The study of the rise of syntactic complexity, in particular of clause subordination and recursive language structures has more recently become the topic of intense discussion. The present paper builds on the reconstruction of grammatical evolution as proposed in Heine and Kuteva (2007) to present a scenario of how new forms of clause subordination may arise. Taking examples from attested cases of grammatical development as well as using evidence that has become available on grammaticalization in African languages, it is argued that there are two major pathways leading to the emergence of clause subordination: either via the integration of coordinate clauses or via the expansion of existing clauses. The concern of this paper is exclusively with the latter pathway.
A fruitful methodology for tracing the development of grammatical complexity has been the examination of centuries of written texts. Yet written documents necessarily remain silent about the prosody of the evolving constructions. An awareness of prosodic patterns can further our understanding of the emergence of complex constructions in several ways. The focus here is on early stages of development of individual constructions within a language, first when prosody is the only indication of complex structure, then when emerging marked constructions are still very young. Processes of development are illustrated with developing complement and relative constructions in Mohawk.
This paper investigates the diachronic pathways that lead to the rise of complex predications. It suggests that the great variety of complex predicate constructions can be traced back to two major pathways. Both pathways begin their life as paratactic verb-complement constructions (complex VPs) under separate intonation contours. Both then condense into syntactic V-complement construction under a single intonation contour. In the first type, the complement clause begins as chained (conjoined) to the main clause, and the chain then condensed into a serial verb construction. In the second type, a finite main clause and a non-finite (nominalized) object clause undergo a similar condensation. Both types can then go on to create morphologically complex lexical verbs. Both thus share the general diachronic trend of parataxis-to-syntaxis to lexis, albeit with somewhat different synchronic properties of both the syntactic and lexical product.
In Kalam, a Trans New Guinea language spoken in Papua New Guinea, there are two main types of serial verb construction (SVC), showing different degrees of morphosyntactic complexity. Compact SVCs contain from two to four verb roots that form a single, semantically and syntactically very tight-knit verb phrase. Narrative SVCs depict a sequence of events that make up a familiar episode. They contain from two to five small verb phrases, compressed into a single clause–lik e construction. The paper will discuss the functions and origins of these two constructions and reflect on the paradox that while condensing multi-clause constructions into a single clause may simplify the task of speech planning it has creates a clause type of exceptional complexity.
This paper traces the historical development of the Swedish Pseudo-Coordination construction with the posture verb sitta “sit”. In Swedish a small number of verbs, including posture verbs such as sitta, are used in coordination with another verb to convey that the described event has an extended duration or is in progress. Quantitative evidence from Swedish historical corpora suggests that the construction has, even after it established itself as a grammatical construction, undergone a number of gradual changes in the course of the past five centuries. As part of the Pseudo-Coordination construction, the verb sitta has changed its argument structure, and the entire construction has increased in syntactic cohesion.
In their recent work, Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002:1569) suggest that recursion “is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language”. In both generative and typological studies, the relativization site has been considered to be one of the places where recursion of sentences takes place. This paper examines a number of wide-spread patterns of relativization around the globe and argues that what have been identified as relative clauses/sentences are in fact nominalized entities, lacking some crucial properties of both full clauses and sentences. It is furthermore shown that these nominalized forms are neither syntactically nor semantically subordinate to the nominal head they modify.
This paper argues that the paths portrayed in recent literature as the genesis of subordination are only superficial rearrangements of existing subordination, while the real syntactic-cognitive underpinnings of subordination are overlooked. (Derivational) nominalization, the ability to derive a noun from a verb, is shown as the core element in the channel of ‘expansion’, and may also be behind the genesis of relative clauses that are claimed to arise through ‘integration’. And yet, the origins of nominalization are little researched and understood, and thus accounts of the genesis of subordination are robbed of much of their explanatory power. One way is suggested to account for the genesis of nominalization without already presupposing it, based on back-formation from the process of verbalization.
