Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of 76 languages in 25 different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states.

The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories

A usage-based view takes grammar to be the cognitive organization of one's experience with language. Aspects of that experience, for instance, the frequency of use of certain constructions or particular instances of constructions, have an impact on representation that is evidenced in speaker knowledge of conventionalized phrases and in language variation and change. It is shown that particular instances of constructions can acquire their own pragmatic, semantic, and phonological characteristics. In addition, it is argued that high-frequency instances of constructions undergo grammaticization processes (which produce further change), function as the central members of categories formed by constructions, and retain their old forms longer than lower-frequency instances under the pressure of newer formations. An exemplar model that accommodates both phonological and semantic representation is elaborated to describe the data considered.

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From Usage to Grammar: The Mind's Response to Repetition

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

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The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

I INTRODUCTION II THE MAPY AND ACCOMPANYING TEXTS 1. Phonology 2. Morphology 3. Nominal Categories 4. Nominal Syntax 5. Verbal Categories 6. Word Order 7. Simple Clauses 8. Complex Sentences 9. Lexicon 10. Sign Languages 11. Other III REFERENCE MATERIAL INDEX CV

The World Atlas of Language Structures

The World Atlas of Language Structures Online

In this paper I argue that cross-linguistic grammatical comparison cannot be based on grammatical categories, because these are language-specific. Instead, typology must be (and usually is) based on a special set of comparative concepts that are specifically created by typologists for the purposes of comparison. Descriptive formal categories cannot be equated across languages because the criteria for category-assignment are different from language to language. This old structuralist insight (called categorial particularism) has recently been emphasized again by several linguists, but the idea that typologists need to identify "crosslinguistic categories" before they can compare languages is still widespread. Instead, what they have to do (and normally do in practice) is to create comparative concepts that help them to identify comparable phenomena across languages and to formulate cross-linguistic generalizations. Comparative concepts have to be universally applicable, so they can only be based on other universally applicable concepts: conceptual-semantic concepts, formal concepts, general concepts, and other comparative concepts. If, by contrast, one espouses categorial universalism and assumes crosslinguistic categories, as many generative linguists do, typology works by equating comparable categories in different languages, which are said to "instantiate" a cross-linguistic category. But in typological practice, all that is required is that a language-specific category matches a comparative concept. For example, the Russian Dative, the Turkish Dative and the Finnish Allative all match the comparative concept 'dative case', but they are very different distributionally and semantically and therefore cannot be equated and cannot instantiate a cross-linguistic category 'dative'. Comparative concepts are not always purely semantically-based concepts, but outside of phonology they usually contain some semantic components. If one is not confident about the universality of meanings, one can substitute extralinguistic contexts for universal meanings. The view that descriptive categories are different across languages and different from comparative concepts leads to terminological problems, which are also discussed here. Finally, I observe that the adoption of categorial universalism has actually impeded, not facilitated, cross-linguistic research.

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Martin Haspelmath

Papers

The World Atlas of Language Structures

The World Atlas of Language Structures Online

Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies

Approaches to grammaticalization

More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations