Foreword: What is evolutionary linguistics?
序言: [什么是演化语言学？]

William S-Y. Wang 王士元

Abstract 摘要
What is Evolutionary Linguistics? Simply put, to me evolutionary linguistics is the study of language in the 21st century - in a multidisciplinary perspective that has special connections to anthropology and genetics (for how we evolved), to cognitive neuroscience (for how we learn and use language), to computer science (for how to model and simulate), and to several other disciplines. The core concern of evolutionary linguistics, of course, continues to be with the general and the particular properties of languages, their sounds, words, constructions, and usages, the special expertise of linguists. But this core concern is now studied within a much richer perspective than ever before. In 1973, the geneticist T. Dobzhansky wrote famously: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”1, as biology re-oriented itself around evolutionary theory. The past decades have seen incredible breakthroughs in biology, as it successively unpackaged the human genome and reveal the inner workings of the intact brain. Similarly, I believe: “Nothing in linguistics makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Our mission is harder to achieve because language evolution is driven by two forces: one biological and one cultural. On the one hand, without the biological infrastructure, language could not have emerged to carry culture forward. On the other hand, once culture changes, language itself changes as well, with little intervention from biology. Whereas other species evolve largely by genetic mutations that slowly change their bodies, requiring numerous generations of transmission, a community can completely switch over to another language literally overnight. So the concepts and methods of biological evolutionary theory are not adequate to deal with language evolution. This difference between biological evolution and cultural evolution was one that Thomas Huxley was well aware of, one that he called to Darwin’s attention.

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