This chapter examines the diachronic rise of a syntactically and pragmatically complex construction type: pseudoclefts. Given that cleft constructions combine available components of grammar — relative clauses and copular clauses — do they arise in full-fledged form? If they emerge gradually, what constrains their development? We first present a corpus-based analysis of the history of English pseudoclefts and develop qualitative and quantitative measures to identify properties of pseudoclefts at different developmental stages. We then apply the same measures of grammaticalization in a synchronic comparison of pseudoclefts in contemporary spoken and written German, Swedish, and English in order to test their cross-linguistic validity. We find that pseudoclefts develop gradually in a process driven by the pragmatic exploitation of their presuppositional structure (Lambrecht 1994).
Givon has suggested three stages that characterize the diachronic rise of complex constructions: Parataxis, Syntaxis and Lexis. In this paper, it is argued that rather than having three distinct stages of grammatical evolution with a linear increase of tightness, we have to postulate different kinds of integrative processes, which tend to be interwoven with each other in complex ways, both in that they tend to take place at the same time and in that they partly presuppose each other: a. paratactic constructions → syntactic constructions b. syntactic constructions → inflectionally marked words c. syntactic constructions → morphologically complex words In particular, then, there is an intimate relationship between (a) and (b), which means that inflectional morphology not only arises together with the phenomena that Givon labels “Syntaxis” but also to a significant extent is restricted to it.
Frequency and similarity are important determinants for the acquisition of children’s early item-based constructions. This paper argues that frequency and similarity are equally important for the development of more complex and intricate grammatical phenomena such as relative clauses. Specifically, the paper shows that the acquisition of relative clauses is crucially determined by the similarity between particular types of relative clauses and simple SVO constructions. Two specific hypotheses are proposed: First, since subject relatives have the same word order as ordinary SVO clauses, they usually cause fewer difficulties in comprehension studies than non-subject relatives. Second, while non-subject relatives are structurally distinct from SVO clauses, semantically they are expressed by prototypical transitive constructions, which arguably helps the child to learn this type of relative clause.
This paper builds on previous Usage-based accounts of developing sentence complexity (Diessel 2004; Diessel & Tomasello 2000, 2001), considering early relative constructions (RC) in Spanish. RCs development shows various “starting small” processes (Elman 1993): Most CRs show no embedding; they are dialogical co-constructional results or take an absolute position and not intonation integration to any verbal frame. When embedded, constructional frames are lexically biased with an open slot for Head RC insertion. CRs internal structure is mostly similar to independent clause type, with no gap nor genuine ‘relative’ function for the relative pronoun. In sum, CRs show an exemplar based acquisition and individually preferred constructional frames. All these phenomena point towards a non linear, experience based learning, affected by frequency and oriented by function.
This paper investigate the acquisition of V-complement constructions (complex VPs) by English-speaking children ca. age 1;8-to-2;9. It suggests that the child acquires these constructions during intensive epistemic or deontic modal negotiations with the adult. In the earliest stage, the main-plus-complement construction is spread over adjacent child-adult or adult-child conversational turns ( Ochs et al. 1979). The early precursor of the complex VP construction is thus paratactic, with the two clauses falling under separate intonation contours. Only later on is the construction condensed into a complex syntactic construction under a single intonation contour, produced by the child alone. The early use of these constructions is as direct speech acts, be they epistemic or deontic (Diessel 2005), whereby the semantic focus resides in the complement clause, and the main clause acts as a modal operator. But this is true of both the children and their adult interlocutors, and is also characteristic, at the text-frequency level, of adult oral language (Thomson 2001). However, this characterization of complex VPs is semantic rather than syntactic.
We tested whether the speaker’s communicative intent drives the selection of grammatical constructions. Participants viewed complex human action video stimuli and were asked to respond in detail to a single question for each video concerning either what had happened (eliciting descriptions) or why a particular event had occurred (eliciting explanations). We predicted that responses to the why questions would contain more syntactically complex constructions (specifically verbal complements), while responses to the what questions would be more concatenated. The experimental results with these stimuli did not uphold the first part of the hypothesis: complexity in the form of syntactic embedding was statistically equivalent under both conditions. However, there was significantly more concatenation in the form of coordination in the what condition.
Linguists have often argued that recursion produces linguistic complexity. However, recursion itself preexisting processes such as lexical insertion, lexical combination, memory stacks, and methods of interpretation. In the brain, recursion is an emergent property of a set of adaptations that involve at least six processing systems. Linguistic complexity arises from the interplay of all six of these systems. The complexity of this neuronal support means that the full complexity of human language could not have arisen fortuitously at some single moment in evolution. However, there is evidence that some pieces of the six systems supporting complexity have developed more recently than others.
