The Biological Model and Historical Linguistics

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2852229
AutoresRobert D Stevick (autor correspondente)
Ano1963
Volume39
Fascículo2
Páginas159
Data de publicação1963-04-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLanguage (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
EditoraJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/411199
OpenAlexW2333699818
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas7

Bad luck with biological models has left historical linguistics with such a heritage of confusion and specious explanations as to condition linguists to reject or ignore all putative parallels between languages and living organisms. Traditional textbooks for the history of the English language, though they show vestiges of biology-patterned language history, make regular protests that a language, after all, is not really an organism. Sapir charged ‘the evolutionary prejudice’ with being ‘probably the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking’, and offered a devastating, memorable comparison: 'A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoölogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow.' A few years ago Charles F. Hockett attacked the shoddy terminology of historical linguistics, demonstrating that, from both the pedagogical and the professional point of view, ' “evolution” and “progress” certainly ought to be avoided', that ‘law’, a longtime troublemaker, was distorted by deterministic biology as well as by physics, and that the use of kinship terms ‘must be modified in order to render them fit for use in discussing language’. Henry M. Hoenigswald's Language change and linguistic reconstruction treats language so unbiologically that the few traditional terms employed for language relationships—‘ancestor’, ‘daughter’, and 'sister'—are as startling as if they were bold, fresh metaphors. Quite recently Winfred P. Lehmann declared on behalf of historical linguists: 'We now view language as a set of social conventions so complex that a simple biological or geometrical model is totally inadequate. Rather than force one on language, we attempt to understand it in its complexity.'

Historical linguistics · Linguistics · Theoretical linguistics · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Philosophy