Abstract
In this article it is argued that evolutionary plausibility must be made an important constraining factor when building theories of language. Recent suggestions that presume that language is necessarily a perfect or optimal system are at odds with this position, evolutionary theory showing us that evolution is a meliorizing agent often producing imperfect solutions. Perfection of the linguistic system is something that must be demonstrated, rather than presumed. Empirically, examples of imperfection are found not only in nature and in human cognition, but also in language — in the form of ambiguity, redundancy, irregularity, movement, locality conditions, and extra-grammatical idioms. Here it is argued that language is neither perfect nor optimal, and shown how theories of language which place these proper-ties at their core run into both conceptual and empirical problems.
Highlights
Linguistic theory is inevitably underdetermined by data
Talk of language and its apparent imperfections takes on special significance in light of its role in the formulation of one linguistic theory that has been prominent in recent years — the Minimalist Program, as introduced by Chomsky (1995)
Optimality seems most often to be equated with “economy”, and with the related suggestion that all properties of language might derive from virtual conceptual necessity,5 a term glossed by Boeckx (2006: 4) as “the most basic assumptions/axioms everyone has to make when they begin to investigate language”
Summary
Whether one is trying to characterize the distribution of wh-questions across languages or account for the relation between active sentences and passive sentences, there are often many distinct accounts, and linguistic data alone is rarely absolutely decisive. Whereas the Darwinian phrase ( due to Huxley rather than Darwin) of “survival of the fittest” sometimes is misunderstood as implying that perfection or optimality is the inevitable product of evolution; in reality, evolution is a blind process, with absolutely no guarantee of perfection. To appreciate why this is the case, it helps to think of natural selection in terms of a common metaphor: as a process of hill-climbing. Perfection is possible, but not something that can be presumed
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