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Tue 10th December, 11.30-1.00, B21 7 George Square

Functionalism and Its Discontents

Kevin Stadler

Functional explanations of language features have not only regained
appeal in the past decades by their reframing in evolutionary (read:
selectionist) terms, they’ve also recently been joined by newly
discovered relationships between linguistic features such as
grammatical and phonological complexity and non-linguistic features
such as the size of the speech community. Crucially, both functional
features in individual languages as well as probabilistic universals
(whether of the newfangled or the more traditional Greenbergian type),
while being synchronic in nature, require diachronic explanations to
go from description (or correlation) to explanation (or causation):
just because something is apparently functional does not mean we can
account for its existence or prevalence simply based on this function.

Functional explanations have a long history within the traditional
study of language change, and an equally long (and illustrious) list
of adversaries and fervent critics, from Jespersen over Weinreich et
al. and Lass to Haspelmath and back again. In this talk I want to
provide an overview of these critiques, both to raise awareness of the
problematic nature of selectionist explanations, but also to explore
possible ways out of the numerous functionalist traps.

Time allowing I will touch upon topics such as the actuation problem,
unmoved movers, Saussure’s firewall, ‘boring’ universals, frequency
effects, emergent grammar, process theories of language change and -
more fundamentally – the uneasy relationship between functional
accounts of language features and the arbitrariness of language.

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