Evolucionismo linguístico: um paralelo entre evolucionismo biológico e mudança linguística

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Adriel G [UNESP]
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Trabalho de conclusão de curso
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/123000; http://www.athena.biblioteca.unesp.br/exlibris/bd/capelo/2015-04-06/000746708.pdf
• topic: Linguística; Evolucionismo; Darwinismo social; Social Darwinism

The comparison between linguistic change and biologic evolution is a subject that has caused and still causes much controversy among linguists and other academics that see, in this parallel, problems related to similar attempts in the nineteenth century by Social Darwinism, which approached the biological evolution with social and cultural development of a people. However, this paper aims to show that today this parallel is not built in the same way as was done before. Names like William Labov, Salikoko Mufwene, Jonathan West and Hildo Honorio do Couto in linguistics; Charles Darwin in biology; and Tom Ingold and Clifford Geertz in anthropology, showed that areas of Humanities, such as linguistics and anthropology, and of Biological Sciences, as phylogeny and genetics, are likely to be worked together by the great similarities between processes that compose them. Thus, based on the writings of these authors and some others, this paper presents this theme’s controversy; it shows the similarities between characteristics of languages and species; it seeks through the concepts MA Mental, MA Social and MA Natural of the languages (coined by Couto on Linguística, ecologia e ecolinguística: contato de línguas) to develop ideas of how it is possible to think the language change in the light of Darwin's concept, Natural Selection; and finally, it shows that the parallel theme is rather productive, based on the texts and discussions presented in the whole paper, and that the controversy has been being dissolved with more and more people working on the parallel between language and species