Universals of language and convergent diachronic evolution (Talk in the 2024 ELLE series, Edinburgh Lectures in Language Evolution)

While linguists have long been interested in macro-evolutionary trends in the diachrony of grammatical patterns (e.g. Schleicher 1850; Müller 1864), research on universals of language structure became prominent only in the 1960s (e.g. Greenberg 1963; Croft 1990). But how do language universals relate to trends in diachronic change? There are two competing views that have recently been contrasted (e.g. Haspelmath 2019; Cristofaro 2019): On the one hand, it has been argued that many synchronic universals are due to constraints on diachronic change (e.g. Anderson 2005), so that the true universals are diachronic (Bybee 2006). On the other hand, it has been argued that language universals (like cultural universals more generally, e.g. Brown 2004) are the result of convergent cultural evolution. As language change is very slow and often not more than random drift (or even dysfunctional, Enke et al. 2024), it is difficult to provide evidence for either of these two views. However, I will discuss a range of different considerations that favour the view of universals as resulting from convergent diachronic evolution.