Who were the creators of early language?

The question of who exactly it is that creates new functional categories and modes of grammatical organization has aroused a remarkable interest in various domains of linguistic analysis. Discussion on this issue has centered especially around demographic variables, and most conspicuously on age. It has been claimed in studies of creole languages, for example, that it is young children rather than adults who produced new forms of grammar. Thus, Bickerton (1981, 1984) argued that in the polyglot slave and servant populations the only lingua franca among adults was a pidgin, a makeshift system with little in the way of grammar. The children in those plantations did not passively have the pidgin culturally transmitted to them, but quickly developed creole languages, which have all the basic features of established human languages.

That (pre-school age) children are the agents who are responsible for language change has been claimed by a number of scholars. According to Kiparsky (1968: 194–5), one of the early proponents of this view within formal linguistics, children construct over simplified intermediate grammars, and some feature of these grammars may survive into adulthood and be adopted by the speech community, resulting in a new linguistic norm. More generally, a major line of generative diachronic linguistics is that first-language acquisition is the main engine of grammatical change: Faced with such mixed data, it is argued by some, young learners can acquire grammars that are distinct from those of the previous generation. One major thread of reasoning in this tradition is that children are portrayed as simplifiers of grammars while adults are elaborators. Perhaps most vociferously, Lightfoot (1979, 1991, 1999a: 77 f., 1999b) claims within the framework of a principles-and-parameters theory that changes in grammar result from resettings of parameters in language acquisition. And children have also been claimed to play a crucial role in grammaticalization (Newmeyer 1998a: 276). Evidence in support of this claim has been provided by the development in Nicaragua from homesign to signed language roughly between 1977 and 1985 (Senghas 1995, 2000; Kegl and McWhorter 1997; Kegl, Senghas, and Coppola 1999; Senghas and Coppola 2001; Morford 2002; Senghas, Kita, and Özyürek 2004). Goldin-Meadow summarizes the findings made by herself and others in the following way:

For example, many children who are congenitally deaf have hearing losses so severe that they are unable to acquire spoken language, even with intensive instruction. If these deaf children are not exposed to sign language input until adolescence, they will be for all intents and purposes deprived of a usable model for language during early childhood—although, importantly, they are not deprived of other aspects of human social interaction. Despite their lack of linguistic input, deaf children in this situation use gestures to communicate. These gestures, called ‘‘homesigns,’’ assume the form of a rudimentary linguistic system, one that displays structure at both word and sentence levels and is used for many of the functions served by conventional language. (Goldin-Meadow 2002: 344)

But there is an alternative view on what actually happened in Nicaragua and elsewhere. Slobin observes that all of the grammatical innovations that have been studied were already present in the first cohort of deaf people, that is in the old signers, and ‘‘what seems to have happened was that younger signers—that is, those who entered a community that already had a developing communication system—used the existing grammatical elements more frequently and fluently’’ (Slobin 2002: 388). He notes further that Senghas and Coppola (2001) report that children who acquired Nicaraguan Sign Language before the age of 10 sign at a faster rate and are more skilled in comprehending grammatical forms. What this suggests is that the claim that young children invented a new sign (or gestural) system has to be taken with care. While children were in fact involved in the emergence of homesigns in general and Nicaraguan Sign Language in particular, there is no evidence to suggest that these were actually young children in their early years of language acquisition.

The question of whether the creators of early language were children or adults is an issue that falls squarely within the scope of grammaticalization theory; but unfortunately, an answer must remain unsatisfactory at the present stage of research because so far there is hardly any information on the sociolinguistic conditions of grammaticalization: For most grammaticalization processes there is essentially no empirically sound knowledge on who exactly did what in instigating and propagating the process, or on whether there were any specific socio-psychological requirements for it to take place. Still, there is some information at least.

The pidgin/creole Sango, national language of the Central African Republic, has undergone a number of structural changes since its genesis at the end of the nineteenth century. One of these changes involved the rise of a new functional category via the grammaticalization of the second-person plural pronoun a̒là to a deferential second-person singular pro noun (Samarin 2002). What makes this a particularly interesting case is that it allows us to study such a change in its status nascendi. The rise of the category is a recent one, it occurred after the Central African Republic attained its independency; there is no evidence for its existence prior to the 1960s. Essentially any Sango speaker can give a̒là to anyone else instead of the traditional second-person singular pronoun mò. Nevertheless, there are degrees of probability in the use of the strategy, based on the demo graphic variables of sex and age: Female addressees are generally more likely to receive a̒là than males, and the probability that grandparents and parents receive a̒là is the highest, being in the range between 77 and 89 percent of Samarin’s data.¹ The social categories least affected by this grammaticalization process are younger siblings and friends, with whom a̒là is used with less than 25 percent probability.

