人類学談話会

Rethinking linguistic diversity : when, how and why languages change

Dr. Damián Blasi(Harvard University)

2020年02月10日(月)    16:50-18:35  理学部2号館 201号室   

Language traits from all domains of linguistic diversity -from grammar to lexical semantics, phonology, pragmatics and beyond- display highly non-trivial distributions across the languages of the world. Cross-linguistic frequency ranges from the universal or quasi-universal (e.g. pronominal systems and clause embedding) to rarissima (e.g. trial number and clicks) and everything in-between. These differences in cross-linguistic frequency remain a fundamental piece in our theories of language and language change. Linguistic traits that are frequently attested across languages and language groups are taken to be indicative of some type of cognitive, communicative, structural and/or interactional efficiency. Conversely, traits that can be shown to exhibit those qualities in experimental or naturalistic language use or acquisition are expected to be common across the languages of the world. In between these two levels of description takes place language transmission, human history, and all the other factors binding individual behavior to (collective) languages. In this presentation I will argue that, in spite of how venerable and intuitive they might be, both perspectives on cross-linguistic frequency are surprisingly problematic and poorly buttressed by empirical studies. I will illustrate this by tapping on several sources and domains, from the emergence of creole languages in the last 500 years and the use of artificial languages to reveal linguistic biases, to the spatiotemporal distribution of recurrent form-meaning associations, the phylogenetic history of word order and the deep roots of contemporary linguistic diversity back in the early Holocene.