Tommorow’s LEC talk will be given by Anna Martowicz, “The last step in the evolution of modern language – some findings and thoughts”, abstract below. Tuesday 24th, 11am, DSB 1.17

The last step in the evolution of modern language – some findings and thoughts

In this talk I summarize the findings of my cross-linguistic PhD study on the encoding of four circumstantial relations between states of affairs: anteriority, causality, purpose and conditionality. The items used as the exponents of these relations (including but not limited to the category of subordinators) are missing from Bickerton’s (1990) protolanguage. Also according to Jackendoff (1999), the emergence of clause linkers, along with other “symbols that explicitly encode abstract semantic relationships”, is the last step in the evolution of modern language. This is supported by the evidence from grammaticalization studies which strongly suggest that of all the grammatical categories, clause linking devices developed as one of the last groups (Heine and Kuteva 2007). However, modern languages differ significantly as to the number and types of the clause-linkers they have at their disposal. This fact is usually explained by pointing at certain socio-linguistic factors influencing language structure (most commonly – the presence and length of written tradition). Testing the hypothesis I present the results of correlation analyses between a number of socio-cultural factors and the degree of grammaticalization, lexicalization and explicitness of clause-linking devices in the 84 languages in my world-wide sample. I argue that in order to explain the complex picture emerging from the study we also need to consider geographic patterns of distribution of the abovementioned degrees, pragmatic relevance and cognitive characteristics of the analyzed relations.

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