estructura social y lenguaje

8/3/2019 Estructura Social y Lenguaje

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SOCIAL AND LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 1

Language structure is partly determined by social structure.

Gary Lupyan

University of Pennsylvania

Rick Dale

University of Memphis


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Abstract

The languages of the world differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological

systems and in the social and ecological environments in which they exist. In the present work,

we challenge the long-held assumption that language grammars are unrelated or only spuriously

related to the social environments in which they are found (Chomsky, 1995) 1. Based on a

statistical analysis of 2,236 languages, we report strong relationships between linguistic factors

related to morphological complexity and demographic/socio-historical factors such as the

number of language users, geographic spread, and degree of language contact. The analyses

suggest that languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than

languages spoken by smaller groups as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and

complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more

likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality,

negation, aspect, and possession. These results are explained using principles borrowed from


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Although the most populous languages are spoken by millions of people spread over vast

geographic areas, most languages are spoken by relatively few individuals over comparatively

small areas. The median number of speakers for the 6,912 languages catalogued by the

Ethnologue is only 7000, compared to the mean of over 828,0002. Similarly, for the 2,236

languages in our sample (Figure 1), the median area over which a language is spoken is about the

size of Luxembourg or San Diego, California (948 km2). The mean area is about the size of

Austria or the US state of Maryland (33,795 km2). Languages also differ dramatically in the

proportion of individuals who speak the language natively (L1 speakers) to those who learned it

later in life (L2 speakers)Table 1.Although there are numerous counter-examples

(Supplementary Note 1), languages spoken by millions of people have a greater likelihood of

coming into contact with other languages and of having numerous nonnative speakers compared

to languages spoken by only a few thousand people. This is not surprising: a language spoken by

more people is more likely to encompass a larger and more diverse area and include speakers


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differ in the amount of information conveyed through inflectional morphology compared to the

amount of information conveyed through non grammatical devices such as word order and

lexical constructions, e.g., compare morphological marking aspect in Russian: Ya vypil chai (I

PERFECTIVE+drank tea) to the English lexical strategy: Ifinished drinkingthe tea). Other

domains exhibiting such differences between lexical and morphological strategies include tense,

aspect, evidentiality, negation, plurality, and expressions of possibility.

Languages with richer morphological systems are said to be more overspecified 5-7.For

instance, of the languages that encode the past tense inflectionally, about 20% have past tenses

that explicitly mark remoteness distinctions. For example Yagua, a language of Peru, has

inflections that differentiate 5 levels of remoteness. A verb denoting an event that happened only

a few hours ago takes the suffix jsiy; an event that happened a day previous to the utterance

requires a different suffix, -jay, an event that occurred a week to a month ago, a still different

suffix, -siy, etc.8. Of course, languages without these grammatical distinctions can express them


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The degree and specificity of inflectional encoding can reach astounding levels. In

Karoka language of Northwestern Californiawe find grammaticalized verbal suffixes for

various containmentpa:-kirih throw into fire,pa:-kurih throw into water,pa:-ruprih

throw in through a solid (the affixes are unrelated to the nouns water, fire, etc.)10. Clearly, such

elaboration does not arise from communicative necessity. Researchers have long been puzzled

by the reasons why some languages abound in such overspecification, while others eschew it,

particularly in cases of closely related languages. For example, in comparing English and

German we find that where the surface structures of English and German contrast, English tends

to leave more to context6, thus, German speakers are forced to make certain semantic

distinctions which can regularly be left unspecified in English (ref.6, p. 28). For example,

German obligatorily specifies the direction of motion in the place adverbs here/there/where.

Compare: hier/her; dort/hin; wo/wohin. English can specify direction using to and from (where

to versus wherefrom), but such specification is optional and is generally left to context11.


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learning are morphologically simpler, less redundant, and more regular/transparent2,6,11,12,13,37.

This argument has been made most forcefully and convincingly for Creole languages17, but it has

been speculated that any situation in which a language is learned by a substantial number of

adults becomes simplified due to the lousy language learning abilities of the human adult19.

