[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

[Dingemanse, Mark]

Hi all,


Dediu & Levinson 2013 have some discussion of time-depth in relation typological diversity that is tangentially relevant to the Proto-World discussion. They believe that the possibility of some form of Neanderthal speech and language may put the antiquity of language at about half a million years, giving it much more time to explore the typological possibility space: "Another consequence is that the present-day linguistic diversity might better reflect the properties of the design space for language and not just the vagaries of history, and could also contain traces of the languages spoken by other human forms such as the Neandertals."


Whatever you make of that particular argument, it is clear that modern languages have had quite some time to undergo cultural evolution by both drift and selection since "Proto-World" (whether mono or poly). If there are any patterns or structures that survive this long, they are likely to be kept in place by factors like efficiency, processing, interactional infrastructure, or other kinds of transmission biases (I think biologists call this stabilising evolution). In other words, if we find strong universals today, they are unlikely to be there merely because "Proto-World" was like that and they just happened to be passed on.


Take for example a pragmatic universal like the use of a "Huh?"-like interjection to ask for clarification. This is attested in roughly the same form and function in all spoken languages for which we have sufficient data (Dingemanse et al. 2013). So it seems to be a fairly strong universal. We've argued this item is optimally adapted to its interactional ecology (basically, it's the most effient question word when you're under pressure to respond but didn't quite catch what was said). To the extent that the same interactional pressures of turn-taking and formulation hold for "Proto-World", it is reasonable to assume some form like it would also have been present there.


However, the same pressures are still active today and so the striking similarities we find today might be the result of stabilising evolution or of independent convergent evolution, as we noted in our paper: "Our proposal accounts for the present-day cross-linguistic similarity of "huh?", but has to remain agnostic as to its ultimate origins – in the absence of historical language data it is impossible to tell whether the present-day forms go back to one ancestral form (a stabilising evolution scenario [77]) or whether they arose independently in different languages (an independent convergent evolution scenario [78]). In either case, the selective pressures are the same."


Something similar may hold for word order. The communicative ethology of turn-taking likely predates at least some aspects of modern language (Pika et al. 2018). Roberts & Levinson have argued that the cultural evolution of word order may be partly explained in terms of turn-taking pressures (Roberts & Levinson 2017). An important caveat here is that word order generalizations look to me like a good case for multiple causation: there are several reasonable theories that help explain the current distribution, and rather than only one of these theories being the single magic bullet it's likely that they conspire together.


Best,


Mark


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Dediu, D., & Levinson, S. C. (2013). On the antiquity of language: The reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences. Frontiers in Language Sciences, 4:, 397. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397

Dingemanse, M., Torreira, F., & Enfield, N. J. (2013). Is “Huh?” a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items. PLOS ONE, 8(11), e78273. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078273

Pika, S., Wilkinson, R., Kendrick, K. H., & Vernes, S. C. (2018). Taking turns: Bridging the gap between human and animal communication. Proc. R. Soc. B, 285(1880), 20180598. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2018.0598

Roberts, S. G., & Levinson, S. C. (2017). Conversation, cognition and cultural evolution: A model of the cultural evolution of word order through pressures imposed from turn taking in conversation. Interaction Studies, 18(3), 404–431. doi: 10.1075/is.18.3.06rob




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