24 Linguistics Ontogeny

Dr. Neeru Tandon

Learning outcome

While much of what is now known about human development is the result of observational and experimental studies of ontogeny (the development of individuals over their life course), the recognition that each individual’s development is afforded and constrained by the time and place in which they grow up has led a number of researchers to look beyond ontogenetic development in contemporary societies to ask questions about the historical development of those societies and also about the development of the human species as a whole from the point when it evolved from the line that connects humans to other higher primates.

In this module on Linguistic Ontogeny and Phylogeny we will discuss these two concepts of linguistics in detail. We will also come to know about the acquisition of Grammar and phonemic habits. Connection between Ontogeny and Phylogeny will be made clear along with phylogenetic changes.

Nature of Linguistics: Before understanding Linguistic Ontogeny we must understand the nature of Linguistics. The following are some important natures of linguistics:

• Like human body, language is a complex system. A human body functions because of different organs like the heart, lungs, brain etc. Similarly the language system functions because of words, structures, sound etc.
• These are the most important parts of a language. We cannot express ourselves by the help of only one of the elements of language, i.e., sounds, words of structures. All these are inter-linked.
• In language learning speech is the fundamental thing. Reading and writing are secondary. Language works through symbols, which are the words. For example, the word “pen” is not a “pen,” it stands for a “pen.” Therefore the speaker, the listener, the reader and the writer must know the symbols used in a language.
• Language is not an inherent biological function of man. It is acquired through learning. Language is learnt through practice and habit formation. Rules and definition of grammar cannot help for the development of language of a child.
• According to Ben Jonson, “speech is the instrument of society.” A society cannot be thought of without language. Hence the important purpose of language is communication.
• Language does not remain in a vacuum. It exists in the speakers. It is related to the culture of a particular society.
• Language is flexible; changes from time to time go on in respect of speech sounds, grammatical features, vocabulary etc. Therefore, in language teaching, we should not be rigid.

Linguistic Ontogeny: An Introduction

‘’The process of development of speech habits in a single person, from birth to death, is linguistic Ontogeny, the study of which is one aspect of diachronic linguistics.’ -Charles F Hockett (Professor of linguistics and Anthropology, Cornell University)

There are three longstanding questions about the role of the child in language evolution and diachronic linguistics—that is, the processes whereby language arose in our species and the ceaseless changes of human language once it is present in the species. The four basic questions come at the surface levels that are must to answer.

1. Does linguistic ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny?
2. Does linguistic diachrony recapitulate ontogeny?
3. Whether historical changes in language mirror ontogenetic changes?
4. Do children create grammatical forms?

Question 1 Does linguistic ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny? asks whether linguistic ontogeny can be conceived of as a recapitulation of linguistic phylogeny? —

Linguistic ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny because the form and content of “under- two” child language is shaped by the form and content of an already existing exposure language. Further, if we compare the rates of development of various cognitive capacities in contemporary primate species, heterochronic relations between various developing capacities indicate that any particular set of capacities, such as those underlying language, pattern in distinctly different ways across species. Therefore processes of human language development are not likely to mirror the phylogenetic origins of such processes

Does Linguistic Diachrony Recapitulate Ontogeny?

This question means do patterns of historical change of existing languages mirror the ways in which human children acquire existing languages? This position has been advanced repeatedly over the last several centuries, due to striking parallels between patterns of language development in individual children and repeated diachronic changes in languages. One is tempted to propose that similar cognitive processes underlie both sorts of development. The facts that we cannot examine in the history of languages are available to us in the child. … There are certain easy routes…: they are frequently the same ones that languages have followed in the course of their evolution and that the child, in turn, takes up in learning his language. (Guillaume, 1927/1973)

In contemporary linguistics the child learner is seen as the source of various sorts of language change, both in generative accounts (e.g. Lightfoot, 1988) and functional approaches (e.g. Gvozdanović, 1997). Why would one propose such an explanation for historical language change? It is based on a simple set of propositions: (a) Children are imperfect learners. Their “errors” tend toward regularization. (b) Languages are imperfect systems. They tend toward regularization. (c) Child learners are responsible for changing the language.

Propositions (a) and (b) are true; but the evidence suggests that (c) is false. Most changes of the sort carried out by young children are a matter of “cleaning up” an existing grammar,rather than introducing new forms or constructions. Furthermore, for a linguistic change to have a lasting effect, it has to be maintained into adulthood; that is, the childish revisions must come to sound normal and acceptable. Sociolinguistic studies, however, show that lasting changes are more likely to be due to usage in adolescent peer groups, rather than in early childhood (e.g. Romaine, 1984).

Whether Historical Changes In Language Mirror Ontogenetic Changes?

