Fwd: Croft, "Explaining Language Change"

[Mike Cleven]

>
>Ever since the origins of both linguistics and evolutionary biology in
>the 19th century, scholars have noted the similarity between
>biological evolution and language change. Yet until recently neither
>linguists nor biologists have developed a model of evolution general
>enough to apply across the two fields. Even in linguistics, the field
>is split between the historical linguists who study change in language
>structure, and the sociolinguists who study social variation in the
>speech community.

As a tangent off this, has anyone in the group happened to read Lewis
Thomas' essays tracking the movement of morphemes through language history
as if they were viruses?  I think there's several essays each in "The Medusa
and the Snail" and "Notes of a Biology Watcher"; he discusses the "movement"
of Indo-European morphemes and their changing contexts and meanings - and
re-congruent convergences (? - you have to read him to understand what I'm
referring to there to, if at all); how such meaning-components migrate
through time and shift in meaning and function, sometimes returning to their
ancestral context; all in the context of behaving as if they were living
things....

MC
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