Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure

BACKGROUND: Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We conducted a statistical analysis of >2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures--a database of structural language properties. We found strong relationships between linguistic factors related to morphological complexity, and demographic/socio-historical factors such as the number of language users, geographic spread, and degree of language contact. The analyses suggest that languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession. Our findings indicate that just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. As adults learn a language, features that are difficult for them to acquire, are less likely to be passed on to subsequent learners. Languages used for communication in large groups that include adult learners appear to have been subjected to such selection. Conversely, the morphological complexity common to languages used in small groups increases redundancy which may facilitate language learning by infants. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We hypothesize that language structures are subjected to different evolutionary pressures in different social environments. Just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. The proposed Linguistic Niche Hypothesis has implications for answering the broad question of why languages differ in the way they do and makes empirical predictions regarding language acquisition capacities of children versus adults

Tone and word length across languages

The aim of this paper is to show evidence of a statistical dependency of the presence of tones on word length. Other work has made it clear that there is a strong inverse correlation between population size and word length. Here it is additionally shown that word length is coupled with tonal distinctions, languages being more likely to have such distinctions when they exhibit shorter words. It is hypothesized that the chain of causation is such that population size influences word length, which, in turn, influences the presence and number of tonal distinctions

Negation in Low Katu

In Low Katu (or Western Katu; ISO 639-3: kuf) there are five common words used to mark negation: kah, məʔ, jɨəʔ, ˀɛh and ˀɔːʔ. This variety in negators hints at differential syntactic or semantic uses. In this paper I illustrate the syntactic properties of these negators and, where possible, describe what semantic or pragmatic backgrounds they might have. I do this by comparing negative sentences from Katu folk tales and stories and investigating how they behave with respect to the typology of negation. Understanding the negation of Low Katu can unveil aspects on the scarcely researched syntactic behavior of this language, for instance on the position of verbs. This paper is intended to be the groundwork for further, more corpus-based research on negation or other grammatical aspects of Low Katu

Language and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond: In Honor of Robbins Burling

This volume celebrates the life and work of Robbins Burling, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, giant in the fields of anthropological linguistics, language evolution, and language pedagogy, and pioneer in the ethnography and linguistics of Tibeto-Burmanspeaking groups in the Northeast Indian region. We offer it to Professor Burling – Rob – on the occasion of his 90th birthday, on the occasion of the 60th year of his extraordinary scholarly productivity, and on the occasion of yet another – yet another! – field trip to Northeast India, where his career in anthropology and linguistics effectively began so many decades ago, and where he has amassed so many devoted friends and colleagues – including ourselves. (First paragraph of Editor's Introduction)