The past-tense case study suggests that children in the early stages of acquisition are not the ones who push the language forward. Other work in developmental psycholinguistics also suggests that children are not the ones to create new grammatical forms.

In brief, preschoolers are at work sorting out the regularities and irregularities of subsystems of the language, on the basis of limited information. Older children, having established a working knowledge of the language and using a larger database, are able to apply patterns at the level of the language as a system. That is, they have a sufficient grasp of the overall structure of the language to allow them to adjust particular parts of the system. Again, the immature learner does not serve as an appropriate model of the processes of change.

Do Children Create Grammatical Forms?

There are three sorts of situations in which we can ask whether children can create grammatical forms on their own:

•  The emergence of creole languages,
•  The invention of “homesigns” by deaf children with hearing parents,
•  And the emergence of a new sign language.

With regard to each situation it has been proposed that children have the capacity to innovate structure, suggesting that this is an innate capacity that arose in the evolution of our species. So do children create grammatical forms? To some extent they do, but within limits. At least in the gestural modality, deaf children with no sign language input can create a gestural language that has systematic patterns of reference and sign order. Children who acquire a partially structured language—either a pidgin language or an incipient sign language based on homesign—are skilled at making the language into a more efficient and regular system.

But these processes go beyond the individual. On the plane of evolution, whatever scenario one might be attracted to, complex social products such as language can emerge, in part, in processes of interpersonal use.

In a nutshell the answer to all three questions is mainly negative, because the particular language being acquired shapes Ontogeny. That is, there is no universal form of early child language that reflects a biologically specified proto-language. In historical change of existing languages, it appears that lasting innovations do not come from preschoolers but from older speakers. That is, language changes more in use than it does in the process of being learned. Languages are sociocultural as well as individual products. Therefore, we can’t expect to discover the phylogenetic origins of human language by studying the individual alone.

Approaches to Linguistic Ontogeny

We have mainly two approaches to Linguistic ontogeny, which are complimentary and not contradictory. One approach to Linguistic Ontogeny is Child centered, concerned with what the acquisition of communicative habits does to the child. Another approach is system- centered, concerned rather with the impact of the child on the communicative systems he is acquiring. Still if we compare the two approaches we find that the system-centered approach is more widely accepted and prevalent. The Homo sapiens child is different as the child is exposed to some already evolved human language and is equipped with a brain that evolved to make use of such a language.

Initially, babies have very limited ability to change their position in order to interact with the world around them By about the eighth month, there develops the stage of ‘secondary inter- subjectivity, when, by following the other’s direction of gaze or point, mother and infant are able to achieve joint attention to some person or object that is of mutual interest, At this stage, the mother frequently signals her awareness of the infant’s interest by bringing the object within the infant’s reach and/or by naming the object and making some comment about it. By doing so, the mother treats the object of attention as having meaning as well as material form. For example, an infant shows an interest in the spoon that is used to feed her and her mother hands her the ‘tool’ and at the same time names it. Then, in due course, the infant will take over the use of the word ‘spoon’ to call attention to, or ask for, the spoon, and this signing will coordinate the mother’s and the infant’s actions with respect to the spoon and the uses to which it may be put. Radzikhovskii (1984) explains this latter form of inter- subjectivity as follows:

[T]he general structure of ontogenetically primary joint activity (or, more accurately, primary joint action) includes at least the following elements: subject (child), object, subject (adult). The object here also has a symbolic function and plays the role of the primary sign. In fact, the child’s movement toward, and manipulation of, an object, even when he is pursuing the goal of satisfying a vital need, is also simultaneously a sign for an adult: to help, to intervene, to take part. (…) In other words, true communication, communication through signs, takes place here between the adult and the child. An objective act is built up around the object as an object, and sign communication is built up around the same object as the sign. Communication and the objective act coincide completely here, and can be separated only artificially (quoted in (Engeström 1987).

The Acquisition of Grammar

Once successful analogical coinage has taken place, the habit of building new utterances with raw- materials extracted from old ones is reinforced by the success. The leap is often extremely sudden and is followed by an amazingly rapid proliferation of what the child says. Coinage which deviate too radically from what is provided for by the grammatical system of the adult language do not meet with understanding: the coinage, and the specific analogies on which they are based, are abandoned for lack of reinforcement.

The Acquisition of Phonemic Habits

The correlation between the development of phonemic and of grammatical habits is not clear. It is known that some children make a holistic false start on pronunciation, learning to imitate a few adult utterances with remarkable phonetic accuracy, but then losing this accuracy temporarily as true phonemic habits again. The development of a child’s phonemic system from one stage to the next thus takes the form of a splitting of some articulatory range into smaller contrasting sub-ranges. In a nutshell the child’s utterances are not, in general, a routine phoneme-by-phoneme transformation of the adult form. Rather, consonant clusters may be mapped into single consonants, unstressed syllables are often omitted, and a single consonant may be repeated in successive syllables.