Based on a review of the neuroimaging literature, I argue that the resources allocated for processing syntactically complex sentences (i.e., object-extracted relative clauses) are domain-general. Overlapping brain areas are activated by OR clauses and by effortful executive tasks, such as storing information in verbal working memory, resolving conflict among competing representations, and switching one’s mindset. A re-conceptualization of ‘syntactic complexity’ in terms of executive functions provides a useful framework in which to explore its links to relational complexity and to cognitive neuroscience, in general. As such, this approach should prove useful to linguists and cognitive scientists alike.
Cognition in the human brain requires processes of memory consolidation and retrieval that are carried out across reentrant connections between limbic cortex and multiple network levels of the neocortex. Given this layered architecture, and the point-to-point reentrance of the connections, cognition is likely to be recursive, changing its internal representations dynamically with each cycle of consolidation. To provide structure and constancy within this dynamic interplay, language operations appear to draw on the capacity for inhibitory specification emergent within the ventral, paleocortical corticolimbic pathways. We propose that inhibitory specification has been essential to regulate the dynamism of recursive consolidation, supporting the evolution of both the object qualities of words and the regularized structure of grammar.
The current chapter considers neuronal circuits in the human brain that represent a neuroanatomical basis for the processing of syntactic complexities. We will present data from event-related brain potential studies and from functional and structural brain imaging studies to elucidate the brain’s underpinnings for syntactic processing. The data shall indicate that the processing of syntactic dependencies is subserved by two distinct networks of brain areas, one involving the deep frontal operculum and the anterior part of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), holding responsible for the processing of local dependencies, the other involving Broca’s area and the posterior part of the STG, holding responsible for the processing of hierarchical dependencies. Structural brain data are referred that identify two separate neural fiber pathways for these two networks. These findings are supported by ontogenetic and phylogenetic comparison. The data suggest functional and structural separation for the processing of different levels of syntactic complexity.
The ability of the human nervous system to process information, perform complicated simultaneous mental and physical tasks, and express feelings and emotions is peerless. Because of its complexity, the human brain is the seminal achievement of biological evolution on our planet. This paper focuses on one aspect of brain complexity, neural plasticity, the ability of the nervous system to alter its output in response to changing stimuli. Several examples of neuroplasticity at the molecular, cellular, systems and cognitive levels are presented, all of which have physiological and behavioral consequences. The examples presented provide a basis for the premise that neural complexity arose from the need to perform complex functions. These examples also lend support for the notion that complex adaptive functions are subdivided into separate neural pathways which are oftentimes anatomically distinct.
The study of the rise of syntactic complexity, in particular of clause subordination and recursive language structures has more recently become the topic of intense discussion. The present paper builds on the reconstruction of grammatical evolution as proposed in Heine and Kuteva (2007) to present a scenario of how new forms of clause subordination may arise. Taking examples from attested cases of grammatical development as well as using evidence that has become available on grammaticalization in African languages, it is argued that there are two major pathways leading to the emergence of clause subordination: either via the integration of coordinate clauses or via the expansion of existing clauses. The concern of this paper is exclusively with the latter pathway.
A fruitful methodology for tracing the development of grammatical complexity has been the examination of centuries of written texts. Yet written documents necessarily remain silent about the prosody of the evolving constructions. An awareness of prosodic patterns can further our understanding of the emergence of complex constructions in several ways. The focus here is on early stages of development of individual constructions within a language, first when prosody is the only indication of complex structure, then when emerging marked constructions are still very young. Processes of development are illustrated with developing complement and relative constructions in Mohawk.
This paper investigates the diachronic pathways that lead to the rise of complex predications. It suggests that the great variety of complex predicate constructions can be traced back to two major pathways. Both pathways begin their life as paratactic verb-complement constructions (complex VPs) under separate intonation contours. Both then condense into syntactic V-complement construction under a single intonation contour. In the first type, the complement clause begins as chained (conjoined) to the main clause, and the chain then condensed into a serial verb construction. In the second type, a finite main clause and a non-finite (nominalized) object clause undergo a similar condensation. Both types can then go on to create morphologically complex lexical verbs. Both thus share the general diachronic trend of parataxis-to-syntaxis to lexis, albeit with somewhat different synchronic properties of both the syntactic and lexical product.
