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تسجيل

Language in the world: properties and powers Linguistic autonomy The autonomy of syntax

المؤلف:  Alison Sealey & Bob Carter

المصدر:  Applied Linguistics as Social Science

الجزء والصفحة:  P157-C7

2026-09-30

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Language in the world: properties and powers

Linguistic autonomy

The autonomy of syntax

Human languages have some features that are peculiar to them, and the feature which is frequently identified as distinguishing human languages from other symbolic systems, including the protolanguages used by other species, is syntax, It is the grammatical dimension of human languages which is their quintessential feature, since it does not correspond to any extralinguistic phenomenon; and it is this which makes possible the expression of relationships and of possibilities beyond what lexical items alone can express. Bickerton (1996: 65) describes syntax as 'the Rubicon between thought as we know it and more primitive ways of thought'. The properties of a grammatical language which are highlighted from this perspective are its compositionality ('the property whereby an expression's meaning is a function of the meanings of parts of that expression and the way they are put together') and recursion (the 'property of languages with finite lexica and rule sets in which some constituents of an expression can contain a constituent of the same category') (Kirby 1999). Although all human languages have these properties, different varieties manifest them in different ways. There is as yet no consensus about the reasons for these variations, but there is some evidence that processes internal to languages themselves may explain them. For example, Nettle (1999) discusses the fact that OV languages, in which the Verb follows the Object, 'favor' morphological marking through suffixes, while VO languages may have suffixes or prefixes. He accounts for this by observing that 'the presence of one item alters the probability of presence (or persistence) of the other items in the suite' (p.133). In this case, the mechanism proposed (as suggested by Hawkins 1994) is ease of parsing for both patterns: speakers experience a general 'harmony' in processing OV order and Noun-Postposition order, both of which place the phrasal category last within the phrase. This is an example of an intra-syntactic property of language, and even at this level the dynamic, emergent and probabilistic qualities of the system are illustrated.