In new research, scientists from the University of East Anglia and elsewhere studied 874 speakers of 29 different languages, including English, Spanish, Norwegian, Japanese, Mandarin, Tzeltal and Telugu, to see how they use demonstratives — words that show where something is in relation to a person talking such as ‘this cat’ or ‘that dog’.
Coventry et al. show that speakers of all tested languages use spatial demonstratives as a function of being able to reach or act on an object being referred to. Image credit: Coventry et al., doi: 10.1038/s41562-023-01697-4.
“Speakers of different (spoken) languages share the same perceptual apparatus, so one might expect that the world’s 7,000 or so living languages may have evolved communication systems that also share common properties,” said University of East Anglia’s Professor Kenny Coventry and colleagues.
“Yet the idea that there are universals in communication systems has been challenged with studies documenting extensive cross-linguistic variation in domains closely yoked to perception, including color naming and spatial communication.”
In the study, Professor Coventry’s team studied 29 languages from around the world, including English, Spanish, Norwegian, Japanese, Mandarin, Tzeltal and Telugu.
“We wanted to find out how speakers of a wide range of languages use the oldest recorded words in all of language — spatial demonstratives, such as ‘this’ or ‘that’,” Professor Coventry explained.
The authors tested 874 speakers to see how they use demonstratives in their language to describe where objects are across a range of different spatial configurations.
“Demonstratives occur in all languages and are among the earliest words to appear in a child’s lexicon,” they said.
“They are multimodal, more intimately linked to eye gaze and gesture than other spatial terms.”
“Joint attention (shared gaze) between speaker and addressee usually immediately precedes spatial demonstrative use and pointing obligatorily accompanies demonstrative forms in some languages.”
“Moreover, it has been claimed that demonstratives are among the earliest forms in language evolution, consistent with the view that language may have evolved from gesture.”
“Demonstratives are therefore prime candidates to examine possible universal constraints across languages.”
The statistical analysis revealed the same mapping between reachable and non-reachable objects and demonstratives across all languages.
“We found that in all the languages we tested, there is a word for objects that are within reach of the speaker, like ‘this’ in English, and a word for objects out of reach — ‘that’,” Professor Coventry said.
“This distinction may explain the early evolutionary origin of demonstratives as linguistic forms.”
The results were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
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K.R. Coventry et al. Spatial communication systems across languages reflect universal action constraints. Nat Hum Behav, published online October 30, 2023; doi: 10.1038/s41562-023-01697-4
