What you can do for evolutionary developmental linguistics

Article Article scientifique Article What you can do for evolutionary developmental linguistics eng 2024-12-16 2025-03 author Bausman William C. 0000-0002-7445-8722 author Weber Marcel 0000-0003-2142-5043 659406 Département de philosophie (PHIL1) 10.1007/s13194-024-00628-y 1879-4912 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. Philosophy of liguistics Philosophy of biology Linguistic evolution Evolutionary developmental biology Neo-Darwinism Selection Drift Developmental bias Dewey 100/501 National Centre of Competence in Research Evolving Language #51NF40_180888 Swiss National Science Foundation NCCR Evolving Language (phase I) 180888 CH Programmes 89 Département de philosophie 3G false European journal for philosophy of science 15 1 54d07cd8-df7b-4016-8113-a5da422a35ca Article (Published version) Public Article_scientifique_from_crossref.pdf 678540 application/pdf CC BY-4.0 d174fc815b950bb025889ef942f2f865354cfb62b3b035835fec2d0a026150a8 openAccess Faculté des lettres / Département de philosophie

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Causal role theories	Philosophy of biological functions	2026	5	15
What you can do for evolutionary developmental linguistics	European journal for philosophy of science	2025	94	228
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