Science News - November 19, 2011

in which verbs come before objects
tend to use prepositions, as in “The
man (subject) put (verb) the dog (object)
in (preposition) a canoe.” Languages in
which verbs follow objects tend to use
postpositions, as in “The man (subject)
the dog (object) put (verb) the canoe in
(postposition).”
Using eight word-order features, Dunn
and Gray’s team statistically recon-
structed evolutionary trees of languages
from four major families: Austronesian,
Bantu, Indo-European and Uto-Aztecan.
These families contain about one-third
of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages.

The team found that languages within each family, but not languages across families, formed branching patterns with related sentence structures. Pairs of word-order features, such as a particular arrangement of numerals and nouns or of nouns and adjectives, almost always occurred together within single language families.

If universal properties of the human mind provide a framework for speech, then word-order patterns should have shown commonalities across language families. But this work suggests that speakers of, say, Indo-European and Austronesian languages — heirs of distinctive cultural traditions — take vastly different routes to ordering various types of words in sentences.

“This finding indicates that different cultures come up with their own, quite sensible word-order rules,” says evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel of the University of Reading in England, a pioneer of phylogenetic studies of language.

Borrowing of words and grammatical styles can cloud lines of descent, but Dunn’s analysis accounts for such nonevolutionary factors while ferreting out systematic word-order changes over time, Pagel says. “What makes phylogenetic findings so extraordinary is that, despite lots of uncertainty, we still see that language gets transmitted in evolutionary ways,” he says.

Universal kickback

Many linguists think that what makes Dunn’s phylogenetic study

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Numeral
–noun
Genitive
–noun
Subject
–verb
Adposition
–noun
Adjective
–noun
Object
–verb
Demonstrative
–noun
Relative clause
–noun
Numeral
–noun
Genitive
–noun
Subject
–verb
Adposition
–noun
Adjective
–noun
Object
–verb

Austronesian

No universals A study looking at how different word-order features depend on one another (line thickness indicates connection strength) suggests that Austronesian and Indo-European language families follow different word-order rules. Among four features expected to be strongly correlated (shaded background), only one link showed up in both families.

Demonstrative
–noun
Relative clause
–noun

Indo-European

so extraordinary is a cavalier, data-challenged dismissal of the bedrock notion that talk everywhere shares common properties. Other work indicates that languages around the world pick from a limited menu of possible word-order choices, says MIT linguist David Pesetsky. Language families can’t opt for off-menu, one-of-a-kind word sequences, he says.

Consider verb-second positioning, in which the second word or group of related words in a main clause is always a verb. A verb-second structure appears in the following Dutch sentences: “I read this book yesterday,” “Yesterday read I this book” and “This book read I yesterday.” Among Germanic languages, which include Dutch, only English lacks a structure that always puts the verb second. (English speakers, for example, could say, “Yesterday I read this book,” a verb-third positioning.) Researchers have now identified verb-second tongues in West Africa and Brazil.

Languages everywhere can easily pop
into a verb-second framework, Pesetsky
proposes. Other verb placements
sometimes appear, as in English, but the
menu of alternatives is limited; no lan-
guages that always put the verb third or
second from the end have been found.