The Utterance Selection Theory of language change
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C4P122
2025-12-13
50
The Utterance Selection Theory of language change
In this section, we focus on a particular cognitively oriented theory of language change: the Utterance Selection Theory of language change developed by Croft (2000). The key assumption behind this approach is that languages don’t change; instead, people change language through their actions. In other words, language is changed by the way people use language. In this respect, Croft’s approach takes a usage-based perspective on language change. At first glance, this perspective may seem problematic. Language is a system that people use for communication. Given that humans are not telepathic, then if communication is to succeed, speaker and hearer must share a common code (a technical term for a single variety of a language). This means that speaker and hearer follow certain conventions in the way they use language. As we observed earlier, a convention is a regularity in behaviour which all speakers in a particular linguistic community adhere to, either consciously or unconsciously. It follows that a language is a conventional system that allows speakers to express meanings that will be recognised by others in the same linguistic community. For instance, the word dog is arbitrary in the sense that there is nothing predictable about the sounds that are used to express the lexical concept DOG in English. Other languages use different sounds (e.g. chien in French and Hund in German). However, a convention of English holds that the word dog refers to a particular kind of animal: the word has a conventional meaning. This means that all English speakers can use this word to refer to this animal and in so doing they are following a convention of English. In addition, strings of words can also represent conventions. For example, as we saw in Chapter 1, the idiomatic meaning of the expression He kicked the bucket, is ‘he died’ not ‘a male kicked a bucket’. This is a convention of English. Similarly, the phrase: Can you pass me the salt? which is literally a question about someone’s ability to do something, is actually understood as a request. This is also a convention of English.
If convention is so important to human language and linguistic behaviour, why does language change? If everyone is following the conventions of the language, how do languages change and what causes this change? For this to happen, someone must break a convention and this innovation must then undergo propagation, which means that the change spreads through the linguistic community and becomes established as a new convention. As we saw above, the conventions of Old English and Modern English are radically different, yet these are two varieties of the same language, separated by time but connected by the process of continuous replication (section 4.3.3).
According to Croft, the explanation lies in the fact that ‘there cannot be a word or phrase to describe every experience that people wish to communicate’ (Croft 2000: 103). In other words, language use has to be partly non-conventional if it is to express all human experience, yet it is also partly conventional in that novel uses rely upon existing aspects of language. One area in which human experience frequently outstrips the conventions of language, and thereby necessitates innovation, is the domain of technological advances. The telephone, the computer, the car and the camcorder are all inventions that have emerged relatively recently. Their emergence has necessitated the coining of new words.
Consider the word camcorder. This describes a hand-held camera that records moving pictures. The new word camcorder made use of existing conventional forms camera and recorder, and blended them to create camcorder. This is called a formal blend. Blending is a productive word formation process in which elements from two existing words are merged to provide a new word, as in the standard textbook example of smog from smoke and fog. Blending relies partly on convention (using existing words), but is also partly innovative, creating a new word.
By assuming the two processes of innovation and propagation, Croft’s approach explicitly acknowledges that language change is both a synchronic and a diachronic phenomenon. A synchronic view of language examines the properties of language at a specific discrete point in time: innovation occurs at a specific point in time. A diachronic view of language considers its properties over a period of time: propagation occurs over a period of time, in that an innovation sometimes requires centuries to become fully conventionalised. Figure 4.6 illustrates the structure of language change. A (set of) convention(s) is changed when the convention is first broken: this is innovation. If this innovation is propagated throughout a linguistic community, it can become established as a convention, and this changes the language. The diagram in Figure 4.7 captures the view that language change involves synchronic and diachronic dimensions (in contrast to some theories of language change, which only consider propagation as language change).
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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