Cladistic language concepts

[Michael Cysouw]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Continuing this thread, let me add some general thoughts on the comparison
languages-species.
 
A central point in this comparison is what is concieved as an 'individual'
(or 'unit' if you don't like to anthropomorphize). In linguistics there are
two basic views on language around: either the *speaker* is seen as a
unit/individual, or a *language* is seen as a unit/individual. Depending on
which stance you take, you'll get differing analogies to biological
concepts.
 
IMO, a far most interesting viewpoint on language is to view each
individually uttered morpheme as a unit/individual. Before expanding on
this stance let me stress that all three ways of looking are useful for
certain insights, useless for others. This stance though is particularly
apt for a biology-linguistics analogy.
 
Imagine that each individual morpheme uttered is 'born' at the speaker and
'dies' an entropic death in the air, hoping in time to have reached a
hearer to eventually propagate in his brain. What we normally in
linguistics call a morpheme, is in this view seen as a species: a coherent
group of individuals/units. A morpheme 'tree' is nothing more than the set
of all individual utterences of it. A *language*, a set of interconnected
morphemes, then becomes analogous to a biological *ecosystem*, bound to a
certain expend by its natural surrounding: the social structures.
 
This view makes it possible to see language change analogous to selection.
e.g. bwald wrote that social pressure can only work on *whole* languages.
But if a language is seen an ecosystem, then social selection pressure
works only on parts of a language.
 
bwald wrote:
>The closest analog for selection
>pressures in language seems to be social, and may involve the total
>replacement of one language by another, so that one language fails to
>survive, never because it could not adopt to the communicative demands put
>on it, but because it could not find a social niche to allow its
>continuation.
 
If we want to make the analogy between biology and linguistics (which I
think is very insightful), we might be looking at the wrong place by
comparing *language* with *species*. Rethinking *language* as *ecosystem*
seems much more promising.
 
bye
michael cysouw
university of nijmegen, holland