In Kalam, a Trans New Guinea language spoken in Papua New Guinea, there are two main types of serial verb construction (SVC), showing different degrees of morphosyntactic complexity. Compact SVCs contain from two to four verb roots that form a single, semantically and syntactically very tight-knit verb phrase. Narrative SVCs depict a sequence of events that make up a familiar episode. They contain from two to five small verb phrases, compressed into a single clause–lik e construction. The paper will discuss the functions and origins of these two constructions and reflect on the paradox that while condensing multi-clause constructions into a single clause may simplify the task of speech planning it has creates a clause type of exceptional complexity.
This paper traces the historical development of the Swedish Pseudo-Coordination construction with the posture verb sitta “sit”. In Swedish a small number of verbs, including posture verbs such as sitta, are used in coordination with another verb to convey that the described event has an extended duration or is in progress. Quantitative evidence from Swedish historical corpora suggests that the construction has, even after it established itself as a grammatical construction, undergone a number of gradual changes in the course of the past five centuries. As part of the Pseudo-Coordination construction, the verb sitta has changed its argument structure, and the entire construction has increased in syntactic cohesion.
In their recent work, Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002:1569) suggest that recursion “is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language”. In both generative and typological studies, the relativization site has been considered to be one of the places where recursion of sentences takes place. This paper examines a number of wide-spread patterns of relativization around the globe and argues that what have been identified as relative clauses/sentences are in fact nominalized entities, lacking some crucial properties of both full clauses and sentences. It is furthermore shown that these nominalized forms are neither syntactically nor semantically subordinate to the nominal head they modify.
This paper argues that the paths portrayed in recent literature as the genesis of subordination are only superficial rearrangements of existing subordination, while the real syntactic-cognitive underpinnings of subordination are overlooked. (Derivational) nominalization, the ability to derive a noun from a verb, is shown as the core element in the channel of ‘expansion’, and may also be behind the genesis of relative clauses that are claimed to arise through ‘integration’. And yet, the origins of nominalization are little researched and understood, and thus accounts of the genesis of subordination are robbed of much of their explanatory power. One way is suggested to account for the genesis of nominalization without already presupposing it, based on back-formation from the process of verbalization.
This chapter examines the diachronic rise of a syntactically and pragmatically complex construction type: pseudoclefts. Given that cleft constructions combine available components of grammar — relative clauses and copular clauses — do they arise in full-fledged form? If they emerge gradually, what constrains their development? We first present a corpus-based analysis of the history of English pseudoclefts and develop qualitative and quantitative measures to identify properties of pseudoclefts at different developmental stages. We then apply the same measures of grammaticalization in a synchronic comparison of pseudoclefts in contemporary spoken and written German, Swedish, and English in order to test their cross-linguistic validity. We find that pseudoclefts develop gradually in a process driven by the pragmatic exploitation of their presuppositional structure (Lambrecht 1994).
Givon has suggested three stages that characterize the diachronic rise of complex constructions: Parataxis, Syntaxis and Lexis. In this paper, it is argued that rather than having three distinct stages of grammatical evolution with a linear increase of tightness, we have to postulate different kinds of integrative processes, which tend to be interwoven with each other in complex ways, both in that they tend to take place at the same time and in that they partly presuppose each other: a. paratactic constructions → syntactic constructions b. syntactic constructions → inflectionally marked words c. syntactic constructions → morphologically complex words In particular, then, there is an intimate relationship between (a) and (b), which means that inflectional morphology not only arises together with the phenomena that Givon labels “Syntaxis” but also to a significant extent is restricted to it.
