Syntactic Complexity: Diachrony, Acquisition, Neuro-cognition, Evolution

561 Pages·2009·4.99 MB·English

by  Talmy Givón (Ed.)

Syntactic Complexity
Typological Studies in Language (TSL)
A companion series to the journal Studies in Language. Volumes in this
series are functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in
language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and
language typologies.
General Editor
Michael Noonan
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Assistant Editors
Spike Gildea Suzanne Kemmer
University of Oregon Rice University
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Santa Barbara Buffalo Pittsburgh
Ronald W. Langacker Doris L. Payne Sandra A. Thompson
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Canberra Köln
Volume 85
Syntactic Complexity. Diachrony, acquisition, neuro-cognition, evolution
Edited by T. Givón and Masayoshi Shibatani
Syntactic Complexity
Diachrony, acquisition, neuro-cognition, evolution
Edited by
T. Givón
University of Oregon
Masayoshi Shibatani
Rice University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Syntactic complexity : diachrony, acquisition, neuro-cognition, evolution / edited by T.
Givón and Masayoshi Shibatani.
p. cm. (Typological Studies in Language, issn 0167-7373 ; v. 85)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax. I. Givón, T. II. Shibatani,
Masayoshi.
P291.S952 2009
415--dc22 2008053096
isbn 978 90 272 2999 1 (hb; alk. paper) / 978 90 272 3000 3 (pb; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 9014 4 (eb)
© 2009 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
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Table of contents
Introduction 1
T. Givón
part i. Diachrony
From nominal to clausal morphosyntax: Complexity via expansion 23
Bernd Heine
Re(e)volving complexity: Adding intonation 53
Marianne Mithun
Multiple routes to clause union: The diachrony of complex verb phrases 81
T. Givón
On the origins of serial verb constructions in Kalam 119
Andrew Pawley
A quantitative approach to the development of complex predicates:
The case of Swedish Pseudo-Coordination with sitta “sit” 145
Martin Hilpert & Christian Koops
Elements of complex structures, where recursion isn’t: The case of relativization 163
Masayoshi Shibatani
Nominalization and the origin of subordination 199
Guy Deutscher
The co-evolution of syntactic and pragmatic complexity: Diachronic
and cross-linguistic aspects of pseudoclefts 215
Christian Koops & Martin Hilpert
Two pathways of grammatical evolution 239
Östen Dahl
i Table of contents
part ii. Child language
On the role of frequency and similarity in the acquisition
of subject and non-subject relative clauses 251
Holger Diessel
‘Starting small’ effects in the acquisition of early relative constructions in Spanish 277
Cecilia Rojas-Nieto
The ontogeny of complex verb phrases: How children learn to negotiate
fact and desire 311
T. Givón
part iii. Cognition and neurology
Syntactic complexity versus concatenation in a verbal production task 391
Marjorie Barker & Eric Pederson
The emergence of linguistic complexity 405
Brian MacWhinney
Cognitive and neural underpinnings of syntactic complexity 433
Diego Fernandez-Duque
Neural mechanisms of recursive processing in cognitive and linguistic complexity 461
Don M. Tucker, Phan Luu & Catherine Poulsen
Syntactic complexity in the brain 491
Angela D. Friederici & Jens Brauer
part i. Biology and evolution
Neural plasticity: The driving force underlying the complexity of the brain 509
Nathan Tublitz
Recursion: Core of complexity or artifact of analysis? 531
Derek Bickerton
Index 545
Introduction
T. Givón
University of Oregon
1.  Complexity and syntax
Complexity is a property of organized entities, of organisms, or of systems. Indi-
vidual entities, as long as they have no internal organization, are by definition
maximally simple. They may become parts of an organized whole when they have
some relations — or connectivity — within an organized system. Within an organized
system, the simple entities may bear relations to the system as a whole, or to its sub-
parts, or to each other. At the most abstract level, a system may be described as a net-
work of nodes and connections, where the nodes stand for either the simplest entities
or to more abstract, higher level sub-parts of the system, and the connections stand for
the nodes’ relations within the system.
As an illustration, consider (1a) below, which depicts ten simple entities with no
connection to each other, thus not part of an organized system. Contrast (1a) now with
(1b), where four of the simple entities partake in an organized system of the most rudi-
mentary sort. In such a system, the individual nodes bear relations only to the system
as a whole, which is then the sole abstract node.
(1) a. b.

The 4-node system in (1b) may be also depicted, using a tree diagram, as a 1-level hier-
archy, with only one abstract node — or meta-level — representing the whole. That is:
(2) 1 -level hierarchic system:
 T. Givón
System (2) has the lowest complexity level, a 1-level hierarchy. But the same four
entities may be re-organized in a more complex, 2-level hierarchy, as in:
(3) 2-level hierarchic system:

The gist of Herbert Simon’s (1962) seminal work on the architecture of complexity
is that increased complexity is, at the most general level, increased hierarchic organi-
zation; that is, an increase in the number of hierarchic levels within a system. And as
Chomsky (1957) has made explicit, the syntax of a simple transitive clause can already
be a 3-level hierarchy:1
(4) Simple transitive clause: 3-level hierarchy
S
NP VP
ADJ N V NP
ADJ N
smart women like smart men
Two or more simple clauses may be concatenated into a clause chain, as in:
(5) Concatenated (conjoined, chained) clauses:
C
S CONJ S
NP VP NP VP
N BE ADJ PRO V NP
ADJ N
women are smart and they like smart men
1. If the lexical words themselves are considered the terminal nodes, then (4) is, trivially, a
4-level hierarchy. But since there is no hierarchic branching below the lexical category node
(N, V, ADJ), a more realistic view is that lexical category nodes are the terminal node in a 3-level
hierarchic structure.
Introduction 
While chained clauses are definitely an iterative structure, whether they are embed-
ded (‘recursive’) may be a matter of definition. Thus Chomsky (1957, 1965) considered
them embedded under a higher node of the same type (S), thus presumably ‘recursive’.
That is:
(6) Clause chaining (conjunction):
S
S S S S
While one may have good reasons for not considering chained clauses embedded, as in
(6), they still figure prominently in the genesis of syntactic complexity.
The type of syntactic complexity that concerns us most in this volume involves
the embedding of clauses inside other clauses. The two most common types of such
embedding are relative clauses in the noun phrase and verbal complements in the
verb phrase, as in (7a) and (7b) below. Respectively:2
(7) a. Embedding in the NP (REL-clause)
S
NP VP
N S/REL BE ADJ
NP VP
V NP
PRO ADJ N
women [who like smart men] are smart
. While REL-clauses and V-complements are the most common types of recursive embed-
ding in syntax, they are by no means the only ones. And recursive syntactic structure may also
involve constituents other than the clause, e.g., noun-phrase conjunction, as in:
S
SUBJ VP
[NP]
NP conj NP V OBJ
[NP]
NP conj NP
Jill and Jane love Joe and Jim