Bausman, William C and Weber, Marcel (2025) What You Can Do for Evolutionary Developmental Linguistics. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 15 (1). ISSN 1879-4912

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Abstract

A growing number of linguistic attempts to explain how languages change use cultural-evolutionary models involving selection or drift. Developmental constraints and biases, which take center stage in evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo, seem to be absent within this framework, even though linguistics is home to numerous notions of constraint. In this paper, we show how these evo-devo concepts could be applied to linguistic change and why they should. This requires some conceptual groundwork, due to important differences between linguistic and biotic evolution. In biological evolution, development generates the organism's variable traits on which selection and drift act. In linguistic evolution by analogy, we say development generates the linguistic variants on which selection and drift can act. “Linguistic development” then picks out how individual speakers produce and comprehend language. It involves much more than just learning. Using this broad notion of development, we distinguish between different types of bias that could operate in the processes of linguistic innovation and transmission, which correspond to genetic mutation and biological reproduction, respectively.
Having thus sharpened our conceptual toolbox, we then reanalyze two well-documented cases of linguistic change and show that, in both these cases, linguists have only considered Neo-Darwinian evolutionary explanations, falsely deploying an exclusive disjunction of selection and drift. We show that there is at least a third relevant alternative in these examples, namely developmental constraint or bias in the sense we explicate here.

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Item Type:	Published Article or Volume
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Bausman, William C wcbausman@gmail.com 0000-0002-7445-8722 Weber, Marcel marcel.weber@unige.ch 0000-0003-2142-5043
Keywords:	Philosophy of linguistics, linguistic evolution, evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), cultural evolution, selection, drift, developmental bias, constraint
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory Specific Sciences > Cultural Evolution
Depositing User:	Prof. Marcel Weber
Date Deposited:	17 Dec 2024 13:12
Last Modified:	17 Dec 2024 13:12
Item ID:	24407
Journal or Publication Title:	European Journal for Philosophy of Science
Publisher:	Springer
Official URL:	https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-0...
DOI or Unique Handle:	https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-024-00628-y
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory Specific Sciences > Cultural Evolution
Date:	2025
Volume:	15
Number:	1
ISSN:	1879-4912
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24407

Available Versions of this Item

• What You Can Do for Evolutionary Developmental Linguistics. (deposited 04 Dec 2024 13:21)
  • What You Can Do for Evolutionary Developmental Linguistics. (deposited 17 Dec 2024 13:12)
    • What You Can Do for Evolutionary Developmental Linguistics. (deposited 17 Dec 2024 13:12) [Currently Displayed]

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