The Evolution of Morphological Agreement

Richard Littauer Saarland University"

@Richlitt www.replicatedtypo.org

OUTLINE

•  What  I  mean  by  agreement  

•  The  evolu3on  of  morphology  

•  The  arguments  regarding  simultaneous  evolu3on  

•  Using  the  agreement  hierarchy  

•  Differences  in  protolanguage  communi3es  

What is Agreement

•  “The  term  agreement  commonly  refers  to  some  systema3c  covariance  between  a  seman3c  or  formal  property  of  one  element  and  a  formal  property  of  another.”  (Steele  1978:  610)  

•  “The  essen3al  no3on  is  the  covariance  or  matching  of  feature  specifica3ons  between  two  separate  elements.”  (CorbeM  1998:  191)  

What is Agreement  

•  The  most  produc3ve  case  of  agreement  across  languages  appears  to  be  subject-­‐verb  agreement.  Even  languages  with  liMle  or  no  agreement  elsewhere  in  their  grammars,  such  as  English,  may  exhibit  subject-­‐verb  agreement,  however  residually.  –  Hawkins  1994:  370  

What is Agreement  •  Controller:  the  element  that  determines  the  agreement.  (also  

trigger,  source)    

•  Target:  The  element  whose  form  is  determined  by  agreement  .    

•  Domain:  The  syntac3c  environment  in  which  agreement  occurs.    

•  Features:  The  means  or  manner  in  which  agreement  operates.  (also  category)    

•  Condi2ons:  other  factors  which  have  an  effect  on  agreement  but  are  not  directly  reflected.  (CorbeM  1998:  191)  

 

Simultaneous Evolution

•  Where  did  morphology  come  from?  

•  Uses  for  agreement  

•  Varying  complexity  

•  The  case  of  pidgins,  creoles,  and  gramma3caliza3on  

Whence Morphology?

•  “The  conven3onal  historical  explana3on  for  morphology  traces  it  to  proto-­‐syntax  and  phonology.”  –  Carstairs-­‐McCarthy  1994:  46  

•  There  are  clear  controversies  over  where  to  put  morphology:  –  its  own  component  (Aranoff  1993)  –  wherever  it  is  relevant  to  the  syntax  (Anderson  2004)  –  out  of  access  of  the  syntax  en3rely  (Chomsky  1970)  –  in  the  lexicon  (Jensen  2004:  237)  –  as  a  cohesive  whole  with  syntax  (Bickerton  1990)  –  par3ally  overlapping  with  syntax  (Sadock  2004)  

Whence Morphology?  •  There  is  also  a  common  view  of  morphology  as  independently  built  

on  top  of  protolanguage,  at  the  same  3me  as  syntax.  

•  There  are  arguments  for  this:  –  Agreement  markers  do  not  always  follow  syntac3c  order  

(Comrie  1980)  –  Rela3vely  free  word  order  of  some  languages  (like  La3n)  

(Samson  2009:  4)  –  Its  use  for  clause  combining  (Heine  &  Kuteva  2007:  349)  

Whence Morphology?  

•  “Thus  we  might  think  of  phrasal  syntax  and  morpho-­‐syntax  as  independently  evolved  systems,  each  built  on  top  of  the  system  of  protolanguage,  each  refining  communica3on  through  its  own  expressive  techniques.  In  a  similar  vein,  Casey  and  Kluender  (1995)  suggest  that  agreement  inflec2on  evolved  as  an  extra  system  to  provide  redundant  (and  hence  more  reliable)  informa3on  about  seman3c  rela3ons  of  arguments.  I  see  no  immediate  reason  to  assert  the  temporal  priority  of  one  of  these  systems  over  the  other  in  the  course  of  evolu2on.”  –  Jackendoff  2002:  260  

Whence Agreement?  •  Six  gradual  stages  from  protolanguage  to  modern,  and  agreement  

occurs  on  the  sixth.    –  Heine  and  Kuteva  (2007)  

•  “Agreement  is  a  purely  morpho-­‐syntac3c  phenomenon,  and  serves  the  purpose  of  marking  those  cons3tuents  that  are  bound  together  in  close  gramma3cal  rela3onships.  Such  close  gramma3cal  rela3onships  ofen  reflect  closeness  in  the  conceptual  representa3on,  but  clearly  in  the  mental  representa3on  itself  such  closeness  is  inherent  and  does  not  stand  in  need  of  marking.  Agreement  is  part  of  the  apparatus  for  mapping  pre-­‐linguis2c  representa2ons  onto  strings.”  –  Hurford  (2002:  332)  

Whence Agreement?  •  The  historical  sources  of  various  agreement  markings  in  modern  

languages  are  ofen  used  diagnos3cally  to  suggest  late  evolu3on.    