Frequency and similarity are important determinants for the acquisition of children’s early item-based constructions. This paper argues that frequency and similarity are equally important for the development of more complex and intricate grammatical phenomena such as relative clauses. Specifically, the paper shows that the acquisition of relative clauses is crucially determined by the similarity between particular types of relative clauses and simple SVO constructions. Two specific hypotheses are proposed: First, since subject relatives have the same word order as ordinary SVO clauses, they usually cause fewer difficulties in comprehension studies than non-subject relatives. Second, while non-subject relatives are structurally distinct from SVO clauses, semantically they are expressed by prototypical transitive constructions, which arguably helps the child to learn this type of relative clause.
This paper builds on previous Usage-based accounts of developing sentence complexity (Diessel 2004; Diessel & Tomasello 2000, 2001), considering early relative constructions (RC) in Spanish. RCs development shows various “starting small” processes (Elman 1993): Most CRs show no embedding; they are dialogical co-constructional results or take an absolute position and not intonation integration to any verbal frame. When embedded, constructional frames are lexically biased with an open slot for Head RC insertion. CRs internal structure is mostly similar to independent clause type, with no gap nor genuine ‘relative’ function for the relative pronoun. In sum, CRs show an exemplar based acquisition and individually preferred constructional frames. All these phenomena point towards a non linear, experience based learning, affected by frequency and oriented by function.
This paper investigate the acquisition of V-complement constructions (complex VPs) by English-speaking children ca. age 1;8-to-2;9. It suggests that the child acquires these constructions during intensive epistemic or deontic modal negotiations with the adult. In the earliest stage, the main-plus-complement construction is spread over adjacent child-adult or adult-child conversational turns ( Ochs et al. 1979). The early precursor of the complex VP construction is thus paratactic, with the two clauses falling under separate intonation contours. Only later on is the construction condensed into a complex syntactic construction under a single intonation contour, produced by the child alone. The early use of these constructions is as direct speech acts, be they epistemic or deontic (Diessel 2005), whereby the semantic focus resides in the complement clause, and the main clause acts as a modal operator. But this is true of both the children and their adult interlocutors, and is also characteristic, at the text-frequency level, of adult oral language (Thomson 2001). However, this characterization of complex VPs is semantic rather than syntactic.
We tested whether the speaker’s communicative intent drives the selection of grammatical constructions. Participants viewed complex human action video stimuli and were asked to respond in detail to a single question for each video concerning either what had happened (eliciting descriptions) or why a particular event had occurred (eliciting explanations). We predicted that responses to the why questions would contain more syntactically complex constructions (specifically verbal complements), while responses to the what questions would be more concatenated. The experimental results with these stimuli did not uphold the first part of the hypothesis: complexity in the form of syntactic embedding was statistically equivalent under both conditions. However, there was significantly more concatenation in the form of coordination in the what condition.
Linguists have often argued that recursion produces linguistic complexity. However, recursion itself preexisting processes such as lexical insertion, lexical combination, memory stacks, and methods of interpretation. In the brain, recursion is an emergent property of a set of adaptations that involve at least six processing systems. Linguistic complexity arises from the interplay of all six of these systems. The complexity of this neuronal support means that the full complexity of human language could not have arisen fortuitously at some single moment in evolution. However, there is evidence that some pieces of the six systems supporting complexity have developed more recently than others.
Based on a review of the neuroimaging literature, I argue that the resources allocated for processing syntactically complex sentences (i.e., object-extracted relative clauses) are domain-general. Overlapping brain areas are activated by OR clauses and by effortful executive tasks, such as storing information in verbal working memory, resolving conflict among competing representations, and switching one’s mindset. A re-conceptualization of ‘syntactic complexity’ in terms of executive functions provides a useful framework in which to explore its links to relational complexity and to cognitive neuroscience, in general. As such, this approach should prove useful to linguists and cognitive scientists alike.
Cognition in the human brain requires processes of memory consolidation and retrieval that are carried out across reentrant connections between limbic cortex and multiple network levels of the neocortex. Given this layered architecture, and the point-to-point reentrance of the connections, cognition is likely to be recursive, changing its internal representations dynamically with each cycle of consolidation. To provide structure and constancy within this dynamic interplay, language operations appear to draw on the capacity for inhibitory specification emergent within the ventral, paleocortical corticolimbic pathways. We propose that inhibitory specification has been essential to regulate the dynamism of recursive consolidation, supporting the evolution of both the object qualities of words and the regularized structure of grammar.
