The emergence of grammar: systematic structure in a new language

Abstract

This report contains a linguistic description of a language created spontaneously without any apparent external influence in a stable existing community. We describe the syntactic structure of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language that has arisen in the last 70 years in an isolated endogamous community with a high incidence of nonsyndromic, genetically recessive, profound prelingual neurosensory deafness. In the space of one generation from its inception, systematic grammatical structure has emerged in the language. Going beyond a conventionalized list of words for actions, objects, people, characteristics, and so on, a systematic way of marking the grammatical relations among those elements has appeared in the form of highly regular word order. These systematic structures cannot be attributed to influence from other languages, because the particular word orders that appear in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language differ from those found both in the ambient spoken languages in the community and in the other sign language found predominantly in the surrounding area. Therefore, the emerging grammatical structures should be regarded as an independent development within the language.

Fig. 1.

Frequency of predicate-final orders compared with non-predicate-final orders. Predicate-final orders combine all occurrences of predicates appearing in the final position of a clause. Non-predicate-final orders include all other predicate positions. Predicate-final orders overwhelmingly outnumber non-predicate-final orders, 136 to 22.

Fig. 2.

Frequency of the two word orders (predicate-final and non-predicate-final) for each subject. In all signers but one, predicate-final order clearly outnumbers non-predicate-final order. Subject 7, the only hearing subject, produced only predicate-final sentences. Signer 6, the youngest subject, produced more non-predicate-final than predicate-final sentences (8 and 7, respectively).

Fig. 3.

Frequency of order of all major constituents in the data set. Most clauses contain one argument per verb, with the argument preceding the verb; in those with more than one argument, the subject always precedes the object. We found no consistent ordering of direct object and indirect object with respect to one another. Overall, the tabulation is consistent with a basic S–O–V order and inconsistent with any other basic order.

Fig. 4.

Frequency of transitive and intransitive subject arguments in S–V sentences. Intransitive subjects occur almost twice as much as transitive subjects. However, this pattern is not equally distributed in our data. In narratives, transitive subjects in S–V are quite rare (5 of 25); in sentences elicited by video clips, the two types of subject are common (14 transitive and 19 intransitive).

Fig. 5.

Frequency of relative orders of a modifier and its head. For all types of modifiers, the modifier follows the head. This consistency across type implies an underlying common head–modifier order within phrases.