Esa Itkonen

ON THE 'RATIONALIST' CONCEPTION OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE Although my topic is linguistic change, I shall begin by making a remark on synchronic linguistics. My reason for doing so will become fully evident only at the end of this paper.1 In any of its synchronic states a language is a system of rules. By 'rule' I do not mean a rule of grammar, but a social norm which determines what kinds of forms or meanings are correct or incorrect. Norms are about what ought to be done, which largely coincides with, but is in principle distinct from, what is done. In other words, as all textbooks of philosophy teach us, there is an irreducible gap between 'ought' and 'is'. From this it follows that synchronic grammatical descriptions as descriptions of rules are not reducible to descriptions of actions (or reactions) in space and time, which means that they are not empirical, in the most widely accepted sense of this term. This is a line of thinking that I have been pursuing for more than ten years (cf., e.g., Itkonen 1972, 1978, 1981). It is interesting to note, I think, that Jerrold Katz, the former champion of Chomskyan linguistics, has recently made a complete methodological turn-about and now also argues that synchronic grammatical theory is different from such empirical sciences as physics or psychology, and similar to such non-empirical sciences as logic and philosophy. The main difference between Katz (1981) and myself is that he seeks support in Platonism, whereas I believe I can manage without doing so. The central concept here is rule. Notice that when we say that people obey rules in speaking, we say more than just that they wish to guarantee mutual comprehension. This could be guaranteed also by speaking somewhat incorrectly. But people aspire to more than just mutual comprehension; in most instances at least, they also wish to speak correctly. In addition to correctness, I need another type of normativity, namely, rationality. The difference between correctness and rationality may not always be obvious, but there are clear cases which show that it is meaningful to make a distinction between the two. One can perform irrational actions by uttering perfectly correct sentences, and vice versa one can, under specific circumstances, act rationally by speaking incorrectly. As a rule of thumb, it might be said that, from the viewpoint of synchronic grammatical theory, the subpragmatic levels of language from phonology to semantics are the domain of correctness, whereas pragmatics is the domain of rationality. In fact, the need for rationality as an explanatory concept is most evident in pragmatics suffice it to mention Grice (1975) and Kasher (1979) and their use of what they call 'rationality principles'. Starting from the methodology of pragmatics, I have for some time been exploring the possibility of extending the use of rationality to other subdomains of linguistics as well (cf. Itkonen 1984). This is where linguistic change comes into the picture. An action is said to be rationally explained if it is shown to be a means adequate to an

end. Here it is possible to distinguish between several degrees of explanatory strength. Suppose we are justified to attribute a certain goal to an agent. Then, if some action of his is a necessary condition for bringing about the goal, it is felt to be fully explained. If it is a sufficient (but not necessary) condition, it is explained in a weaker sense because we still do not know why it, rather than some other action also qualifying as a sufficient condition, was performed. Finally, an action is explained in an even weaker sense but still explained if it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, but nevertheless contributes to bringing about the goal. Now, can rational explanations be used to explain linguistic changes? I am willing to answer this question affirmatively. However, doing so presupposes that linguistic changes may be regarded as actions of some sort. This presupposition may seem unacceptable to many, and therefore I must first try to justify it. Language is first and foremost a social phenomenon. Therefore linguistic changes should be regarded as a special case of social changes, and diachronic linguistics should accordingly be regarded as part of the theory of social change. It is surprising how seldom this rather obvious conclusion has been drawn. The main reason for this state of affairs seems to be the tendency to equate change of language with change of grammar, taking 'grammar' to be a mental or psychological entity; in this way linguistic change has come to be seen as a purely psychological phenomenon. This position is untenable, at least for the following two reasons: First, psychological and social do not exclude each other. 'Behind' every social phenomenon there is always and necessarily some sort of psychological mechanism which 'supports' it; and vice versa, psychological phenomena never occur in a social vacuum. Second, because children do not have direct access to their parents' grammars, it is not very meaningful to regard linguistic changes as taking place in a mental grammar that is common to the parents and to the children. The changes in mental grammars are discontinuous, and unknown in their details. By contrast, the changes in the social language are continuous (or minimally discontinuous) , and their general rationale seems to be within our grasp. I shall come back to this point. I am arguing that linguistic change is social change. Before going on, I must acknowledge the difference between change by adults and change by children. This difference is real enough, but for the purposes of the present discussion I shall try to ignore it as well as I can. That is, I shall regard every linguistic change as primarily a change in the social language, its psychological counterpart being a set of changes in individual people's capacities to act and/or to perceive. In the case of the child more than in the case of the adult, changing the capacity means developing or enlarging it. Changes in the capacity are kept in check by the social control that is exerted upon its products. If linguistic change is social change, what kind of social change is it, then? We get a preliminary answer by contrasting linguistic change with the principal type of social change, which could be characterized as being the unintended collective result of an indefinite number of individual, often antagonistic actions. To illustrate, suppose there is a number of persons A, B, C, etc. who all want to have some desired thing X. What is the end result? Quite typically it is that no one will have X. On the other hand, the overall situation of A, B, C, etc. will be changed in a way intended by no one. Schelling (1978)

