14. Grammatical Approaches to Syntactic Change.pdf

14. Grammatical Approaches to Syntactic Change : The Handbook of Historical Linguistics : Blackwell Reference Online

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14. Grammatical Approaches to Syntactic Change

DAVID LIGHTFOOT

Subject

Linguistics » Historical Linguistics

Key-Topics

grammar , syntax

DOI:

10.1111/b.9781405127479.2004.00016.x

People use “grammar” to refer to a wide range of objects, and I adopt a biological view: grammars are

mental entities which arise in the mind/brain of individual children. These mental grammars show properties

which are not determined by the experience that children have. Children are exposed to utterances made in

some context and this experience does not suffice to shape all aspects of their mature grammars.

Consequently language acquisition is data-driven only in part. Researchers have postulated genotypical

principles which are available independently of experience and which therefore do not have to be learned.

These principles determine similarities among grammars, recurrent properties which hold of all grammars.

Alongside the invariant principles, we also postulate grammatical parameters , which children set on the

basis of their linguistic experience and which account for grammar variation. So language acquisition

proceeds as children set the parameters defined by Universal Grammar (UG), that is, those genotypical

principles and parameters which are relevant for the emergence of language in an individual (Chomsky

1986). The parameters of UG are structural and abstract, as we shall see, and that accounts for the

“bumpiness” of language variation; even closely related languages generally differ from each other in several

ways and not just in terms of one or two superficial phenomena.

We adopt the schema of (1) where (1a) gives general biological terminology and (1b) gives the specific

linguistic terminology: children are genetically endowed with UG and they are exposed to some triggering

experience (PLD); as a result, a mature grammar emerges and becomes part of their phenotype:

(1)

a. Triggering experience (linguistic genotype → phenotype)

b. Primary Linguistic Data (Universal Grammar → grammar)

This perspective on language acquisition was revived in the 1950s. Researchers have focused on poverty-of-

stimulus problems, ways in which mature grammars have properties which cannot result entirely from

childhood experience. Work has also dealt with language variation, parsing, and acquisition, and now we

have fairly rich theories of individual grammars and the UG from which they arise. 1

Turning now to language change, we note that the speech of no two people is identical, so it follows

naturally that if one takes manuscripts from two eras, one will be able to identify differences and so point to

language “change.” In this sense languages are constantly changing in piecemeal, gradual, chaotic, and

relatively minor fashion. However, historians also know that languages sometimes change in a bumpy

fashion, several things changing at the same time, and then settle into relative stasis, in a kind of

“punctuated equilibrium,” to borrow a term from evolutionary biology. From the perspective adopted here, it

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“punctuated equilibrium,” to borrow a term from evolutionary biology. From the perspective adopted here, it

is natural to try to interpret cascades of changes in terms of changes in grammars , a new setting for some

parameter, sometimes having a wide variety of surface effects and perhaps setting off a chain reaction. Such

“catastrophic” changes have distinctive features discussed in section 1. 2 So grammatical approaches to

language change have focussed on these large-scale changes, assuming that the clusters of properties tell

us about the harmonies which follow from particular parameters. By examining the clusters of simultaneous

changes and by taking them to be related by properties of UG, we discover something about the scope and

nature of large-scale parameters and about how they are set. Work on language change from this

perspective is fused with work on language variation and acquisition.

1 Parameter Resetting

If we aim to gain insight on how parameters are set by considering the conditions under which parameters

came to be set differently in the history of some language, then we need to know what to look for in

identifying a new parameter setting, as opposed to diachronic shifts which involve no structural change. New

parameter settings have some distinctive characteristics, which are quite independent of any particular

grammatical model.

