E-language perspectives

The central claim of this book is that if we view the human language capacity in terms of an I-language system, focusing on internal, individual properties, we will take different approaches to the study of language acquisition and therefore to the study of historical change. That, in turn, will enable us to understand how new languages may develop. Now that we have begun to explore I-language ideas, let's see how they might impinge on ideas about language acquisition and learnability. We shall adopt an approach quite different from what one finds in most of the generative literature.

Acquisition involves the study of children and learnability represents its theoretical and computational aspect: learnability models portray how a natural language organ might emerge in a child under naturalistic boundary conditions. So far, I shall argue in this section, work on learnability has been dominated too much by E-language approaches. If children acquire I-languages with the properties discussed in the last chapter, one would expect acquisition to reflect their I-language nature. A simple example: if children acquire the kind of abstract systems just discussed, then one would expect those systems to permit deductions, to predict new phenomena. An English child may hear Kim may have eaten and Kim has been eating. At the point where the child's language organ analyzes may as an Inflection item and the perfective and progressive aspect markers as preceding the main verb, then it follows automatically that Kim may have been eating is also a sentence, and that sentence will automatically be part of a child's capacity even before he/she hears it.

Newspapers tell us that languages are dying out at an alarming rate but they do not tell us that new languages are always emerging. To explain the emergence of new languages with new structures, one needs to understand how languages change and how they emerge in children, like new plants growing and spreading. In fact, we need some new understanding, because the most usual models of change and of the acquisition of language by children make it hard to think of how new languages can emerge; we need new models.

This book aims to investigate not new meanings or new pronunciations but how new systems might arise and be acquired by children, who are the vehicles for structural shifts, I argue. Languages undergo big changes from time to time and adults and children play different, complementary roles.

Linguists have always been interested in language change. Linguistics first became an independent discipline in the nineteenth century and at that time it was concerned exclusively with the history of languages, trying to understand how languages became the way they are. The nineteenth century can be seen as the century of history. Linguists wanted to know how languages changed, biologists wanted to know how species changed, and political thinkers wanted to know how societies and political systems changed; they read each other and gave similar kinds of answers.

Languages and the language capacity

Languages come and languages go. We deplore it when they go, because the disappearance of a language is a loss for the richness of human experience. These days, linguists are devoting much energy to documenting expiring languages. That documentation itself may increase the use of the language, which may increase its chance of surviving in some form. For example, simply finding a written version of a language facilitates its use for new purposes and new uses lead the language to be spoken more widely. Adapting computer software to accommodate the language may bring further advantages. Ultimately, however, people cease to speak a language because they come to identify with a different group, perhaps encouraged by factors of economic interest, perhaps influenced by governmental policy favoring one language above others in schools and official discourse.

Nettle & Romaine (2000: ⅸ) note that “the greatest linguistic diversity is found in some of the ecosystems richest in biodiversity inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent around 4% of the world's population, but speak at least 60% of its 6,000 or more languages.” Expiring languages tend to be spoken by small, underprivileged groups that lack resources. The disappearance of languages is a complicated matter that began to generate widespread concern in the 1990s, when funds were invested in investigating the death of languages and efforts were made to document endangered languages.

The use of grammars

Children hear E-language, language out there, and E-language may change; it may change in such a way that it triggers new I-languages, as we saw in the last chapter. New E-language may result from prior changes in I-languages or because people come to use their grammars differently or because there are new social mixes of grammars. There is more to a person's speech than his/her I-language.

Grammars are used and some elements of their use result from general properties of the human cognitive system, others are more idiosyncratic, and that distinction is fundamental. In fact, we need two distinctions: grammars need to be distinguished from the way in which they are used (Newmeyer 2003), and general use functions need to be distinguished from specific, learned strategies. Let us consider some examples.

(1a) is ambiguous between a deontic and epistemic reading. It might mean that John is under an obligation to study or it must be the case that John is a student (for example, because he drinks cheap wine). (1b) is ambiguous in precisely the same way. That would lead us to expect that (1c) would be four-ways ambiguous: deontic–deontic, epistemic–epistemic, deontic–epistemic, or epistemic–deontic. This turns out to be false: (1c) is only two-ways ambiguous and each conjunct must have either the epistemic reading or the deontic, but no mixing is possible.

Language change, contingency, and new systems

So languages change, both I-languages and E-language. There is a deep interrelationship and new languages are always emerging, of both kinds. Adults and children both play roles. The perspective we have developed, particularly the distinction between external E-language and individual I-languages, recasts matters of the role of children and adults, the gradualness of change, directionality, the spread of changes through populations, explanation, and other issues that have been central for traditional historical linguistics; see Janda & Joseph (2003) for a recent survey.

E-language, a group phenomenon, language out there, is amorphous and in constant flux. No two people are exposed to the same E-language and everybody hears different things. E-language is in flux because people say different things and use their grammars differently, both differently from other people and differently themselves over time. Some people use certain constructions provided by their I-language more or less frequently than others, and more or less frequently than themselves at other times or in different contexts. There may be whims and fashions, whereby people take on the speech forms of public figures, popular singers, politicians, or comedians, and certain expressions take on new forces or come to be used more or less frequently. Furthermore, people's speech may change through their lifetime, as one can see by looking at one's own letters written over a period of years.

