More on the limits of variability in language
The language faculty is part of the cognitive system, and as such it is constrained by the architecture of the non-deterministic brain and by the cognitive limitations of individual language users. At the same time, language is a tool for social interaction and communication and therefore must provide mechanisms that allow the language user to achieve communicative success in a vast variety of discourse contexts and communicative situations.
This dual nature of language calls for certain features or properties in the underlying linguistic system that enable variability in language, here defined as a range of possible alternative linguistic behaviours. However, this variability in linguistic behaviour must necessarily have limits. First, there are cognitive limitations that may impede the processing of overly complex syntactic structures (e.g., a limitation on working memory and/or attentional capacity might affect the processing of some kinds of relative clauses). Second, language use is a coordinated action, and for linguistic communication to be successful, linguistic structures and their associated meanings must be coordinated in conventionalized ways across the members of a group of language users, and they must also be adapted to the contextual or communicative situations at hand. Such coordinations and adaptations thereby ensure the reliable recovery of meaning as expressed through externalized linguistic forms. The result of these coordination processes should be reflected in the individual language users’ linguistic systems and can, in the long run, lead to language change over time. In effect, then, the mere fact that an individual may potentially exhibit a wide range of available linguistic behaviours does not mean that “anything goes”. For instance, if language users go beyond the limits that are imposed by either their own or their interlocutors’ linguistic or nonlinguistic systems, communication might fail because the linguistic utterance cannot be processed, and the intended message cannot be transmitted.
This CRC systematically explores variability and the limits of variability across a wide range of linguistic behaviours to identify the organization and the constraints of the underlying linguistic system. Limits of variability can be observed when a linguistic behaviour is relatively consistent, that is, resistant to influences of cognitive factors or communicative situations, conventions, and change, and/or when it shows relative consistency across and within languages, groups of language users, and individuals. We expect that such instances of consistent behaviour may be indicative of stable and strong constraints in the underlying linguistic system. At the same time, consistent behaviours in individuals and groups of language users may also be conditioned by language-external factors, such as areal features under language contact, functionality in communication, or cognitive factors. This shows that the limits of variability can change dynamically over time.
We argue that the systematic investigation of the variable aspects of linguistic behaviour, on the one hand, and their (dynamic) limits, on the other, will provide important insights into the nature of language users’ linguistic systems as well as into the nature of human language in relation to language-external factors in general.
