How research on language evolution contributes to linguistics

Since its inception in the second part of the 20th century, the science of language evolution has been exerting a growing and formative pressure on linguistics. More obviously, given its interdisciplinary character, the science of language evolution provides a platform on which linguists can meet and discuss a variety of problems pertaining to the nature of language and ways of investigating it with representatives of other disciplines and research traditions. It was largely in this way that the attention of linguists was attracted to the study of emerging sign languages and gestures, as well as to the resultant reflection on the way different modalities impact communicative systems that use them. But linguistics also benefits from the findings made by language evolution researchers in the context of their own research questions and methodologies. The most important of these findings come out of the experimental research on bootstrapping communication systems and the evolution of communicative structure, and from mass comparison studies that correlate linguists data with a wide range of environmental variables.

Natural/sexual selection: What’s language (evolution) got to do with it?

By considering a specific scenario of early language evolution, here I advocate taking into account one of the most obvious players in the evolution of human language capacity: (sexual) selection. The proposal is based both on an internal reconstruction using syntactic theory, and on comparative typological evidence, directly bringing together, formal, typological, and evolutionary considerations. As one possible test case, transitivity is decomposed into evolutionary primitives of syntactic structure, revealing a common denominator and the building blocks for crosslinguistic variation in transitivity. The approximations of this early grammar, identified by such a reconstruction, while not identical constructs, are at least as good proxies of the earliest stages of grammar as one can find among tools, cave paintings, or bird song. One subtype of such “living fossils” interacts directly with biological considerations of survival, aggression, and mate choice, while others clearly distinguish themselves in fMRI experiments. The fMRI findings are consistent with the proposal that the pressures to be able to master ever more and more complex syntax were at least partly responsible for driving the selection processes which gradually increased the connectivity of the Broca’s-basal ganglia network, crucial for syntactic processing, among other important functions.

Reconsidering the contents of interpreters’ notes: A human-centered approach to classification

This paper tackles the issue of the lack of a substantially new approach to classifying the interpreters’ notes. In my paper, I highlight the fact that the researchers in the field are yet to agree on the contents of interpreters’ notes, and that is, in my opinion, the problem that is numerously stumbled upon in consecutive interpretation research in general and note-taking research in particular. Not only do researchers invent new classifications within an excising paradigm, sometimes they contradict each other presenting different definitions for the same concepts. This paper attempts to solve the issue by introducing a new perspective on the contents of interpreters’ notes by adapting the human-centered approach and turning to the “writers” of the notes, the interpreters. The interpreter trainees who participated in this research were interviewed to obtain an in-depth understanding of what is included in interpreters’ notes. Under the semiotic perspective, which assumes both linguistic and non-linguistic notes as a system of signs, I classified the interpreters’ notes based on the subject’s comments to the notes they had written. This retrospective approach unveiled how interpreter trainees perceive their notes which prompt meaning-making and facilitate the memory when delivering interpretation.

The relationship between inhibitory control and speech production in young multilinguals

Speech production in multilinguals involves constant inhibition of the languages currently not in use. In relation to phonological development, higher inhibitory skills may lead to the improved suppression of interference from the remaining languages in one’s repertoire and more accurate production of target features. The participants were 20 sequential multilingual learners (13-year-olds with L1 Polish, L2 English, L3 German), acquiring their L2 and L3 by formal instruction in a primary school. Inhibition was measured in a modified flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen 1974; Poarch & Bialystok 2015). Multilingual production of voice onset time (VOT) and rhotic consonants was tested in a delayed repetition task (e.g. Kopečková et al. 2016; Krzysik 2019) in their L2 and L3. The results revealed that higher inhibitory control was related to increased global accuracy in the L2 and L3 production. Moreover, higher inhibitory control was also linked to higher accuracy in the overall L2 production, but there was no significant relationship with the L3 accuracy. These findings suggest that inhibition may play a role in phonological speech production, however, it may depend on one’s level of proficiency.

Behavioural indicators of translators’ decisional styles in a translation task: A longitudinal study

Translation Process Research defines translation as a decision-making process, but a plethora of studies has demonstrated that there is high individual variation in the translators’ styles of making decisions. The present interdisciplinary empirical study combines the theory of personality types and translation process research in order to identify the behavioural indicators that characterise translators’ decisional styles at the stage of end revision, where final decision-making takes place. As based on previous research, such indicators as the duration of end revision, pause length and number, the number of deleted characters and the types of corrections introduced at the stage of end revision may comprise the behavioural variables that define the translators’ styles of decision-making. The analysis of the data shows that two distinct behavioural styles may be distinguished, and their nature lies in the translators’ individual preferences for one of the two dichotomous psychological functions responsible for decision-making.

