"Il n'y a pas de langage"

Victor Henry, Antinomies

linguistiques (Paris, 1896:4)

On the non-existence of language1

by

Kees Versteegh (University of Nijmegen)

Abstract

Most views about the nature of language agree in one point, that languages change. The

background to these views is the notion of language as an organism, which originated in

the 19th century. In later interpretations, this organic view of language was often taken to

be metaphorical, but it continues to affect the ideas about linguistic change, leading away

from the role of the speakers. Only behavioral frameworks avoid the misconception of

language as an entity. After sketching the historical background of the notion of language

as an organism in Section 2, I discuss its consequences for theories of linguistic change in

1
This essay is a revised English version of ideas I first presented in my inaugural lecture at the University of
Nijmegen (1990). I should like to express my sincere gratitude to Sylvain Auroux, who first introduced me to
the writings of Victor Henry in Trier, more than thirty years ago, and to Julie Tetel Andresen, who took my
ideas on the non-existence of language seriously when we met in Durham, N.C., more than twenty years ago.
1
the discussion about internal and external causes and the role of acquisition (Section 3). In

Section 4, I go into various attempts that have been made to safeguard the position of

language as a systematic entity. The last section offers some suggestions about an

alternative way of looking at verbal behavior.

Language as an organism

In ordinary usage, we speak of languages as independent entities. We say, for instance, that

French has a definite and indefinite article, that English has developed into an analytic

language, that Arabic does not have an infinitive, and that Chinese avoids consonant

clusters. This metaphor represents language as an organic entity, leading its own life,

having certain properties, and exhibiting certain tendencies quite independent from the

speakers of the language. There is nothing wrong with using a figure of speech, provided

one constantly remind oneself of its status as a metaphor. The use of this particular

metaphor of language as an organism, however, has led to grave misunderstandings

concerning the nature of language and the nature of linguistic changes. This mode of

thinking is epitomized by the universally accepted maxim that languages always change. In

this essay I shall defend the thesis that languages do not exist and that, since they do not

2
exist, they cannot change. Obviously, this calls for some qualification.

It might be thought that rejecting the existence of language goes against the grain

of most reflections about language, yet, according to Chomsky (2011) it is the dominant

view in most contemporary thinking within the cognitive sciences. He even states that

fifty years ago it was widely held by the most prominent philosophers and

psychologists that language does not exist in any serious sense. It's just a matter of

conditioning and some obscure notion of induction and analogy.

If he is right about this, the statement that language does not exist would not seem to be

overly revolutionary. Nevertheless, at least within the linguistic sciences, most scholars

seem to believe differently, and for them, language very definitely does exist. What is more,

they continue to look upon language as some kind of entity with a life of its own. This

metaphor of language as a living organism is part of everyday parlance and scholarly

discourse alike.2 Within such a view, it is only natural to assume that, just like any

organism, language is affected by change. In nature, organisms are born, they grow,

reproduce, get older and die. Some of the changes affecting them are caused by external

2
The development of the language-organism-species association as a discourse metaphor formation is
analyzed by Frank (2008); see also Aitchison (2003).
3
factors, but in many cases the motor of the change and even of the decay is contained

within the cellular structure of the organism itself.3

In the case of language, the metaphor of life inevitably leads to the belief that

language, too, changes either through external or through internal causes. Likewise, within

the scope of this metaphor, it is quite natural to assume that languages affect each other,

just like other organisms do. This explains why we say without giving it another thought

that English has borrowed words from French, that Greek has transmitted certain features

to Bulgarian, that Coptic has influenced Egyptian Arabic, and so on. It is commonly

assumed that there is such a thing as substratal influence (a language is influenced by an

underlying substratal language), areal influence (adjacent languages develop common

features), convergence (languages in contact grow more alike). Each of these notions takes

for granted that there is an entity called language, capable of affecting other entities and

being affected by them.

Social scientists have a similar tendency to reify the object of their study. Bourdieu

(1980:175; cf. Welten 1991:32) critically discusses the tendency of some scholars to ascribe

an autonomous effect to culture or some of its aspects. He regards such a tendency as

unscientific since only physical entities have the ability to act: cultures do not change, only

3
For a discussion of the notion of 'organism' in biology and philosophy see the collected papers in
Gambarotto and Illetterati (2008), and the editors' introduction to the volume.
4
human beings do. Likewise, in the ethnographical literature, some authors have warned

against treating constructs like 'society' or 'tribal network' as "relatively bounded, discrete

phenomena analogous to organisms" (Braun and Plog 1982:505). And, in the study of

history, there is an unmistakable tendency to reify history as an autonomous force, with a

life of its own, transcending the individual events of the past, so that people speak of 'the

laws of history', or offer truisms like 'history repeats itself'. This is the kind of positivist

thinking about the past as an entity with its own life and its own rules that was criticized by

Popper (1957) in his study about The poverty of historicism.

