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Creativity and Universality in Language pp 43–57Cite as

Symmetry and Universality in Language Change

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis ((LECTMORPH))

Abstract

We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to the notion of universality as it applies to complex interacting systems in the physical sciences and which establishes a link between generic (‘universal’) patterns at the macroscopic scale and symmetries at the microscopic scale. By relating the presence and absence of specific symmetries to fundamentally distinct mechanisms for language change at the level of individual speakers and speech acts, we are able to draw conclusions about which of these underlying mechanisms are most likely to be responsible for the changes that actually occur. Since these mechanisms are typically believed to be common to all speakers in all speech communities, this provides a means to relate universals in individual behaviour to language universals.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One may ask what a magnet is doing in a ‘chemistry set’, given that magnetism is physics, but this is beyond the scope of this article.

  2. 2.

    An exception is my young child, who has elected for ‘couch’.

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Acknowledgments

I thank my collaborators Gareth Baxter, Bill Croft, Simon Kirby, Alan McKane, Kenny Smith and Kevin Stadler with whom much of the work outlined here was done. I also thank Miriam Meyerhoff, Sali Tagliamonte and Peter Trudgill for the sociolinguistic insights that they have shared with me.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Astronomy, SUPA, University of Edinburgh, Peter Guthrie Tait Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, UK

    Richard A. Blythe

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  1. Richard A. Blythe
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Correspondence to Richard A. Blythe .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Mirko Degli Esposti

  2. the Physics of Complex Systems, Max Planck Institute for, Dresden, Germany

    Eduardo G. Altmann

  3. Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris, France

    François Pachet

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Blythe, R.A. (2016). Symmetry and Universality in Language Change. In: Degli Esposti, M., Altmann, E., Pachet, F. (eds) Creativity and Universality in Language. Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24403-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24403-7_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24401-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24403-7

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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