Comments welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii
Reflections on the evolution of human language:
2. The Emergence of Analytic Processing:
3. A Role for "Meaningless Morphemes"?
The emergence of analytic processing was a critical development in the evolution of language. With a communication system limited to holistic processing, users would have had no means of deducing the meanings of unfamiliar utterances and no means of designing comprehensible new ones. In my most recent “Reflections” (Grace 2004a, b) at this site I’ve been speculating about what might have led our ancestors to imagine the possibility of signs that could be designed or interpreted analytically, i. e. of signs that are motivated. What clues might have been present in the holistic systems that immediately preceded the emergence of language that might have suggested the possibility of utterances (1) being made up of more than one part and of each part making a different contribution to the meaning of the whole?
My speculations so far have been based on phenomena known--even if regarded as marginal--from contemporary languages. In Grace 2004a, b I suggested, respectively, phonaesthesia and blending as two such phenomena that might offer clues as to how analytic processing could have originated. Both of these would have led to recurrent partials of form with each being associated with some--more or less well-defined--meaning.
Here I want to propose another possible kind of step toward analytic processing. Papers by R. H. Robins and Byron Bender give reason to believe that recurring partials of form--what I refer to in the title as “meaningless morphemes”--may have developed independently from any association with meaning.
In 1959 Robins published a widely-cited article entitled "In defence of WP". It was written in response to Charles Hockett's (1954) paper "Two models of grammatical description" contrasting the kinds of descriptions made according to what he labeled, respectively, the "Item and Arrangement" (IA) and "Item and Process" (IP) models. As Robins's title implies, he was arguing that a third model, "Word and Paradigm" (WP) offered more insight into language structure than Hockett's treatment had implied.
Some entities that are clearly to be assigned morphemic status may be seen in several languages to bear conflicting and even contradictory grammatical functions when considered in isolation. This is often accompanied by conflicting 'meanings' also, but as one must insist that grammatical methods are not determined by semantic considerations, and that the morpheme is not defined as a semantic element in the first instance, this consideration is to be ruled out as irrelevant at this point. (Robins 1959: 128).
He cites examples from a number of languages
where a single morpheme shape, or class of such shapes in complementary distribution, may as an isolate serve quite different grammatical functions, but without grammatical ambiguity in the whole words of which they form part. Thus we have in English -er serving as comparative adjectival suffix and as 'agentive' deverbal noun formative, and -(e)s ([-s], [-z], [-iz]) as third person singular present tense suffix in verbs and as plural suffix in nouns. (1959: 130).
Byron Bender goes further and argues that such recurring parts are essential to "enabling our limited memories to retain and operate with a vastly expanded inventory of signs" ( Bender 1998: 23). He points out that in the case of English there are numerous frequently recurring parts, many of which are only very vaguely if at all associated with any identifiable meaning or grammatical function. For example,
It can be instructive to look at a favorite English pattern for two-syllable words, those with a stressed first syllable, and a weak, unstressed second syllable occupied by a single syllabic sonorant: /r, l, m, n, y, w/--in their usual spellings, -er, -le, -on, -en, -y, -ow. (1998: 17).
Although no identifiable functions could be found for some such “morphemes”, they typically have multiple, more or less definable, functions. For example,
Instances where the same morphemes have found functions include the following: -er with agentive function: baker, butcher,…..; -er with comparative function:….; -er with “article of clothing” function: blazer, bloomer(s), ….; -er with “resident of” function: Hoosier, islander, Londoner,….; -er with reiterative function: chatter, flutter, quiver, … (1998: 18).
In Bender’s view morphemes, like phonemes, are
recurring units with little or no correlation to meaning, which nevertheless perform a vital function by enabling our limited memories to retain and operate with a vastly expanded inventory of signs.(1998: 23).
As Bender indicates, learning signs that are unrelated--suppletive--in form would become increasingly difficult as their number increased. As Nowak, Plotnik, and Jansen (2000) point out, the selective advantage offered by a communication system would depend on interacting individuals knowing the same signs. Once the inventory of signs to be learned exceeded the point where this could be counted on, there would have been no advantage to further growth. Nowak et al see this as creating pressure for the development of syntax--i.e., of analytic processing. This is no doubt right, but our concern here is with the smaller steps by which that development might have occurred, and the morphemes proposed by Robins and Bender seem to suggest one likely step.
The hypothesis then would be that there were patterns in the form of utterances that developed independently of any associated meaning (or grammatical function). That is, there were instances where a part of one utterance was identical to a part of other utterances. Furthermore, the number of such instances grew as the inventory of utterances increased, and the mnemonic advantage provided by these recurring partials alone was sufficient to permit a significant expansion of the repertoire of utterances.
I don’t want to over-emphasize the separation of form from meaning. There is probably a tendency for identifiable recurring forms to find meanings. The discussions of phonaesthesia and blending have suggested two ways in which this might come about. However, it seems important to recognize the possibility that process of discovering the analyzability of form might have followed a partially independent path from that of the analyzability of meaning.
NOTE
1. I’m using the (not very satisfactory) term “utterance” to refer to the kind of linguist sign that would have been uttered (if that's a suitable description for a sign that may not have been oral either in whole or in part) in a single act. It, further, refers just to the sign--the type, not the token--and not to any other components of the speech act in which it is uttered.
REFERENCES
Bender, Byron W. 1998. The sign gravitates to the word. In Mark Janse (ed.)(with the assistance of An Verlinden). Productivity and creativity: Studies in general and descriptive linguistics in honor of E. M. Uhlenbeck. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 15-25.
Grace, George W. 2004. A Role for Phonaesthesia in the Emergence of Analytic Processing? Reflections on the evolution of human language, number 2. Internet WWW page at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~grace/phonaesthesia.html .
Grace, George W. 2004. A Role for Blends in the Emergence of Analytic Processing? Reflections on the evolution of human language, number 3. Internet WWW page at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~grace/blending.html.
Hockett, Charles F. 1954. Two models of grammatical description. Word 10: 210-34.
Nowak, Martin A., Joshua B. Plotkin, and Vincent A. A. Jansen. 2000. The evolution of syntactic communication. Nature 404: 495-98.
Robins, Robert H. 1959. In defence of WP. Transactions of the Philological Society. 116-44.
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First put on the Web on 22 April 2005