gives an overview of changes of this kind, all of which he subsumes under the pertinent label of "conflict between micromotives and macrobehavior". It is a significant fact that this kind of conflict is absent from linguistic change. Therefore if we wish to find a social-change counterpart for linguistic changes, we must look for it elsewhere. One candidate is the type of change that Smelser (1962) has investigated under the label of 'collective behavior'. By this term he means those cases where a group of people acts like one man, that is, where there is a basic agreement between micromotives and macrobehavior. It is questionable whether we can in connection with linguistic changes speak of a common goal shared by the group whose language is changing. Rather, the collective aspect seems concentrated on the social control that weeds out unacceptable innovations. Still, there is this similarity that the Smelser-type collective behavior subsumes changes in fashion as a special case, and there has been a recurrent tendency among practitioners of diachronic linguistics to regard linguistic changes as qualitatively similar to changes in fashion (cf. Postal 1968 and Lass 1980).2 The changes in 'linguistic fashion' are constrained by the fact that a language must at every moment remain a system of (commonly sharable) rules. If linguistic change is a type of collective behavior, then it can be characterized as social action. However, I have not yet justified the use of the term 'action'. I shall do it now, by defining the relation of linguistic change to the notions of nomicity (or lawlikeness) and teleology. Natural events are nomic, which means that they occur in conformity with laws, either deterministic laws as in macrophysics or statistical laws as in microphysics. A sizable part of human behavior also conforms to laws of some sort, even if these are less wellestablished than the laws of the natural sciences. But human actions have resisted all attempts to subsume them under laws, that is, laws not restricted to a specific time and to a specific culture. What about linguistic changes? Where do they belong? At least on the face of it, we are confronted with a simple choice: if linguistic changes are nomic, they should be regarded as natural events, whereas if they are non-nomic, they should be regarded as human actions. It is common knowledge, and has been strongly reemphasized by Lass (1980), that as far as we know there are no deterministic laws of linguistic change, and such statistical laws as exist are just too weak to be explanatory. Now someone might reply that this does not yet decide the issue. Although no deterministic laws have been discovered during the last two hundred years or so, they will be discovered tomorrow. This may be a logical possibility, but I find it too implausible to merit attention.3 So let us agree that linguistic changes are non-nomic. But why should we call them 'actions'? Why can't we just admit that there are two distinct kinds of non-nomic phenomena, namely actions and linguistic changes? This is where teleology comes into the picture. Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that linguistic changes are non-nomic events distinct from actions. We still have to explain why they occur. How do we go about this? It is very important what kind of change we take to be the typical or paradigmatic one. I think it is counterproductive to start either with sound changes or with