•  However,  agreement  is  not  always  telis3c,  nor  affected  only  by  erosion  (CorbeM  2006:  273)  

•  “A  purely  historical  explana3on  for  why  morphology  exists  amounts  to  an  asser3on  that  all  morphological  phenomena  can  be  traced  back  to  ancestral  phenomena  that  were  en3rely  non-­‐morphological,  involving  only  syntax  or  phonology.”  –  Carstairs-­‐McCarthy,  2010:  46)  

Why Agreement?      •  "Given  that  the  evidence  for  each  of  the  proposed  func3ons  is  not  

fully  convincing,  it  appears  unlikely  that  agreement  is  to  be  explained  in  terms  of  a  single  func3on.  Rather,  it  has  different  combina3ons  of  func3ons  in  different  languages."      –  Carstairs-­‐McCarthy  2010:  275  

Why Agreement?  •  Givón  (1976:  173)  gives  many  examples:    

1.  Pro-­‐drop  (arguable)  2.  In  Redundant,  predictable,  obligatory  verb-­‐  subject  agreement  

cases,  the  agreement  can  become  a  way  of  signaling  the  syntac3c  type.    

3.  Correct  case  marking  in  iden3cal  parsed  forms  can  be  iden3fied  due  to  mismatching  of    agreement  features.  

4.  Agreement  allows  a  synchronic  analysis  of  evolu3onarily  transi3onal  processes  

5.  Verb  agreement  marks  the  verb’s  syntac3c  type,  as  well  as  its  general  seman3c-­‐selec3onal  typology.  

Why Agreement?  •  Pro  drop  (cont.)  

•  The  ability  to  use  pro-­‐drop  correctly  ofen  develops  much  later  in  children  than  other  morphological  agreement  abili3es  (e.g.  Snyder,  Senghas  &  Inman,  2001).    However,  pro-­‐drop  may  be  different  from  other  agreement  phenomena.    Pro-­‐drop  can  be  viewed  an  interface  phenomenon  -­‐  it  must  be  processed  on-­‐line  by  combining  informa3on  from  the  syntac3c  and  pragma3c  domains  (Sorace,  2011)  

Why Agreement?  •  "Uninterpretable  features  are  the  mechanism  that  implements  the  

displacement  property.”    –  Chomsky  2000:  12;13-­‐14  

•  Carstairs-­‐McCarthy  disputes  this,  using  La3n  as  an  example.  

Why Agreement?  •  Some  other  proposed  uses  for  agreement:  –  Syntac3c  agreement  may  be  a  way  of  marking  nodes  for  help  

in  parsing.  (Hawkins  (1994)  Kirby  (1999)  followed  this  up  in  simula3ons.  

–  Help  with  reference  tracking.  (Levin  2001)  –  Marking  cons3tuency.  (Levin  2001)  –  Agreement  allows  expression  of  different  seman3c  

perspec3ves  (the  commiMee  has/have  ...)  (CorbeM  1999)  –  Signals  thema3c  roles.  (Jackendoff  2002)  –  Pronominal  effect,  which  allows  pro-­‐drop.  (Anderson,  others)  –  Agreement  markers  as  arguments,  in  Autolexical  syntax.  

(Sadock  1991)  

Modern Morphogenesis

•  Pidgins?  

–  Almost  no  inflec3onal  morphology.  

–  The  closest  example  has  been  that  of  Palu’e,  an  Austronesian  language  from  Indonesia,  which  has  begun  to  cli3cize  its  first  person  pronoun  subject  to  the  front  end  of  the  verb.  (CorbeM  2006:  266)  

Modern Morphogenesis  •  Children?  

–  Children  figure  out  the  basic  proper3es  of  the  agreement  system  very  early  on,  at  the  same  3me  as  syntac3cally  significant  produc3on  (Cinque  &  Kayne  2005:  99)  

–  Children  learning  languages  with  complex  morphological  systems  learn  agreement  markers  faster.  (Atsos  2011)  

Modern Morphogenesis  •  Pathological  cases?  

–  “Broca's  and  Wernicke's  aphasics  both  seem  to  be  significantly  impaired  in  the  produc3on  of  gramma3cal  morphology  -­‐  par3cularly  when  their  performance  is  compared  with  evidence  for  sparing  of  pragma3cs  and  word  order  in  the  same  transcripts.”  (Batalli  2004:  291)  

Modern Morphogenesis  •  Primate  cogni3ve  abili3es?  

