Ecology and Exaptation All the Way in Language Evolution

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Ecology and Exaptation All the Way in Language
Evolution

• Salikoko S. Mufwene
• University of Chicago

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Whats the ecology of language?

• Its the speaker
• through his mental and anatomical predisposi-tion
  for language
• through his adaptive responses to his
  socio-economic environment
• Its the socioeconomic environment that
  determines the particular language varieties that
  shape his idiolect
• An interesting cascade of indirect ecological
  determinisms apply in colonial settings
  geographical ecology ? economic system ?
  population structure ? language variety

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Theres also an internal ecology

• It lies in the language itself
• Its more obvious at the communal than at the
  idiolectal level
• It lies in the variants that compete for the same
  communicative or structural function
• It lies in the interdependencies that obtain
  between particular structural features
• It lies in the particular composition of the
  feature pool in which the variants compete

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Language evolution is largely determined by how
the feature pool is affected by the external
ecol-ogy, especially the relevant population
structure
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A communal language is a collective pro-duction

• It is an emergent phenomenon
• It is the outcome of the cooperative
  commu-nicative activities of speakers/signers
• No particular speaker/signer has the monop-oly of
  determining how a language variety shapes up,
  though some are more produc-tive than others
• Different speakers innovate different forms and
  structures
• Competition arises at the level of copying

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Various factors bear on the copying/spread-ing
processes

• Chiefly, intelligibility
• Ease of production and ease of perception
• Need for precision, clarity, transparency,
  regularity, etc. ? scale of markedness
• Identification with a particular group
• loyalty, prestige, singularity
• These and other ecological factors determine how
  competition is resolved (or how variation is
  reduced, if not eliminated)

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Innovation vs copying/spreading

• While language is social, the engine of its
  evolution lies in the activities of individual
  speakers in individual communicative acts
• It also lies typically in the dyadic or triadic
  interactions of individual speakers and how they
  accommodate each other
• Communal patterns emerge from repetitions of some
  accommodations, which produce convergent forms,
  structures, and meanings
• This is where the invisible hand operates, in
  the selections that favor some variants over
  others

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If uniformitarianism is a valid assumption

• the same ecological factors that affect the
  diachrony of individual languages in human
  history (language evolution) must also have
  influenced the phylogeny of language in mankind
  (the evolution of language)

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Ecology as scaffolding

• Use of speech and gestures in ways that
  distinguish human from other animals was
  facilitated by bipedalism
• Exaptation of bucco-pharyngeal structure and
  hands to produce language was facilitated by
  particular mental infrastructure, one that found
  an advantage in explicit/elaborate communication
  with members of ones group and an advantage in
  collaboration to solve problems
• Language was not invented wholesale by one
  hominin its the outcome of collaborative
  productions by various speakers

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Ecology as habitat and how it can help explain
linguistic diversity
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Homo sapiens did not disperse from the same
village nor at the same time

• Homo sapiens probably did not speak the same
  language
• The languages of Homo sapiens may/must have also
  varied in complexity
• We have no clue about the extent of normalization
  in the language varieties spoken by Homo sapiens
• There must have been quite a few contacts of
  populations and of languages since the exodus of
  Homo sapiens out of East Africa they must have
  contributed to further specia-tion of languages

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Language contact as an ecological factor

• Then and now, contact must have generat-ed new
  feature pools, produced new patterns of
  competition and selection
• It cannot be ignored in research on the origins
  of typological variation
• In research on Phylogenetic evolution of
  language, ecology contributes complexity in
  causation

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Thank you!
http//humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mufwene/