http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121140347.htm 


Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure

ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2010) — Psychologists
at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a
new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for
why languages differ throughout the world.


The study argues that human languages may adapt more like biological
organisms than previously thought and that the more common and popular the
language, the simpler its construction to facilitate its survival.


Traditional thinking is that languages develop based upon random change and
historical drift. For example, English and Turkish are very different languages
based upon histories that separate them in space and time. For years, it has
been the reigning assumption in the linguistic sciences.


The recent report, published in the current issue of PLoS One,
offers a new hypothesis, challenging the drift explanation. Gary Lupyan, a
postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology in Penn's School of
Arts and Sciences, and Rick Dale, an assistant professor in psychology at the
University of Memphis, conducted a large-scale statistical analysis of more
than 2,000 of the world's languages aimed at testing whether certain social
environments are correlated with certain linguistic properties.


The researchers found striking relationships between the demographic
properties of a language -- such as its population and global spread -- and the
grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages having the most speakers
-- and those that have spread around the world -- were found to have far
simpler grammars, specifically morphology, than languages spoken by few people
and in circumscribed regions. For example, languages spoken by more than
100,000 people are almost six times more likely to have simple verb
conjugations compared to languages spoken by fewer than 100,000 people.


Larger populations tend to have simpler pronoun and number systems and a
smaller number of cases and genders and in general do not employ complex
prefixing or suffixing rules in their grammars. A consequence is that languages
with long histories of adult learners have become easier to learn over time.
Although a number of researchers have predicted such relationships between
social and language structure, this is the first large-scale statistical test
of this idea.


The results draw connections between the evolution of human language and biological
organisms. Just as very distantly related organisms converge on evolutionary
strategies in particular niches, languages may adapt to the social environments
in which they are learned and used.


"English, for all its confusing spelling and exceptions -- if a baker
bakes, what does a grocer do? -- has a relatively simple grammar," Lupyan
said. "Verbs are easy to conjugate and nouns are mostly pluralized by
adding 's.' In comparison, a West African language like Hausa has dozens of
ways to make nouns plural and in many languages -- Turkish, Aymara, Ladakhi,
Ainu -- verbs like 'to know' have to include information about the origin of
the speaker's knowledge. This information is often conveyed using complex
rules, which the most widely-spoken languages on earth like English and
Mandarin lack."


Lupyan and Dale call this social affect on grammatical patterns the
"Linguistic Niche Hypothesis." Languages evolve within particular
socio-demographic niches. Although all languages must be learnable by infants,
the introduction of adult learners to some languages (for example, through
migration or colonization) means that aspects of a language difficult for
adults to learn will be less likely to be passed on to subsequent generations
of learners. The result is that languages spoken by more people over larger
geographic regions have become morphologically simpler over many generations.


A remaining puzzle is why languages with few speakers are so complex in the
first place. One possibility, explored by researchers, is that features such as
grammatical gender and complex conjugational systems, while difficult for adult
learners to master, may facilitate language learning in children by providing a
network of redundant information that can cue children in on the meanings of
words and how to string them together.


The results and theory proposed by Lupyan and Dale do not aim to explain why
a specific language has the grammar it does. Because the findings are
statistical in nature, many exceptions to Lupyan and Dale's theory can be
identified. Their work, however, provides a comprehensive analysis of how some
social factors influence the structure of language and shows that the
relationships between language and culture is far from arbitrary.


The study was funded by an Integrative Graduate Education and Research
Training award to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at Penn and
by the National Science Foundation.


Adapted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania.

1.      
Gary Lupyan, Rick Dale. Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social
Structure. PLoS
ONE, 2010; 5 (1): e8559 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008559




University of Pennsylvania (2010,
January 21). Language structure is partly determined by social structure. ScienceDaily. Retrieved
January 28, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­
/releases/2010/01/100121140347.htm



 









    
     

    
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