using the linear order of concatenated symbols to express relations between them, and introducing new sorts of
vocabulary ite mthat convey relations explicitly. We take these up in turn.
With just symbol concatenation,eat apple Fredandeat Fred applemight be used to conveyexactly the same message. In
thisparticular casetherewouldbenoproblem,becauseofthepragmaticsofthewordsinvolved.Butinhit tree Fred, did
Fred hit thetree or did thetree hitFred? Though thelarger context mighttellus, thepragmatics ofthewordsalone do
not. Pinker and Bloo m(1990) point out this proble mand argue that using principles of word order would be
communicatively adaptive.
However, one needn't advance to a full generative syntax, replete with recursive trees, in order to improve the
situation. Modern languages display some robust principles that are in some sense prior to syntax, and that reveal
themselvesmore clearly in less fullydevelopedsituations. An importantpiece of evidencecomes from Wolfgang Klein
and Clive Perdue's (1997) massive longitudinal study of adult second-language learners with various native languages
and target languages. The subjects, immigrant workers who “picked up” the target language without explicit
instruction, uniformly achieved a stage of linguistic competence that Klein and Perdue call“The Basic Variety”(BV);
some, but not all, went beyond this stage in their competence at the new language.
Therelevantfeatures ofBVare (a)lexicalcompetence; (b)absence ofinflectional morphology, e.g. verbsalways appear
in a fixed for mrather than undergoing tense and agree ment inflection; (c) omission of contextually supplied
arguments, i.e. no obligatory subjects or objects; (d) absence of sentential subordination (no relative clauses, indirect
quotes, etc.);(e)simple,largelysemanticallybasedprinciplesofwordorder. Themostprominentofthese principlesare
AgentFirst and Focus Last.^125 So BV is quitefar fro mfulllinguistic co mpetence.(And, giventhat many subjectsin the
study never went beyond this stage, it belies occasional claims that adult second language learning, aside from
pronunciation, is usually pretty close to complete).
Agent First and Focus Last are of interest here. A speaker employing Agent First would usehit tree Fredto mean only
that the tree hit Fred and not that Fred hit the tree; this principle enables one to disambiguate a large proportion of
utterances involvingtwocharacters. Itremainsquitepowerfulinstructuringwordorder inmodernlanguage:itappears
as the default principle“Agent is expressed
AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE 247
(^125) In addition, if thereis more than one noun argument in a sentence, the verb regularly falls after thefirst argument, i.e. there is SVO order. However, this may be an artifact
of the target languages in the study, all of which were verb-second in main clauses.