The current chapter considers neuronal circuits in the human brain that represent a neuroanatomical basis for the processing of syntactic complexities. We will present data from event-related brain potential studies and from functional and structural brain imaging studies to elucidate the brain’s underpinnings for syntactic processing. The data shall indicate that the processing of syntactic dependencies is subserved by two distinct networks of brain areas, one involving the deep frontal operculum and the anterior part of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), holding responsible for the processing of local dependencies, the other involving Broca’s area and the posterior part of the STG, holding responsible for the processing of hierarchical dependencies. Structural brain data are referred that identify two separate neural fiber pathways for these two networks. These findings are supported by ontogenetic and phylogenetic comparison. The data suggest functional and structural separation for the processing of different levels of syntactic complexity.
The ability of the human nervous system to process information, perform complicated simultaneous mental and physical tasks, and express feelings and emotions is peerless. Because of its complexity, the human brain is the seminal achievement of biological evolution on our planet. This paper focuses on one aspect of brain complexity, neural plasticity, the ability of the nervous system to alter its output in response to changing stimuli. Several examples of neuroplasticity at the molecular, cellular, systems and cognitive levels are presented, all of which have physiological and behavioral consequences. The examples presented provide a basis for the premise that neural complexity arose from the need to perform complex functions. These examples also lend support for the notion that complex adaptive functions are subdivided into separate neural pathways which are oftentimes anatomically distinct.
The study of the rise of syntactic complexity, in particular of clause subordination and recursive language structures has more recently become the topic of intense discussion. The present paper builds on the reconstruction of grammatical evolution as proposed in Heine and Kuteva (2007) to present a scenario of how new forms of clause subordination may arise. Taking examples from attested cases of grammatical development as well as using evidence that has become available on grammaticalization in African languages, it is argued that there are two major pathways leading to the emergence of clause subordination: either via the integration of coordinate clauses or via the expansion of existing clauses. The concern of this paper is exclusively with the latter pathway.
A fruitful methodology for tracing the development of grammatical complexity has been the examination of centuries of written texts. Yet written documents necessarily remain silent about the prosody of the evolving constructions. An awareness of prosodic patterns can further our understanding of the emergence of complex constructions in several ways. The focus here is on early stages of development of individual constructions within a language, first when prosody is the only indication of complex structure, then when emerging marked constructions are still very young. Processes of development are illustrated with developing complement and relative constructions in Mohawk.
This paper investigates the diachronic pathways that lead to the rise of complex predications. It suggests that the great variety of complex predicate constructions can be traced back to two major pathways. Both pathways begin their life as paratactic verb-complement constructions (complex VPs) under separate intonation contours. Both then condense into syntactic V-complement construction under a single intonation contour. In the first type, the complement clause begins as chained (conjoined) to the main clause, and the chain then condensed into a serial verb construction. In the second type, a finite main clause and a non-finite (nominalized) object clause undergo a similar condensation. Both types can then go on to create morphologically complex lexical verbs. Both thus share the general diachronic trend of parataxis-to-syntaxis to lexis, albeit with somewhat different synchronic properties of both the syntactic and lexical product.
In Kalam, a Trans New Guinea language spoken in Papua New Guinea, there are two main types of serial verb construction (SVC), showing different degrees of morphosyntactic complexity. Compact SVCs contain from two to four verb roots that form a single, semantically and syntactically very tight-knit verb phrase. Narrative SVCs depict a sequence of events that make up a familiar episode. They contain from two to five small verb phrases, compressed into a single clause–lik e construction. The paper will discuss the functions and origins of these two constructions and reflect on the paradox that while condensing multi-clause constructions into a single clause may simplify the task of speech planning it has creates a clause type of exceptional complexity.
This paper traces the historical development of the Swedish Pseudo-Coordination construction with the posture verb sitta “sit”. In Swedish a small number of verbs, including posture verbs such as sitta, are used in coordination with another verb to convey that the described event has an extended duration or is in progress. Quantitative evidence from Swedish historical corpora suggests that the construction has, even after it established itself as a grammatical construction, undergone a number of gradual changes in the course of the past five centuries. As part of the Pseudo-Coordination construction, the verb sitta has changed its argument structure, and the entire construction has increased in syntactic cohesion.
