DISEÑO POR RESISTENCIA

The effects of canonical alignment can be seen to work against “mismatches” not only in acquisition, but in adult grammar as well. I suggested earlier that the elements which are highly salient for young children may also be salient for the adult speakers these children become. As one piece of evidence bearing on this prediction, consider the fact that a factorial typology constructed from the distinct elements of S(ubject), O(bject), and V(erb) yields 6 theoretically possible basic word orders for adult languages. However, by far the most common word orders cross-linguistically are those in which the subject appears before the object (with SVO and SOV the most common, and VSO represented in a smaller but still significant minority of languages;Greenberg,1963). Taken together withKeenan’s (1985) observation that across languages, basic subjects normally express the agent of the action (if there is one), it seems that preverbal agent-subjects are fairly widespread in adult language, and Greenberg in fact notes that SV order is dominant over

VS order.23 _{This jibes strongly with the predictions of semantic scaffolding. In short,} agents seem to be salient, and this may be a direct result of basic attentional processes responding preferentially to the properties that agents entail: animacy, action, motion, causation.24

6.9.2 Creole Genesis

Documentation on contact languages suggests that canonical alignment may have a hand in language genesis, as well. The canonical word order in all of the Atlantic creoles (those found in the Caribbean and West Africa) is SVO; this phenomenon may simply reflect substrate and superstrate influences in the region (Holm, 1988), but

Bickerton (1981, p. 18) claims (much too strongly) that SVO “characterizes almost all contact languages.”

This formulation is too extreme, since “contact languages” subsumes many lan- guage types which do not evince SVO order. However, the phenomenon of SVO in pidgins and creoles does appear fairly robust. For instance, although basic word order in pidgins shows significantly more variation (Bakker,1994), there is a widespread occurrence of SVO here, as well—a tendency thatM¨uhlh¨ausler(1997, p. 145) notes “deserves closer investigation.” Explanations vary as to what the mechanism behind this wide distribu- tion might be; _Bickerton (₁₉₈₁) implies that SVO may be “bioprogrammatic” (and thus domain-specific), but it is also possible that extralinguistic (specifically, semantic) processing factors converge on this order due to its inherent ease of interpreting grammat- ical and thematic relations. Without the benefit of morphological case marking (which

23_{We might ask if the crucial aspect is whether subjects arepreverbal or simply preobject.}

Green- berg’s (1963) observations suggest that both play a strong role. As noted, SV order is dominant over VS order, indicating that preverbality is important. But Greenberg also notes the rarity of VOS, OSV, and OVS languages, which share in common the fact that the object precedes the subject. He formulates a linguistic universal from this observation, namely that “In declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object” (p. 110). 24_{Those interested in the phylogenesis of language could argue that human attention to animacy,} motion, and the like serves a protective purpose, and therefore must have been selected for over the course of human evolution. For instance, it is not too difficult to imagine that humans who did pay attention to that moving sabertooth over there lasted longer (and procreated more) than those who did

not. This issue clearly goes beyond the scope of this dissertation, but is worth mentioning.

most contact languages lack;_Winford,₂₀₀₃), languages must resort to other strategies to distinguish verbal arguments, and allocating the subject and object to distinct sides of the verb is one of the best ways to accomplish this.25

To the extent that creole genesis gives us a window into the most basic structure of UG (and clearly, this is not an uncontroversial claim), this evidence suggests that languages which maintain a canonical word order other than SVO and/or allow for freer word orders may have moved further away from some cognitively basic language structure. On the other hand, though, such a hypothesis would not explain the crosslinguistic predominance of SOV.

6.9.3 Computer Simulations of Language Evolution

Some of the research which has modeled language evolution also supports the no- tion that there may be something special about SVO and SOV as basic word orders. For instance,Minett et al. (2006) developed a model of phylogenetic language emergence which combines multiple local syntax rules (i.e., those which order two lexical elements relative to one another: e.g., cat before drink/eat) to deduce a global syntax (i.e., the canonical ordering of S, V, and O) for the ambient language.