The evidence for such linguistic simplification has been descriptive, consisting of selected

examples and examining grammatical inventories of a small number of languages6,12,19,21. Thus,

at present, there is no convincing evidence of global relationships between linguistic structure

and non-linguistic factors and no framework within which to understand such relationships. An

additional limitation of previous work is that it fails to explain why morphological complexity

and grammatical overspecification arise in the first place. That is, why arent all languages as

morphologically simple as those that have been argued to be heavily shaped by adult learning

(e.g., English11)?

The present work aims to: (1) establish whether non-spurious relationships exists


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speakers of esoteric languages are more likely to (1) be nonnative speakers or have learned the

language from nonnative speakers, (2) use the language to speak to outsidersindividuals from

different ethnic and/or linguistic backgrounds. The exoteric niche includes languages like

English, Swahili, and Hindi, while the esoteric niche includes languages like Tatar, Elfdalian,

and Algonquin. The analyses described below aim to test whether systematic relationships exist

between grammars and social contexts within which languages are spoken.

Methods

To assess relationships between social and linguistic structure we constructed a dataset

that combined social/demographic and typological information for 2,236 languages. The dataset

was constructed by combining typological data from the World Atlas of Language Structures

(WALS)24 with the following demographic and ecological variables: speaker population,

geographic spread, and number of linguistic neighbors. Because direct measures for the


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counting the number of languages whose global polygons are contained in, overlapping with, or

contacting a given languages polygons. For example, although English originates in the British

Isles, the fact that it is spoken in North America and Australia means that its neighbors include

the extant indigenous languages on those continents.

Selecting Typological Features for Analysis

Our analysis focused on typological factors most relevant to inflectional morphology

with particular emphasis on continuous variables such as the number of inflectional case

markings or the inflectional synthesis of verbsthe number of different types of information that

can be inflectionally encoded by verbal affixesmeasured in categories per word26

. An

additional guide for feature selection was the ability to make a priori predictions about the level

of morphological complexity of a given feature. For instance, plurality (feature 16) can be coded

using prefixes, suffixes, some combination of the two, a plural word, a plural clitic,


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Results

Table 2 shows the results of three models used to explore the relationships between

typological features, and measures of population, geographic spread, and degree of linguistic

contact (Supplementary Note 4). For most (20/26) of the WALS features that were most relevant

to inflectional morphology, demographic variables (population, area over which a language is

spoken, and degree of linguistic contact) combined with geographic covariates

(latitude/longitude) proved to be better predictors of the linguistic features than geographic

location alone (Supplementary Note 5). The results provide overwhelming evidence against the

null hypothesis that language structure is unrelated to demographic factors. Across a wide range

of linguistic features, a systematic relationship between demographic and typological variables

was found. Although the three demographic predictors are not independent (intercorrelations

range from .5 to .6), including all three predictors helps to ensure that linguistic-demographic

relationships are not spurious. We summarize the findings below (parenthetical numbers


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2. Contain fewer case markings (3), and have case systems with higher degree of casesyncretism (4) (further reducing the number of morphological distinctions).

Nominative/accusative alignment is more prevalent than ergative/absolutive alignment

(5).

3. Have fewer grammatical categories marked on the verb (6) and are less likely to haveidiosyncratic verbal morphology such as verbal person markings that alternate between

marking agent or patient depending on semantic context (7).

4. Are more likely to not possess noun/verb agreement or have agreement limited to agents(8) and are more likely to possess no person markings on adpositions (9). As with case


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(16). For languages with optional markers, analytic (word) strategies are more common

than inflectional strategies (affixes or clitics). (c) Are less likely to have a separate

associative plural (e.g., He and his friends) (17) (c) Are more likely to have a dedicated

question particle (18).