As the description by Samarin (2002) suggests, it was adolescents who were crucially involved in the rise of the new category: They are the ones in the modern Sango-speaking world that are most sensitive to social identity, status, style, and linguistic change, and it is young male adults and adolescents who make the most pronounced use of deferential a̒là; very likely therefore they were the initiators of the process. Children below 13 years of age do not seem to have been involved in the creation of the new category, and they hardly use it.

In cases such as the present one it is possible to narrow down the range of possible agents involved in the genesis of new grammatical forms. What is fairly obvious on the basis of the evidence available is that it was not preschool-age children who instigated the process. In creating the new category, Sango speakers drew on a universal strategy, namely pluralization, whereby expressions used to refer to plural referents are extended to singular referents, giving rise to (deferential) second-person singular pronouns (see Heine 2002a). That it is not young children who can be held responsible for the genesis of new functional categories is also suggested by other examples of the pluralization strategy. We observed in “Motivations underlying grammaticalization” that the Roman emperor sometimes spoke of himself as nos ‘we’, and that he was addressed by means of the plural pronoun vos instead of the singular form tu ‘you (SG)’. vos thereby acquired a new, additional meaning, namely that of a polite form denoting a singular referent. Subsequently this usage turned into a grammatical change: It was extended to a range of new situations of social interaction, with the effect that in medieval Europe, generally, the nobility said tu to the common people but received vos—a usage that spread to a number of European languages and is retained, for example, in the French distinction between vous and tu. It appears that the agents who initiated this grammatical change were of a different kind than those that created the new pronoun a̒là in Sango: Rather than adolescents, very likely they were adults of the Roman nobility. In the further development of the vos-form there were other agents shaping the meaning of the category, possibly also including adolescents. But what this case has in common with the Sango one is the fact that on account of the social environment in which the process took place it is unlikely that young children played any significant role in it.

Another domain where there is demographic information on the age of speakers innovating grammatical change is that of intensifiers, especially intensifiers on adjectives expressing the notion ‘very’.² An analysis by Claudi (1998) on 108 intensifiers of contemporary German suggests that this development represents a canonical process of grammaticalization having the following properties:

(a) One of the main conceptual sources is provided by adjectives expressing negatively evaluated qualities, such as ‘terrible’, ‘mad’, ‘crazy’, ‘sinful’, ‘frightful’, ‘insane’; their number is three times as high as that of adjectives having positive meanings.

(b) Extension has the effect that the use of these items is extended to contexts that are incompatible with the meaning of the erstwhile intensifiers, such as use as modifiers of positively evaluated adjectives, for example English wicked good, crazy good, mad good, etc.

(c) The effect is desemanticization, in that the intensifier loses its negative semantics and is reduced to something like an emphatic equivalent of ‘very’.

(d) The intensifiers are decategorialized, losing their categorical properties as adjectives, no longer being members of the paradigm of adjectives, and they tend to be restricted to the context where they qualify adjectives.

As the study by Claudi (1998) suggests, it is young people below the age of 30, in ‘‘constant search for new emotional kicks’’, that are the main instigators and propagators of the process, taking innovative and hyperbolic language use as a means of efficient communication; there is no indication that pre-school age children are involved in the process.

Further support for the hypothesis that young children are not crucially involved in grammatical change in general and the development of functional categories in particular is provided by Bybee and Slobin (1982) after a study of innovations in English past-tense verb forms such as builded, hitted, and brang in three different age groups. The authors found that it is only the forms produced by school-age and adult speakers that mirrored ongoing changes in the English verb system, while many of the ‘‘errors’’ produced by pre-school age children were transient, showing no chance of becoming part of English. Accordingly, the authors conclude that earlier learners are not innovators in this part of grammar.

That children can be involved in grammatical change is suggested by the following examples. A number of languages in many parts of the world have grammatical systems of numeral or noun classification, and the primary source of nominal classifiers is provided by nouns via grammaticalization (Aikhenvald 2000). Senft (1996: 235) found that in the Austronesian language Kilivila of the Trobriand Islands there is a change in the structure of classifiers involving the extension parameter, whereby specific classifiers, for example, tend to be replaced by shape-based classifiers. The greatest number of innovations has been found among school children between the ages of 8 and 14 ‘‘because of their readiness for a playful exploration of the possibilities the CP [classifier particles; a.n.] system offers and because of their increased linguistic awareness’’. Innovations and language change patterns in classifier usage have also been observed among adults between 21 and 35. Once again, as in all the preceding cases, it was not pre-school age children that were involved.