First, each new parameter setting is manifested by a cluster of simultaneous surface changes, and this is one

element of the catastrophic nature of parameter resetting. For example, the loss of the operation moving

verbs to a distinct inflection position in English (see section 2) entailed the predominance of forms like Kim

always reads the Bible instead of the earlier Kim reads always the Bible , and the obsolescence of inversion

and negative sentences like reads Kim the Bible? and Kim reads not the Bible . These apparently unrelated

changes took place in parallel, as demonstrated by the statistical studies of Kroch (1989a), which showed the

singularity of the change at the grammatical level (and led Kroch to postulate his Constant Rate Effect; see

Pintzuk, this volume).

Second, not only are new parameter settings typically manifested by clusters of changes, but they also often

set off chain reactions. A clear example from English is the establishment of verb-complement order at D-

structure. Lightfoot (1991) showed that this entailed indirectly the analysis of the infinitival to as a

transmitter of properties of its governing verb and the introduction of an operation analyzing speak to,

spoken to , etc. as complex verbs. Such chain reactions can be understood through the acquisition process: a

child with the new verb-complement setting is forced by the constraints of UG to analyze some expressions

differently from the way they were analyzed in earlier generations.

Third, changes involving new parameter settings tend to take place more rapidly than other changes, and

they manifest the S-curve of Kroch (1989a). For example, grammaticalization and morphological change,

involving the loss of gender markers (Jones 1988), the reduction in verbal desinences, or the loss of the

subjunctive mood generally take place over long periods, often several hundred years. In the interim,

individual writers and speech communities show variation in the forms they employ. This kind of gradual

cumulativeness is usually not a hallmark of new structural parameter settings. The old negative patterns

associated with the verb raising operation ( Kim reads not the Bible ) were robust and widely attested in the

texts until their demise, which was rapid (see section 2). The fast spread of new parameter settings is not

surprising if one thinks of it in the context of language acquisition. Once the linguistic environment has

shifted in such a way as to trigger a new parameter setting in some children, the very fact that some people

have a new parameter setting changes the linguistic environment yet further in the direction of setting the

parameter in the new fashion. That is, the first people with the new parameter setting produce different

linguistic forms, which in turn are part of the linguistic environment for younger people and so contribute to

the spread of the new setting.

Fourth, obsolescence manifests new parameter settings. When structures become obsolete, it is hard to see

how to attribute their obsolescence to the ebb and flow of non-grammatical changes in the linguistic

environment. A novel form may be introduced for expressive reasons, to focus attention on some part of the

utterance by virtue of the novelty of the form, but a form can hardly drop out of the language directly for

expressive reasons or because of the influence of another language. On the contrary, obsolescence must be

due to a structural domino effect, a by-product of something else which was itself triggered by the kind of

positive data generally available to children (for a recent application of this methodology, see Warner 1995:

542).

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Fifth, any significant change in meaning is generally a by-product of a new parameter setting, for much the

same reason that the obsolescence of a structure must be the indirect consequence of a more abstract

change. Lightfoot (1991: ch. 6) discusses changes affecting the thematic roles associated with particular NP

positions with verbs like like, repent, ail (the direct object of these verbs could once be an experiencer,

while in modern English only the subject may be an experiencer; so people said things along the lines of

“apples like me” for the modern I like apples ). These changes could not arise as idiosyncratic innovations

that somehow became fashionable within the speech-community. It is hard to see how the variation in

meaning could be attained by children on a non-systematic basis, and even harder to see how the variation

could have been introduced as a set of independent developments, imitating properties of another language

or serving some expressive function through their novelty. Rather, such changes must be attributed to some

aspect of a person's grammar which was triggered by the usual kind of environmental factors - for the

English psych-verbs, the existence of only structural Cases.

Sixth, new parameter settings occur in response to shifts in simple data, cues occurring in unembedded

domains only; they are not sensitive to changes or continuities in embedded domains. Embedded domains

are as likely as unembedded domains to reflect the usual toing and froing of the chaotic linguistic

environment, but they have no effect on parameter setting. This follows from degree-0 learnability, the claim

that grammars are learnable, that is, parameters are set on the basis of data from unembedded binding

domains (Lightfoot 1991).