Comparable discourses are found in other fields of human behavior as well. In

religious studies, scholars tend to hypostasize religions and treat them as bounded

phenomena rather than focusing on the believers' behavior. In fact, all types of collective

human behavior tend to be seen as independent entities, endowed with agency and capable

of affecting other entities. It is not unusual to say, for instance, that French gastronomy has

changed between the 16th and the 19th century, or that it has been affected by Italian

cuisine in the 20th century. One knows that these developments were instigated by human

agents, yet, one is constantly tempted to personify the behavior, as if it represents an

autonomous entity, to which agency may be assigned rather than to the speakers (see

Frank 2008).

5
 Since language is a set of human acts and, as such, related to other forms of

behavior, it is not surprising that the tendency to treat language as an organism,

dissociated from the speakers, and going through a life cycle, just like other organisms, has

strong roots in the history of linguistics. Its origin is usually associated with the name of

August Schleicher (1821-1868). Schleicher aimed at applying the rigorous methods of the

natural sciences to the study of language, as in the following quotation from his Die

Sprachen Europas in systematischer Übersicht (1850; quoted after Koerner 1989:358):

Just like the natural sciences, linguistics has a domain in which the working of

immutable rules of nature is visible, which are impervious to the will and whims of

humans (Wie die Naturwissenschaften, so hat auch die Linguistik die Erforschung eines

Gebiets zur Aufgabe, in welchem das Walten unabänderlicher natürlicher Gesetze erkennbar

ist, an denen der Wille und die Willkür des Menschen nichts zu ändern vermögen).

The methods of the natural sciences, when introduced into linguistics, should make it

possible to establish immutable laws of linguistic development, based on careful

observation, like the ones later associated with the Junggrammatiker. Schleicher believed

he had every reason to identifiy linguistics as a natural science, because he conceived of

6
language as a living organism, with its own cycle of birth, growth, and death (Koerner

1989:350).

True, a plea for naturalistic methods of linguistic comparison, both between

languages and between the successive stages of a language, was a healthy one at the time,

since it contrasted favorably with the impressionistic etymologizing methods of earlier

historical linguists. But Schleicher's view of causality in linguistic change is obfuscating

(Koerner 1989:359):

Already in older periods of language, when sounds are still more stable, a force

begins to manifest itself, which affects the multiplicity of forms negatively and

limits them ever more to those that are absolutely necessary (Allein schon in älteren

Sprachperioden, zu einer Zeit, in welcher die Laute noch standhafter sind, beginnt sich eine

Macht geltend zu machen und feindlich auf die Mannigfaltigkeit der Formen zu wirken und

sie mehr und mehr auf das allernothwendigste zu beschränken).

In the sequel to this quotation, Schleicher then describes this 'force' (Macht) as something

outside the human speakers, who have no alternative but to obey the laws of nature. He

sees language as directly affected by the forces of nature, rather than as a product of

7
human behavior.4

Even though the explicitly biological paradigm was rejected almost universally by

later linguists, its effects are still pervasive in linguistic thinking. In spite of the consensus

on the flaws of the biologizing paradigm, there has been surprisingly little explicit criticism

of Schleicher's views. One of these critics was the French linguist and philosopher Victor

Henry, who in 1896 published a book entitled Antinomies linguistiques, in which he took the

biologizing view of language to task. Henry starts off by stating "there is no language" (il n'y

a pas de langage), and then elaborates this statement as follows (1896:4):

In short, there is no more a French language than there is a physical person being

the incarnation of the French Republic, sexual selection, or the horror vacui in nature

(Bref, il n'y pas plus de langue française, qu'il n'y a quelque part une personne physique

incarnant la République française, la sélection sexuelle ou l'horreur du vide dans la nature).

He further illustrates the absurdity of such essentialist conceptions by referring to religion:

"Finally, and above all, there is no religion, there are only people who believe or practice"

4 Schleicher's use of the term 'organism' has sometimes been interpreted as a metaphor (see Frank 2008), but
I agree with van Driem (2008), who insists that this was not the case and that Schleicher really regarded
language as an organism.
8
(et enfin, et surtout, il n'y a pas de religion, il n'y a que des gens qui croient ou pratiquent). Language

is a construct and as such, it cannot have any physical existence. Accordingly, it is simply

wrong to attribute to it properties like birth, growth, change, or death (Henry 1896:10).5

Growth and change

Henry takes his opposition to the idea of language growth one step further (1896:11), when

he says that the notion of language death is wrong in itself: we think that Latin is a dead

language because if we were able to speak to Cicero nowadays in French, he would not

understand us, but he would have understood Quintilian, who would have understood

Lactantius, who would have understood Gregory of Tours, who would have understood the

anonymous scribe who copied the text of the Serment de Strasbourg, and so on, up till the

present day (1896:10):

5
In the French historiographical tradion the main questions dealt with in connection with Henry's
contribution to linguistics are, firstly, whether or not he was a Kantian (Savatovsky 2004), and secondly, what
the relationship between him and Saussure was. Normand (2004) shows that Saussure acknowledged the
metaphorical nature of such notions as 'life' and 'change', when applied to language, but nonetheless
persisted in employing them. Henry tended to look upon the use of metaphors as far less innocent and he was
more aware of the inherent risk in applying them to language (Chiss 2004). Nonetheless, Sylvain Auroux, in an
interview he gave to Christian Puech calls Henry's solution of treating such labels as fiction 'the easy way out
of the problem' (Puech 2004:35).
9
 Saying that language evolves is tantamount to saying that successive generations of

individuals speaking a given language are forced, by the reasons deduced above, to

speak in reality each a particular idiom, more or less different according to the

distance [in time] from which one observes them (Dire que le langage évolue, c'est-à-

dire que les générations diverses d'individus parlant un langage donné sont sujettes, par les

raisons déduites plus haut, à parler en réalité chacune un idiome particulier, plus ou moins

différent suivant la distance à laquelle on les envisage).

