Competition and the lexicon
This article begins with a general axiom of competition that originates in evolutionary biology. The axiom holds generally across organized systems. I show in particular that this version of competition, rooted in biology, helps us to understand and unify a range of lexical and morphological phenomena in language. The overall message is that languages can have properties that are not peculiarly linguistic but hold generally across organized systems. The wide scope of these properties removes some of the explanatory burden from both linguistics and psychology. It is not the job of linguistics or psychology to account for why languages have properties that can be attributed to competition, although there is no denying that the job of linguistics and psychology is to account for how these properties are implemented in languages. I will discuss a number of phenomena: the rarity of synonyms, competition between affixes, and the possibility of a state of equilibrium between rival realizations of the same morphosyntactic meaning.
Times cited: 10
