The Gradual Emergence of Phonological Form in a New Language Wendy Sandler
نویسندگان
چکیده
The division of linguistic structure into a meaningless (phonological) level and a meaningful level of morphemes and words is considered a basic design feature of human language. Although established sign languages, like spoken languages, have been shown to be characterized by this bifurcation, no information has been available about the way in which such structure arises. We report here on a newly emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which functions as a full language but does not yet appear to have developed phonology. Early indications of formal regularities provide clues to the way in which phonological structure may develop over time. In the middle of the last century, André Martinet and Charles Hockett discovered a notable feature of human language that Martinet (1960) called double articulation and Hockett (1960) called duality of patterning and which the latter identified as the last of his thirteen design features of human languages. Duality of patterning, which is found in all known spoken languages and not in the natural communication systems of animals, is the existence in a linguistic system of two levels of combinatorial structure. At the first level, meaningful elements (morphemes and words) are combined into larger meaningful units; at the second level, phonology, meaningless elements (speech sounds) are combined to form the sound signals of the meaningful elements of the first articulation. 1 Zwicky and Pullum elevated this independence into a principle, which they called the principle of phonology-free syntax (Zwicky and Pullum 1986). This principle appears to be violated in a few very limited cases of agreement, where the agreeing element may copy the first or last segment of the controller (Dobrin 1998), but these cases are very rare.
منابع مشابه
The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language.
The division of linguistic structure into a meaningless (phonological) level and a meaningful level of morphemes and words is considered a basic design feature of human language. Although established sign languages, like spoken languages, have been shown to be characterized by this bifurcation, no information has been available about the way in which such structure arises. We report here on a n...
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