PhilSoc Meetings

Cross-modal typology aims to provide an understanding of universals and linguistic variation that cuts across spoken and signed languages, uncovering both modality-specific and cross-modal patterns (Zeshan & Palfreyman, 2017). In this presentation, I share findings from the CrossMoGram project, a cross-modal study of the grammaticalisation of aspect markers in 30 sign languages and 50 Creole languages. CrossMoGram focuses on aspect markers due to their prominence in the literature for these language types, and applies grammaticalisation parameters developed by the Mainz Grammaticalisation Project (Bisang & Malchukov, 2020).

Sign languages have rich simultaneous morphology but are said to feature few examples of late-stage grammaticalisation such as sequential affixes (Aronoff, Meir & Sandler 2005; Pfau & Steinbach 2006), a claim that can now be tested quantitatively using our CrossMoGram database. I also discuss the ways in which grammaticalisation pathways for signed languages may diverge from spoken languages, for example in terms of ambient gestures that become part of sign language grammar. By considering these diachronic processes in light of the world’s spoken languages, it then becomes possible to begin drawing conclusions about how modality impacts language change.

Murrinhpatha is a polysynthetic language from northern Australia with verbal morphology that is both highly complex and typologically unusual. It is also one of a handful of Australian Indigenous languages that is still being acquired as a first language by children and used on a daily basis in its community of Wadeye, Northern Territory. Murrinhpatha thus provides a rare opportunity to study the process by which children acquire complex polysynthetic verbal morphology, thereby contributing to theories of language acquisition which are largely based on only a small number of European languages with very different typological properties (Kidd and Garcia 2022). In this paper I first discuss the verbal structure of Murrinhpatha, what makes it typologically interesting, and the particular challenges it poses for the child learner. I then report on a long-term project investigating its acquisition among 2-6 year old children in the Wadeye community. We find that children acquiring its large inflectional verb paradigms begin by encoding a small number of grammatical categories which help to reveal the building blocks of the larger system. The categories encoded are driven in part by the way in which children use verbs in social interactions. Nonetheless, even children’s early verbs have a substantial amount of morphological complexity, showing that Murrinhpatha children already have a good handle on the morphological richness of their language from an early age. This supports claims in the literature that the acquisition system adapts to suit the typological properties of the language being acquired, meaning that children learning Murrinhpatha can learn morphological complexity much earlier than children learning English (e.g. Bates & MacWhinney 1987, Xanthos et al 2001, Dressler 2007, Forshaw et al 2017, Stoll et al 2017). Both polysynthetic languages and Australian Indigenous languages are greatly under-represented in the language acquisition literature, and thus this research makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the acquisition of linguistic diversity.