Cladistic language concepts

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
A brief (really!) comment on Michael Cysouw's passage:
 
>bwald wrote that social pressure can only work on *whole* languages.
 
No, that's not what I meant to be understood when I 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.
 
That's why I used "may" for the verb of the second clause.
 
I think that historical linguists view languages as collective units (not
individual units for each single speaker), and are concerned with change
and continuity in the succession of speakers who learn that collective unit
over time.  As long as any and all languages are viewed this way, then I
think that any and all changes have a social motivation.  The least that
can be said about the social motivation is that it determines why the
change occurs and is spread at a particular point in time rather than at
some other point -- or never (in which case it fails to be a change, but
perhaps just the idiosyncrasy of some speaker or a number of speakers who
never meet or communicate with each other and will take their innovation to
their graves with them).  Some studies suggest that social motivation for
change can be much more powerful in some cases, so I have only indicated
what I think is minimally true about the role of social motivation for
linguistic change.
 
That understood, it simply occurred to me that language shift-and-death is
the simplest and clearest analog for environmental conditioning on the
SURVIVAL of life forms.  Again, I think that the SURVIVAL of ALL linguistic
changes (in the technical sense of linguistic change I gave above, and
which I think is a consensus understanding of linguistic change) depends on
social conditions (from the beginning of the change to its end, whether
that takes days or millenia or any amount of time in between).