functionality

[Dick Hudson]

Dear Martin et al,
You contrast functionality with social pressures to conform. I know why you
do it, but in the long run I think it may be misleading. I also like Guy
Deutscher's reformulation of the question, because it highlights the
functional role of social differentiation - see below.

After all, social-group differentiation is an important function of
language. It's at least imaginable (and I think Daniel Nettle has actually
argued this) that languages differentiate in part "in order to" act as good
distinguishers of social groups. Most obviously, teenagers seize on new
anti-language in order to distinguish themselves from adults, but we all
enjoy local features that help to make us feel different from other groups.
That's as much of a "function" of language as preventing misunderstanding
or making words easy to pronounce.

The reverse side of the same coin is the pressure to conform within the
group, which is also a functional pressure - the more homogeneous the group
with respect to a particular pattern, the better that pattern is as a
signal of membership for that group.

So, following Guy, we can ask whether there are any innovations which are
purely dysfunctional in terms of the traditional functional motivations -
i.e. whose ONLY function is to identify a social group. It's surely very
easy to think of such examples: loan words for concepts that already have
names in the borrowing language, or more generally any kind of neologism
which produces a synonym of an existing word. Typically there's no benefit
in terms of length or ease of use, and the result is one more word to hold
in memory; so there's no processing or storage benefit, but usually the
reason for preferring the new form is that it links the speaker more or
less closely with some social group.

Dick

Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
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