Abstract
Looking at the fate of the concept of exaptation in historical linguistics, this article attempts an extension of exaptation from morphosyntactic change to phonological change. It argues that explicit recognition of the links between language change and other manifestations of Darwinian evolution can provide a context in which the use of this concept might be justified. First, an overview of the applications of exaptation in linguistics is provided (Section 2). Next, the historical data, that is the raisings of the close–mid long vowels as part of the Great Vowel Shift, as well as the lowerings of the short vowels as part of the Short Vowel Shift, adduced in this paper to verify the usefulness of exaptation in studying sound change are presented (Section 3). Consequently, two ways in which exaptation can be applied in the analysis of these data are presented: first (Section 4.1), a superficially evolutionary approach, which treats exaptation as a biologically inspired metaphorical label, and second (Section 4.2), a strictly evolutionary approach, which goes beyond metaphorical extensions of biological terms to linguistics, and which instead treats languages as truly evolutionary systems.
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Pronoun innovation in Middle English
- A diachronic view of Zamucoan verb inflection
- A new interpretation of Lachmann’s Law
- Event-centrality and the pragmatics–semantics interface in Kikongo: From predication focus to progressive aspect and vice versa
- The origin of the causative prefix in Rgyalrong languages and its implication for proto-Sino-Tibetan reconstruction
- Exaptation and phonological change
- Reconstruction and idiomaticity: The origin of Russian verbless clauses reconsidered
- The historical phonology of Mawé glides
- Reviews
- David Willis, Christopher Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth: The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean
- Coulter H. George: Expressions of time in Ancient Greek
- Kim Gerdes, Eva Hajičová & Leo Wanner: Dependency Linguistics. Recent advances in linguistic theory using dependency structures
- IE.com: Websites relevant to Indo-European Historical Linguistics
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Pronoun innovation in Middle English
- A diachronic view of Zamucoan verb inflection
- A new interpretation of Lachmann’s Law
- Event-centrality and the pragmatics–semantics interface in Kikongo: From predication focus to progressive aspect and vice versa
- The origin of the causative prefix in Rgyalrong languages and its implication for proto-Sino-Tibetan reconstruction
- Exaptation and phonological change
- Reconstruction and idiomaticity: The origin of Russian verbless clauses reconsidered
- The historical phonology of Mawé glides
- Reviews
- David Willis, Christopher Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth: The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean
- Coulter H. George: Expressions of time in Ancient Greek
- Kim Gerdes, Eva Hajičová & Leo Wanner: Dependency Linguistics. Recent advances in linguistic theory using dependency structures
- IE.com: Websites relevant to Indo-European Historical Linguistics