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. So far, project members have done fieldwork in two different locations in Indonesia in order to find out more about grammatical structures in languages of those areas. This is bringing 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. We are also in the process of building a database using information from published grammatical descriptions, which will help us see how different structures vary across the Austronesian language family. We are collaborating 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 are working to construct as detailed a picture as possible of the differences and similarities, which are providing us with insights into just how many different factors influence changes in grammatical systems. Within this subproject, an MA thesis was also submitted at the University of Oslo in 2020, which looks at how speakers choose between possible alternative clause types in one of these languages. We are in the process of completing 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. Towards the end of the project, all these different threads will be pulled together into a general understanding of which factor affect clausal structure in Austronesian languages, which in turn will form the basis for a broader theory of how this works in language in general.

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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.