Linguistic evolution is no more nor less than the observation that different individuals

spoke and speak differently. Henry sees linguistic change as the result of infinitesimal

variation between individuals. Minute differences arising in the course of generations

('according to the distance [in time] from which one observes them') may grow into

insurmountable obstacles to mutual comprehension. This approach to language change has

the strong advantage of localizing the change there where it belongs, with the speakers. On

the other hand, Henry has to have recourse to the idea of an infinitesimally slow pace of

linguistic change: speaking about the change from the Latin declensional system into the

French system where prepositions have taken over the function of case endings, he

concedes (1896:14) that it is permitted to talk metaphorically of the death of Latin and the

10
birth of French "provided one abstracts from the many centuries spanned by the

infinitesimally slow movement that has led to this radical transformation" (à condition de

faire abstraction des longs siècles sur lesquels se répartit et s'échelonne le mouvement infiniment lent

qui a abouti à cette transformation radicale). The trouble with such an approach is that it is by

definition impossible to observe an 'infinitesimally slow movement of an infinitesimally

large number of minute changes'. All we can do is compare different behavioral patterns.

In spite of the fact that Henry does not clarify the nature of the mechanism

responsible for the 'slow changes', he deserved to be mentioned here because of his

unconditional opposition to the concept of language as an organism. The usual reaction to

such fundamental criticism of the metaphor of language as an organism is along the

following lines: 'This metaphor may be somewhat confusing, but at the same time it is

harmless since nobody really believes that languages actually live'. Yet, in spite of this

alleged awareness of the metaphorical nature of this notion, there is at least one domain in

which it has created a lot of confusion, that of linguistic change. The concept of the 'life of

language' has survived even in the most recent handbooks of historical linguistics. Almost

without any exception, linguists take for granted that in the long run every language

undergoes changes. Even within modern frameworks that treat language as a self-

organizing system, its different levels are described as being subject to change (Steels

11
2005).

Out of many, I quote just one example of the tendency to refer to language change

as something so obvious that it should need no arguing. In her handbook of bilingualism

Romaine (1989:72) states:

Since all languages are constantly changing, even if they are not in contact with

other languages, how can we be sure that the changes we observe in a dying

language would not have occurred anyway without influence from another

language as a motivating factor? Strictly speaking, the simple answer is that we

cannot be certain.

This statement clearly implies that in the absence of any external contact languages still

change naturally by themselves.

Internal and external causes of change

Exceptions to the tendency to take linguistic change for granted are few and far between.

In his study of linguistic variation, Milroy (1992:1) starts off by saying:

12
 One of the most important facts about human language is that it is continuously

changing. Everyone knows that languages have changed in the course of history: it

is easy to see from a distance in time that there are differences between

Shakespeare's English and present-day English, but it can also be shown from close

at hand that language is continuing to change in the present just as it did in the

past.

Yet, in the second chapter of his book, when he presents the theoretical parameters of the

study of linguistic variation, he clarifies that neither the study of linguistic change nor that

of linguistic permanence or stability can be performed without the social context. In fact,

change and stability are social phenomena and have to be studied within that framework.

Change reflects "changes in consensus on norms of usage in a speech community" (Milroy

1992:17). Crucially, change is not a property of any linguistic system, but of the speakers'

behavior.

In their classic study of linguistic contacts, Thomason and Kaufman (1988:4) state

programmatically:

13
 The key to our approach ... is our conviction that the history of a language is a

function of the history of its speakers, and not an independent phenomenon that

can be thoroughly studied without reference to the social context in which it is

embedded.

Historical linguistics has always been "strongly prejudiced in favor of internal explanations

for linguistic change" (1988:57). If there is any possibility at all to explain a linguistic

change by system-internal factors, "system-based accounts of change" (Milroy 1992:22ff.),

such as those of Kiparsky (1988) or Lass (1997), tend to opt for that explanation and reject

any attempts to call in external factors. Internal factors are the kind of dynamic system-

inherent pressures Thomason and Kaufman mention at the beginning of their discussion

(1988:4):

We certainly do not deny the importance of purely linguistic factors such as pattern

pressure and markedness considerations for a theory of language change, but the

evidence from language contact shows that they are easily overridden when social

factors push in another direction

14
Rather than focusing on these internal causes, they plead for an approach that leaves more

room for external factors in linguistic change. They distinguish between two kinds of

linguistic change as a result of external causes, which may conveniently be referred to as

change by shifters and change by borrowers.6 In the case of the shifters, one group of

speakers takes over the linguistic behavior of another group, while applying to it their own

structural features, but avoiding their own lexical items. In some cases, their new way of

speaking becomes infectious and original native speakers start taking over their way of

speaking. Borrowing, on the other hand, occurs when one group of speakers takes over

items from speakers of other languages, usually lexical items, while continuing to speak

their own language. Their motives may, of course, differ. They may use French loanwords

to gain prestige, English loanwords to sound technical and modern, Arabic loanwords to

show their religious piety, and so on. Although borrowers may take over syntactic and

morphological items as well, borrowing often remains restricted to lexical items.

