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PRAGMATICS AND LANGUAGE EVOLUTION

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Автор(ы): Sarieva Zamira
Рубрика: Филологические науки
Журнал: «Евразийский Научный Журнал №12 2021»  (декабрь, 2021)
Количество просмотров статьи: 581
Показать PDF версию PRAGMATICS AND LANGUAGE EVOLUTION

Sariyeva Zamira
TerSU

Abstract

Language is a symbolic, culturally transmitted system of communication, which is learnt through the inference of meaning. It is important in developing for the explanation of language change and language evolution.

Language change is described on three different timescales ( Kirby, Hurford, 2002). An individual’s acquisition of language on an ontogenetic timescale, the historical development of language on a glossogenetic timescale, and the emergence and complexification of language on a phylogenetic timescale. Glossogenetic timescale is intermediate between them, much slower than language acquisition but faster than genetic changes in the spaces.

According to Kirby and Hurford (2002) , human languages can be seen as organisms living in an environment that is made up of human brains, utterances, and written work, and that these languages have differing fitness with respect to their environment, which causes them to evolve over time, changing in an adaptive fashion as languages and language constructs that are maladjusted to us, the language users, die off over time.

Key words: Pragmatics, language change, language types.

Peter Grundy in his book: “Doing Pragmatics” , on the matter of language evolution suggested “Iterated learning theory” by Kirby (2001). According this theory language transmitted from one generation to another. This process of language evolution is idealized as the transmission of languages over a sequence of generations, each consisting of one or more learners. The first learner sees some data as a set of utterances and forms a hypothesis about the language, by using the hypothesis, the learner generates a new set of data for the next learner. This process continues as a circle, with each learner seeing or hearing data, forming a hypothesis, generating data for the next learner.

The main request for the language transmission is having syntax, in order to provide unlimited number of sentence combinations by mean of limited number of structural rules. An important aspect of this communication system is compasionality. AsFrege explained (1892), a language is compositional when the meaning of the whole is a function of the meaning of its parts and the way in which they are combined. For example, the phrase “kick the ball” combines the meanings of “kick” and "the ball.“The meaning of “kick” can also be combined with themeaning of “the dog” to form “kick the dog.” In contrast, combining “kick” with “the bucket” forms the holistic phrase “kick the bucket,” which in English means to die; according the meaning of “kick” is not a part of the whole meaning, and otherpart also.

Iterated Learning theory is also supported by Akbarov. In his work the author suggested that syntax plays the main role in language evolution. The author discussed about kinship of languages, which is connected with internal and external languages. The author’s theory about language acquisition is that all children since their birth have the knowledge of universal grammar to prove this theory the author suggested the arguments of Chomsky , K. Wexler and S.Pinker.

Discussions

Language is culturally transmitted. As we know, the language change is fact and so rapidly, nowadays it is hard to find a stable language. Language change is necessary and serves a certain purpose within the system of our communication. There are two factors: External and Internal ( Gerritsen and Stein, 1992). External factors influence to the morphological regularity of language. And the internal factors influence to the symbolic role of language in society. When the levels of language affected, first are usually phonetics.

As we talked above main aspects of language change the first is phylogenetic which to come full circle creates the fitness landscape for the evolution of the linguistic capacity. In this timescale languages have mutual distance. For instance, languages like Ainu cause of few population, Belarusian cause of Russian Revolution, Hawaiian by replacing with English and other languages Hebrew, Chochenyo, Chornish they were considered as a dead language, but now they are all revived. The next Ontogenetic, humans learn language by observing the language use of others.

Conclusion.

The child learns language from parents. And the child then has a child of its own, and teaches it the language, and so on. The last, language change through the process of cultural learning. Unfortunately day by day many words are losing their emotional color, but our vocabulary is increasing and speech is getting easier. For example, in Russian suffixes like -ur, -yat’, hard mark " ‘ " are not used in modern Russian language. And the word sposi bog is changed as spasibo (thank you). In Uzbek the suffix at the end of every verb —dur is not used. And in English also Thank you very much is changed like Thank you, Thanks, Thanx, Thx, Ta. So we can say that in our daily life communication we use more low variety than high variety.

Reference

1.Hurford, J. R. (2002). Expression/induction models of language evolution: dimensions and issues. In E. Briscoe (Ed.), Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition: Formal and Computational Models (pp. 301-344). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

2.Kirby, S. (2001).Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure: An iterated learning model of the emergence of regularity and irregularity. IEEE Journal of Evolutionary Computation, 5(2):102-110.

3.Kirby, S. (2002a). Natural Language from Artificial Life.Artificial Life, 8(2):185-215.

4.Levinson, S.C. (2004). Deixis. In Horn, L.R and Ward, G. (eds) The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwel Publishing, 97-121

5.Swarup.S. & Gasser. L. ( 2009 ) The Iterated Classification Game: A New Model of the Cultural Transmission of LanguageAdaptive Behavior 2009 17: 213 DOI: 10.1177/1059712309105818