Studying the data that are available on the rise and development of linguistic systems such as pidgins, creoles, homesigns and signed languages, Slobin (2002: 386–9) argues that in situations where people who have only limited linguistic resources at their disposal are put together and begin to communicate about a range of topics, it is not young children who are the creators of new languages, nor are they the innovators of new grammatical categories (see also “On pidgins and other restricted linguistic systems Discussion”). His discussion suggests, however, that the situation is more complex: Young children also seem to make some contribution in both processes.

The first piece of evidence comes from situations where pidgin languages have acquired, or are acquiring, native speakers. One example is provided by the English-based pidgin/creole Tok Pisin when it began to acquire first language speakers (SankoV and Laberge 1973, 1974). There is no evidence that the intervention of young children was required in the transition from pidgin to creole, nor in the innovation of new forms. Still, in the wording of Slobin (2002: 387), ‘‘children learners apparently did what children are good at: making a system more regular and automatic’’. Speaking with much greater speed and fluency, children appear to have been responsible for the decategorialization and erosion of Tok Pisin structures by turning optional constituents into obligatory ones and reducing their phonetic substance.

Similar examples have been reported from Nigeria (Shnukal and Marchese 1983) and the Solomon Islands. In Southern Nigeria it is adults rather than first language speakers of Nigerian Pidgin English who were responsible for most structural changes, while use of this pidgin/creole among younger speakers is characterized by an increase in tempo and fluency, and by some amount of erosion (phonological reduction). In a similar fashion, among speakers of Solomons Pijin English it is adults who have a creative impact on the pidgin (or creole) by expanding the syntactic resources and the lexicon, whereas children have a regularizing impact, particularly as they streamline and condense phonology and generalize grammatical patterns.

These observations are all consonant with the findings made by other students of grammaticalization (e.g. Traugott and Dasher 2002: 41–2). Accordingly, on the basis of a review of data on child development, diachronic linguistics (including grammaticalization), homesigns, signed languages, and pidgins and creoles, Slob in finds that (pre-school) age children are neither the agents of language change nor do they create new languages. And this is confirmed by Haspelmath’s (1999b: 589) analysis: Using observations on a wide range of grammatical changes, he concludes that ‘‘they all involve adult innovations and diffusion to other adult grammars through language use.’’

Additional evidence in support of this view can be seen in the conceptual and pragmatic nature of grammaticalization processes: A number of these processes presuppose a fairly sophisticated knowledge and concepts about referential relations across sentences and social situations, about distinctions in epistemic modality and evidentiality, or about relative time spaces. Research on language acquisition suggests that children in their early years of language learning have problems understanding and distinguishing such concepts. In a similar fashion, grammaticalization entails mechanisms of inferencing, for example on causal, conditional, concessive, and other concepts, and it is hard to imagine how pre-school age children would be in a position to use such mechanisms in a productive way:

New meanings of grammatical forms arise in adult language use on the basis of pragmatic inferences drawn from existing referential and propositional meanings. Preschool-age children are not yet able to draw most of such inferences, and are limited to core semantic concepts and pragmatic functions. (Slobin 1994: 384)

Furthermore, it is hard to see how small children would be able to perceive the complex network of text relations characterizing narrative discourse, for example, and to contribute substantially to the grammaticalization of discourse structure (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 41).

To conclude, there is a fairly clear answer to the question of who were the creators of early language: On account of all the observations made above they must have been adolescents and adults, and it seems unlikely that young children were the driving force in creating early language; rather, the observations on the rise of new grammatical forms and constructions are all in support of Aitchison’s (2003: 739) categorical statement that ‘‘babies do not initiate changes. Groups of interacting speakers do, especially adolescents.’’

However, these observations also suggest that children as well may have contributed to the evolution of grammatical categories. While not being creators, proposing new meanings in new contexts (extension), they can be important agents in the second part of grammaticalization where existing grammatical forms undergo decategorialization and erosion, becoming more regular, automated, and phonetically reduced due to increased frequency of use, fluency, and fastness of production.

¹ Unfortunately, Samarin (2002) does not make it clear what the corpus is on which these figures are based.

² An alternative label proposed is degree adverb. The term ‘‘intensifier’’ has been used in a wide range of different functions; more recently, it has come to be widely used for what is traditionally called ‘‘emphatic reflexive’’.

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Cognitive versus generative models

Functions of early language Discussion

Motivations underlying grammaticalization

Cognition or communication?

Functions of early language

Word order

From non-language to language

Grammatical evolution Layers

Early language

On the rise of recursion Conclusions

Generative approaches to grammar

Loss of recursion