According to Thomason and Kaufman, the actions of the shifters and borrowers

account for the majority of linguistic changes, but they leave some room for internal

6
The category of the shifters is referred to by Thomason and Kaufman (1988) as 'substratal influence'. Their
terminology has been criticized by Van Coetsem (2000), who prefers to call the two kinds of change 'transfer
under recipient language agentivity' and 'transfer under source language agentivity' (see Lucas 2015). In the
present context, this does not seem to make much of a difference: the assignment of agentivity to languages
continues to obscure the speakers' role.
15
causes, the explanation that is strongly preferred by structural linguists. Why are the latter

so dead-set against explanations in terms of external causes? To a certain extent, one may

understand their reluctance to accept, for instance, the use of substratal influence as an

explanation of historical change. In the past, substratal factors have often been

conceptualized as an autonomous force acting upon languages in contact, independently

from the speakers. This has obscured the fact that shifts in speech behavior always take

place in interaction with other speakers. Substratal influence as a kind of osmosis is

certainly not an interesting category of explanation and should be rejected out of hand.

Structural linguists, therefore, prefer internal causes as explanations of linguistic

change. In an article that appeared a decade after his study of language variation and

change, Milroy (2003) again focused on the role of the speakers, rejecting the monopoly of

endogenous explanations in historical linguistics. According to Lass (1997:209), the

Principle of Parsimony forces us to prefer endogenous explanations:

In the absence of evidence, an endogenous explanation of a phenomenon is more

parsimonious, because endogenous change must occur in any case, whereas

borrowing is never necessary.

16
Against this, Milroy (2003:145) argues that when language use is observed, it is always

observed within a social context, so that social factors are always part of the observation.

Hence, there is no empirical way to prove that languages change of their own volition.

Milroy's arguments against the privileged position of endogenous explanations are very

much to the point, but unfortunately he stops short of rejecting this paradigm altogether:

"It is clear that all changes must at least involve language-internal factors" (2003:146). Thus,

his plea for social factors to be taken into account as well sounds almost apologetic. He

appears to have some doubts about the force of his own arguments, but it is obvious that he

does in fact demonstrate that there is no such thing as an independent internal change and

that language change is always and exclusively social - although he does not wish to be

identified with that position (2003:145).

The debate about internal (or endogenous) and external (or exogenous) causes of

language change is fraught with ambiguity, if only because when a factor is called internal

or external, it is usually not stated with respect to what it is internal or external (Willis

2016). Because of this ambiguity, Gerritsen and Stein (1992:7-9) propose the following

working definition (1992:7):

By 'internal factors' are meant those inherent in, and arising out of, any given

17
 synchronic state of the language system. By 'external' factors are meant the forces

arising out of the location and use of language in society.

According to this definition, some of the explanations advanced in the literature about

linguistic change, such as grammaticalization, are not internal factors at all (i.e., they do

not arise out of the language system), but they have to do with the economy of linguistic

computation, in other words, with mental activity. Strictly speaking, they are connected

with "'broader-than-linguistic' tendencies" (1992:7), which might just as well be called

'external factors'. But this, Gerritsen and Stein say, would then lead to a new dichotomy, in

which a distinction is made between 'natural tendencies', i.e., general faculties of the

human mind, and 'non-natural tendencies', i.e., specifically linguistic faculties. In one

sense, these 'non-natural tendencies' could be regarded as internal causes of linguistic

change, but of course not in the sense of 'emanating from the linguistic system'.

Gerritsen and Stein conclude that this reasoning calls into question the nature of

our conception of language (1992:8):

In fact, the very dichotomy between 'external' and 'internal' has as its long-standing

theoretical underpinning the idea that it is possible and useful to hypostatize an

18
 abstract, non-observable entity as something logically separate from use, speakers,

and speech community.

They regard this as a useful abstraction, but since the abstract system is located in society,

and must be regarded as a 'social possession', factors emanating from that abstract entity

could hardly be regarded as located outside the community: such factors are just as

external as factors emanating from contact with other speakers. Pattern pressure and

typological constraints, for instance, two types of 'internal factors' often mentioned in the

literature as causes of linguistic change, could just as well be regarded as instances of

'behavioral economy', which implies that they are internal to the speaker (but external to

the linguistic system).

Rather than following this line of discussion, Gerritsen and Stein then decide to stick

to the traditional definition of external factors as those factors that are connected with

"prestige, acts of identity, taboo, and forces that are part of standardization, such as

reduction of variation, types of varieties, especially written varieties, etc." (1992:8). Such an

approach may be defended on practical grounds, but is not very helpful in elucidating the

relationship between the linguistic system as an 'abstract entity' and the speakers'

behavior.

