Commentary: Desiccation and tone within linguistic theory and language contact research

Abstract

The notion that there may be causal connections between the environment and language structure has long been in disrepute. In part, this is due to earlier connections to racist ideologies. And in part, this is due to the more recent Chomskyan tradition, which sees language as an autonomous and innate faculty. Within the domain of phonology, the general sentiment that there can be no causal relationship between the environment and language is nicely expressed by the following quote: There is no correlation whatever between […] any aspect of linguistic structure and the environment. Studying the structure of a language reveals absolutely nothing about either the people who speak it or the physical environment in which they live . (Kaye 1989: 48) This claim bristles with confidence, using phrases such as ‘absolutely nothing’ and ‘no correlation whatever’, making it clear that the author—like many other linguists—is convinced that environmental influences on language are not worth studying. We note that this statement (and its context) do not reference positive evidence for this conclusion, but rather express the absence of correlations as an established scientific statement. Has Kaye sieved through quantitative data of hundreds of languages to show that there is no correlation between the environment and linguistic structure? No, he did not. The quote is an expression of tradition, not an expression of fact. Everett et al. (2015) rightly point out that unquestioned beliefs about the absence of environmental influences are just as speculative as the racist ideas that were circulating within linguistics of the 19th and 20th century. Happily, tradition and force of rhetoric are becoming less constraining now. We are currently experiencing a ‘data gold rush’ within linguistics, what some have called ‘computational cognitive revolution’ in analogy to the ‘cognitive revolution’ ushered in by Noam Chomsky (Griffiths 2015). The …