred over other variants when constituent noun phrases are short, possessor constituents are inanimate, and possessum constituents are thematic. In addition to these substantive contributions, we showcase methods of dealing with a complex dataset covering nonbinary grammatical variation.

Form and Function in the Evolution of Grammar.

This article focuses on claims about the origin and evolution of language from the point of view of the formalist-functionalist debate in linguistics. In linguistics, an account of a grammatical phenomenon is considered "formal" if it accords center stage to the structural properties of that phenomenon, and "functional" if it appeals to the language user's communicative needs or to domain-general human capacities. The gulf between formalism and functionalism has been bridged in language evolution research, in that some leading formalists, Ray Jackendoff for one, appeal to functional mechanisms such as natural selection. In Jackendoff's view, the biological evolution of language has proceeded in stages, each stage improving communicative efficiency. This article calls into question that idea, pointing to the fact that well-understood purely historical processes suffice to explain the emergence of many grammatical properties. However, one central aspect of formalist linguistic theorizing-the idea of the autonomy of syntax-poses a challenge to the idea, central to most functionalist approaches, that the nature of grammar is a product of purely historical (as opposed to biological) evolution. The article concludes with a discussion of the origins of the autonomy of syntax, speculating that it may well have arisen over evolutionary (as opposed to historical) time.

Univerbation via liaison and the evolution of lexicon and grammar in Northern Akhvakh

One of the most striking particularities of Northern Akhvakh is the pervasiveness of a phonological process for which I use the term liaison, traditional in French linguistics. This phonological process blurs word boundaries, possibly resulting in various lexicalization and grammaticalization phenomena. In this paper, after describing the phonological process and discussing its conditioning, I examine itsrole in the evolution of the lexicon, the emergence of new grammatical forms, the development of infixation, and changes in the valency properties of Akhvakh verbs.

Grammaticalization at an early stage: futurebe going toin conservative British dialects

The Englishgofuture, a quintessential example of grammaticalization, has shown layering withwillsince at least 1490. To date, most synchronic evidence for this development comes from dialects wherebe going torepresents a sizable proportion of the future temporal reference system. However, in the United Kingdom in the late twentieth century there were still dialects wherebe going towas only beginning to make inroads, representing a mere 10–15 per cent of future contexts. These varieties offer an effective view of the early stages of grammatical change.Statistical analysis of nearly 5,000 variable contexts reveals that the use ofbe going tois increasing across generations, but at different rates, depending on location and orientation to mainstream norms. Major patterns of use mirror previous findings:be going tois favoured for subordinate clauses. However, other widely reported constraints conditioningbe going toare radically different across age groups, exposing contrasts between incipient vs later stages of grammaticalization. In the most conservative dialectsbe going tois strongly correlated with negatives and questions especially in the first person singular. This suggests that these contexts may have been the ‘trigger’ environments for redistribution of meaning of the incoming grammatical form (Hopper &amp; Traugott 1993: 85). The fact that strong effects of negatives and questions endure in contemporary urban varieties (Torres-Cacoullos &amp; Walker 2009) confirms that grammaticalization begins in very specific syntactic contexts, and impacts on the system for generations to come. In contrast, other reported constraints – resistance ofbe going toin the first person singular and extension to inanimates and far future readings – emerge across generations, suggesting they are later developments.Taken together, these findings demonstrate how synchronic dialects show us incremental steps in the grammaticalization process. Comparative sociolinguistic analysis thus offers insights into which patterns define the point of grammaticalization itself; which derive from systemic processes; which can be attributed to discourse routines and collocations; and how these factors converge in shaping the evolution of grammar.

From the Guest Editor: “Creating the Contours of Grammar”