7. (a) Are lesslikely to encode the future tense morphologically (19) or possess remotenessdistinctions in the past tense (20). In contrast, languages spoken in the exoteric niche are

somewhat morelikely to mark the perfective/imperfective distinction in their morphology

(21), although this relationship disappears when language geography is particle out. (b)

Are more likely to mark singular imperatives on verbs using inflections than have no

morphological markings for imperatives at all, but are less likely to contain more

elaborate markings that differentiate between singular and plural imperatives (22). (c)

Are less likely to have inflections that mark possession (23), and the optative mood (24).


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relationship is particularly striking when averaged by the largest language families (Figure 3a,

Pearson r= .48) and by continents (Figure 3b, Pearson r= .96).

In a subsequent analysis, we constructed an overall complexity measure by adding up the

number of features for which each language relies on lexical versus morphological coding and

subtracting the total from 0 (Supplementary Note 6). There was a strong relationship between

complexity and speaker population, F(1,1246)=71.20, p


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As noted above, semantic distinctions coded lexically are more likely to be optionally

expressed than those coded inflectionally (e.g., lexical versus inflectional encoding of tense).

Thus, languages that are less grammatically specified tend to rely more on extra-linguistic

information such as pragmatics and context.12 Reduced reliance on morphology also has the

effect of increasing the transparency between word-forms and meanings (form-meaning

compositionality)3. Consider the high occurrence of exceptions in the inflectionally marked past

tense forms of English compared to the perfect regularity of the modally marked future tense.

One reason for the inverse relationship between morphology and form-meaning compositionality

is that inflections such as affixes are, by definition, phonologically bound to the stem which

increases opportunities for phonological compression and sound change to disrupt regular

mappings between form and meaning. Thus, although it is logically possible to have complex

inflectional morphology that is highly regular (frequently classified as agglutination), in practice,

coarticulation, historical sound change, and other phonological/articulatory processes often


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niche morphologically simpler than languages spoken in the esoteric niche? (2) Why are

languages spoken in the esoteric niche so morphologically complex, given that such a high level

of specification seems unnecessary for communication?

We propose that the level of morphological specification is a product of languages

adapting to the learning constraints and the unique communicative needs of the speaker

population. As a language spreads over a larger area (e.g., as a result of colonization) and is

being learned by a greater number of outside learners, complex morphological paradigms

become simplified19,17,11. Complex morphological paradigms appear to present particular learning

challenges for adult learners even when their native languages make use of similar paradigms31.

This appeal to learning constraints of adult learners as an explanation for morphological

simplification has also been proposed by the descriptive analyses of Trudgill20 and McWhorters

(interrupted transmission hypothesis)7 which has been previously supported only by selected

examples.


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mother tongue from parents to offspring. For example, in a survey of 188 individuals in

Senegal who listed Bambara as their native language, Bambara was the fathers native language

in 16%, the mothers in 19%, the native language of both parents in 26%, and the native

language ofneitherparent in 39%32. It is thus common for children to receive input of what they

consider to be their native language from nonnative learners. Vehicular languages like Bambara

(as well as colonial languages like French in Gabon) are often dominant enough to impose

themselves within families even when they are not the native language of the parents. Although

children are learning these languages from a young age and are, in theory, fully capable of

learning whatever inflectional system the language possesses, much of their input may come

from nonnative speakers. Thus, whatever aspects of Bambara were difficult for the parents to

learn are more likely to be passed on to the offspring in a revised form.

Many have commented on the puzzle of baroque accretion so common to languages33.

We propose that the surface complexity of languages adapted to the esoteric niche may arise as a


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The reconstruction-erroris the number of bits required to repair any errors that occur

when S as communicated by A is reconstructed by L.

Total Cost = Code-cost + Model-cost + Reconstruction-error

Let us assume that the reconstruction error is constant (Supplementary Note 7). Minimizing the

code-cost increases the model-cost. To take an example from a familiar domain: one can reduce

the size of a music file by compressing it, but decreasing its size in this way requires more

powerful decoders to read the file. Reading a CD is far simpler than reading an MP3. Let the

code-cost correspond to the surface level grammatical specification. Thus, requiring speakers to

specify tense, number, aspect, evidentiality, and mood on a verbwhich we have shown to be

more common to languages spoken in the esoteric niche (e.g., feature 6)corresponds to a

greater code-cost. A decrease in the model cost under such circumstances, would suggest that

morphological overspecification may increase redundancy (Supplementary Note 8) and,

provided that infants benefit from such an increase may simplify language acquisition36,37


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walk and walked can be compressed by storing walk and ed in a dictionary and

referencing ed for any regularly inflected verb, producing a storage savings whenever an

inflected verb occurs (of course the addition of inflections can increase the overall size of the

uncompressed document). In the absence of an inflectional past tense marker, no such savings

occurs.

