Darwinism tested by the science of language
Linguistics enjoyed great success in the last half of the 19th century. The use of tree diagrams to express the genetic relations between languages spread from linguistics to evolutionary biology. The achievements of the Neogrammarians in establishing sound laws, however, led to a realization that the exceptionless laws of language change bore no resemblance in kind to the laws of natural science. Language evolution had no principled basis akin to natural selection. Saussure solved this problem in the Cours by rooting linguistic theory in synchronic states of language rather than historical change, thus relegating diachronic linguistics to a minor position in the field. In recent decades, the field of cultural evolution has allowed for the application of well-established principles from evolutionary biology and ecology. The application of one of these, Gause's principle of competitive exclusion, to central problems of morphology has produced good results, suggesting prospects for the revival of evolutionary explanation in language along the lines of what linguists envisioned a century and a half ago.
