Where does grammar come from? The cognitive basis of transitivity and grammatical relations

Language is what makes us human, and all humans have language. But are all human languages fundamentally the same, or can they be organised in very different ways? Does our shared ability to use language come from a specialised language faculty in our brains which determines how languages can be structured, or from our general cognitive abilities and shared communicative needs? This project takes the latter approach in trying to explain how basic sentence structures arise. If all human languages have a shared grammatical blueprint, then organising sentence structure around categories like subject and object should be common to all languages. Our starting point is the Austronesian language family, which covers Island Southeast Asia and most of the Pacific Ocean, and stretches all the way to Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. Within this language family, some languages do clearly structure their sentences around the categories of subject and object, while others seem to be organised in a different way that more directly reflects communicative concerns such as which aspects of a situation the speaker considers to be most important. Moreover, we know that in the Austronesian languages which do have a subject-object system, it has developed from something like this other type of system. This suggests that even the most basic properties of grammatical structure are best understood as stemming from the function of human language as a system of communication. The project will use the wide range of variation in structures found in Austronesian languages to develop a theory of how our communicative needs shape basic sentence structure, and of which properties shape different types of system. This will give us greater insight into how human language works, and the ways in which human language and human experience shape and influence each other. To find out more about the variation within Austronesian, project members and associated researchers have done fieldwork in three different locations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, in order to find out more about grammatical structures in languages of those areas. This has brought greater insights into both how previously described structures function in detail and how they fit into the geographical and historical context, and how a language which lacks many of the grammatical mechanisms for changing clause structures found elsewhere in the family manages similar functions. In addition to doing primary fieldwork, we have also built a database using information from published grammatical descriptions, which helps us compare grammatical structures across the Austronesian language family. We have collaborated with external researchers to study similarities and differences within a small group of Austronesian languages which have very different systems despite being very close both geographically and genealogically; here we have worked to construct as detailed a picture as possible of the differences and similarities, which provides us with insights into just how many different factors influence changes in grammatical systems. We have also published a collection of papers by internationally recognised researchers on how prominence, in the sense of what aspects of a situation are perceived as most important or salient, affects grammatical structure in different Austronesian languages. Unsurprisingly, all these different subprojects show that there are many and complex factors involved in affecting changes in basic clause structure. We have identified some factors which appear to be particularly important, such as how information about ‘who does what to whom’ is encoded in the clause, what kinds of grammatical restrictions exist on complex constructions such as relative clauses, and how the language treats the difference between expressions which refers to a specific entity in the world (That fish is big) versus expressions which just refer to a general class of entities (Fish is tasty). We are now working on understanding how these different factors are connected and what kinds of processes lead to them changing over time.

Prosjektet har styrket det internasjonale forskningssamarbeidet mellom sentrale fagmiljøer innen forskning på austronesiske språk. Dette gjelder i særlig grad samarbeidet mellom Universitetet i Oslo og Australian National University, institusjonene som sto bak søknaden; men det er også lagt grunnlag for varig samarbeid med andre institusjoner gjennom at deltagere som er eller har vært tilknyttet prosjektet nå er ansatt ved andre institusjoner i Europa (Humboldt-universitetet i Berlin; Universitetet i Napoli) og fortsetter å samarbeide med de andre prosjektdeltagerne. Prosjektet har bidratt til rekruttering og karriereutvikling for yngre forskere ikke bare gjennom de rekrutteringsstillingene som var del av prosjektet, men også gjennom å stille seg bak søknader til andre finansieringskilder med temaer som var knyttet direkte opp mot prosjektet. Av fire slike søknader i løpet av prosjektperioden fikk to finansiering: et Wenner-Gren Fellow-stipend 2021-2024 og et MSCA postdocstipend 2023-2025. En posterpresentasjon av resultater fra prosjektet fikk 2. plass i kategorien ‘Beste poster’ på konferansen 56th Annual Conference of the Societas Linguistica Europaea i 2023 (Lidia Mazzitelli: Varieties of passive in the Lavongai-Nalik languages of Northern New Ireland (Papua New Guinea)). Prosjektet bidrar til å støtte og utvikle bruk av utsatte minoritetsspråk gjennom å gjøre tilgjengelig grammatiske beskrivelser og dokumentasjonsmateriale som vil kunne brukes som basis for å utvikle språklige ressurser som f.eks ordbøker eller læremateriell. Prosjektet bidrar til å styrke forskning på grammatiske relasjoner og austronesiske språk gjennom databasen som vil bli gjort allment tilgjengelig i løpet av 2024. Denne databasen inneholder store mengder detaljert informasjon om grammatiske relasjoner i rundt 70 austronesiske språk, og vil være en betydelig ressurs for framtidig forskning. Prosjektet bidrar også med ressurser i form av korpora på enkeltspråk som er tilgjengelige for videre forskning via PARADISEC (patani) og Zenodo (kara).

A core question in the study of human language is: Where does grammar come from? That is, what is the source of the complex structural rules which speakers of any language follow in putting words together into meaningful utterances, and which do not appear to have obvious parallels in any non-human communication system? The ability to use complex language is one of the characteristics that define humans as a species, and so understanding the nature of language is essential to understanding ourselves as humans. The project will challenge traditional views of grammar as being biologically determined by specialised architecture in the brain, by showing how certain grammatical principles often thought to be key to the organisation of clauses in all languages - transitivity and grammatical relations - have a direct basis in the function of language as a system of human communication, and are not in fact language-universal. By providing a detailed account of how these principles have developed and changed within the Austronesian language family, the project will make an important contribution to the development of a theory which understands grammar as arising out of general principles of cognition and the use of language in human communication, adding to our knowledge about the nature of language.