In their recent work, Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002:1569) suggest that recursion “is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language”. In both generative and typological studies, the relativization site has been considered to be one of the places where recursion of sentences takes place. This paper examines a number of wide-spread patterns of relativization around the globe and argues that what have been identified as relative clauses/sentences are in fact nominalized entities, lacking some crucial properties of both full clauses and sentences. It is furthermore shown that these nominalized forms are neither syntactically nor semantically subordinate to the nominal head they modify.
This paper argues that the paths portrayed in recent literature as the genesis of subordination are only superficial rearrangements of existing subordination, while the real syntactic-cognitive underpinnings of subordination are overlooked. (Derivational) nominalization, the ability to derive a noun from a verb, is shown as the core element in the channel of ‘expansion’, and may also be behind the genesis of relative clauses that are claimed to arise through ‘integration’. And yet, the origins of nominalization are little researched and understood, and thus accounts of the genesis of subordination are robbed of much of their explanatory power. One way is suggested to account for the genesis of nominalization without already presupposing it, based on back-formation from the process of verbalization.
This chapter examines the diachronic rise of a syntactically and pragmatically complex construction type: pseudoclefts. Given that cleft constructions combine available components of grammar — relative clauses and copular clauses — do they arise in full-fledged form? If they emerge gradually, what constrains their development? We first present a corpus-based analysis of the history of English pseudoclefts and develop qualitative and quantitative measures to identify properties of pseudoclefts at different developmental stages. We then apply the same measures of grammaticalization in a synchronic comparison of pseudoclefts in contemporary spoken and written German, Swedish, and English in order to test their cross-linguistic validity. We find that pseudoclefts develop gradually in a process driven by the pragmatic exploitation of their presuppositional structure (Lambrecht 1994).
Givon has suggested three stages that characterize the diachronic rise of complex constructions: Parataxis, Syntaxis and Lexis. In this paper, it is argued that rather than having three distinct stages of grammatical evolution with a linear increase of tightness, we have to postulate different kinds of integrative processes, which tend to be interwoven with each other in complex ways, both in that they tend to take place at the same time and in that they partly presuppose each other: a. paratactic constructions → syntactic constructions b. syntactic constructions → inflectionally marked words c. syntactic constructions → morphologically complex words In particular, then, there is an intimate relationship between (a) and (b), which means that inflectional morphology not only arises together with the phenomena that Givon labels “Syntaxis” but also to a significant extent is restricted to it.
Frequency and similarity are important determinants for the acquisition of children’s early item-based constructions. This paper argues that frequency and similarity are equally important for the development of more complex and intricate grammatical phenomena such as relative clauses. Specifically, the paper shows that the acquisition of relative clauses is crucially determined by the similarity between particular types of relative clauses and simple SVO constructions. Two specific hypotheses are proposed: First, since subject relatives have the same word order as ordinary SVO clauses, they usually cause fewer difficulties in comprehension studies than non-subject relatives. Second, while non-subject relatives are structurally distinct from SVO clauses, semantically they are expressed by prototypical transitive constructions, which arguably helps the child to learn this type of relative clause.
This paper builds on previous Usage-based accounts of developing sentence complexity (Diessel 2004; Diessel & Tomasello 2000, 2001), considering early relative constructions (RC) in Spanish. RCs development shows various “starting small” processes (Elman 1993): Most CRs show no embedding; they are dialogical co-constructional results or take an absolute position and not intonation integration to any verbal frame. When embedded, constructional frames are lexically biased with an open slot for Head RC insertion. CRs internal structure is mostly similar to independent clause type, with no gap nor genuine ‘relative’ function for the relative pronoun. In sum, CRs show an exemplar based acquisition and individually preferred constructional frames. All these phenomena point towards a non linear, experience based learning, affected by frequency and oriented by function.