We are pleased to present Aspect in Slavic: Creating Time, Creating Grammar as a special issue of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics. Here we offer some of the research results of the CLEAR (Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian) group at the University of Tromso and our collaborators. This research was sponsored by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council for a project entitled Neat Theories, Messy Realities and by a grant from the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for a project entitled Time Is Space: Unconscious Models and Conscious Acts. (1) All of the contributions to this special issue approach topics relating to the metaphorical representation and evolution of grammar, particularly with respect to verbs and their interpretation. In this introduction I will situate these works with respect to relevant research on the role of cognitive processes in structuring grammar (e.g., Coulson 2006, Fauconnier and Turner 2002 and 2008, Langacker 2006 and 2008), and on the metaphorical structure of aspect (Croft 2012). As human beings, we tend to think of reality as something objectively separate from ourselves that is delivered to our perceptual organs in conveniently discrete units. However, there is ample evidence that this is a naive and incomplete view. Instead, external input is processed in an interactive fashion that creates structure beyond what is out there. As Coulson (2006) points out, vision is an excellent example of this interactive process. At the place where the optic nerve passes through the retina, there are no photoreceptor cells, so we have no visual input. Yet we do not experience a hole in the visual field, because our brains fill in what would be missing. Blinking also disrupts visual input for about 100-400 milliseconds about 10 times per minute, but we don't notice any discontinuity thanks again to the completion effected by our brains. Researchers in robotics face enormous obstacles due to the differences between our human experience of vision, in which boundaries and objects are easy to see, as opposed to cameras, which are unable to detect the relevant discontinuities. Various optical illusions are made possible by the constructive nature of vision, which is context-sensitive and able to interpolate where input is inadequate due to differences in lighting, viewpoint angle, or obstructions. Language is similarly context-sensitive and constructive. Fauconnier and Turner (2002 and 2008) present a detailed model of how cognitive processes such as conceptual integration and compression make the construction of meaning possible. The full meaning of an utterance is not encoded in the linguistic string. Instead, background knowledge and context are essential resources in making meaning possible. More crucially, use of language often involves partitioning and organizing information in creative ways, given that new structure can emerge as a result of cognitive processes. We can create distinctions: the perfective versus imperfective distinction is not something that exists objectively; instead, it is creatively projected onto perceived events, and different language communities are free to construct such distinctions in different ways. Thanks to blending, we can integrate mental spaces that clash with reality and thus conceive of things that don't exist, as in the use of modals, counterfactuals, and future tense (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: chapter 11). We can even assign multiple interpretations to a single item of realia, such as snails (which evokes a biological frame) vs. escargot (which evokes a culinary frame; Langacker 2008: 49). Coulson (2006) makes the case that parallels between the fundamentally constructive processes of vision and of language are not merely accidental. They likely rely upon the same neurological mechanisms of connectivity, in which the behavior of any given neuron is influenced by others that connect to it, yielding networks of cells that fire simultaneously. …

Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins and William Pagliuca The Evolution of Grammar:Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World

Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins and William Pagliuca The Evolution of Grammar:Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World

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“Kataptation” or the Qwerty-Effect in Language Evolution

Suppose that an archeologist of the future finds keyboards that belong to electronic computers only but not to mechanical typewriters. How could the archeologist explain the fact that only one type of key letter layout, namely the “QWERTY” layout, was available in the English speaking world? The explanation for this apparently chaotic (i.e., non-alphabetic) letter disposition is that this arrangement was designed to reduce the probability of physical clashing of metal type-bars by placing commonly used combinations of letters as far as possible from each other. This specific layout, which was only one among several other possible combinations, was then preserved even if the function for which it was originally designed had disappeared in the age of electronic keyboards (Liebowitz and Margolis, 1990). The archeologist will just not be able to explain the keyboard display because the original reasons are no longer available to observation. The theoretical point I would like to raise here is that we may face similar situations in the domain of neurolinguistics and possibly of cognitive science. Recent studies proved that those types of grammars that are never found across languages, that is non-recursive grammars (Moro, 2011) are nevertheless attainable by the human mind, although they recruit non-language specific networks (Tettamanti et al., 2002; Musso et al., 2003; Moro, 2008). Why don't humans get better grammars or just more grammars if they are nevertheless attainable? Mutatis mutandis, for a cognitive scientist to explain this phenomenon may be as impossible as for our archeologist to explain the QWERTY disposition is. The theoretical point I would like to raise here is that this state of affairs is expected on purely conceptual grounds as the opposite of what is known as “exaptation,” i.e., the persistence in a population of a trait that is modified for functional reasons different from those for which it was originally selected (Gould and Vrba, 1982). We may then call the analogous of the QWERTY effect in biology “kataptation,” i.e., the persistence in a population of a trait that survives unmodified even if the original function that the trait was selected for disappeared and no other function has replaced it. Notice that kataptation may well reflect both phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. When it comes to language, phylogenetic hypotheses are extremely difficult because there is no empirical evidence of evolution of grammar (Scott-Phillips and Kirby, 2010): there is language change, of course, but this is the outcome of some degree of freedom of grammars which leaves all major properties of language structure, such as recursion, unchanged (Newmeyer, 2005; Crisma and Longobardi, 2009). As for ontogenetic factors, instead, the experimental path may be accessible: it could well be that infants may have access to only certain types of grammars for temporary reasons related to the growth of brain circuitry that disappear in adults and simply maintain them (Kaan and Swaab, 2002). In other words, the fact that adults do not change or enhance the type of grammars that are available to infants and preserve their old style “QWERTY grammars” may just be a case of kataptation: unlike deciduous teeth nature has not provided us with deciduous grammars in the cognitive domain.