semantic changes. Rather, the paradigmatic type of change should be one in which meaning and sound, or meaning and form, most obviously interact, namely morphological or syntactic change. Of these two, morphological change is more familiar, and is best illustrated by the traditional analogical change. When paradigm levelling takes place, we have no doubt about how it should be explained: first, sound changes destroy the transparent or reasonably one-to-one relation between meaning and form, and then this relation is restored; that is, levelling the paradigm is the means to achieve the goal of having a one-to-one relation, or isomorphism, between meaning and form. Syntactic reanalysis proceeds along similar lines, except that the initial change may also take place on the meaning side: when the meanings of formally similar constructions drift apart, the forms are changed after a while so as to re-establish the meaning-form isomorphism. Accounts like these are of course entirely teleological, and I emphasize that every account of paradigm levelling or of syntactic reanalysis boils down to this, no matter how it is formulated or formalized. This is in its barest outline the argument for the teleology of linguistic change. And because the explanation of actions is teleological par excellence, it follows that this is also the argument for the similarity between linguistic changes and actions. To be more precise, paradigm levelling and syntactic re-analysis illustrate the superordinate teleology that concerns the relation between meaning and form. Under this level of abstraction, both meaning and form have their own teleologies. The teleology of sound change, for instance, has to do with local simplifications of pronunciation, filling gaps in the phonological system, and conspiring to reach or to maintain a preferred phonotactic pattern (for more discussion, cf. Itkonen 1982a and Campbell & Ringen 1982). What happens when changes motivated by a subordinate teleology come into conflict with the superordinate teleology? This brings up the question about the strength of teleological explanations: can we predict when, for instance, a paradigm levelling will occur and how, precisely, it will be implemented? A negative answer to these questions was already entailed by the non-nomic character of linguistic changes. Only nomic events can be predicted, the reliability of predictions being dependent on the strength of nomicity. Thus teleological explanations of linguistic changes just like similar explanations of human actions are in principle post hoc, i.e., after-the-fact. Moreover, I am not claiming that there is a teleological post hoc explanation for each and every linguistic change. I fully admit that there may be random changes, or changes due purely to chance. In fact, we very quickly bump into chance when we, after giving a normal teleological post hoc explanation, try to answer the further questions of why the change happened precisely then and precisely in that way, except that chance now becomes indistinguishable from free will. Whichever term we use, we must sooner or later accept this limit to our capacity of explanation. Let us agree, then, that explanations of linguistic changes are non-nomic and teleological. But why should they be called rational explanations? There are two complementary lines of thinking that justify this terminology. On the one hand, William Dray, the philosopher of history who has coined the term, points out that there is in fact an evaluative element in the historians' actual descriptive practice: when they try to explain the actions of the personages they are interested in, they invariably start by trying

to find good reasons for the actions; only if they fail in this, will they settle for bad reasons, and even then they try to explain how the de facto bad reasons could have appeared good to the personages (cf. Dray 1963). On the other hand, philosophers like Davidson (1975) and Laudan (1977) point out that it is methodologically sound to start with the rationality assumption because it is a minimal assumption: if we just hit upon the right rationality principle, we need not additionally explain why people follow it; only deviations from rationality just like deviations from inertia in Newtonian physics need to be explained. I have found much general support for my view that linguistic change is rational in the work of Eugenio Coseriu (see especially Coseriu 1958). I have now given an affirmative answer to the question: can rational explanations be used to explain linguistic changes? The next question to be answered is: what is the relation between rational explanations and causal explanations? Before tackling it, however, I must counter one possible objection to what I have said so far. I have presented the dichotomy between nomic science and non-nomic science as the dichotomy between physics and the historiography of human or social actions. But this dichotomy is not exhaustive, because evolutionary theory too is a non-nomic science and could therefore function as a model for diachronic linguistics. In fact, conceptualizing linguistic change as an interaction between chance and necessity, as Lightfoot (1979) for instance has done, seems to be a deliberate attempt to adapt diachronic linguistics to evolutionary theory. There is nothing objectionable in Lightfoot's notion of 'necessity', insofar as it is meant to express the therapeutic need to restore the transparency or isomorphism between meaning and form: this is just the 'superordinate teleology' of linguistic change I mentioned earlier. But insofar as Lightfoot's notion of 'necessity' is meant to express our ability to predict or postdict linguistic changes, it is mistaken, simply because we do not possess such an ability. In Lightfoot's framework the ability to predict requires that the non-transparency (or 'opacity') of grammatical derivations be quantified so that we can tell the precise point at which it becomes intolerable; but not even a hint is given about how such a quantification could be done. The emphasis on predictability if only limited predictability seems to indicate that at least this 'chance vs. necessity' distinction goes in fact back to Chomsky's (1975) distinction between 'mysteries' and 'problems' in the study of language. For Chomsky, the operation of free will is a mystery, and beyond scientific treatment, whereas other aspects of linguistic behavior are amenable to scientific, that is, nomic and predictive description. However, this dichotomy is unjustified, because most aspects of human (including linguistic) behavior fall neither under absolute chance (or 'freedom') nor under absolute necessity, but somewhere in between. The excessive sharpness of this dichotomy shows that it is just a continuation of the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter as two completely distinct realms of phenomena. In this respect as in others, the Cartesian dualism has outlived its usefulness. Even if one attempt to adapt diachronic linguistics to evolutionary theory has failed, it is possible that other similar attempts will succeed; and I have no way of disproving this possibility. Indeed I do not wish to deny that there may be some deep-seated similarity that underlies both biological mutations and linguistic changes. Nevertheless, to me at least it seems undeniable that at present the link between biological and linguistic changes