–  AnBn  grammars:  “no  syntac3c  rules  implemen3ng  embedded  nonadjacent  dependencies  were  learned  in  these  experiments”    

–  “Distribu3onal  regulari3es  explain  the  data  beMer  than  grammar  learning.”  •  Hochmann  et  al.  2008    

Modern Morphogenesis  •  ”Gramma3caliza3on  can  hardly  explain  fully  the  origin  of  

morphology  as  a  paMern  of  gramma3cal  organiza3on  dis3nct  from  syntax.”  (Carstairs-­‐McCarthy  2010:  50)  

•  Furthermore,  studies  like  Dunn,  Gray,  &  Greenhill    suggest  that  phylogeny  is  more  important  for  language  change  than  universals  or  UG.  Quick,  almost  a  priori  languages  such  as  pidgins  and  creoles  may  not  be  the  best  guide.  

Agreement Hierarchy

•  CorbeM  reduced  his  hierarchy  to  three  basic  principles,  which  fit  the  bill  for  what  proto-­‐morphology  might  have  looked  like  (CorbeM  2006:  26-­‐7):  

I.  Canonical  agreement  is  redundant  rather  than  informa3ve.  II.  Canonical  agreement  is  syntac3cally  simple.  III.  The  closer  the  expression  of  agreement  is  to  canonical  

inflec3onal  morphology,  the  more  canonical  it  is  as  agreement.  

Agreement Hierarchy  •  What  is  canonicity?  

–  “’Canonical’  instances  of  agreement  [are  the]  “best,  clearest,  indisputable  (according  to  the  'canon');  such  cases  need  not  be  common.”    (CorbeM  2001:  109)  

Agreement Hierarchy  •  Some  examples:  

–  Controller  present  >  controller  absent  –  Controller’s  part  of  speech  irrelevant  >  relevant  –  Bound  >  free  –  Inflec3on  marking  >  cli3c  >  free  word  –  Obligatory  >  op3onal  

Agreement Hierarchy  •  Some  examples:  

–  Regular  >  supple3ve  –  Allitera3ve  >  opaque  –  Produc3ve  >  sporadic  –  Doubling  >  independent  only  –  Target’s  part  of  speech  irrelevant  >  relevant  –  Local  >  non-­‐local  

Agreement Hierarchy  •  A  quick  example  of  one  of  the  canonical  hierarchies  (allitera3ve  

agreement):    ki-­‐kapu      ki-­‐kubwa    ki-­‐moja      ki-­‐lianguka    7-­‐basket    7-­‐one      7-­‐fell      7-­‐large    'one  large  basket  fell’    (CorbeM  2001:  116)  

Agreement Hierarchy  •  “It  is  not  good  enough  simply  to  define  a  structural  complexity  

hierarchy  and  assume  it  directly  gives  rise  to  a  cross-­‐linguis3c  hierarchy,  because  one  needs  to  explain  why  not  all  languages  opt  for  minimum  complexity.”  (Kirby  1999:  119)  

•  Complexity  may  arise  from  constraints  regarding  costs,  benefits,  and  func3onal  load.  Alterna3vely,  it  may  be  due  to  the  possible  nature  of  “language  universals  as  products  of  cultural  influence.”  (Sampson  2009:  15)  

Varying Complexity

•  Languages  differ  in  complexity.  (eg.  Sampson  2009)  See  Lupyan  and  Dale  (2010),  LiMle  (2011),  and  other  studies  on  community  size,  second  language  learners,  foreigner-­‐directed  speech,  etc.  and  morphological  complexity.    

•  “Complexi3es  in  morphology  are  accompanied  by  complexi3es  in  syntax."  (Dahl  2009:  63)  

Evolutionary Environment?

•  Smaller  communi3es  =  more  agreement.  

•  As  Hurford  (2012)  states,  language  evolved  gradually  –  complexity  on  the  scale  of  modern  language  comes  into  it  later.  

•  Gramma3caliza3on  not  necessarily  a  good  theory  for  showing  early  language  change.  

Future Work?  •  Possible  future  work  would  include:  

–  Cross-­‐linguis3c  first  language  agreement  acquisi3on  (specifically  across  families)  

–  More  studies  into  linguis3c  complexity  involving  speaking  community  size  

–  Experimental  studies  using  agreement  morphology  in  lieu  of  syntax  to  convey  meaning  

–  simula3ons  of  morphological  redundancy  (which,  computa3onally,  may  not  be  easy.)  

Conclusion

 “Nothing  in  biology  makes  sense  except  in  the  light  of  

evolu3on.”  (Dobzhansky  1973)        

Agreement  may  be  a  living  fossil  of  protolanguage.  

THANKS!  

 (Refs on request)

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