2 V-to-I Raising and its Cue

Let us consider one case of a grammatical change, which is partially understood, using it as a case study to

show what further work is needed. It will show how the study of a change is intimately connected, under this

approach, with work on grammatical theory and on language acquisition. Operations which associate

inflectional features with the appropriate verb appear to be parameterized, and this has been the subject of

a vast amount of work covering many languages (see, for example, the collection of papers in Lightfoot and

Hornstein 1994). We can learn about the shape of the parameter(s) by considering how the relevant

grammars could be attained, and that in turn is illuminated by how some grammars have changed.

Assuming work by Emonds (1978) and Pollock (1989), I adopt the basic clause structure of (2):

(2)

Subjects occur in Spec-IP and wh -elements typically occur in Spec-CP. Heads raise from one head position

to another, so verbs may raise to I and then further to C. In fact, many grammars raise their verbs to the

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to another, so verbs may raise to I and then further to C. In fact, many grammars raise their verbs to the

position containing the inflectional elements ((3c) and (3d)), but English grammars, unusually, have an

operation which lowers I on to an adjacent verb ((3a) but not (3b)). We know this because English finite verbs

do not occur in some initial C-like position (4a) and cannot be separated from their complements by

intervening material (4b):

(3)

a. Jill VP [leave+past]

b. Jill I [leave i +past] VP [e i

c. Jeanne I [lit i ] VP [toujours e i les journaux]

d. lit i IP [elle e i VP [toujours e i les journaux]

(4)

a. *visited you Utrecht last week?

b. *the women visited not/all/frequently Utrecht last week

What is it that forces French children to have the V-to-I operation and what forces English children to lack

the operation and to lower their Is?

It is reasonable to construe the English lowering operation as a morphological phenomenon: in general,

lowering operations are unusual in the syntax, and a syntactic lowering operation here would leave behind a

trace which would not be bound or properly governed. Furthermore, one would expect a morphological

operation but not a syntactic operation to be subject to a condition of adjacency. Therefore the

representation in (3a), reflecting a morphological operation, contains no trace of the lowered I. In any case,

the English lowering needs to be taken as the default setting, as argued in Lightfoot (1993), Lasnik (1999),

and Roberts (1999); there is no non-negative evidence available to the child which would force her or him to

select an I-lowering analysis over a V-raising analysis (3b) for English, if both operations could be syntactic

and subject to an adjacency requirement: children would need to know that (4a) and (4b) do not occur

(negative data, therefore unavailable as input to children). In that case, let us take the morphological I-

lowering analysis as the default setting.

Now one can ask what triggers the availability of a syntactic V-to-I raising operation in grammars where it

may apply. Some generalizations have emerged over the last several years. One is that languages with rich

inflection may have V-to-I operations in their grammars, and rich inflection could be part of the trigger

(Rohrbacher 1994). However, the presence of V-to-I raising cannot be linked with rich inflection in a simple

one-to-one fashion. It may be the case that if a language has rich inflection, then V-to-I raising is available

(Lightfoot 1991; Roberts 1997). If there is no rich inflection, a grammar may have the raising operation

(Swedish - see Lightfoot 1997) or may lack it (English). Indeed, English verb morphology was simplified

radically and that simplification was complete by 1400; however, V-to-I movement disappeared only in the

seventeenth century, so there was a long period when English grammars had very little verbal inflection but

did have V-to-I movement. In that case, there needs to be a syntactic trigger for V-to-I movement. So, for

example, a finite verb occurring in C, that is to the left of the subject NP (as in a V2 language or in

interrogatives), could only get there by raising first to I, and therefore inversion forms like (3d) in French

could be syntactic triggers for V-to-I. 3

Here we need to spell out an assumption about language acquisition: associated with each parameter

defined in UG is a cue , some kind of structure. Children scan their linguistic environment for these cues and

set the parameters accordingly. This view is, I believe, implicitly assumed in some work on acquisition

(notably work by Nina Hyams, e.g., Hyams 1986) but it needs to be spelled out more precisely. It differs

from other models (Chomsky 1965; Clark 1992; Clark and Roberts 1993; Gibson and Wexler 1994), which

take a child to converge on a grammar if it succeeds in generating the input data to which the child is

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take a child to converge on a grammar if it succeeds in generating the input data to which the child is

exposed. The idea that language acquisition is cue-based and does not proceed in this “input-matching”

fashion results to some extent from work on abrupt language change, where children arrive at grammars

which generate data quite different from grammars of an earlier generation (Lightfoot 1999b).