is metaphorical, whereas the relation between linguistic and socio-psychological changes is so direct as to be almost one of identity. Thus we are left with rational explanations, which are non-nomic and non-predictive in character. What is their relation to causality? Some ten years ago it was customary to emphasize the distinction between reasons and causes. An intentional action was said to be done for a reason, whereas a physical event was said to be produced by a cause. This difference is a valid one, and I do not wish to obliterate it. But at a higher level of abstraction there is also a similarity between the two cases which was neglected before. Just as a window would not have broken, had it not been hit by a stone, an action would not in general have occurred, had the agent not had that reason for acting which he had in fact. To use von Wright's (1980) term, a reason is a 'volitional-epistemic' concept, which means that it is jointly constituted by a goal the agent entertains and by his belief about the available means for achieving the goal. In conformity with current cognitive psychology, the goal is conceptualized as a mental representation of the desired state of affairs, and beliefs are regarded as mental representations of states of affairs presumed to exist. It goes without saying that agents need not be conscious of the reasons for their actions, that is, their goals and/or beliefs may lie under the level of consciousness. In sum, actions and linguistic changes as a subtype of social actions can be said to exemplify non-nomic, teleological, and representational causality (for details, cf. Itkonen 1983). There is no redundancy in this definition.4 Rationality has a dual character which may seem rather puzzling. Under its normative aspect it is made use of to evaluate and criticize people's actions, whereas under its descriptive aspect it is made use of to explain and even to 'causally' explain people's actions. I take care of this duality by assigning the normative aspect to rationality principles understood as social entities and by assigning the descriptive aspect to internalizations of rationality principles, such internalizations being understood as psychological entities. The 'reasons' I spoke of earlier may now be identified more narrowly as internalizations of rationality principles. (My distinction between norms and their internalizations corresponds to Popper's (1972) distinction between 'world-3' and 'world-2'.) Let us now elaborate the causal aspect a little. It is customary to distinguish, on the one hand, between external and internal causes and, on the other, between dynamic and static causes. How do these distinctions apply to linguistic changes? The facts relating to the socio-economic and geographical structure of the society in which one lives could be called large-scale external causes of the static type, whereas wars, invasions, and mass immigrations are analogous causes of the dynamic type. Small-scale static and dynamic external causes are provided, respectively, by the unchanging and the changing aspects of those people's behavior in particular, linguistic behavior with whom one comes into immediate contact. Mental reactions provoked by external factors have first the status of effects, but insofar as they lead to observable behavior, they have in the process acquired the status of causes, that is, internal dynamic causes. People are more or less free to decide whether or not to react to external factors, the limiting case being free will. Free will approaches the notion of spontaneous causation, or of a cause which itself is uncaused. But notice that free will is never absolutely free; rather, it is always quite

strongly constrained by one's historical situation, which means that, paradoxically, it too is 'caused', namely in the static sense of the word. Finally, the static internal cause of one's linguistic behavior is one's mental grammar. I envisage this as a rather loose conglomeration of inflectional paradigms, sentence structures, and lexical meanings. There is no dichotomy between depth and surface. Each grammatical level has its own basic units, and the mental grammar contains more or less abstract classes of such units, classes which stand to each other in more or less strong relations of similarity and influence. This is the aspect of longterm linguistic memory, or storage, and rather simple operations, triggered by external and/or internal dynamic causes, apply to it and are constrained by it in sentence production and perception. It might seem natural to say that the classes and relations just mentioned are defined in terms of surface entities, but since I reject the distinction between deep and surface, I must say that the entities in question are those of the social language. This overall picture seems to come rather close to the analogy-based conception of language that Raimo Anttila has been advocating for years (see, e.g., Anttila 1977a and b). It has also been confirmed, as far as its concreteness is concerned, by Fodor et al.'s (1980) recent experimental findings. An analogous view has been advocated for phonology by Linell (1979).5 Taken together, all the different types of causes of linguistic change enumerated above constitute what Popper (1957) calls the 'situational logic'. To explain an action or a linguistic change is to show that it was an adequate or rational solution to the problem with which his situation presented the agent. This kind of explanation consists in showing that all the different ingredients of the integral situation external and internal, dynamic and static hang together so as to form a coherent whole. This shows the connection between rational explanations and so-called pattern explanations widely employed in cultural anthropology. The larger the number of qualitatively different phenomena a pattern explanation encompasses, the more interesting it is. If explanations of linguistic changes are in danger of being trivial, this is not because they are nonpredictive, but because the circle they draw around their data is too small. I see the recent trend towards 'socio-historical linguistics' as a deliberate attempt to enlarge this circle (see, e.g., Maher 1977 and Romaine 1981). I suspect that several of my readers might feel dissatisfied by what I have said so far. They worry that if we have no predictions, we have no theory; what we are left to do, instead, is just to describe disparate changes one by one. Now this is once again a false dichotomy. Although we cannot have predictions, we can have theory unless, of course, you make 'theory' synonymous with 'predictive theory'. Curiously enough, people practicing historical linguistics have almost entirely ignored the lessons one can learn from observing how historians go about their business. Let us not repeat this mistake. Rather, let us consider the most grandiose theory (sic!) of history that has been produced in this century, namely Arnold Toynbee's account of the rise and decline of civilizations. It is meant to apply to all cultures and civilizations: in each, Toynbee thinks he detects the same pattern; for instance, the decline is the joint result of external pressure and internal weakness. Of course, Toynbee does not claim to be able to predict when and how, precisely, a civilization will decline. All he is saying is that something like this will happen sooner or later. Does this mean that his account has no value? Such a judgment

