How does grammar arise?

Answer

Dear Christine,

that’s exactly the kind of question historical linguists like to ponder!

There are two sides to your question. On the one hand, all languages ​​have their own specific grammar, so you can ask yourself how those grammars came about. On the other hand, you can ask how humans as a species came to use a communication system with a grammar. The answer to the second question is by far the most difficult, because there are no archaeological traces of the origin of language, and therefore of grammar, in the evolution of man. But the answer to the first question may help us on our way to answering the second (with a vengeance).

Languages ​​are constantly changing, including their grammar. Each grammar is essentially a snapshot of a system that renews itself all the time. For example, Old Dutch had complicated verb conjugations and cases. Contemporary Dutch has almost completely lost its cases and verb conjugations have become simpler, but it has acquired articles, and compound verb tenses with be, have and be.

Since it is relatively easy to see how such new bits of grammar arise over time, we can also observe that grammatical renewal processes follow a fixed pattern to a certain extent. Often an element of the lexicon (say the dictionary of the language) is recruited to fulfill a grammatical function. For example, the English word go for ‘to go’ has acquired a grammatical function, namely to indicate the future, as in these pancakes are going to be delicious (where the old meaning ‘to go’ has long since disappeared). It is often not noticeable at first sight, but many parts of a grammar have arisen in this way. A well-known example is the future tense in French, whose endings are original forms of the verb avoir ‘to have’ (just think of je chanter-ai ‘I will sing’, tu chanter-as ‘you will sing’, etc. ). Those forms are recruited to express future and then get attached to the verb. This process of removing a word from the lexicon and giving it a grammatical function is appropriately called ‘grammaticalization’.

Now it is not implausible that grammaticalization also played a role in the emergence of the very first grammatical structures in the evolution of man as a species. In all likelihood, our ancestors started with a lexicon. Efforts to teach primates human language have resulted in chimpanzees or bonobos being able to acquire a rich vocabulary (a lexicon), but failing to learn grammatical rules, such as verb conjugations, or fixed word order. Such communication is somewhat like a loose stream of words. Perhaps it was no different for our ancestors. But somehow humans as a species have developed the ability to structure communication grammatically. Once that capability was in place, perhaps existing words were gradually transformed into grammatical elements, precisely through the kind of grammaticalization processes that we still see at work today.

How and why the capacity for grammatically structured communication arose is a major point of contention among linguists. You can read more about this here: http://www.tijdschriftstijl.be/het-ontstaan-van-taalspreis/.