Palabras clave
language typology
variation
adaptation cambio lingüístico
tipología lingüística
variación
adaptación
Cómo citar
Resumen
La presente aportación propone una aproximación crítica de las propuestas que postulan que la explicación de la diversidad de las lenguas se sigue de la adaptación de las mismas al entorno extralingüístico. Mostraré que, a pesar de que la comparación entre lenguas y especies naturales es sólida y razonable, la correlación entre propiedades lingüísticas y aspectos extralingüísticos es débil, esencialmente por dos razones: (I) porque buena parte de la estructura de las lenguas no es sensible al cambio lingüístico y, por tanto, no puede adaptarse a nada y (II) porque las partes de la estructura de las lenguas que sí son sensibles al cambio lingüístico en general tienen una relación muy indirecta con el entorno cultural y físico en el que se hablan.
Citas
ANDERSEN, H. (1973): “Abductive and deductive change”, Language, 49, pp. 567-595.
ASOULIN, Eran (2016): “Language as an instrument of thought”, Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 1(1), 46. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.34.
BAKER, Mark (1996): The Polysynthesis Parameter, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
BAKER, Mark (2001): The atoms of language, Nueva York: Basic Books.
BAKER, Mark (2003): “Linguistic differences and language design”, Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, pp. 349-353.
BENTZ Christian y Bodo WINTER (2013): “Languages with more second language learners tend to lose nominal case”, Language Dynamics and Change, 3, pp. 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004281523_005.
BERWICK, Robert C. y Noam CHOMSKY (2011): “The Biolinguistic program: the current state of its development”, en A.M. Di Sciullo y C. Boeckx (eds.), The Biolinguistic Enterprise, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19-41.
BERWICK, Robert C. y CHOMSKY, Noam (2016): Why Only Us, Boston: The MIT Press.
BICKEL, Balthasar, Alena WITZLACK-MAKAREVICH, Kamal K. CHOUDHARY, Matthias SCHLESEWSKY e Ina BORNKESSEL SCHLESEWSKY (2015): “The neurophysiology of language processing shapes the evolution of grammar: Evidence from case marking”, PLoS ONE, 10, 8. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0132819.
CERCLE LINGUISTIQUE DE PRAGUE (1929): “Thèses présentées au Premier Congrès des philologues slaves”, Travaux Linguistiques de Prague, 1, pp. 5-29.
CHOMSKY, Noam (1985): Knowledge of Language. Its Nature, Origins and Use, Nueva York: Praeger.
CHOMSKY, Noam (2007): “Approaching UG from below”, en U. Sauerland y H. M. Gärtner (eds.), Interfaces + Recursion = Language? Chomsky’s Minimalism and the View from Semantics, Berlín: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110207552-001.
CROFT, William (2000): Explaining Language Change. An Evolutionary Approach, London: Longman.
DAHL, Östen (2004): The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
DARWIN, Charles (1871): The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, London: John Murray.
DARWIN, Charles (2000 [1893]): The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Amherst: Prometheus Books.
DE BUSSER, Rick y Randy J. LAPOLLA (eds.) (2015): Language Structure and Environment: Social, Cultural, and Natural Factors, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
DIXON, R. M. W. (1994): Ergativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DIXON, R. M. W. (1997): The Rise and Fall of Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DRYER, Matthew S. y Martin HASPELMATH (eds.) (2013): The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info.
EVANS, Nicholas y Stephen C. LEVINSON (2009): “The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, pp. 429-448. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x0999094x.
EVERETT, Caleb, Damián E. BLASÍ y Seán G. ROBERTS (2016): “Language evolution and climate: the case of desiccation and tone”, Journal of Language Evolution, 1, pp. 33-46. https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzv004.
EVERETT, Daniel L. (2005): “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã”, Current Anthropology, 46, pp. 621-646. https://doi.org/10.1086/431525.
GOULD, Stephen Jay (1996): “The pattern of life’s history”, en John Brockman (ed.), The Third Culture. Beyond the Scientific Revolution, New York: Simon & Schuster.
GOULD, Stephen Jay (2002): The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
GOULD, Stephen Jay y Richard C. LEWONTIN (1979): “The spandrels of San Marco and the panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 205, pp. 581-598. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1979.0086.
HARRIS, Alice (2008): “On the explanation of typologically unusual structures”, en J. Good (ed.), Linguistic Universals and Language Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 54-76. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199298495.003.0003.
HASPELMATH, Martin (2008): “Parametric versus functional explanations of syntactic universals”, en Teresa Biberauer (ed.), The Limits of syntactic variation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 75-107. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.132.04has.
HAUSER, Marc D., Noam CHOMSKY y W. Tecumseh FITCH, (2002): “The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how it evolved?”, Science, 298, pp. 1569-1579.
HAWKINS, John A. (2004): Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
KAUFFMAN, Stuart A. (1993): The Origins of Order. Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, London: Oxford University Press.
