LANGUAGE CHANGE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

The working of the invisible hand

LANGUAGE CHANGE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

In this chapter I would like to address the question of the extent to which language evolution represents a case of (socio-) cultural evolution and what the mechanisms underlying such an evolutionary process could be. In this context, ‘language evolution’ does not mean the development of human language or languages from animal proto-forms, but the historical evolution of language.

Language evolution in this sense necessarily implies stasis as well as change, as already pointed out in section 4.5. Historians of language have traditionally focused on the aspect of change, perhaps tacitly assuming that ‘Where nothing changes, there is nothing to be explained’. To my mind, there are no objective grounds for holding this view. There is, for example, no less need to explain the fact that the West Germanic Satzklammer (the rule that in a main clause with complex predicates, the finite part of the predicate must be in second position and the other parts of the predicate at the end of the sentence) has maintained itself in German, Dutch, and Afrikaans, than to explain the fact that it has completely disappeared in English and is almost gone in Yiddish (with the exception of sentences with prepositional objects).¹ The motto, ‘If we do nothing, everything remains the same’, does not work in language. If we ‘do nothing’, language no longer exists. But everything does remain the same if we do not change our preferences of expression. If we maintain or change them, we make in both cases a (mostly unconscious) choice, and the one is no less mysterious than the other. ‘It may be’, writes biologist John Maynard Smith, ‘that the search for the causes of constancy in human affairs may prove as fruitful as has

the comparable study of homeostasis in biology.’² The ‘evolution of language’ should therefore include both stasis and change.

The use of the word ‘evolution’ for social and cultural phenomena often arouses distrust, for two reasons. First, there is the general suspicion that the natural sciences are being inappropriately imitated.

Second, there is the danger that one might be classified with social Darwinists. As both worries are not totally unfounded—which one can see by looking at the history of linguistics—I would like to comment on them briefly to prevent misunderstandings.

The desire shared by many linguists to be a member of the illustrious circle of natural scientists has driven some to dream up rather grotesque theories. I demonstrated this in section 3.2 by discussing the examples of Max Müller and August Schleicher. Chomsky’s own works and those of his followers clearly show that this wish is still alive today (see section 5.3). I therefore want to stress that, when I say a theory of the development of language is an evolutionary theory, I do not thereby claim to present a theory belonging to the natural sciences.

Coseriu writes: ‘One should note, for example, that the human sciences still have not found a concept to replace the bothersome and inappropriate concept of evolution: cultural objects have a historical development, not an “evolution” like natural objects.’³ Elsewhere he points out, ‘The system does not evolve in the sense of an “evolution”, but is created by the speakers in accordance with their expressive needs.’⁴

I am in fact in good company with my use of the expressions

‘evolution’ and ‘genetic’ in reference to the cultural object of language

—even from Coseriu’s point of view. ‘If…we conceive of language-making as successive, we must base it, like all becoming in nature, upon a system of evolution.’⁵ These words were written by Wilhelm von Humboldt; elsewhere he stresses that the ‘true definition’ of language can ‘only be a genetic one’.⁶

My thoughts on the matter stand in a sociological tradition which has also influenced biological theory. In his History of Biological Theories, Emil Rádl points out Bentham, Smith, and Malthus as forerunners of a Darwinian theory of evolution.

There was this new and magnificent idea of a household of nature, in which animals and plants have the status of members of a society, of citizens of nature…. It would be hard to understand why Darwin could have had such an influence on sociological thinkers, did we not know that his own theory was

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itself a sociology of nature, that Darwin projected onto nature the then dominant ideal of the English state.⁷

‘Just as Adam Smith was the last moral philosopher and the first economist, Darwin was the last economist and the first biologist’, wrote Simon N.Patton in 1899.⁸

With this, we come to the second danger: suspicion of social Darwinism. Those sociologists who tried to project Darwin’s theory onto society were bad biologists and bad sociologists both. They used Darwin’s metaphors of the ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify racism and imperialism with the veil of science.

They succeeded in doing so, mainly because they took the metaphor of struggle literally to prove that wars and oppression were somehow laws of nature; they also surreptitiously re-interpreted the theses of the

‘survival of the fittest’ as meaning the ‘survival of the strongest’. The result of such an adaptation were statements like this: ‘Lasting good can only be achieved in this world by struggle and bloodshed. As long as injustice exists in this world, the sword, the gun and the torpedo boat are parts of the evolutionary mechanisms of this world, blessed like any other of its parts’, or ‘Nature only wants…the best race to govern…

This is the law of nature.’⁹

Those social scientists’, wrote von Hayek, ‘who, in the 19th century, needed Darwin to learn what they should have learned from their own predecessors, did progress in the theory of cultural evolution a great disservice with their “social Darwinism”.’¹⁰ But von Hayek probably misjudged the social Darwinists in assuming that they wanted to learn. It was not their intention to further the progress of a theory of cultural evolution; on the contrary, they wished to strengthen the acceptance of a certain colonial and racist policy by means of a justifying ideology.

