1/4 Linguistic diversity as a scientific resource - Nick Evans - #LinguisticDiversity | ILARA
Channel: ILARA
Date: 2022-03-07

In this lecture, we set the scene by examining how fundamental linguistic diversity is ubiquitous, from phonology through morphosyntax to semantics, in addition to surveying the issues of how to establish diversity at various levels (languages; families; typological profiles); of establishing comparability; and of using typology to explore the ‘design space’. 

CYCLE: THE EVOLUTION OF LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

There is increasing recognition that the incredible diversity of the world’s 7000 languages should not be regarded as superficial variations on a fictitious or empirically vague ‘universal grammar’. Rather, it should be looked straight in the face: the deep variability across the world’s languages mirrors the variability of species found in the biological realm. Just as it was Darwin’s search for evolutionary processes able to encounter for nature’s incredible variety which laid the foundations for modern biology, so linguistics will only become a mature science when we develop explanatory accounts of how the full range of linguistic diversity has evolved. Expressed another way, all sciences seek general laws, including linguistics. But where for generative approaches the general laws were taken to be those generating different surface structures from a generalised set of deep structures, in coevolutionary approaches the general laws pertain to the processes that engender language structures, not the structures themselves. This fundamental shift, which moves diversity from noise to signal in the study of the world’s languages (Evans & Levinson 2009, Evans 2013), is the theme of this course.

In these four lectures we examine how linguistic diversity arises. We take a coevolutionary approach that goes beyond interplays between language-internal factors and brings in a broad range of selectors – cultural, demographic, population-genetic, climatic, economic, system-internal – that nudge the evolution of linguistic systems to different points in the ‘design space’ over hundreds of iterated generations of language change. Drawing on the extraordinary facts of linguistic diversity from around the world, we will develop a general account of how such diverse linguistic systems can arise from the crucible of their particular cultural and environmental conditions. The broader goal is to establish a long-term dialogue between linguists and philologists interested in the particularities of the languages they study in particular cultural and historical contexts, and a general theory of how the world’s exuberant linguistic diversity has come into existence, just as in biology the extraordinary variety of life-forms has driven the development of a sophisticated and multi-level theory of evolution.

NICK EVANS :

Nick Evans is the Director of CoEDL (Australian Research Center of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language), which he has led since 2014, as well as the ECDI Institute (Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative) established in 2020. He has worked on a wide range of Aboriginal Australian and Papuan languages as a linguist, anthropologist and interpreter, in particular. He has published both on languages or groups of languages that are little described, and on questions of general and typological or historical linguistics, as well as on fields as varied as multilingualism, social cognition, phonology, and the processes favouring diversification of languages over time. The brand-new institute he directs (ECDI) is devoted to studying the evolution of the languages and cultures of Oceania over the past 60,000 years.

Nick Evans is the author of two grammars and three dictionaries of Aboriginal languages from Australia and Papua New Guinea, ten monographs and (co-)edited volumes, as well as over two hundred articles in leading international publications. 
He was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (in 1997), of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences (in 2016), Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (in 2011), and Honorary Life Member of the Linguistic Society of America (in 2021).
Among his publications, the following ones directly related to the theme of his guest studies are noteworthy: The Myth of Language Universals (2009, with S. Levinson); Dying words (2009); Language diversity as a resource for studying cultural evolution (2013).

nicholas.evans@anu.edu.au
https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/evans-nrd

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