This paper investigate the acquisition of V-complement constructions (complex VPs) by English-speaking children ca. age 1;8-to-2;9. It suggests that the child acquires these constructions during intensive epistemic or deontic modal negotiations with the adult. In the earliest stage, the main-plus-complement construction is spread over adjacent child-adult or adult-child conversational turns ( Ochs et al. 1979). The early precursor of the complex VP construction is thus paratactic, with the two clauses falling under separate intonation contours. Only later on is the construction condensed into a complex syntactic construction under a single intonation contour, produced by the child alone. The early use of these constructions is as direct speech acts, be they epistemic or deontic (Diessel 2005), whereby the semantic focus resides in the complement clause, and the main clause acts as a modal operator. But this is true of both the children and their adult interlocutors, and is also characteristic, at the text-frequency level, of adult oral language (Thomson 2001). However, this characterization of complex VPs is semantic rather than syntactic.
We tested whether the speaker’s communicative intent drives the selection of grammatical constructions. Participants viewed complex human action video stimuli and were asked to respond in detail to a single question for each video concerning either what had happened (eliciting descriptions) or why a particular event had occurred (eliciting explanations). We predicted that responses to the why questions would contain more syntactically complex constructions (specifically verbal complements), while responses to the what questions would be more concatenated. The experimental results with these stimuli did not uphold the first part of the hypothesis: complexity in the form of syntactic embedding was statistically equivalent under both conditions. However, there was significantly more concatenation in the form of coordination in the what condition.
Linguists have often argued that recursion produces linguistic complexity. However, recursion itself preexisting processes such as lexical insertion, lexical combination, memory stacks, and methods of interpretation. In the brain, recursion is an emergent property of a set of adaptations that involve at least six processing systems. Linguistic complexity arises from the interplay of all six of these systems. The complexity of this neuronal support means that the full complexity of human language could not have arisen fortuitously at some single moment in evolution. However, there is evidence that some pieces of the six systems supporting complexity have developed more recently than others.
Based on a review of the neuroimaging literature, I argue that the resources allocated for processing syntactically complex sentences (i.e., object-extracted relative clauses) are domain-general. Overlapping brain areas are activated by OR clauses and by effortful executive tasks, such as storing information in verbal working memory, resolving conflict among competing representations, and switching one’s mindset. A re-conceptualization of ‘syntactic complexity’ in terms of executive functions provides a useful framework in which to explore its links to relational complexity and to cognitive neuroscience, in general. As such, this approach should prove useful to linguists and cognitive scientists alike.
Cognition in the human brain requires processes of memory consolidation and retrieval that are carried out across reentrant connections between limbic cortex and multiple network levels of the neocortex. Given this layered architecture, and the point-to-point reentrance of the connections, cognition is likely to be recursive, changing its internal representations dynamically with each cycle of consolidation. To provide structure and constancy within this dynamic interplay, language operations appear to draw on the capacity for inhibitory specification emergent within the ventral, paleocortical corticolimbic pathways. We propose that inhibitory specification has been essential to regulate the dynamism of recursive consolidation, supporting the evolution of both the object qualities of words and the regularized structure of grammar.
The current chapter considers neuronal circuits in the human brain that represent a neuroanatomical basis for the processing of syntactic complexities. We will present data from event-related brain potential studies and from functional and structural brain imaging studies to elucidate the brain’s underpinnings for syntactic processing. The data shall indicate that the processing of syntactic dependencies is subserved by two distinct networks of brain areas, one involving the deep frontal operculum and the anterior part of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), holding responsible for the processing of local dependencies, the other involving Broca’s area and the posterior part of the STG, holding responsible for the processing of hierarchical dependencies. Structural brain data are referred that identify two separate neural fiber pathways for these two networks. These findings are supported by ontogenetic and phylogenetic comparison. The data suggest functional and structural separation for the processing of different levels of syntactic complexity.
The ability of the human nervous system to process information, perform complicated simultaneous mental and physical tasks, and express feelings and emotions is peerless. Because of its complexity, the human brain is the seminal achievement of biological evolution on our planet. This paper focuses on one aspect of brain complexity, neural plasticity, the ability of the nervous system to alter its output in response to changing stimuli. Several examples of neuroplasticity at the molecular, cellular, systems and cognitive levels are presented, all of which have physiological and behavioral consequences. The examples presented provide a basis for the premise that neural complexity arose from the need to perform complex functions. These examples also lend support for the notion that complex adaptive functions are subdivided into separate neural pathways which are oftentimes anatomically distinct.