To my knowledge, the influence of social Darwinism was negligible in the field of linguistics. It is true that Max Müller, too, used the metaphor of the struggle for survival, but without any Darwinistic implications: ‘A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.’¹¹ We find the same metaphor in the work of August Schleicher, this time with a clear tinge of social Darwinism.

He believed that he could observe how ‘during historical periods … species and genera of speech disappear, and how others extend themselves at the expense of the dead’, and that ‘in the process of the

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struggle for existence in the field of human speech…the descendants of the Indo-Germanic family are the conquerors in the struggle for existence’, and that, as far as languages are concerned, ‘the preservation of the higher organisms in the struggle for existence’ cannot be denied.¹²

My own attempt at conceiving linguistic development as an evolutionary process is in no way driven by the wish to project a model borrowed from the natural sciences onto an object belonging to the cultural sciences. On the contrary, I wish to apply a genuinely cultural model, that of the invisible hand, to the study of language. It is worth pointing out that there is only a small step from the theory of the invisible hand to the concept of evolution, historically as well as systematically. The theory of evolution in the domain of animate nature can serve only as a heuristic model, relying on ‘the fruitfulness of analogical thinking, properly controlled’—as Gerard, Kluckhohn, and Rapoport point out in their essay ‘Biological and Cultural Evolution’.¹³

On what conditions can one be completely justified in calling a process of historical evolution an evolutionary one? There are three:

1 The process should not be a teleological one; that is to say, we should not be dealing with a process which is carried out in a controlled fashion to achieve a preset goal. This does not mean, however, that evolutionary processes cannot have a certain direction. But on no account must they have a certain direction, not even in the domain of animate nature.¹⁴ The implementation of orthographical reform is thus not an evolutionary process, even though it might take place over a period of biological time (and although evolutionary subprocesses can take place within it).

2 It must be a cumulative process. ‘By evolution’, write Gerard, Kluckhohn, and Rapoport, ‘we mean the cumulative process of small changes.’¹⁵ That is, we are normally dealing with a process which is brought about by populations, not by a single individual. I say

‘normally’ because there are borderline cases. A trowel takes on a specific shape because it is always used by the same person with the same habitual movements. This shaping process is cumulative and not teleological. Is it evolutionary? Or the development of my individual competence during my adulthood; is this an evolutionary process? To my mind, it would be terminological arbitrariness to exclude such one-man processes, although such processes are surely not prototypical in so far as evolutionary processes are concerned.

3 The dynamics of the process must be based on the interplay between variation and selection. Excluding random effects, this is the

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case when there are, generally speaking, alternatives which are differently suitable for a certain purpose (as a given task) or in a certain environment (such as ecological conditions).

Let us have a very simplified look at the dynamics of the evolutionary process, taking biological evolution as an example. Mutation comes about through genetic copying mistakes. The new type created through mutation is called a mutant. The purpose of a living being is to create more creatures of its type. If a mutation has the effect that the new mutant can fulfil this purpose better than the already existing type in a certain environment, one can expect the relative percentage of the new type to increase in the population; that is, the frequency of the new type rises. One can call biological ‘fitness’ the relative number of descendants with which a type is represented in the next generation.¹⁶ However, the definition of ‘fitness’ seems to be rather controversial among biologists.¹⁷ Important is that ‘fitness’ has nothing to do with the strength or the survival of any individual whatsoever. ‘Fitness’ is not a measurable attribute of an individual. It is a statistical value attached to the reproduction probability of an individual of a certain type, relative to a certain ecological environment. The fitness W_A [of a certain type A]…

can be defined for a particular environment only.’¹⁸ Under certain circumstances, severe short-sightedness, for example, increases the biological fitness of men, as it results in them not being drafted for military service.¹⁹

Leaving behind these general characterisations, we will turn to those cultural objects which I have called phenomena of the third kind, especially language, to see if and in what way they fulfil the above conditions.

Condition 1: Language evolution is definitely not teleological. There is no definite preset goal that has to be achieved, something which has been made sufficiently clear in the discussion of the finality thesis (see section 4.3). This is one of the reasons why language evolution cannot be predicted. Language development is, however, partially directed (see section 5.1). It is therefore possible to make trend extrapolations in some domains.

Condition 2: Language evolution is definitely a cumulative process.

Being a cumulative process is precisely the criterion that makes something a phenomenon of the third kind. This, too, has been sufficiently discussed (see sections 4.1, 4.2).

