Language Evolution

The Clark paper examines the stages of word-formation devices in young children, specifically looking at how children aged 3 to 5 gain use of the affix “-er” to denote agent and instrument nouns. Overall, the findings show that children begin using compounds (like “hugger-people” and “knocker-man”) to denote agents and eventually gain productive control over “er” to denote agents and later instruments. Consistently in both comprehension and production, children are able to form agentive nouns like “cutter” before instrument nouns like “typewriter.” Clark postulates that the increased specificity of instruments (as opposed to agents, who can perform multiple purposes) contributes to this difference in acquisition.

            The discussion focuses on how conventionality and transparency, two of the three factors affecting acquisition of word-formation, affect the age at which children are able to use “-er” instead of (often ungrammatical) compounds. This begs the question- where did the convention of using “-er” originate? Why is “-er” what children are normalized to, what they “relinquish their own innovations” for? How does a group language-users establish conventions to begin with?

            My initial hypothesis is that the “-er” convention evolved from its brevity- “cutter” is noticeably shorter than “cut-man,” and the convenience of having less syllables to produce could’ve caused “-er” to be generalized to agents and to instruments. Based on the ease with which children adopt “-er” for agents (compared to instruments), it would make sense that “-er” evolved to denote agents before denoting instruments. As Clark noted, instruments tend to be more specific, meaning the instrument “cutter” could’ve initially referred to an inanimate version of the agent “cutter.”

            Thinking about convention through the lens of its origin is interesting; it’s easy to think of language in an evolutionary sense. Existing conventions are the ones that are most readily learned, and existing conventions are used as regularly as they are because they’re the forms that have survived, proved successful over generations of language-users. Like biological evolution, language evolution doesn’t tend toward greater sophistication; it simply moves toward what is most easy for its speakers to use. I wonder if the “-er” affix will change in the future- and if developmental language acquisition tells us anything about the history thus far of how our language has already evolved.