Importantly, the authors found that “bias in the word order of simple utterances is constrained primarily by the need to distinguish the agent and the patient” and that “competition between SO and OS drives the evolution of global syntax” (p. 212). When SO is dominant, SV also tends to emerge as a local rule, yielding SOV and SVO as global syntaxes. On the other hand, when OS is dominant, VOS and OVS tend to surface as coexisting global orders.26

25_{It should also be noted that while OVS similarly distinguishes the verbal arguments, this is not} a highly attested canonical order for contact languages. Interestingly, the other word orders common in pidgins are SOV and OSV (_Bakker, ₁₉₉₄). I take the preverbality of subjects in these orders as yet another indication that subjects are salient. Moreover, this fact may provide one piece of evidence indicating that preverbality plays a larger role in word order than does preobjecthood. See the earlier footnote on this matter.

26_{Interestingly,}

Minett et al.(2006) also found that combinations of local syntax rules that generate animprecise syntax—that is, those which are congruent with more than one possible global syntax (e.g., the local rules SV and SO are consistent with both global SOV and SVO)—tend to persist, while those

Thus, the agent-patient distinction which seems to influence creole word orders may also play a significant role in non-contact language evolution. In short, the notion of actors in an event—what we lexicalize as verbal arguments—seems to be a major shaping force in the configuration of languages.

6.9.4 Agrammatic Aphasia

A number of studies with agrammatic aphasics suggest that the effects of seman- tic scaffolding and canonical alignment may also be seen under adult situations of brain trauma. Some case studies indicate that aphasics produce fewer tokens of the passive voice than do control subjects (e.g., Stark and Dressler, 1990) or have significant trouble producing passives correctly, even when it is modeled for them in a picture description task (_{Dickey and Thompson},₂₀₀₇); likewise, some aphasics show consid- erably more difficulty with non-canonical Patient-Agent (PA) verbs than they do with canonical AP verbs (e.g., Salis and Edwards, 2007). Moreover, in at least some (but not all27_{) cases of agrammatic aphasia, comprehension of reversible full passives} is significantly below chance (Berndt et al., 1996), indicating that these individuals systematically interpret the first NP as the agent and the second as the patient. Fi- nally, _{Caplan and Hildebrandt} (₁₉₈₈) found evidence indicating that processing

local syntax rules that generate aprecise syntax—those combinations which are consistent with only one global syntax (e.g., local SV and VO are only allowable in a global SVO order)—tend not to persist. In short, it appears that because precise syntaxes only allow a single word order, any evidence for another word order within the speaker population will quickly spread, throwing the stability of the single global syntax out of alignment; thus, these grammars tend to be transient. Meanwhile, a global syntax which allows for two word orders will remain stable, since it can handle significantly more variation in speaker behavior to begin with.

27

Caramazza et al. (2001) perform a careful analysis of data reported in other studies and ulti- mately reject the received wisdom that agrammatic aphasics perform at ceiling in their comprehension of active voice utterances but at chance on passive voice utterances. Instead, they stress that a number of distinct comprehension patterns exist in the population of aphasics, and claim that the method of analysis chosen to interpret the data is vital in coming to accurate conclusions about it. In short, it is possible to achieve a group mean of “chance performance on passives” if some individuals are performing significantly above chance and some significantly below it. While I am sympathetic to this complaint, it is important to realize that this is a possibility inherent inanystudy which pools data from a number of individuals, including the current one. Ideally, such studies will include a large enough group of partici- pants to make the experimental results empirically valid; regardless, this may simply be a shortcoming about experimental research that we have to accept.

load increases with non-canonical θ-role ordering.

Both passives and unaccusatives involve movement of an NP from an internal to an external argument position for reasons of Case (see again Section 3.2.2 for syntactic details). Thompson(2003) conducted a study which examined spontaneous production by agrammatic aphasics, and found that these individuals had significantly more trouble producing unaccusative intransitive verbs than unergative intransitive verbs.28 To explain this, she proposed theargument structure complexity hypothesis, which claims that verbs will be more difficult when (a) they are associated with a larger number of arguments (i.e., θ-roles), or (b) their underlying argument structure does not match the S-structure representation.29 _{This second phenomenon meshes with the effects of semantic scaffolding} we have seen here: specifically, the prediction that violations of canonical form may correlate with higher processing loads.

In short, many similarities exist between child language acquisition and aphasic speech; this one in particular may constitute a case of a kind of “syntactic emergence of the unmarked,” in which a default preference—normally hidden by typical adult brain function and processing power—surfaces under circumstances of duress.