Condition 3: In this case the situation is less clear. In linguistic literature one can often find remarks to the effect that language, too, is governed by the mechanism of variation and selection; an example is

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the aforementioned passage by Max Müller, written in 1870: ‘A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.’²⁰ In 1880, Hermann Paul wrote in his Principles of the History of Language: ‘For the rest, purpose plays in the development of language no other part than that assigned to it by Darwin in the development of organic nature, -the greater or lesser fitness of the forms which arise is decisive for their survival or disappearance.’²¹

The well-known contemporary biologist and specialist in the theory of evolution, Richard Dawkins, thinks that ‘languages clearly evolve’.²² In his book The Selfish Gene, he stretched the analogy between biological and cultural evolution to its extreme, inventing a new equivalent for the gene (presumably not to be taken too seriously) in the domain of culture:

the meme. Memes are, like genes, replicators with high copying-fidelity:

‘Copying-fidelity is another way of saying longevity-in-the-form-of-copies.’²³ Memes are units of memory, one might say, just big enough to be transferable en bloc from one memory to the next. ‘Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.’²⁴ Linguistic units, such as words or idioms, the way to articulate something or how to form a plural, are memes too, of course.

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.²⁵

Just like genes, some memes join up to form co-adapted meme complexes in order to increase their survival value, or infective value. The meme

‘God’ and the meme ‘purgatory’ would each by itself never have been as successful as they were, had they not joined forces and built a meme complex together with the meme ‘faith’.²⁶

Memes compete with each other: for scarce storage space, for example. As with genes, ‘some memes are more successful in the meme pool than others. This is the analogue of natural selection’.²⁷ ‘Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own.’²⁸

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I would like to break off the presentation of Dawkins’s play with analogies at this point and spin it out myself, making it language-specific. However, one thing should be noted in advance. Max Müller’s words and forms which ‘struggle for survival’ and Richard Dawkins’s memes which compete for higher frequency in the meme pool have one thing in common: they become active.

We will let our imagination play further. Analogous to the gene pool (the set of genes of an entire population), one can imagine a linguistic meme pool. This would be the set of all linguistic memes in a linguistic community: all linguistic units that are just big enough to be able to travel from one individual competence to another. We are dealing here with a kind of infection.²⁹ One is infected by use and adoption, that is, learning. In contrast to genes, which stay in the body for life, linguistic memes can ‘leave’ the competence again through forgetting. Genes have alleles. Where there is a gene for blue eyes, there cannot be one for brown ones. Alleles are rivals competing for a certain place on a chromosome. Linguistic memes have alleles, too. They are rivals competing for a ‘place’ in speech, alternative expressions which have the same function. I can, for example, express the relationship of possession between my sister and her bicycle in at least three ways: my sister’s bicycle’, the bicycle of my sister; the bicycle that belongs to my sister. These three alleles compete for a ‘place’ in my utterances that are expressions of the possessive function. Grammatical forms (schemata vs schemas) or variantsin pronunciation (advertisement vs ) compete, too, and are therefore alleles. Synonyms are alleles par excellence.

Dawkins’s analogy seems to have one snag, however: his ‘self-replicating memes’ are unrealistically active. If he wanted to, he could trace this opinion back to a famous predecessor. ‘A transmittable idea constitutes an autonomous entity…capable of preserving itself, of growing, of gaining in complexity; and is therefore the object of a selective process’, writes Jacques Monod.³⁰ This is a modern form of cultural vitalism. Genes really do something. They come together to form bodies (plants, animals, and humans), using them for their replication. A gene ‘wants’ nothing but to be represented as often as possible in the gene pool, It achieves this by contributing to the creation of a body which should, if possible, be fitter than other bodies not containing this gene. A ‘good gene’ is one that can produce ‘efficient survival machines—bodies’.³¹

Memes, however, do not use their brains to replicate themselves, In this analogy, the relation between producer and product has been turned upside down. We are the products of our genes, but the producers of our

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memes. To this one could object: but not of all of them! We have got almost everything we have in our heads from other people. This is a valid objection. It is even correct to say that I cannot protect myself against the ‘intrusion’ of a meme. To this extent, the metaphor of infection works as well. I know words or theories that I never intended to learn. But those intruders do not force me to contribute to their multiplication. Nothing in nature corresponds to the distinction between active and passive knowledge. A linguistic meme does not use the human being to increase its success in reproducing itself (as genes do);

on the contrary, humans use linguistic memes to increase their success in communication; or, in more general terms, their social success.

What is a good linguistic meme? This question cannot be answered as smoothly as the one concerning a good gene, for two reasons, the first of them being the active-passive asymmetry. It can be very useful to me to know linguistic forms which I would never use myself; even those whose use I detest. Ability to understand more is better than understanding less. From this point of view, my linguistic competence can never be great enough. For its owner, every meme is a good meme.

Things are different for the user, which brings us to the second reason:

good linguistic memes are those whose use contributes to the success I want to achieve in my communicative actions. Perceptions of success can differ greatly, as we saw in section 4.5. For the gene, high frequency alone is relevant. This, however, can be just what the speaker does not want from a linguistic unit. Social success can sometimes

In document KELLER, Rudi. on Language Change - The Invisible Hand in Language (Page 146-157)