changing FUNKNET topics

[William Mann]

Dear Martin and all:

It seems to me that one of the premises of this discussion should be that
innovation and variation are extremely abundant.  Noisy environments, memory
lapses and listening to children all lead speakers to create items that are
novel to the hearer.

That suggests that the problem is not explaining innovation but rather
explaining what few innovations are retained, a selectivity explanation
problem.

Also, we might have a problem if we, in our terminology, use that phrase
from below:

functional
> innovation ("mutation")

That presumes that innovations are functionally motivated, caused, given
expression or some such.  But the relationship between innovations or
mutations and function are really under discussion here. It is quite
possible that mutations are not initially functional in any sense.

So I suggest this editorial restatement of the two positions:


 (i) Individuals begin to use novel structures in their language because
they tacitly or consciously find some advantage in the novel structures as
they use them.  (call this Individual Functional adaptation.)  (Croft,
restated),

 (ii) Languages change, in large part because speakers begin to use novel
structures which they have heard and which they tacitly or consciously find
some advantage in the novel structures as they use them.  (Call this
Functional propagation.)(Nettle,  Haspelmath, and no doubt others,
restated).

Notice that (ii) still needs to have a few original sources.

I hope that this clarifies either the positions or my misunderstandings.  We
shall see.

Bill Mann

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Haspelmath" <haspelmath at EVA.MPG.DE>
To: <FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 7:08 AM
Subject: changing FUNKNET topics


> 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)

=============================
 William C. Mann
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 bill_mann at sil.org