So triggers consist not of sets of sentences but rather of partially analyzed syntactic structures (Lightfoot

1991: ch. 1): Parameters are set by these partial structures, elements of I-language which act as what

Dresher and Kaye (1990) call cues. So a cue-based learner sets a Spec-head parameter (Spec

precedes/follows its head) on the basis of exposure to data which must be analyzed with a Spec preceding

its head, for example, [[ spec John's] [ N hat]]. This parameter can only be set, of course, when the child has a

partial analysis which treats John's and hat as separate words, the latter a head noun, etc. Less trivially, a

cue-based learner acquires a V2 grammar not by evaluating grammars against sets of sentences but on

exposure to structures commencing with a XP followed immediately by a finite V, where there is no fixed

grammatical or thematic relation between the initial phrasal category and the finite verb, effectively where

the initial XP is a non-subject (Lightfoot 1999b). This requires analyzing the XP as in Spec-CP and so CP [XP]

is the cue for a V2 system; the cue must be represented robustly in the PLD. As noted, the cue-based

approach to parameter setting is implicitly assumed in some earlier work; also it corresponds to work on the

visual system (which develops as organisms are exposed to very specific visual structures; Hubel 1978;

Hubel and Wiesel 1962; Sperry 1968), it has been productive for phonologists concerned with the parameters

for stress systems (Dresher and Kaye 1990; Dresher 1999; Fikkert 1994, 1995), it has been invoked for

some syntactic problems by Fodor (1998), and it represents something quite different from the input-

matching approach of Gibson and Wexler, Clark, and others.

Returning to our case study, under a cue-based learning approach, one would say that the cue for the V-to-

I parameter is a finite verb in I, that is, I [V], an element of I-language. One unambiguous instance of I [V] is

an I containing the trace of a verb which has moved on to C, as in the structure of (3d).

Indeed, I would guess that this would be a very important expression of the cue, and I doubt that structures

like (4b) would be robust enough to trigger V-to-I in isolation; this can be tested (see below). Adopting

terminology from Clark (1992), one can ask how robustly the cue is “expressed”; it is expressed robustly if

there are many simple utterances which can be analyzed by the child only as I [V]. So, for example, the

sentences of (3c) and (3d) can only be analyzed by the French child if the V lit raises to I; a simple sentence

like Jeanne lit les journaux ‘Jeanne reads the newspapers,’ on the other hand, could be analyzed with lit

raised to I or with the I lowered into the VP in the English style, and therefore it does not express the cue for

the V-to-I parameter.

In English the cue for the V-to-I operation, I [V], came to be expressed less in the PLD in the light of three

developments in early Modern English. First, the modal auxiliaries ( can, could, may, might, shall, should,

will, would, must ), while once instances of verbs that could raise to I, were recategorized such that they

came to be base-generated as instances of I; they were no longer verbs, and so sentences with a modal

auxiliary ceased to include I [V] and ceased to express the cue for V-to-I movement. The evidence for the

recategorization is the obsolescence of (5), which follows if the modal auxiliaries are generated in I and

therefore can occur only one per clause (5a), without an aspectual affix (5b), (5c), and mutually exclusively

with the infinitival marker to , which also occurs in I (5d):

(5)

a. John shall can do it

b. John has could do it

c. canning do it

d. I want to can do it

This change has been discussed extensively in Lightfoot (1979, 1991), Kroch (1989a), Roberts (1985,

1993a), and Warner (1983, 1993), and there is consensus that it was complete by the early sixteenth

century.

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