KAYNE, Richard (1994): The Antysymmetry of Syntax, Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
KIPARSKY, Paul (2008): “Universals constrain change; change results in typological generalizations”, en J. Good (ed.), Linguistic Universals and Language Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 23-53. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199298495.003.0002.
KOERNER, Konrad, ed. (1983). Linguistics and Evolutionary Theory. Three Essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and Wilhelm Bleek, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
LABOV, William (1963): “The social motivation of a sound change”, Word, 19, pp. 273-309.
LADD, Robert D., Séan G. ROBERTS y Dan DEDIU (2015): “Correlational studies in typological and historical linguistics”, Annual Review of Linguistics, 1, pp. 221-41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124819.
LASS, Roger (1997): Historical Linguistics and Language Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LONGOBARDI, Giuseppe (2003): “Methods in parametric linguistics and cognitive history”, Linguistic Variation Yearbook, 3, pp. 101-138.
LUPYAN Gary y Rick DALE (2010): “Language structure is partly determined by social structure”, PLoS ONE 5, 1, e8559. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559.
LUPYAN, Gary, y Rick DALE (2016): “Why are there different languages? The role of adaptation in linguistic diversity”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), pp. 649 660. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.005.
MAYR, Ernst (1942): Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist, New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.1163/19552629-00502004.
MCWHORTER, John H. (2011): Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity. Why Do Languages Undress?, Boston/Berlin: The Gruyter Mouton.
MENDÍVIL-GIRÓ, José-Luis (2006): “Languages and species: Limits and scope of a venerable comparison”, en J. Rosselló y J. Martín (eds.), The Biolinguistic Turn. Issues on Language and Biology, Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, pp. 82-118.
MENDÍVIL-GIRÓ, José-Luis (2014): “What are languages? A biolinguistic perspective”, Open Linguistics, 1, pp. 71-95. https://doi.org/10.2478/opli-2014-0005.
MENDÍVIL-GIRÓ, José-Luis (2015): El cambio lingüístico. Sus causas, mecanismos y consecuencias, Madrid: Síntesis.
MENDÍVIL-GIRÓ, José-Luis (2016): “¿Qué relación hay entre el cambio lingüístico y la evolución del lenguaje?”, Lingüística en la Red, 14, pp. 1-17.
MENDÍVIL-GIRÓ, José-Luis (2018): “Why don’t languages adapt to their environment?”, Frontiers in Communication, 3(24). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00024.
NETTLE, Daniel (1999): Linguistic Diversity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
NEVINS, Andrew, David PESETSKY y Cilene RODRIGUES (2009): “Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment”, Language, 85, pp. 355-404. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0107.
NEWMEYER, Frederick J. (1998): Language Form and Language Function, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press.
NEWMEYER, Frederick J. (2003): “Formal and functional motivation for language change”, en R. Hickey (ed.), Motives for Language Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 18 36. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511486937.003.
NEWMEYER, Frederick J. (2005): Possible and Probable Languages. A Generative Perspective on Linguistic Typology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
NICHOLS, Johanna (1992): Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
O’GRADY, William (2005): Syntactic carpentry: An emergent approach to syntax, Mahwah (NJ): Lawrence Erlbaum.
PERKINS, Revere D. (1988): “The covariation of culture and grammar”, en Michael Hammond, Edit Moravcsik y Jessica Wirth (eds.), Studies in Syntactic Typology, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 359-378.
PINKER, Steven (2007): “Response to Recursion and human thought: why the Pirahã don’t have numbers”, A talk with Daniel L. Everett”. https://www.edge.org/conversation/recursion-and-human-thought (25/9/2017).
REGIER, Terry, Alexandra CARSTENSEN y Charles KEMP (2016): “Languages support efficient communication about the environment: Words for snow revisited”, PLoS ONE, 11(4), e0151138. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0151138.
RICHARDS, Norvin (2016): Contiguity Theory, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
ROBERTS, Ian y Anna ROUSSOU (2003): Syntactic Change. A Minimalist Approach to Grammaticalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SCHLEICHER, August (1983 [1863]): Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language (trad. J. C. Hotten), en Konrad Koerner (ed.), Linguistics and Evolutionary Theory. Three Essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and Wilhelm Bleek, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 13 72. Edición original: Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft, Weimar: H. Böhlau.
SEELY, Jonathan (1977): “An ergative historiography”, Historiographia Linguistica, 4(2), pp. 191-206.
SWADESH, Morris (1971): The Origin and Diversification of Language, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
WILLIAMS, George C. (1992): Natural Selection: Domains, Levels and Challenges, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ZAWISZEWSKI, Adam (2017): “Processing ergativity: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence”, en J. Coon, D. Massam y L. Travis (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 693-708. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198739371.013.28.
Esta obra está bajo una licencia internacional Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0.
Derechos de autor 2019 Ediuno (Ediciones de la Universidad de Oviedo)