[parislinguists] conf S.Mufwene

[Lea Nash]

L'UMR 7023 (SFL)
a le plaisir d'annoncer un exposé

Date : lundi 29 novembre 2004
Lieu : locaux SFL, 15 rue Catulienne, 93 Saint-Denis, salle 205
Heure : 10:00-13:00
Métro : Basilique de Saint-Denis
RER : Saint-Denis


10:00-13:00

Salikoko S. Mufwene
University of Chicago

LANGUAGE EVOLUTION: THE POPULATION GENETICS WAY



RESUME:

	In this presentation I argue that the study of the development of 
creoles invites us loud and clear to reexamine the received doctrine 
about “language transmission,” “language acquisition,” and language 
speciation. Among other things, I address the “actuation question,” 
submitting that the causes of language change lie in the following 
factors which often act concurrently: 1) the variation that lies in 
every language, which must be thought of as species; 2) the imperfect 
reconstructive way in which speakers develop competence even in their 
native languages; 3) the competition and selection that take place in 
the ecologies in which a language is “transmitted” to learners; 4) the 
day-to-day communicative events in which speakers accommodate each other 
and innovate forms and structures; 5) the fact that both the internal 
and external ecologies in which one learns a language vary from one 
individual to another (even in the same family), 6) etc. I show that the 
singularity or anomaly of the development of creoles is largely an 
artifact of the way genetic linguistics has been done to date. However, 
studying language evolution the population genetics way does not entail 
blindly copying from the latter discipline all of its concepts and 
working assumptions. It simply means allowing genetic linguistics to 
question some of its working assumptions and aligning some of its 
research methods with normal assumptions about the interface of 
individuals’ and population behaviors.
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