5 - Contact language formation in evolutionary theory

Summary

Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.

Antoine Lavoisier, father of modern chemistry

In this chapter I propose a view of language formation and language transmission that I believe can help us better appreciate the contribution of contact language formation (CLF) to general linguistics. The field of contact linguistics has always posed a challenge for the dominant linguistic paradigm; in contact linguistics we need to overcome Saussure's dichotomy between competence and performance – i.e. language as a set of abstract features and language as usage – in order to arrive at explanations that can accommodate the role of society in language formation and transmission. In order to develop a theory of language within which the study of CLF assumes a central role, we need to look into social theories of language in order to construct a solid basis of philosophical ideas on which to build our theory.

A crucial aspect in our conceptualization of language lies in the nature of acquisition or transmission of language. In order to engage with language change over time, whether in the individual or in society, we must have an assumption about how grammar is (re)created in humans during the course of their life. How does the child obtain his linguistic knowledge? What determines the type of individual grammar (idiolect) that adults develop over time? If we want to imagine how language is ‘acquired’ by an individual, we could conceive of grammar as a system of rules that is passed from one speaker (e.g. the parent) to another (e.g. the child) in toto.