Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally) by John McWhorter

Author:John McWhorter [McWhorter, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627794732
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2016-09-05T22:00:00+00:00

Grammaticalization as Spectator Sport

From the point of view of one language, such as our own, it will seem as if grammaticalization serves to lend a language the tools it “needs” to convey all shades of meaning. But in fact grammaticalization is driven to a large extent by the same factors of chance that determine how the meanings of words change.

Some words are more subject to grammaticalization than others: go and want, basic concepts constantly used, are easy to reinterpret as markers of future action, whereas more specific and lesser-used words such as prickle and bloat never get sought for grammaticalization. However, the concepts that grammaticalization leads to in any given language are not predictable. The phenomenon lends itself to spectating, and perhaps even to betting on the odds of one thing happening over another. So much of our own language’s grammar feels so fundamental that it can be surprising how much of it is just arbitrary tinsel that a language could easily do without. An English speaker’s sense of what a language is supposed to be is as arbitrary as a mole’s sense of what life is supposed to be—there is so very much more out there.

Surely, for example, a language has to have a way of indicating the past tense, so grammaticalization will fulfill that “need,” right? Actually, not: plenty of languages have no marker that means the past and get along just fine leaving it to context. It’s weird to encounter documentation of such languages—you keep looking in the index, sure that you’ve missed something, you scan the table of contents again, keep checking random sentences in the book thinking the author must have missed something, but no: there’s just no past marker. Some have no markers of past or future. Most languages do not have two little grammar words corresponding to our the and a.

Then, on the other hand, there are languages with grammar that marks things we would never consider as part of a language. Most East Asian and Southeast Asian languages mark the shape of the things you’re talking about. Languages on the island of New Guinea tend to have markers that tell whether you’re still talking about someone or are switching to discussing someone else. In Native American Algonquian languages, a suffix marks that something had a larger effect on another thing in the sentence than ordinary experience would suggest: if a mouse scared an elephant instead of an elephant scaring a mouse, you’d have to hang that suffix on scare. Marking the past or having a word a are just a couple of points on a huge roulette wheel.

Hence: just as we saw in chapter 2 that words ooze across a grid of meanings in an endlessly variant array of combinations, grammaticalization creates an endlessly variant array of grammar words marking assorted shades of existence, just “because.” Nor, it must be noted, does any of this correlate with the culture of the language’s speakers. An attempt to correlate a language’s grammatical features with its speakers’ cultural traits begins with hope and ends in a sputter.

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