University of Michigan
rburling@umich.edu

abstract

A surprisingly broad consensus has grown among scholars interested in the origin of language that the ability to speak is a relatively recent and quite sudden development. One support for this presumption is the difficulty some linguists have imagining a partial syntax. No part of syntax, it is supposed, could exist without all the rest. Among other possible candidates for partial syntax is child language, so if one is to deny the possibility of partial syntax one must interpret child language as jumping abruptly from a state where it consists of little more than strings of poorly joined individual words (or "proto-language") to a stage of full syntax.

Unfortunately for those who hold this position, the facts of child language, as we can observe it each day in the behavior of our own children, do not fit this abrupt scenario. While it is true that children frequently appear to achieve complex syntax with enviable speed, they do not move from proto-language to full syntax in a few months, let alone in a single day. Two factors give us an illusion of much greater speed in language learning than the evidence can support.

First, an important part of language learning takes place silently, well before children actually produce the forms they have learned. It would be reckless to ignore the confidence of all parents that their children understand far more than they can say. Their level of understanding during the period before they use multiword sentences points to the priority of comprehension. Producing a syntactic construction should be looked upon as only the final stage in a long developmental process.

Second, syntactic learning continues well beyond the age of five. The illusion of the mature five-year-old is probably due to the fact that children of this age have generally overcome the imperfect phonology of their earlier years and no longer make the obvious morphological errors of younger children. The speak with few obvious mistakes, but they avoid syntactic mistakes by the simple expedient of avoiding complex syntactic constructions, not by knowing all there is to know about syntax.

If syntax starts to be learned months before it appears in production, and if it continues to be learned well past the age of five, its acquisition is not as magically fast as it sometimes seems. Partial syntax of many levels of complexity is there to be observed in our own children. If partial syntax is so evident in our own children, I see no reason to doubt the possibility of partial syntax, of many levels of complexity, among our early ancestors.

I do not mean to imply that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The slow growth of language in children does not require us to believe in the slow development of language in prehistory. I mean only to insist that one cannot use the evidence of children to support the opposite claim, the odd notion that syntax had to develop abruptly in our ancestors because a partial syntax is impossible.

 Conference site: http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/