PSYCHOLINGUISTIC CONSTRAINTS ON THE FORM OF GRAMMAR

All languages are cut from the same pattern because they are used by the same species for the same functions of communication and cognition. When one examine a broad sample or the languages of the world, it is evident that,for all their variety, human languages have much in common.

In the years since 1961, when Greenberg, Orgood and Jenkins organized a pioneering interdiciplinary conference on the question of the language universal, enough information on the world’s languages has been accumulated to reveal striking common patterns (Greenberg, 1978).

Each language provides conventions for the mapping of communicative intentions onto utterance- These conventions are constrained, for all languages, by

a)      Human tendencies to think and image in certain ways

b)      Processing demands imposed by a rapidly fading, temporally ordered code.

c)      The nature and goals of human interaction.

A.     WAYS OF THINKING

i)                    The Sensory-Motor Metaphor

                          

David Mcneill (1975), Charles Osgood (Osgood & Bock, 1977), and others, have argued that the organization of sentences in all languages is founded on such very basic ways of thinking. Osgood speaks of a pervasive “naturalness” of the most frequently  used word orders across languages.

Consider, for example, the possible ordering of Subject-Verb-Object. Of the six possible orders, almost all of the languages of the world use only one of three as their basic orders (Greenberg, 1963); subject-verb-object (SVO), subject-object-verb (SOV) and verb-subject-object (VSO).

Similar arguments can be made in regard to other apparently universal basic orders. For example, it is a well-known fact of perception that figures tend to stand out against background; figure-ground orders are basic in linguistic expression. (eg: the book is on the table is a more natural description than the table is under the book,  or on the table is the book). By contrast, some types of expression do not have universal order constraints and again a psycholinguistic argument can be offered.

In speaking, of such matters as time and abstract ideas, the languages of the world use metaphors based on the human body, located in space, acting on physical object, looking ahead, and moving forward. Thus, we can speak of looking forward to tomorrow, meeting on Wednesday, getting through the weak, having giving taking and losing time and so on.

In the domain of mental experience, we seem to think of the mind as a container filled with ideas and emotion as object –object which themselves can have physical characteristics: filled with grief, full of ideas, grasp and idea, a thorny problem, a hairy theory. Abstract idea can also be treated as object of manipulation: the plan slipped through my fingers; she held onto that hope, or mental contents can themselves become animate subject: that idea really grabs me.

Such physical metaphors have grammatical concequence. For example, preposition which express spatial relations can also be used temporally (as on Wednesday); nouns which refer to ideas or events can be treated as object nouns or as animate nouns.

ii)                   The Expression of Complexity

In each case, the plural is longer than the singular. In English, a final consonant is added, in Turkish, a whole syllable; in Arabic an infixed syllable. In a sense, these forms can be looked upon as physical metaphors: more thing, more sounds. Herbert and Eve Clark (1977, chapter 14; 1978) propose that there is more at work here than simply a physical metaphor. They advance a general principle: “ Complexity of thought tends to be reflected in complexity of expression” (Clark & Clark, 1977, p. 523).

The examples below show the various ways of negating in english:

affirmative                                    negative

The book is here                             The book is not here

Ellen has some money                     Ellen doesn’t have any money

tie                                                   untie

confirm                                           disconfirm

ever                                                never

one                                                 none

A state is less complex than a change of state. This is reflected in linguistic complexity.

state                                              change of state

solid                                               solidify

black                                              blacken

long                                                lengthen

legal                                               legalize

  

In raising the issue of complexity, we have touched upon the role of processing constraints. Presumably, things which are closest to the self and which are spoken of most frequently come to be expressed with the least complexity because of matter of efficiency.

B.     PROCESSING CONSTRAINSTS

In surveying a large and varied sample of the languages of the world, Greenberg (1963), and others after him, have found  curious gaps in the possible combinations of grammatical features which make up a language. As illustration, the basic word order of a language is closely tied to the possible positioning of other sentence elements, besides simple subject, verb and object.

      Certainly one could devise a language of each of the six types; Indeed, the cells with small numbers indicate that the unusual types are not completely impossible. But figures like these lead one to look for some sort of psycholinguistic explanation. Consider the two extreme cases, verb-initial and verb-final languages. An “adposition” (that is, a pre- or postposition) functions rather like a verb, in that it relates other elements in a sentence to one another: On relates snow to house in a spatial framework; after relates leaving to the meeting in a temporal sense. In similar fashion, fell relates snow to its final location on the house, and left relates Rebecca to the time after the meeting. If we speak a language in which we are accustomed to placing the verb at the end of the sentence, after mentioning the participants in the relationship described by the verb, it is then consistent to also place the adposition at the end of its phrase, after mentioning the participants in the relationship described by adposition.

C.      DISCOURSE CONSTRAINTS

In reading through the literature of linguistics and psycholinguistic, one can easily get the impression that a sentence is an entity which functions to prove a linguistic point or to measure an experimental subjects’s response. However, almost all of the sentences which have ever occured in the world have been spoken in the context of other sentences in an ongoing interaction between people who alternate as speakers and hearers. This most basic function of human language cannot help but determine the form of the linguistic code.

The basic assumption of the listener is that he will be guided from what he already knows to what he does not know. Accordingly, sentences tend to begin with stating a definite topic which is given or known, and move on to present new information as comment. Givon (1975, p. 76) presents this as a universal word order principle “That the leftmost constituent is the more topical one, i.e, the one more likely to not constitute new information, while the rightmost constituent is the focus for the new information”.

For example, in English, we have special grammatical means to bring focused information to the front of the sentence, using such means as stress (THAT professor I wouldn’t trust), topicalization (as for Jones that I wouldn’t trust, Jones is not to be trusted). Beginnings and ends of temporal units seem to have special attention value to human perceivers, and languages are constructed to exploid this tendency by favoring these positions to signal special features of message. We have just noted the use of first position, plus grammatical signals, to convey special emphasis or attention.

In sum, as we come to understand more of the functional pressures on language, we will be better able to account for the particular form that human language has taken.