19
 Aitchison (1992:296) connects internal causes with strong genetic programming,

which is wired into the human brain and constrains our choice of constructions (either

linked to certain types of languages, or universal), and contrasts the internal causes in this

sense with strong external causes, for instance borrowing. Even when they shift the

internal causes from an autonomous linguistic system to the speakers' brains, linguists

continue to attribute the changes in speech behavior to system-driven motivations. In

other words, even though the autonomy of the linguistic entity is now avoided, the

speakers still carry out the needs and requirements of a system hardwired into their brain.

Thus, in a sense, the autonomous status of the linguistic system is preserved.

Even within sociolinguistics, the study of language variation and change always

includes system-bound internal factors. Hazen (2011:36, n. 11) emphasizes the fact that

sociolinguists like Labov agree with generative linguists that "a mental grammar generates

a potentially infinite set of utterances". In his monumental Principles of linguistic change,

Labov explicitly chose to deal with system-internal and external factors separately, as is

clear from the titles of the three volumes. The first volume, Internal factors of (sound) change

(1994), deals with changes within the linguistic system, such as vowel mergers and vowel

shifts, chain shifts, and functional effects on sound change. Labov's formulation (2001:xiv)

makes clear that the inner working of the system is connected with the physical properties

20
of speech:

Though the first volume was largely concerned with the internal, linguistic factors

that organize phonological change, an understanding of these factors was

ultimately based on the physiological substratum of speech.

The second volume, Social factors (2001), introduces non-linguistic material to understand

the nature of linguistic changes and "deals with the impact of external or social factors

upon language" (2001:xiv). The third volume, Cognitive and cultural factors (2010), treats

factors external to the linguistic system as well, namely cognitive factors, which "influence

the acquisition of the linguistic system that conveys information about the state of affairs"

(2010:2), and "the ability to decode what is being said through the accurate identification of

linguistic categories" (2010:4), and cultural factors, which are represented by those social

patterns that go beyond face-to-face interaction

Outside the sociolinguistic framework, social factors as external causes are only

reluctantly admitted into the realm of linguistic change: the system remains the main

driving force behind changes in linguistic behavior. Unless there are blatant external

causes for a particular linguistic change, the language is supposed to have changed 'from

21
the inside'. Since we cannot pinpoint any discrete stages within this development, the

change must have come about by slow, imperceptible steps. We have seen above that this is

the way Henry envisages the introduction of changes into language. In fact, the acquisition

of language by children has often been quoted as the locus for the 'small, imperceptible

changes' that, when cumulating over the generations, are responsible for the visible

changes in language (H. Andersen 1973; Hooper 1976). This leads to the actuation paradox

mentioned by Willis (2016): changes in the system are only possible if they are transmitted

faithfully by children, but if children are indeed faithful transmitters, how could any

changes be realized? Yet, the combined force of the biologizing paradigm and the metaphor

of the living organism all but compel historical linguists to posit the existence of such

changes.

Research into intergenerational changes as a result of the children's input has not

been very successful, however. According to Meisel, Elsig, and Rinke (2013), children are

not responsible for changes in the core properties of grammars. These can only be changed

by L2 speakers. Yet, they do hold children responsible for the introduction of other

changes, which means that they still need to posit a system (the children's internal

grammar), in which changes can be located and stored in order to transmit it to new

generations. The hypothesis that innovative changes in languages might be due to the

22
speech of children has not been validated by empirical facts, however. Bybee and Slobin

(1982:37; cf. Slobin 1973) found that adults' innovations are more in line with actual

tendencies in the history of English, whereas young children perhaps adhere more to

universal tendencies, since their rules "reveal certain very general operating principles for

approaching morphophonemics". They conclude (1982:34) that "young children are not the

only, and perhaps not the primary instigators and perpetrators of morpho-phonemic

change". Therefore, the hypothesis of children as the motor of language change is invalid.

In fact, although parents as a rule do not correct their children's speech directly and

explicitly (Lightfoot 1982:18f.), it is highly likely that children take over the exact way of

speaking of their parents, since they even imitate any distributional bias in the adults'

speech (Hendriks 1999). The distribution of tense and aspect markers in the input first

language learners receive from their caretakers, for instance, is roughly similar to that of

their output: children and adults use the same aspect and tense markers with the same

verbs (R. Andersen 1993; see also Shirai and Andersen 1995:757; Shirai 2009:176-177).

According to Tomasello (1992), the biased input children receive from their caretakers is

processed by them, not with any innate Universal Grammar mechanism, but with their

general fact-finding and problem-solving capacities. Tomasello (1992) claims that children

are reinforced to use certain forms, simply because these are frequent and effective in

23
communication. Such findings contradict the axiomatic presence of imperceptible changes

in the transmission process between generations. If there is no evidence for such changes,

the transmission process cannot be held responsible for any changes in the product: the

new speakers behave in just the same way as their parents.

