Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The historical perspective
- 3 Approaching ‘language change’
- 4 The Darwinian approach
- 5 Generalising Darwinism
- 6 Towards an evolutionary theory of language
- 7 What does all this imply for the study of language change?
- 8 How to live with feet, if one happens to be a morph-meme
- 9 The prosodic evolution of English word forms or The Great Trochaic Conspiracy
- 10 Conclusion
- References
- Index
5 - Generalising Darwinism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The historical perspective
- 3 Approaching ‘language change’
- 4 The Darwinian approach
- 5 Generalising Darwinism
- 6 Towards an evolutionary theory of language
- 7 What does all this imply for the study of language change?
- 8 How to live with feet, if one happens to be a morph-meme
- 9 The prosodic evolution of English word forms or The Great Trochaic Conspiracy
- 10 Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
To the extent that languages in time share certain properties with other classes of systems simply by virtue of being historical, there is no need to invoke any ‘special’ local properties in order to characterize their behaviour.
(Roger Lass 1997: 390)The temptations of metaphorical transfer
After having shown what a powerful framework Darwinian Evolutionary Theory is, let us see whether its basic concepts and its argumentative core can be generalised and/or transferred to the study of language.
Crucially, this is not the same as metaphorically importing biological terms and concepts into linguistics. That can and has been (see section 3.4.1.2), repeatedly done in the past. Not only can one speak of ‘language families’ and ‘daughter languages’, or chart relationships among languages in terms of ‘family trees’: as soon as one starts to think about it, one will notice many further apparent similarities between the realm of language and the realm of life. Thus, it is easy to come up with lists like the following.
Like ‘organisms’, languages seem to be complex and functional, so that it seems as if they were ‘adapted’ to the purposes they serve their speakers.
Like species, languages can ‘die out’, and we speak of endangered languages as we speak of endangered species (see Fill 1993)
In the same way as the properties of organisms contain information about the environments in which they live, languages seem to represent those aspects of the world that speakers think and talk about.
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- Selfish Sounds and Linguistic EvolutionA Darwinian Approach to Language Change, pp. 89 - 121Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004