O’Grady’s chapter discusses a recurring theme in Derek Bickerton’s work on creoles which focused on his observation, now somewhat controversial, that their morphosyntactic properties are surprisingly similar, which he attributed to a ‘language bioprogram’ bearing a close resemblance to Universal Grammar. O’Grady’s chapter explores a different line of reasoning by considering the role that processing pressures play in the syntax of creoles – and of human language in general. Drawing on data from anaphora and negation, both of which are well-documented core syntactic phenomena in natural language, he argues that their signature properties are shaped by considerations of computational efficiency and economy that can be traced to the need to minimize the burden on working memory.

Chapter 25 offers a survey of Jejueo (Cheju-ŏ), with a focus on two major issues. The first is the status of Jejueo and whether it deserves to be classified as a dialect of Korean, consistent with long-standing practice. Based on a test of its intelligibility to monolingual speakers of Korean, the chapter concludes that Jejueo is in fact a distinct language and deserves to be recognized as such. This finding leads to the question of how Jejueo differs in its phonology and morphosyntax from Korean. Drawing on the extensive treatment of this subject in the authors’ book, Jejueo: The Language of Korea’s Jeju Island (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), the chapter examines the salient features of its phonological patterns, its inventory of nominal particles, and its system of verbal inflection.

Research on working memory and language has followed two quite divergent paths. The first line of inquiry examines questions relating to the components and organization of working memory – whether there are specialized buffers, the nature of the link to long-term memory, and so on. For the most part, studies of this type have little to say about the workings of language per se – why it has the particular types of relative clauses or patterns of verbal agreement that it does, for example. These issues fall under the purview of a different line of research, which seeks to trace various fundamental properties of language to the cognitive processes involved in the storage and manipulation of information – working memory, broadly construed. The goal of the latter research program, which I will try to advance here, is to establish that general properties of working memory, however they are ultimately integrated into a theoretical model, can contribute to a deeper understanding of the human language faculty. I will focus here on three phenomena that help illustrate this point – a restriction on the interpretation of reflexive pronouns, a curious prohibition on phonological contraction in a type of wh question, and a baffling constraint commonly known as the ‘that-trace effect.’ A careful examination of their properties reveals a previously unsuspected finding: they are shaped by the need to minimize processing cost, a key factor in our understanding of working memory as well.

Introduction

Among the many advantages that speech confers on humans is the ability to convey thoughts by inflecting and arranging words in particular ways. Explaining precisely how this is done has always been the first goal of language science. Progress has been uneven, of course, replete with false leads and dead ends, but various research priorities can be identified with some degree of confidence.

One such priority involves the phenomenon of alignment, which defines a fundamental divide in the morphosyntax of natural languages, as illustrated in Figure 13.1. Norman and Campbell (1978) describe the contrast as follows.

The study of alignment lies at the heart of the field of typology, an area to which Lyle Campbell has made many important contributions, including a remarkable overview of South America's 108 language families (Campbell 2012). Indeed, Campbell was among the first scholars to posit an ergative system of syntax for proto-Mayan (Norman and Campbell 1978; Campbell and Kaufman 1985; Campbell 2016, 2017)—a view that is now universally accepted.

There are essentially two approaches to the typology of alignment. One body of work considers the phenomenon from a functional perspective, with reference to the classic notions of subject and direct object (e.g., Norman and Campbell 1978; Comrie 1981; Campbell and Kaufman 1985; Dixon 1994; Payne 1997; among many others). Another line of inquiry seeks to characterize alignment and its consequences in more abstract terms, usually within the framework of generative grammar (e.g., Aldridge 2008; Deal 2015; Polinsky 2017, and the many references cited there).

I seek here to break a third path by outlining an approach to alignment that draws on an emergentist explanatory framework, whose key elements will be laid out in abbreviated form in the next section. Sections 3 through 6 consider a series of phenomena (case marking, word order, agreement, and relativization) that help shed light on the nature of alignment and on the profound consequences that it has for a language's morphosyntax. The chapter ends with some brief concluding remarks.

This chapter outlines an emergentist approach to understanding why human languages have the particular properties that they do and how those properties are acquired by children. Drawing on a variety of examples, it illustrates the role of two factors in shaping language and its acquisition: limitations on the resources available for processing utterances in real time, and the role of input in facilitating the acquisition of particular words and patterns. Both these factors fit well with a key claim of linguistic emergentism, which is that the human language faculty is shaped by forces – cognition, perception, memory, computation, and experience – that are not themselves linguistic in character. The emergentist approach thus provides an alternative to theories that attribute the unique human ability to learn and use language to an inborn Universal Grammar. The second line of inquiry pursued investigates the emergence of particular features of Korean, especially reflexive pronouns and relative clauses, in child and adult heritage learners. The developmental profile associated with these phenomena fits well with the emergentist approach to language, and helps confirm that heritage languages are learned in essentially the same way as languages that are acquired in a monolingual setting.