would be silly. But is his account a theory? This question is now at the latest seen to be purely terminological, and therefore irrelevant. What is the lesson for diachronic linguistics? It is that we can first of all have a largescale typology of linguistic changes in terms of their causes. 6 Moreover, we can state certain general tendencies of change. We can do so because, if people act rationally, they will act similarly in similar situations. And the situations in which languages change are more or less similar. But the weak predictability which results from this fact is subordinated to, and issues from, the primary notion of rationality. If what I am saying sounds somewhat traditional, this is no accident. I indeed think that much of the progress that is thought to have been accomplished in diachronic linguistics during, say, the last twenty years is no progress at all, because it consists in disregarding the earlier tradition and thus making discoveries that have been made several times before. Should we feel distressed by this de facto lack of progress, as for instance Hockett (1979) confesses to be after rereading Whitney (1875)? Feeling distressed results, in my opinion, from misunderstanding what kind of science linguistics really is. Linguistics, both synchronic & diachronic, is a human science, and progress in the human sciences is different from what it is in the natural sciences; just think of the position that Aristotle occupies in philosophy, Thucydides in historiography, and P ~nini in synchronic grammatical theory: they have no counterparts in the natural sciences (cf. Itkonen 1982b). If the history of diachronic linguistics exhibits little progress in comparison with the history of physics, for instance, I for one am only glad, because this is one more vindication of my position that linguistics as a human science is qualitatively different from the natural sciences.7 This brings us back to Jerrold Katz. His view of the non-empirical nature of synchronic grammatical theory is based on the presumptive fact that the referents of grammatical descriptions are Platonic entities. But such entities are timeless or outside the history. This surely means that Katz will have difficulties in accounting for linguistic change and thus reconciling the synchrony and the diachrony of language. For my part, I get the same result, namely the non-empirical nature of synchronic grammatical theory, by assuming that the referents of grammatical descriptions are norms, and as such, historical entities. In this paper I have outlined how I intend to reconcile synchrony and diachrony: diachronic linguistics consists in showing in what sense it is rational to change the ways of speaking correctly. Notice that I am not only reconciling synchrony and diachrony; I am also doing something more, namely making a significant generalization about synchrony and diachrony, a generalization based on the normative nature of language, as exemplified by the complementary notions of correctness and rationality. One final word about the philosophy of science which constitutes the background of this whole discussion. I have always argued against positivism, or the view that the methodology of the natural sciences is the only scientific methodology, and for hermeneutics, which represents the opposite view. Earlier I was concerned with synchronic grammatical theory, and I tried to show that in this context positivism is trivially false, because it is a category mistake to assume that the methods of natural science, that is, methods designed to deal with events in space and time, could apply to

conceptual analysis.8 I am now concerned with diachronic linguistics, and I have again tried to show that positivism is false, but this time not trivially false, because in some sense diachronic linguistics deals with events in space and time just as the natural sciences do.
NOTES