In a remarkably few years the child’s phonemic system is almost completely congruent with that of the adults, though it is not unusual for a few distinctions of minor roles in keeping utterances apart- to remain un acquired until the age of ten or twelve.

Semantic Aspect of Linguistic Ontogeny

The emotional contexts of the child’s earliest communicative participation-long before his earliest speech- establish a pattern of connotations that are germinal for the personality type of an individual. The broad outlines of the debate are as follows. Individualists believe that the proper object of the scientific study of language is the language of an individual, his idiolect or, in Chomskyan terms, his mental grammar, knowledge of language, or I language. Individualists typically believe that semantic notions such as reference and meaning are dependent on such individualistic facts. This does not necessarily mean that social aspects of language are unimportant or that they do not admit of a scientific description, though some individualists have made this further claim: cf. Chomsky (1975). However, most individualists do believe that only individualistic aspects of language can be formalized and used to make predictions (e.g., about entailment and grammaticality)

The neural basis of language evolution must remain speculative, since clear phylogenetic data are unavailable. However, there are two alternative, though more indirect ways, to approach this issue. One approach is to compare different species in their ability to learn language, in particular, syntax or rule-based sequences. A second is to consult ontogenetic data on language development and brain maturation, under the assumption that ontogeny to some extent reflects phylogeny. In this article, data from both approaches, with a strong focus on rule-based and syntactic sequence learning, will be discussed.

Central to the discussion is not only whether such sequences can be learned, but more crucially, what type of syntactic sequence can be learned. A fundamental distinction has been made between two grammar types, namely finite state  grammars  (FSG)  following  an  (AB)n rule and phrase structure grammar (PSG) following an AnBn rule (Hauser et al., 2002; Fitch and Hauser, 2004)

Child as a linguistic adult

But the age of four to six, the normal child is a linguistic adult. He controls with marginal exceptions if any, the phonemic systems of his language. He does so by handling effortlessly the grammatical core and using the basic connective vocabulary of the language. Not only brain size, but also cultural remains such as tools, shelters, or evidence of feeding techniques can provide important clues to the evolution of language. On the basis of these considerations, language, like tool-use and brain size, is postulated to have evolved slowly over several million years. With each cognitive and linguistic advance, new foraging and social interactive skills would have arisen. It is suggested that, as in ontogeny, language evolution began in mother-child dyads with the communication of simple needs and desires by one- to two-‘word’ utterances. As grammatical skills increased, hominids became capable of discussing co-operative endeavors and/or absent ‘rendezvous’ or other sites.

Linguistic Phylogeny: An Introduction

‘The histories of languages as wholes through successive decades and centuries is linguistic phylogeny.’- Charles F HockettIncreasingly, work is being done using the methods of phylogenetic systematics to uncover cultural and linguistic evolution. A leading lab on this work is Russell Gray’s lab at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and his collaborators have looked at the evolution of language, particularly Pacific languages, and other cultural trends (like canoe decoration) in evolutionary terms.

So phylogenetic can apply nicely in contexts where traditions (or species) are well behaved.

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel’s Law: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny

In the 19th century Ernst Heinrich Haeckel developed the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. By this he meant that it was possible to gain insight into the evolution of species by studying the development of individuals belonging to specific species, and vice versa, that it was possible to gain knowledge about the ontogenetic development of individuals that belong to a certain species, by studying the evolutionary emergence of that species. Biological scholars around the world today reject Haeckel’s biogenetic law as a fundamental law or principle in evolution, but discussion remains about whether his principle can be applied up until a certain degree within biological evolution (Richardson and Keuck 2002). It is especially within extra-biological disciplines, such as the origin and evolution of languages studies, that one can find a renewed interest in his principle (Bickerton 1990; Givon, 2002).

Haeckel’s claim that ontogeny repeats phylogeny has had a checkered career in the history of biology, and certainly cannot stand as a general law of development. However, it may have application in limited domains. In particular, no one should be surprised if it applies to evolutionary developments that are quite recent and that occur in a species whose brain growth is only 70 percent complete at birth and is not completed until two or more years afterwards. (Bickerton, 1990, p. 115)

Most important, however, is that the different applications of Haeckel’s law within language origin and evolution studies, demonstrate the need for a critical evaluation of the units and levels of language evolution. Therefore evolutionary epistemology (Gontier 2005) needs to be implemented Here, the focus will be on 3 specific implementations:

1. It is applied at an interspecific level (between species) when it is argued that hominid development recapitulates primate evolution;
2. It is applied at an intraspecific level (within the same species) when the language of a child is compared with adult human language;
3. and in the Pidgin and Creole application, the “species-concept” is replaced by “different languages”, which makes us raise the evolutionary epistemological question whether languages are understood as analogical to species (interspecifically) or individuals (intraspecifically).