Table3 shows the obtained correlations between the measure of redundancy

(compression ratio) and the demographic variables used in our main analysis. As shown in

Figure 6, languages spoken by more people and/or over a larger area are less compressible than

languages spoken by fewer people (Supplementary Note 9). Additional analyses that particle out

the original file size and the number of unique and total words, did not eliminate the negative

relationship between exotericity and compressibility. To ensure that the redundancy differences

arose from differences in morphological specification, we replaced each unique word with a

unique number, e.g., walk and walked might be consistently replaced throughout the


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underspecification more effectively than infants and thus it is infants that would benefit most

from linguistic redundancy36,37,40

. The paradoxical prediction that morphological

overspecification, while clearly difficult for adults, facilitates infant language acquisition,

remains to be empirically tested. Supplementary materials present some evidence that the most

frequent typologies (e.g., case suffixes are much more widespread/frequent than case prefixes)

correspond to those most easily learned by children whereas typologies common to high-

population (i.e., exoteric) languages are most learnable by adults.

We have argued that, depending on the number of speakers, geographic spread, and

linguistic contact, languages are placed under different learnability and communication

pressures. Languages spoken by millions of people over a diverse region are (1) under a greater

pressure to be learnable by outsiders and (2) under a greater pressure to be understood by

strangersindividuals with whom the speaker does not share much common ground. Languages

appear to respond to these pressures by simplifying their morphology, increasing productivity of


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The Linguistic Niche Hypothesis adds a new perspective to the question that has puzzled

people for millennia. Why are there so many different languages? One, currently accepted

answer is that as a population splits into several groups, dialect differences emerge and gradually

render the languages mutually incomprehensible30. This linguistic drift account is analogous to

genetic drift in evolutionary biology. Crucially, biological speciation events are also produced by

ecological speciation in which genetic diversity is increased between cohabitating populations

when populations adapt to different ecological niches41. The present work suggests that

languages may undergo a similar process of adaptation to a niche. On this view, linguistic

diversity is not simply a product of passive drift, but also of active speciation as languages

adapt either to a small socially cohesive community of native speakers or to a large, diverse

group that includes nonnative learners. The present levels of morphological complexity in a

language may thus be informative of the socio-historical context in which the language evolved.


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Table 1:

Language Speakers (millions)2

L1 L2 %L1

Malay 30 170 .15

English 330 812 .29

French 65 50 .57

Amharic 27 7 .79

Abkhaz 0.11 .006 .95

Siberian Yupik Eskimo 0.001 ~0 ~1


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Table 2

Model

FeatureObserved

PatternPopulation

(LogSpeakers)

Area

(Logkm2)

LingContact

(Logling.

neighbors)

Effect

size

Morphological Type

1. Fusion of inflectionalformatives (20)

Isolating > Concatenating ** x . 17.69

2.

Inflectional Morphology(26) Little or None > Present ** . . 37.26

Cases

3. Number of Cases (49) Fewer Cases > More Cases ** x x f2=.08

4. Case Syncretism (28) Core/Non-Core Cases > CoreOnly > No Syncretism

** * * 11.03

5. Alignment of Case markingsof Full NPs (98)

Nom/Acc > Erg/Abs ** ** ** 25.16

Verb Morphology

6. Inflectional Synthesis of theVerb (categories perword)(22)

Few Forms > Many Forms ** * *f2=.1

5

7. Alignment of Verbal PersonMarking (100)

Neutral Ergative=Accusative >Context Dependent

** * x 31.78

Agreement


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> None 17.Associative Plural (36) No assoc. Plural > Assoc.