The language system

Several attempts have been made to preserve the systemic nature of language structure,

while avoiding the notion of language as an entity. In his discussion of the status of

language, Keller (1994:65) calls language a 'phenomenon of the third kind', which he

defines as "the causal consequence of a multitude of intentional actions which serve, at

least partially, similar intentions". He states (1994:56) that unlike phenomena of the first

and second kind,7 those of the third kind are the accumulated effect of the actions of a large

number of individuals, who share a similar intention. Language is an example of such

action, other examples include (1994:68) money, taste, ghettos, "that is to say, socio-

cultural structures which might easily give rise to the idea (and quite often did so) that

they were created intentionally by a central planning instance, an inventor, god, or central

This terminology refers to the old distinction between phenomena created by God (i.e. natural phenomena),
7

which represent the first kind, and artefacts made by man, which represent the second kind (Keller 1994:61).
24
committee".

Just like Henry did, Keller takes great care in denying language any autonomous

status in the essentialist sense assigned to it by Schleicher and others. When Keller includes

language in the set of phenomena of the third kind, he posits a parallel between language

and such phenomena as traffic jams: both are the causal consequence of collective actions

that in themselves were not intended to produce these consequences. On the basis of this

definition, such phenomena may be said to be affected by change (1994:3):

Languages are always changing. Twenty generations separate us from Chaucer. If we

could board a time machine and visit him in the year 1390, we would have great

difficulties in making ourselves understood - even roughly.

There is indeed some implausibility in a conversation between a contemporary Englishman

and Chaucer. In the absence of a time machine, Keller's reason for assuming this diachronic

difference on the level of spoken speech must have been the text of Chaucer's work, in

other words, a written document. But this text tells us only how people wrote in 1390, and

while the difference between their written language and ours is obvious, we do not know

25
how they spoke, not even on the basis of so-called colloquial documents.8

More importantly, what Keller is referring to here is not a change in any

autonomous entity, but a change in the way of speaking. This is where the invisible hand

explanation comes in. When there is variation in the community, some persons start using

one of the variants and, as by an invisible hand, the entire community ends up using this

variant. Fitch (2007) uses the same metaphor of the invisible hand and refers to it as a

sometimes counter-intuitive explanation of 'macroscopic' language change through

'microscopic' changes in individual language use.

Changes, to be sure, do take place in individuals, in the sense that there is a

transition from one behavior to another in individual speech: at one time a person may

speak in one way, and at another time they speak in another way. What has changed here?

When I break my leg and am convalescing, the way I walk changes: I use different muscles,

my style of walking, my speed of walking changes. Imagine a society in which I am a very

important person: people start imitating my funny walk, because they want to impress

both me and others. Would we then say that 'walking' has changed? This is poignantly

illustrated by Noble and Davidson when they say (1996:3) that we may study the

8
This problem is more fundamental than is sometimes recognized. Even on the basis of so-called colloquial
documents it is impossible to reconstruct the actual speech of speakers in the past, since all written
documents are by definition affected by the written standard (Versteegh 2002).
26
mechanism of 'walking', "without having to involve a mysterious abstract entity called, say,

'ambulation', of which the more everyday activity of walking is somehow a material

expression".

Analogously speaking, language is the sum of all speaking actions in a community.

In Keller's view, "language use has certain attributes from which the continuous change of

our language follows of necessity" (1994:153). This notion of 'necessity' still leaves the door

open for explaining the changes by the presence of a mechanism of internal laws in a

linguistic system. Keller concedes that the claim that this attribute belongs to natural

languages by necessity is unsubstantiated, but still believes that "it is a fact that language

change is actually taking place in all natural languages at all times" (1994:153).

A similar attempt to safeguard the autonomy of language while avoiding the

essentialist interpretation is represented by Lass' (1987) assignment of language to the

category of World3 objects, i.e. products of the human mind, like art or religion.9 He argues

that the existence of 'conspiracies' in language change, i.e., long term developments with a

definite outcome that are beyond the grasp of any single person or single generation10

demonstrates that "it is reasonable to consider language histories in at least some of their

9
In Popper's three worlds scheme, World1 comprises physical objects, World2 mental states. See Keller
(1994:133-140) and Johansson (2005).
10
Lass (1987:162-165) argues that this is somewhat like Sapir's 'drift'.
27
aspects as autonomous objects" (1987:170), i.e., in terms he borrows from Popper and Eccles

(1977:450), "a real ideal object which exists, but exists nowhere, and whose existence is

somehow the potentiality of its being reinterpreted by human minds". Going even beyond

this, he ascribes to this object "some sort of inherent mutability" (1987:170). Lass claims

that in this way the problem of the conspiracies as well as that of convergent developments

in genetically related, but separated languages could be solved.

The most influential attempt, at least within linguistics, to salvage language as a

system, while acknowledging the existing variation in speech, is the distinction between E-

and I-language, introduced by Chomsky (1986:25), but not that different from Saussure's

dichotomy of langue/parole. E-language represents the combined utterances of individual

speakers (somewhat like the 'performance' in earlier versions of the generative model), and

I-language the internalized set of rules (somewhat like the 'competence' of earlier

versions). Specifically with respect to change, the distinction of two different levels entails

that two separate theories of change are necessary, one for each level. A change in the

internalized system of grammar rules follows from changes in the speech speakers are

exposed to, but the opposite is not true: changes may take place in the external speech,

while the internal grammar has not yet been reset. Matthews (2003:17) shows to which

complications this leads and concludes:

28
 We have to ask if there are any reasons, other than a prior belief that knowledge of

'a language' must develop in the form that Chomsky says it does, why these

proliferating levels should be seen as separate.

