Re[4/6]: Cladistic language concepts

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Michael Cysouw wrote:
 
> 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.
 
Language as individual makes little sense to me, but I think that speaker=
individual is clearly the most useful analogy.  Michael's observation that
utterances rather than languages or individual speakers are the units of
selection is correct, but of course this makes them parallel not to
individuals in biological evolution, but to genes.  They are indeed the
units upon which selection operates, in quite the same sense as genes,
rather than individuals, are in biology.  And this parallel works quite
well--not with utterances, but with constructions (i.e. morphemes,
words, and syntactic constructions), which are the building
blocks which make up the structure of a language system, just as
genes are the building blocks of a genotype.  Utterances,
which are actual entities whose structure is informed by the
underlying knowledge of constructions, are, on this model, not
genes but the expression of genes.
     We then have useful parallels to the notion of genotype vs.
phenotype--which ends up recalling, in I think a more useful form,
the "competence/performance" dichotomy between the representation
of a language in a speaker's mind and the actual linguistic forms
produced.
     As in biology, it is more useful for many purposes to think of
a population rather than a species.  That is, there is no abstract
"language" shared by all speakers; rather, there is a population of
interacting individuals whose underlying systems share a great deal
of structure--some but not all of which is probably essential for
interaction with other members of the population, and therefor in
a sense criterial for membership in the "species".
    There are drastic failures in the linguistic/biological parallel, such
as the fact that a single individual can be a native speaker of more than
one language.  But the overall parallels work neatly:  in gross
measure, replication is similar; the speaker acquires linguistic
structure from members of the previous generation.  (Can be more
or, theoretically, less than two such members, though).
     To me this seems like a framework within which we can think
about answers to Michael Ghiselin's question of Aug. 31:
 
>                One point that I still would like clarified is the
>           relationship between the speaker of the language and the
>           language itself.  The speaker is a part of a language
>           community and the vocabulary, grammar etc. are parts of the
>           language.
 
A basic ontological problem with all the human sciences is the nature
of constructs like "language", "culture", etc.  The individual nervous
systems in which these are represented are part of the physical world,
and in some sense, which someday we may understand, the representations
of language (for example) in these nervous systems is also an aspect of
the physical world.  But the abstract "language" which is "shared" by
all members of a speech community is not something which can be located
in the physical world--so, where and what IS it?  I think, in fact, it
is very much the same kind of thing as a species, which likewise does
not exist--what do exist are individuals and populations.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html