Plural** . . 3.74

18.Polar Question coding (92) Question particle > NoQuestion particle ** ** ** 15.06Tense, Possession, Aspect, and Mood

19.Future Tense (67) No Morph > Morph. ** * * 15.9520.Past Tense (66)

Simple Past > No Morph Past> 2-3 Remoteness Dist. > 3+RemotenessDist.

** * * 34.41

21.Perfective/ Imperfective (65)

Morph. Distinction > No

Morph Distinction . * . 4.5022.Morphological Imperative

(70)

Sing only > Not Morph.Marked Sing & Plural Sing. Syncretic with Plural

** x x 26.52

23.Coding of Possessives (57)

No possessive affix >Possessive Affix

** ** ** 30.53

24.Optative (73) Not Marked >Morphologically Marked

. ** x 18.54

Articles and Demonstratives

25.Definite/Indefinite Articles(38-39)

None Both (Lexical) = OnlyDef. or Only Indef. Both(Affixes)

. ** . 23.52

26.Distance distinctions indemonstratives (41)

No distance contrasts > 2Contrasts 2+ Contrasts

** . ** 13.83

Effect Size is the log-likelihood ratio from a comparison of the intercept-only model with a model


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Table 3

Population

(LogSpeakers

)

Area

(Logkm2)

LingContact

(Logling.

neighbors)

Total Words-.01

-.17

(.10)-.11

Unique Words .15

(.14)

.17

(.10).04

Size in bytes -.23

(.02)

-.19

(.06)-.12

Compression

Ratio (CR)

-.56

(


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References

1. Chomsky, N. The Minimalist Program. 300(The MIT Press: 1995).

2. Gordon, R.G. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th Edition. 1272(SIL International: 2005).

3. Wray, A. & Grace, G. The consequences of talking to strangers : Evolutionary corollaries ofsocio-cultural influences on linguistic form. Lingua117, 543-578(2007).

4. Greenberg, J.H. Universals of language. (MIT Press: 1966).

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6. Hawkins, J.A.A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts. (Univ ofTexas Pr: 1986).

7. McWhorter, J. Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard LanguageGrammars. 304(Oxford University Press, USA: 2007).

8. Payne, D.L. & Payne, T.E. Yagua. Handbook of Amazonian Languages2, 249474(1990).

9. Dahl, . & Velupillai, V. The past tense. Haspelmath et al(2005).at

10. Bright, W. The Karok language. (University of California Press: 1957).

11. McWhorter, J. What happened to English? Diachronica19, 217-272(2002).


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22. Dahl, O. The Growth And Maintenance Of Linguistic Complexity. 333(John Benjamins PublishingCo: 2004).

23. Thurston, W. How exoteric languages build a lexicon: esoterogeny in West New Britain. Papersfrom the Fifth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics 555-579

24. Haspelmaths, M. et al. The world atlas of language structures online. (Max Planck Digital Library:Munich,).

25. Seamless Digital Chart of the World. at

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Figure Captions.

Figure 1. Geographic distribution of the 2,236 languages included in the present study.

Figure 2. a: The relationship between population, the number of cases. b: number of categories

per word. The regression lines are flanked by 95% CIs. The ranges on the x-axis correspond

to the coding of these features in the World Atlas of Langauge Structures.

Figure 3. a: Categories-per-word (inflectional synthesis of the verb (feature 6 in Table 2) plotted

against the mean number of speakers for the largest language families (those containing at

least 32 languages). b: Inflectional synthesis of the verb collapsed by continent. The

regression line is flanked by 95% CIs. Eurasia corresponds to the region 38o N 71o20 N /

29oE 172oW.

Figure 4. Languages spoken by more people have simpler inflectional morphology. X-axis scores

represent a measure of lexical devices compared to the use of inflectional morphology.

Symbols represent means; bars show 95% confidence intervals of the median. Bar width is

proportional to sample size for each score.


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