Prace komisji nauk.pdf - Instytut Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu ...

problem. I return to the example of the disappearance of englisch “from the
angels”. This was a reaction to a confusing homonymy. But what causes such a
confusing homonymy? Phonological merger is a possibility, two different
sounds becoming one sound. But what might be the cause of such a merger?
Maybe ease of articulation. Then we must assume that a language may have
difficult sounds. How are such sounds possible in a language? And so on. There
is no end to the questions. This, however, is not a serious problem. We have to
bear in mind that a language is always in a subtle and slightly unstable (neutral)
balance. As we saw, it is affected by different factors: one factor reacts on
another by compensating the less happy effects of this factor. And so things are
constantly going back and forth. In spite of, or (maybe) because of that,
language remains an excellent means of communication.
A more serious problem concerns the fact that language changes are
historical events, taking place in space and time. If languages ultimately have
the same origin and if the same factors operate in them, how is it possible that
they show such different developments? In fact, this is the problem of language
variation. A possible answer is given by what I would call the option theory. 9 At
any moment in history language users have different options: to do something or
to do nothing, and if they want to do something, they have the choice between
different factors and each factor may entail different possibilities. For instance,
there may be various ways of making pronunciation easier. Every language user,
or better: every language community – there is also the sociolinguistic factor to
be taken into account – chooses its own way of development. This optionality
makes it difficult if not impossible to predict future language development (but
see the next paragraph). In fact, language change can only be explained
afterwards, as plausible as possible. But by exploring language changes of the
9 In this connection I mention the so-called optimality theory, in which grammars of natural
languages are considered to be sets of conflicting constraints on surface structures (cf. e.g.
Van Oostendorp 2003).
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