Abstract
Since the famous exchange of letters between Darwin and Schleicher, the parallels between evolutionary processes in the biological and linguistic spheres have been evident. In this paper, I present a coevolutionary approach to language evolution, both in the early phase during which hominins evolved language and in subsequent phases during which humans evolved many thousands of languages whose vastly differing structures serve as a basic resource for understanding the operation of evolutionary processes on languages and cultures. The key elements in this coevolutionary approach are (a) the adoption of a gradualist approach to initial language evolution and (b) the recognition of a large number of selectors (systemic, modality, demographic, usage patterns, biogenetic, epidemiological, sociocultural) which are unevenly distributed across speaker populations and which may nudge emerging languages structures into quite different parts of the design space. Not only does the coevolutionary approach presented here bring the methods of studying linguistic evolution closer to those used in biology, it places the phenomenon of diversity and variability—diversity at the level of differences between languages, and variability between how individuals use them—into the same central role that these occupy in evolutionary biology.
If this is right, then all the achievements of human culture—language, art, religion, ethics, science itself—are themselves artifacts (of artifacts of artifacts …) of the same fundamental process that developed the bacteria, the mammals, and Homo Sapiens Dennett (1995:144).
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Notes
- 1.
Here I abstract away from a host of fascinating questions regarding the relative role of conscious and unconscious factors, overt and covert prestige (the former being the ‘prescribed norm’ associated with education, the latter associated with, e.g., working-class toughness or authenticity), and the positioning and changing prestige of different groups with respect to one another (e.g. aristocrats and the merchant class at the time of Shakespeare, or of different immigrant groups with respect to non-immigrant groups in large cities). For more on these factors, consult such sociolinguistics textbooks as Meyerhoff (2015).
- 2.
For some speakers, this word means ‘read slowly and carefully, over a long period’ while for others it means ‘read casually, when there’s a bit of time’. This is likely to reflect different inductions from a context like ‘peruse this at your leisure’, where the formulation can be taken to mean either ‘this is such a substantial task that you’ll need a lot of reading time to do it’ or ‘do this as part of your leisure activities, so not particularly seriously’.
- 3.
‘The frequent presence of rudiments, both in languages and in species, is still more remarkable… In the spelling … of words, letters often remain as the rudiments of ancient forms of pronunciation’ (Darwin 1871:60).
- 4.
After several decades during which the notion of ‘Universal Grammar’ was vigorous promoted, there remain linguists who see linguistic diversity as a marginal phenomenon: ‘Without proceeding, it seems to me no longer absurd to speculate that there may be a single internal language, efficiently yielding the infinite array of expressions that provide a language of thought. Variety and complexity of language would then be reduced to the lexicon, which is also the locus of parametric variation, and to the ancillary mappings involved in externalisation, which might turn out to be best possible solutions to relating organs with independent origins and properties’ (Chomsky 2007:25). For those taking this view, there is no need to explain diversification, since they regard it as a minor phenomenon. For arguments against this position, see Evans and Levinson (2009).
- 5.
There are others, of course, such as historical contingency: next evolutionary steps are constrained by present structures. Just as preexistent anatomy determines what elements will evolve into a wing, preexisting linguistic structures determine much of what elements will evolve into a future tense marker, an/s/sound, or a complementiser, even when the broad selectional pressures are comparable.
- 6.
See the video made by Christian Döhler with the related Komnzo language for an illustration: https://vimeo.com/54887315, as well as Williams (1936, 225–7) for an early ethnographic description.
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Acknowledgements
The ideas here were presented at the 22nd Evolutionary Biology Meeting at Marseilles in September 2018, and I thank Pierre Pontarotti for his kind invitation to attend this most stimulating conference, as well as to the audience members for their questions. I would also like to thank Damián Blasi, Lindell Bromham, Bill Croft, Dan Dediu, Mark Ellison, Russell Gray, Steve Levinson, Ron Planer and Kim Sterelny for discussions bearing on the contents of this paper, Aung Si for drawing Fig. 10.1, Susan Ford for assistance with editing and the Australian Research Council for support of the work reported on here, in particular through grants FL130100111 ‘The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity’ and CE140100041 ‘Dynamics of Language’.
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Evans, N. (2019). Coevolutionary Approaches to the Science of Language. In: Pontarotti, P. (eds) Evolution, Origin of Life, Concepts and Methods. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30363-1_10
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