Name: CARTA: How Language Evolves: Carmel O’Shannessy: How Languages Get New Structure
Uploaded: 2015-09-17T02:08:24.000Z
Duration: 20 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape, bipedal, naked, large brain, long the

Reflexive pronouns

master of fire, tools and language but still trying to understand ourselves.

Adverbs of manner

Aware that death is inevitable yet filled with optimism. We grow up slowly. We hand

down knowledge. We empathize and deceive. We shape the future from our shared

understanding of the past. Carta brings together experts from diverse disciplines

to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here. An exploration made

possible by the generosity of humans like you.

- Thank you, and thank you very much for the invitation to join you today.

As speakers of English when we hear constructions like, "Get 'em, bring 'em,

take 'em," we analyze those as a verb and a pronoun. Get them or get him, bring them

or bring him. This analysis is supported by the fact that we read and write. We

rarely see the informal forms written it's usually the formal forms and through

schooling which generally tell us to use the formal forms and to leave the others

alone but we also know when it's appropriate to use which style in which

context. We're now going to move to a different context where speakers heard

those constructions but analyze them differently. When Australia was colonized,

there were about 250 languages spoken by indigenous people. The speakers of the

Australian languages and the English speakers had to learn to communicate with

each other very quickly. Usually the English speakers didn't learn much of the

Australian languages. The earnest was on the indigenous people to learn as much

So let's imagine that the English speakers we're using the informal constructions a

lot when they were speaking. "Take 'em over there, bring 'em back," constructions

like that that we use all the time without thinking about it. The speakers of the

Australian languages who hadn't yet learned English identified a pattern in

what they were hearing. When they heard verbs like get, bring, take they

frequently heard something like, "'-im" occurring after the verb but they didn't

hear that when the verb was something like walk which doesn't have a direct object.

So they came to analyze the "'-im" that we would think of as a pronoun as being a

grammatical element that attaches to a transitive verb. It's a verb with an

object but not to verbs like walk and run.

They didn't have literacy or schooling to influence their analysis. They just made

this analysis from identifying patterns in the language being spoken to them and what

they heard around them. So the transitive "-im," or the transitive marker is a new

structure that came in to that system that was not the same as a structure that was

already in English and it was not in the Australian languages either but we can

see where it came from but the Australian languages did influence that structure in

abstract ways. The form of  "-im" is clearly from English but there are other

influences from the Australian languages. I've just listed a few of them here. One

is for example that in those languages when you have a transitive verb

construction it's a different construction from an intransitive verb. So

those speakers learned to pay attention to the transitivity of the verb in every

clause because that was required by their grammar. So it made sense to them based on

the first languages to have a different construction for a transitive

In addition, there were rules for words and the sound systems within the language

that the Australian verbs didn't suit very well and the new analysis suited them

better. So for example words in Australian languages are often at least

two syllables long. If you have a short verb, adding the transitive marker made it

longer and conformed more to the rules of the first languages. So normally words in

Australian languages in that area didn't usually end with a cluster of consonants

at the end of the word. So again, adding that marker made the word shape conform

more to the type of verb that speakers of those languages were used to.

The "-im" structure is a good example of some characteristics of a pidgin. The word

forms come mostly from the language that was spoken by the socially dominant group

which we call the lexifier language but a lot of the structure and word meanings

come from the other multiple languages that were being spoken by the creators. In

addition, reanalysis take place such as what we've just seen through pattern

finding processes and second language learning processes. A pidgin is a means of

inter-group communication. You use it to speak to people who's

language you don't know and all of those speakers were still using their own first

languages when they spoke to people within their same group. The pidgin spread

throughout Australia as English speakers spread throughout Autralia and in each

place there were Australian languages and those speakers were contributing features

to the new system. Indigenous people where brought together in groups and needed to

interact with speakers of many other languages with whom traditionally they

wouldn't have interacted much or at all. So they all needed a way to speak to each

other and this system was a good system to build on in order to do that.

As speakers needed to talk about more and more topics with each other more and more

elements were added from English and also from the Australian languages. Varieties

of northern territory Kriol were derived from interactions of this kind.

- [recording] Det mami-wan en det tu pikanini bin trai stop-im im bat

det debil-debil bin gwei garra det tu dog.

- And you can see there the transitive marker on the verb, which came

in via the pidgin. There's another interesting element there

which is, "bin" meaning past tense. Again, the form is from English have been, had

been but there's another reanalysis there so it just means simple past tense. It's

not part of the have been or had been construction. Reasearch

suggests that there's more than one developmental path for a Kriol language

but this has won a tested path. Again, the word forms come mostly from the socially

dominant language English but much of the structure and the word meanings come from

the other input languages. In this case, there was an earlier pidgin that fed in to

the Kriol. Reanalysis took place through pattern finding and second language

learning processes and the system expanded and developed. There was a prior

pidgin that was used for inter-group communication.

A Kriol is the first language of its speakers and is a full language. This

variety of Kriol continued to develop and stabilize probably up until about the

1940s and '50s and it currently has several varieties.

We'll turn now to another kind of contact language in another setting in Australia.

This is in a small Warlpiri community in the northern territory. In this community,

speakers over about the age of 35 mostly speak Warlpiri their traditional

language but they also code switch into varieties of English and Kriol. Code

switching is switching between languages in a single conversation and by Aboriginal

English there I mean English with elements of the indigenous languages and elements

of Kriol in it. Younger speakers, younger adults and children speak in a new way

which systematically combines elements from those sources in which we call Light

Warlpiri. Children learn to speak this language from when they first begin to

talk now. As they grow older, they also produce Walpiri and they code switch into