Recursive and compositional

English, Dutch, etc., are external languages and such “languages” have no biological reality and cannot even be defined in any precise way, as we saw in the last chapter. Certainly children do not acquire one of those external objects, as if selecting from a supermarket aisle. In this chapter I shall begin to examine a different approach, where we view languages as private, internal, individual entities. A person has a linguistic capacity, acquired under the conditions of childhood, and represented in his/her brain. No two people speak absolutely alike and, personally, I speak David Lightfoot, slightly different from my brothers' speech, and our mother can tell us apart on the telephone. We shall investigate some of the properties that a person's individual language must have, what we are calling her I-language, and the way that it is acquired in childhood.

First, as we noted in chapter 1, a person's language capacity ranges over an infinitude of data. One can appreciate this on an intuitive level. One expresses and encounters new sentences all the time. Take any random sentence from the last chapter and it is likely that you have not said it or heard it in just that form, but there is no difficulty in understanding what it means, or so I hope. Similarly the next complete sentence that you utter is likely to be novel.

Changes in I-languages

We saw in chapter 2 that our nineteenth-century predecessors developed linguistics as a distinct discipline and were concerned exclusively with language change. For them, languages were external objects and changed in systematic ways according to “laws” and general notions of directionality. Languages were related to each other to different degrees, modeled in tree diagrams (Stammbäume), and they changed at certain rates that could be discovered. Linguists of the time focused on the products of human behavior rather than on the internal processes that underlie the behavior, although other approaches were put forward towards the end of the century, particularly in the work of Hermann Paul and phoneticians like Eduard Sievers.

From our perspective, they focused on E-languages and sought to explain, for example, how one E-language, Latin, could develop into the new E-languages of French, Spanish, Italian, Sardinian, and the other Romance languages. Those idealizations were useful to a degree, they have been resilient over a long period, and those of us who deny that E-languages have any biological reality and deny that they can be defined in any precise way, nonetheless find it convenient to refer to English, Swedish, and other E-languages for certain purposes. Furthermore, we shall see that E-language, although not systematic, represents a kind of reality that is indispensable for our account of new I-languages.

Introduction

I should elaborate on the skepticism about languages like English and Dutch, which are undefinable and at best rough and ready notions. In general, an individual either has some grammatical property or not. Ella Fitzgerald pointed out that some say tomeyto and some say tomahto, and the word is different for different people. Some people might say something like Who did Kim say that visited Baghdad? and others might not. There are problems of observation: sometimes a person might agree that some sentence type is part of their competence, while at other times denying it, and we are not good observers of our own speech. Nonetheless, in principle, we will either observe somebody with a certain property or not, with some gray areas. But that is demonstrably not so of an external language like English.

A person brought up in Tennessee might say Kim might could sing that song but a person brought up in Polperro, Cornwall, would not speak that way (with what linguists call a “double modal”). Our Cornishman might ask if she is happy by saying Bin her happy?, but not our Tennesseean. You might agree that our Tennesseean and our Cornishman are both speakers of English and indeed they might communicate with a significant degree of success, but what does this discrepancy mean for “English”? Are Kim might could sing that song and Bin her happy? sentences of English, or not?

Creoles

Sometimes new grammatical properties emerge in rapid succession and well-defined, new languages erupt as if from the craters of Mount Vesuvius. This might happen in response to an especially heterogeneous triggering experience consisting of expressions from a variety of languages, including perhaps a pidgin.

Some owners of coffee, cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations deliberately mixed slaves and workers from different language backgrounds. For example, when demand for Hawaiian sugar boomed just over a hundred years ago, workers were shipped in from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Portugal. Because of the nature of life on plantations and the practice of splitting up workers with a common language, no one of the languages could be fully acquired by everybody and serve as a lingua franca. When speakers of different languages, the substrate languages of the labor force, had to communicate in working contexts, they often developed makeshift jargons. These were pidgins and consisted of strings of words borrowed from the languages of the plantation owners, with little complexity and not much structure. The languages of the plantation owners, the European capital owners, and other socially dominant groups, were the superstrate languages.

Pidgins are created typically by adults with their own native tongues, using the evolving pidgin for limited purposes, specifically for interethnic communication; nobody uses a pidgin as a native language acquired under the normal conditions of childhood.

We have argued throughout this book that the cognitive system underlying a person's language capacity has intrinsic properties which are there by biological endowment. Those properties interact with contingencies resulting from exposure to a particular linguistic environment and the interaction yields a final state in which the person may communicate, perhaps some form of French. In that case, the person, Brigitte, will have incorporated from her environment the contingent lexical properties that livre is a word to refer to the novel she is reading and cooccurs with forms like le and bon (being “masculine”), père may refer to her father. She has also incorporated contingent structural properties: interrogative phrases like quel livre may be displaced to utterance-initial position, verbs raise to a higher functional position, and so on. We have described ways in which linguists have teased apart the intrinsic properties common to the species and the contingent properties resulting from individual experience. That work has been guided by the kind of poverty-of-stimulus arguments that we have discussed, by theoretical notions of economy and elegance, and by the specific phenomena manifested by the mature grammar under investigation.

Viewing a person's language capacity in this way and focusing on what we have called I-language leads one to ask novel questions about children and their linguistic development. The perspective we have sketched has already led to productive research and we have learned a great deal about the linguistic minds of young children.