The child as linguistic historian

ABSTRACTThough the diachronic dimension of linguistic variation is often identified withlinguistic change, many stable linguistic variables with no synchronic motiva-tion show historical continuity with little change over long periods of time.Children acquire at an early age historically transmitted constraints on variablesthat appear to have no communicative significance, such as the grammaticalconditioning of (ING i)n English. Studies (TD) of and (ING i)n King of Prussiafamilies show that children have matched their parents' patterns of variationby age 7, before many categorical phonological and grammatical rules areestablished. Some dialect-specific and socially marked constraints are acquiredbefore constraints with general articulatory motivation. (TD) Constraints onappear in the speech of a 4-year-old, but there is no evidence in the produc-tions of a 2-year-old child in the same family. One of the strongest arguments for the separation of synchronic and di-achronic linguistics is that children do not know the history of the languagethey are learning. As the grammar of the language must be the rule systemthat is learned and internalized by the language learner, and the child isignorant of its history, it follows that historical linguistics is irrelevant forstudents of synchronic linguistics.This principle seems perfectly clear in responding to people who wouldreject automobile as a barbaris —m because it is half Greek and half Latin —in favor o autokineton.f But recent research on variable patterns of languageproduction shows that the principle is not as firm as it once seemed. In manyways, the child is a perfect historian of the language.It is clear that children inherit the history of the language as they learn it,as every construction, every word, every sound and vocal gesture of theirlocal dialect is the product of an historical evolution. All language is anhistorical residue, except perhaps for that shimmering target of formal lin-guistics, the principles of innate and universal grammar. In general, the lan-guage learner would not benefit from knowing where all of this linguisticdetritus comes from, and very often, we cannot tell as observers of the syn-chronic scene what has come from what. (1) lists some isolated historical res-idues that are more or less opaque to synchronic analysis.