Sandler Wendy, Meir Irit, Dachkovsky Svetlana, Padden Carol, Aronoff Mark
Department of English Language and Literature, University of Haifa, 31905 Haifa, Israel.
Lingua. 2011 Oct;121(13):2014-2033. doi: 10.1016/j.lingua.2011.05.007.
The relation between prosody and syntax is investigated here by tracing the emergence of each in a new language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. We analyze the structure of narratives of four signers of this language: two older second generation signers, and two about 15 years younger. We find that younger signers produce prosodic cues to dependency between semantically related constituents, e.g., the two clauses of conditionals, revealing a type and degree of complexity in their language that is not frequent in that of the older pair. In these younger signers, several rhythmic and (facial) intonational cues are aligned at constituent boundaries, indicating the emergence of a grammatical system. There are no overt syntactic markers (such as complementizers) to relate clauses; prosody is the only clue. But this prosodic complexity is matched by syntactic complexity inside propositions in the younger signers, who are more likely to use pronouns as abstract grammatical markers of arguments, and to combine predicates with their arguments within in a constituent. As the prosodic means emerge for identifying constituent types and signaling dependency relations between them, the constituents themselves become increasingly complex. Finally, our study shows that the emergence of grammatical complexity is gradual.
本文通过追踪新语系——阿尔-赛义德贝都因手语中韵律和句法各自的出现情况，来研究二者之间的关系。我们分析了该语言的四位手语使用者的叙事结构：两位第二代年长者，以及两位年轻约15岁的使用者。我们发现，年轻的手语使用者会产生韵律线索，以表明语义相关成分之间的依存关系，例如条件句的两个子句，这揭示了他们语言中的一种复杂性类型和程度，而这种情况在年长者的语言中并不常见。在这些年轻的手语使用者中，一些节奏和（面部）语调线索在成分边界处对齐，表明语法系统的出现。没有明显的句法标记（如补语词）来连接子句；韵律是唯一的线索。但年轻使用者中，这种韵律复杂性与命题内部的句法复杂性相匹配，他们更有可能使用代词作为论元的抽象语法标记，并在一个成分内将谓语与其论元组合起来。随着用于识别成分类型并表明它们之间依存关系的韵律手段的出现，成分本身也变得越来越复杂。最后，我们的研究表明，语法复杂性的出现是渐进的。