The need for the introduction of a separate E-level is connected with the assumption of an

autonomous language acquisition device in Chomsky's theory.11 In his review article of two

recent collections of articles on the evolution of language, Enfield (2010) distinguishes

between a narrow and a broad-based conception of the language faculty. The former is

represented by the "abstract linguistic computational system", the latter by those other

cognitive systems that support the language faculty. Enfield clearly wonders whether in

modern approaches to linguistic evolution there is still room for a narrow-based

conception of the language faculty.

This review in turn led to a reply by Chomsky (2011) in a lecture at Carleton

University, in which he took Enfield to task for having suggested that without the social

context one cannot study language. For Chomsky, this epitomizes the attitude of those who

11
For a fundamental criticism of the arguments used to justify the assumption of a language acquisition
device, in particular the argument of the 'povery of input', see Sampson (1997), Ansaldo (2009:102f.); for the
problems involved in postulating a genetically specified origin of Universal Grammar, see Chater and
Christiansen (2011).
29
reject the existence of language. In attacking this attitude, he repeats the essential dogmas

of his own approach:

Language is very clearly a computational system, so it makes very good sense to

seek the role of general principles of computational efficiency that apply far more

broadly and may indeed be rooted in organism-independent natural law.

He concludes that, in order for this computational system to be transmitted there must be a

genetic element, specific to language, originating in a mutation that took place as a

historical event, i.e. the language acquisition device that is peculiar to human primates.

Apparently, then, for Chomsky, denying the existence of a narrow-based language

faculty is tantamount to denying the existence of language, and this may explain why he

believes, as we have seen above, that the majority of cognitive linguists follow the 'fifty-

year old' view about the non-existence of language. Yet, it is obvious that most cognitive

linguists do believe in a linguistic system, encoded and stored in the human brain; in fact,

this is the bread and butter of all representationalist cognitive science, both nowadays and

fifty years ago, as shown among other things by the fact that they take the existence of a

'language system' for granted and by their assumption that this system is subject to

30
change.

In one way or another, the views discussed so far look upon language as something

separate from actual language use, whether as a phenomenon of the third kind, or as a

World3 object, or as an internal computational system. Against these system-bound views,

evolutionary frameworks have been proposed for a usage-based study of linguistic

variation (Croft 2000; Hruschka et al. 2009:466).

The most radical way of looking at language as the product of an evolutionary

process is to regard it as an autonomous entity resulting from the selection of competing

utterances in a pool of variants. Van Driem (2008) maintains that Schleicher was right in

regarding language as an organism. He applies the concept of 'meme', first developed by

Dawkins (1976) to denote a unit of cultural transmission, in such a way that language is

conceptualized as a symbiont of the human brain, with which we are inoculated in our

infancy: "Like any other life-form, language consists of a self-replicating core. The units of

this self-replicating core are memes and their neural correlates" (2005:332). Viewed in this

way, the notion of language does not seem to leave much room for the human speakers

who act as host to the symbiont.

Apart from this radical interpretation of language as an evolutionary organism,

three different ways of looking at the analogy between linguistic and biological evolution

31
can be distinguished (Croft 2000:10-12). The most literal interpretation sees language as a

genetic capacity and posits a biological basis for its universal properties. This

interpretation is associated with Chomsky's views on Universal Grammar. A second

interpretation treats the analogy as a heuristic device: comparing biological and linguistic

processes helps to bring out the commonalities, even if there are mismatches in the

analogy (Ansaldo 2009:106). Finally, there is a generalized view, which regards both

biological and linguistic evolution as instances of a higher process. In this view, the genetic

pool - the total set of genes in a population of organisms - mirrors the linguistic pool as the

total set of linguistic elements found in a population of utterances. In this elaborate

analogy, the role of the genes as replicators is played in linguistics by the structural

elements in utterances, while the utterances are cast in the role of DNA (Croft 2000:38).

According to this analogy, selection of utterances leads to the replication of the structural

elements.

The usage-based nature of the evolutionary framework does not seem to dispense

with the need to recognize the existence of grammar systems. In spite of his statement that

"[l]anguages don't change; people change language through their actions", Croft maintains

that not only the actual utterances but also the individual speakers' grammars are

empirically real entities (2000:4). Moreover, the image of languages going through an

32
autonomous development crops up from time to time, for instance when he speaks about

sibling languages diverging when they become communicatively isolated, just like sibling

species do when their reproductive isolation persists (2000:18). This focus on the

development of languages rather than speech communities is unfortunate: surely, any

emergent difference between the speech of two communities must be the result of a

difference in contacts: once the communities become isolated from each other, the

speakers, through their outside contacts, develop different verbal habits.