The younger, the better? Speech perception development in adolescent vs. adult L3 learners

Whereas the belief “the younger, the better” regarding foreign language learning seems to hold tenaciously, studies comparing learners of different starting ages attest that in instructed (as opposed to naturalistic) learning contexts, a younger age of onset does not automatically yield better results. However, little is known about how multilingual learners from different age groups develop in their non-native languages over time. The present study thus investigates the understudied domain of perceptual development with seven adolescents aged 12–13 and seven adults aged 19–39 (L1 German, L2 English) over the first year of L3 Polish instruction (tested after one, three, five, and ten months). The sound contrast under scrutiny was /v–w/, which only exists in the learners’ L2 and L3. As expected, in the ABX task, adults performed better than adolescents in both languages at most testing times and generally showed a slight upward trend in both their L2 and L3 learning trajectories. For the adolescents, development was more non-linear. Further, a boosting ‘novelty effect’ was found for the younger learner group: After only a few hours of L3 instruction, they perceived the contrast more consistently and faster than in L2 and at any other testing time, performing within the adults’ range.

The new big picture for linguistics: Complex systems

In the history of linguistics there have been crucial moments when those of us interested in language have essentially changed the way we study our subject. We stand now at such a moment. In this presentation I will review the history of linguistics in order to highlight some past important changes in the field, and then turn to where we stand now. Some things that we thought we knew have turned out not to be true, like the systematic, logical nature of languages. Other things that we had not suspected, like a universal underlying emergent pattern for all the features of a language, are now evident. This emergent pattern is fractal, that is, we can observe the same distributional pattern in frequency profiles for linguistic variants at every level of scale in our analysis. We also have hints that time, as the persistence of a preference for particular variants of features, is a much more important part of our language than we had previously believed. We need to explore the new realities of language as we now understand them, chief among them the idea that patterned variation, not logical system, is the central factor in human speech. In order to account for what we now understand, we need to get used to new methods of study and presentation, and place new emphasis on different communities and groups of speakers. Because the underlying pattern of language is fractal, we need to examine the habits of every group of speakers at every location for themselves, as opposed to our previous emphasis on overall grammars. We need to make our studies much more local, as opposed to global. We do still want to make grammars and to understand language in global terms, but such generalizations need to follow from what we can now see as the pattern of language as it is actually used.

Innovations, distribution gaps and mirror images: The reflexes of Proto-Ryukyuan close vowels in a post-nasal position

The present paper attempts to systematize and explain the changes in Proto-Ryukyuan (PR) vowels in a post-nasal position as observed in the lexicon of five daughter languages: Ie-Kunigamian/Okinawan, Shuri-Okinawan, Hirara-Miyakoan, Shika-Yaeyaman and Yonaguni/Dunan. The changes in question are related to the mid-vowel raising, which supposedly occurred only after the split of PR, but currently bears the markings of an unconditioned change in virtually in all daughter languages. Starting with an assumption that in some environments, the post-nasal raising of the mid-vowels led to the merger of original mid- and close vowels, while in different environments changes to the original close vowels keeps the reflexes of mid- and close vowels apart, the paper analyzes and compares Ryukyuan vocabulary containing the pertinent sound sequences of *mi, *mu, *ni and *nu, contrasting it with the reflexes of *me, *mo, *ne and *no. By scrutinizing in detail as many different environments of the sound sequences in question as possible, the paper aims to discover some patterns in the behavior of these sequences, examining both shared innovations and shared retentions among the daughter languages, observing the differences in the PR distribution of post-nasal mid-and close vowels, and entertaining the implications these findings hold for the general knowledge of PR.

The acquisition of Hungarian recursive PPs

In this study an experiment is presented on how Hungarian children interpret two word orders of recursive PPs (subject-PP-verb and PP-subject-verb order). According to the research of Roeper (2011) and Hollebrandse and Roeper (2014), children tend to give conjunctive interpretation to multiple embedded sentences at the beginning of language acquisition. This interpretation later turns into an adult-like, recursive interpretation. Our aim is to discover (i) whether Hungarian children start with conjunction as well, and whether (ii) the apparently more salient functional head lévő appearing in Hungarian recursive PPs can help them to acquire the correct, recursive interpretation early. We also want to find out whether (iii) the word orders in recursive PPs have an influence on the acquisition of children. In this paper two experiments are presented conducted with 6 and 8-year-olds and adults, in which the participants were asked to choose between two pictures. One of the pictures depicted recursive and the other one depicted conjunctive interpretation of the given sentence. In the first experiment subject-PP-verb order was tested, but in the second one sentences were tested with PP-subject-verb order. We will claim that lévő, which is (arguably) a more salient Hungarian functional element than -i, does not help children to acquire the embedded reading of recursive sentences, because both of them are overt functional heads. However, the two types of word orders affect the acquisition of recursive PPs. PP-subject-verb order is easier to compute because the order of the elements in the sentences and the order of the elements in the pictures matches.

Two syntactic positions of grammatical gender

The paper proposes some formal and functional criteria for distinguishing between two different syntactic positions of grammatical gender: determiner gender (D-gender) and nominal gender (n-gender). Focusing on D-gender and how it differs from n-gender, this work supports previous analyses of gender as a heterogeneous category that occupies different positions in the syntactic tree. Data are presented from 27 languages, many of which are either critically endangered or already extinct.1