We assume that, to have this capacity, there must have been a portion in the brain potentially available for it (and probably for other tasks as well); a portion, in other words, that was not irrevocably committed to monitoring digestion or blood flow, … . … the brain would require a substantial increase to bring it even within reach of syntax, but only a small additional increment to data, since the presumption of cognacy is well justified (Prokić 2010).

In general, lexical similarity measures work best at relatively shallow time-depths (Greenhill 2011). Phylogenetic methods are not limited to working with lexical, morphological or phonological features. We may conclude that there are no substantive formal differences between the utterances of trained apes and the utterances of children under two. The evidence of children’s speech could thus be treated as consistent with the hypothesis that the ontogenetic development of language partially replicates its phylogenetic development. The speech of under-twos would then resemble a stage in the development of the hominid line between remote, speechless ancestors and ancestors with languages much like those of today. (Bickerton, 1990, p. 115)

Phylogenetic Change: In principle, all historical linguistics is phylogenetic, since phylogenetic encompasses the scientific investigation of the descent of organisms in general. While prototypical phylogenetic analysis involves investigating the evolutionary descent of a class of biological species, such phylogenetic analyses have also been applied in other domains (e.g. social organization, musical instruments, decorative motifs on textiles); and indeed, can be applied to any domain that varies according to general evolutionary processes. One reason that in linguistics this term is often used in contrast to other forms of historical linguistic investigation is that phylogenetic approaches maintain their methodological link to the investigation of evolutionary processes in other, mostly biological, domains. The appeal of incorporating the analysis of language into a general theory of evolution is that current evolutionary theory offers a rigorous, quantifiable approach to phylogenetic inference. As Felsenstein states in the preface to his monumental Inferring Phylogenies, “phylogenies, or evolutionary trees, are the basic structures necessary to think clearly about differences between species, and to analyze those differences statistically” (Felsenstein 2004: xix). Linguistic phylogenetic incorporates the whole approach of the phylogenetic comparative method — using language phylogenies as the historical backbone to quantitative models of language change in order to test hypotheses about human dispersals, processes of cultural change, and the evolution of other linguistic subsystems. In this sense phylogenetic linguistics is broader in its ambitions than historical linguistics: historical linguistics seeks to illuminate the history of languages, and only secondarily seeks to say something about the speakers of those languages in approaches like linguistic paleontology and socio-cultural reconstruction, as well as gene-language correlation.

‘’We see,then,that a millennium of phylogenetic change has sufficed to alter English so radically that if a tenth century Englishman and a twentieth –century Englishman or American could meet face to face, THEY COULD NOT UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER AT ALL.—Gradual change in the design of a living language is part of its life and is inexorable’’.-Charles F Hawkett

The role of ontogenesis and Phylogeny in human evolution and development Darwin’s theory of evolution caused a revolutionary change in the concept of time. Evolution did not merely extend history backwards, it brought into being an entirely different order of time, in which different time-scales (durées) co-existed. Understanding the relations between time-scales, phylogenetic, ontogenetic, historical was a major preoccupation of both biologists and psychologists.

The mechanism proposed by Vygotsky for the development of ‘higher’ mental functions in the individual was internalization. However, this concept suffers from a logical problem, since it seeks to explain psychological processes in terms, which presuppose those very processes. Vygotsky also emphasized the importance of tool-use in both the ontogeny and phylogeny of higher mental processes, drawing an analogy between tool-use and the use of conventional signs, including language. Again, however, this analogy is of limited usefulness, since neither tool-use nor cultural transmission is unique to humans.

Summary

A popular approach points to the similarities between the ontogeny and phylogeny of language. The ontogeny and phylogeny argument has force only if the parallels between primate and child language are genuine. Traditionally, children’s language is believed to include abstract linguistic representations and processes even though their speech output may be constrained by nonlinguistic factors, such as working memory limitations.

Reference

• Hockett,    Charles    F. The    Problem    of    Universals    in    Language.    1966.    Retrieved from http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~swinters/371/designfeatures.html.
• Joan L. Bybee, Paul J. Hopper(ed) Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, John Benjamins publishing Company, USA.
• Platnick, Norman I., and H. Don Cameron. 1977. Cladistic Methods in Textual, Linguistic, and Phylogenetic Analysis. Systematic Biology 26 (4):380-385.
• Slobin, D. I. (in press 2004), “From Ontogenesis To Phylogenesis: What can child language
• tell us about language evolution?” (NY).Oxford, OX; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell Science.