changing FUNKNET topics

[Dirk Geeraerts]

Is Martin's question one that can be answered empirically, i.e. what would
we need to answer it on the basis of empirical evidence?

To begin with, keep in mind that changes can spread in other ways than
through social imitation alone. Innovations may occur independently and in
parallel (as when, for instance, a loanword is borrowed simultaneously by
many different language users); in such a case, the dissemination of the
innovation is not due to social imitation.

Suppose we were then to formulate the Haspelmathian hypothesis:
"Functionality supports dissemination. An innovation that is functionally
useful spreads more rapidly than one that is not".
In order to test this, we would first have to filter out all the cases in
which the dissemination is due to simultaneous and independent innovations
rather than imitation, and next, we would have to compare the speed of
dissemination of different innovations (functional and non-functional) in
which social factors and imitation do play a role.

But if you want to test that, you would have to know quite a lot about the
language community that you are investigating. Because you need to quantify
the speed of dissemination, you would need a very good record, at usage
level, of the actual utterances of the language users that contribute to
the spread of the innovation. And even more importantly, you would have to
judge for each user whether he is influenced by others or whether he is
innovating independently.

Linguists usually do not have the kind of material that would enable them
to answer this type of question, so my guess is that it may take us a while
before Martin's question can be answered empirically.
Or would there be other ways of testing the hypothesis ?

Dirk

Dirk Geeraerts
Departement Linguïstiek KULeuven
Blijde-Inkomststraat 21
B-3000 Leuven, België
[++32] 16 324815
e-mail: dirk.geeraerts at arts.kuleuven.ac.be
website: http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/gling/



At 6-2-2002 13:08, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>Could we please stop discussing Chomsky all the time on Funknet? It
>would be a sad sign for functionalism if we had no more burning issues
>to discuss than Chomsky's place in history.
>
>In case you cannot think of any other worthy topic at the moment, here
>is a question that I've been asking myself in recent months, without
>coming to a conclusive answer:
>
>What is the role of functionality in language change?
>
>Many functionalists have recently stressed that functionally adapted
>structures come to be functional through language change. That is, when
>we say that some synchronic structure is, say, economically motivated
>(e.g. the fact that singulars are mostly zero and plurals are mostly
>overt), this doesn't mean that language structure is the way it is
>because it's economical. My English plurals are overt not because this
>is economical, but because I learned to speak like other English
>speakers -- if they had overt singulars and zero plurals, I would have
>acquired such a perverse system as well (i.e. markedness universals such
>as this one are not due to innate restrictions on acquisition). So
>economical structures (and more generally, functional structures) must
>arise in language change, but how exactly?
>
>Bill Croft has argued ("Explaining language change", Longman/Pearson
>2000) that functional motivation comes in exclusively through the
>actuation of language change, i.e. innovations of individual speakers,
>which are (or may be) functionally based. The spread of functionally
>adapted structures plays no role, acording to Croft, because the
>diffusion/propagation of new features is exclusively socially based.
>Using biological terminology, we can say that functionality resides in
>the mutations, not in the selection. On the other hand, Daniel Nettle
>("Linguistic diversity", OUP 1999) and I ("Optimality and diachronic
>adaptation", Zs. f. Sprachwissenschaft 1999) have argued that functional
>adaptation also comes about through selection, i.e. speakers adopt new
>features from other speakers also because they seem structurally useful,
>not just because they are socially attractive.
>
>So in brief, the two positions are:
>
>(i) Functional adaptation comes about exclusively through functional
>innovation ("mutation") (and social selection is non-functional)
>(Croft),
>
>(ii) functional adaptation comes about through functional propagation
>("functional selection"), in addition to functional innovation (Nettle,
>Haspelmath, and no doubt others).
>
>Although I have argued in print for the second position, I'm not very
>sure that Bill Croft is wrong. What do you all think?
>
>Martin
>
>--
>Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
>Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Inselstr. 22
>D-04103 Leipzig (Tel. (MPI) +49-341-9952 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616)