Perhaps, the analogy of the genetic pool is nothing more than a roundabout way to

state that human verbal behavior leads to selection among linguistic variants. In that case,

the evolutionary account of language change becomes a statement about the variability of

human behavior. This variability can be subjected to probabilistic explanations. According

to Hruschka et al. (2009:466), such probabilistic models, while being incapable of making

prognostic claims about language change, are useful as a diagnostic tool to identify

changing patterns in verbal behavior. Interpreted in this way, the evolutionary approach to

language as a selection process could provide a solution for the problem of progressing

from the individual's behavior to the general phenomena that manifest themselves in

language history, through the application of statistical expansionist models to the spread of

variation in a speech community (van Hout 1999). Large-scale statistical analysis of the

33
output variation in a speech community allows researchers to study the variation in the

input of infant learners as well (Enfield 2010). In such statistical models, language change is

viewed not as a process proceeding from an initial stage to a final determined stage, but as

a development through many transitional stages, each serving as input to the next stage in

the process. The documented variation serves as a report on how people behave. At no time

is there any need for a 'system', although there is systematic speech behavior at the level of

the individual speaker. As van Hout (1999:19) aptly observes, the distinction between 'pure'

linguistic changes and changes brought about by linguistic contact is unproductive. And

yet, even Niyogi and Berwick's (1998) computational model, to which van Hout refers,

continues to assign the property of change to the language system.

Verbal behavior

As long as linguistic changes are supposed to take place within an abstract system, the

search for internal causes of changes within this system will continue, and the system will

continue to be seen as something independent from the speakers. In fact, the only brand of

philosophy in which there is no room for a linguistic system is that of Skinner's (1957, 1976)

version of behaviorism, because it radically rejects any mentalist interpretation in the

34
analysis of verbal behavior (Andresen 2014:229-240). In the behaviorist account of the

production and reception of speech, there is no room for meaning or content. Speech is

produced as a response to stimuli from the environment, a response that is reinforced by

the interaction with the environment. It is not the product of any communicative

intention, but its source. Any theories that assign meaning to the acts of verbal behavior

and treat sounds as symbols of meaning, are bound to introduce mentalist notions. Skinner

rejects mentalism because it leads inevitably to the intrusion of metaphysical elements,

such as free will and mind/body dualism (see Versteegh 2015 ms.).

One might object to Skinner's account of verbal behavior that it does not go into the

neural mechanism underlying verbal behavior, which is hqrdly ever referred to. One might

justifiably argue that neural events are as much part of the behavior as the physical

reactions that behaviorists study. By neglecting this type of behavior, behaviorist analysis

is surprisingly close to the generativist paradigm, which treats the brain as a black box and

assumes that all properties of Universal Grammar are 'somehow' encoded in it. It is even

related to most psycholinguistic studies, which posit the storage of a mental lexicon and a

rule system without linking these with the neural substrate. Levelt's (1989:18) blueprint of

speech processing refers to connectionist accounts of neural networks, but stresses the fact

that these accounts are a formal representation of these processes, rather than a

35
biologically faithful representation of the neural networks.12

Notwithstanding Skinner's reluctance to turn to neurophysiology, he deserves

credit for his relentless battle against the illusion of language as a living organism. Once we

let go of this illusion, we have to ask, as Auroux (Puech 2004:35) formulates it, 'the brutal

question' of whether languages exist ("Mais les langues, est-ce que ça existe?"). In Auroux's

formulation, languages are only artefacts, conceptual abstractions, which do not exist and

hence, cannot change. Individuals may of course modify their behavior. Individuals may

even collectively use a different speech pattern altogether. The result may look like a

'conspiracy', generated by the linguistic system, but it is nothing more than the effect of

their interactive behavior, not something that originates within any system changing of its

own volition. In view of the fact that human brains come equipped with the same initial

structure and the same genetic potentialities, with the same general learning properties

and problem-solving properties, it is not surprising that they come up with the same

solutions from time to time and that in similar situations they process the input in similar

ways. It does not serve any purpose to go beyond this and try to find some kind of driving

force behind these similarities within a language system.

12
A direct link between verbal learning and neurophysiology is made within the Adaptive Resonance Theory
framework (Loritz 1999; Grossberg 2013). While its technical aspects are beyond me, I believe this approach
demonstrates the possibility of explaining the neural acquisition of verbal behavior without invoking a
mental grammar.
36
 Historicism and historical determinism have had dire consequences for those who

were confronted with its followers. This is hardly the case for the reification of language,

which cannot be said to have been particularly harmful for humankind. Nonetheless, for

the discipline of linguistics and in particular for the field of historical linguistics, the

concept of language as an autonomous entity has not been very healthy, since it leads us

away from actual language use. Speakers perform certain actions we call 'speech' or

'language' or 'discourse', just as they perform other actions, to which we assign the label

'walking' or 'art' or 'politics' or 'birdwatching'.

The Platonic urge to reify such sets of behavior and relate them to an abstract

principle in order to explain them, parries the real question of how people learn this

behavior, and why they sometimes modify it. In any given community, children end up

talking the way their parents do. Innovations are introduced by speakers when they

accommodate to others, i.e. when they are affected by contacts with other speakers. One

has to find the locus for changes in verbal behavior in the speakers' history. At no point is

there any system directing the change. I find no better way to summarize this than by

repeating Victor Henry's statement that "il n'y a pas de langage".

37
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