Environmental and cultural influences on cross-linguistic variation
In this week’s lecture we covered some evidence that languages evolve as a result of their learning and use, and that these processes can explain some of the fundamental design features of human language, including arbitrariness and compositionality. One corollary of this perspective is that languages whose users are under different constraints or who have different communicative needs will adapt to those requirements, leading languages to diverge in at least some of their details. The readings for this week provide two potential instances of this kind of divergence, where languages existing in different environmental or cultural niches show signs of being adapted to those niches.
In a paper that received quite a lot of attention and generated a bit of controversy at the time, Everett et al. (2015) present evidence that languages spoken in arid climates are less likely to use phonemic tone. Majid et al. (2018) show that languages differ in the linguist resources they devote to communicating about the different senses - while e.g. English has a far larger conventionalised vocabulary for talking about colour and shape than touch, taste or smell, other languages show a different ranking of linguistic codability of the senses, which the authors attribute to differences in cultural practices in the communities using those languages.
You will need to be on the University network to access these papers via the direct links below. The papers are short but technical; read at least one (but ideally both) and focus on understanding the gist if you feel you are getting bogged down/confused by the technical details.
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