1) This paper was read at the UCLA conference on "Causality and Linguistic Change", May 1982. The term 'rational' in the title of the paper does not refer to the 'rationalism vs empiricism' controversy, but rather to the commonsensical notion of rationality. 2) Dante could be cited as the progenitor of this line of thinking; cf. Paradiso XXVI 12738:

ch nullo effetto mai razionabile, per lo piacere uman che rinovella segundo il cielo, sempre fu durabile. Opera naturale ch'uom favella; ma cos o cos, natura lascia poi fare a voi secondo che v'abbella. ............ e ci convene, ch l'uso de' mortali come fronda in ramo, che sen va e altra vene. 3) In the domain of semantic change, it is not even a logical possibility. Notice that when Einstein redefined 'space' and 'time', he gave these words new, and surely unpredictable, meanings. 4) It must be added that the notion of non-nomic causality is in stark conflict with the traditional notion of causality. 5) It should be added that I also accept abstract or axiomatic grammatical description carried out within the tradition of autonomous linguistics. It all boils down to a difference between the research interests of psycholinguistics and autonomous linguistics. 6) The first such typology, and still a valid one, was established by Theodor Bibliander (15041564); cf. Arens (1969:71). 7) Those linguists who consider physics as a universally valid model science are likely to show little interest for the history of their discipline, simply because the history of physics is largely irrelevant to modern physics.

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zur Gegenwart. 2nd enl. ed. Freiburg & Munich: Karl Alber. Campbell, Lyle & Jon Ringen. 1981. "The Explanation of Linguistic Change: Questions of teleology, prediction, and functionalism". Paper read at the 5th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Galway, Ireland, 610 April 1981. Chomsky, Noam. 1975. Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon. Coseriu, Eugenio. 1958. Sincrona, diacrona e historia. Montevideo, Uruguay: Universidad de la Republica. Davidson, Donald. 1975. "Thought and Talk". Mind and Language ed. by Samuel Guttenplan, 723. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dray, William. 1963. "The Historical Explanation of Actions Reconsidered". Philosophy and History ed. by Sidney Hook. New York: Univ. Press. (Repr. in The Philosophy of History, 6689. London: Oxford UP, 1974.) Fodor, Jerry A. et al. 1980. "Against Definitions". Cognition 8 . 263367. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. "Logic and Conversation". Speech Acts ed. by Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan, 4158. New York: Academic Press. Hockett, Charles F. 1979. "Introduction to the Dover Edition". Whitney (1979[1875]), vxx. New York: Dover Publications. Itkonen, Esa. 1972. "Concerning the Methodological Status of Linguistic Descriptions". Derivational Processes ed. by Ferenc Kiefer, 3141. Stockholm: KVAL. - - -. 1978. Grammatical Theory and Metascience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. - - -. 1981. "The Concept of Linguistic Intuition". A Festschrift for Native Speaker ed. by Florian Coulmas, 12740. The Hague: Mouton. - - -. 1982a. "Short-Term and Long-Term Teleology in Linguistic Change". Papers from the 3rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics ed. by J. Peter Maher, Allan R. Bombard & Konrad Koerner, 85118. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. - - -. 1982b. "Change of Language as a Prototype for Change of Linguistics". Papers from the 5th International Conference on Historical Linguistics ed. by Anders Ahlqvist, 14248. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publ. Co. - - -. 1983. Causality in Linguistic Theory. London & Canberra: Croom Helm; Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. Kasher, Asa. 1979. "Conversational Maxims and Rationality". Meaning and Use: Papers presented at the Second Jerusalem Encounter, April 1976 ed. by Avishai Margalit, 197216. Dordrecht/Holland & Boston: D. Reidel. Katz, Jerrold J. 1981. Language and Other Abstract Objects. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lass, Roger. 1980. Explaining Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Laudan, Larry. 1977. Progress and its Problems: Towards a theory of scientific growth. Los Angeles & Berkeley: Univ. of California Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lightfoot, David W. 1979. Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge

Univ. Press. Linell, Per. 1979. Psychological Reality in Phonology. Ibid. Maher, J. Peter. 1977. Papers on Language Theory and History I: Creation and tradition in language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Popper, (Sir) Karl. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. - - -. 1972. Objective Knowledge. London: Oxford Univ. Press. Romaine, Suzanne. 1981. Socio-Historical Linguistics; its status and methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Schelling, Thomas. 1978. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: W.W. Norton. Smelser, Neil. 1962. Theory of Collective Behavior. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Whitney, William Dwight. 1875. The Life and Growth of Language. New York & London: D. Appleton & Co. (New printing, with an Introduction by Charles F. Hockett, New York: Dover, 1979.) Wright, Georg Henrik von. 1980. Freedom and Determination. Amsterdam: NorthHolland Publ. Co.

SUMMARY Language is a social phenomenon; linguistic changes are non-nomic in character; the customary type of explanation utilized in diachronic linguistics is teleological explanation. From these three facts is follows that it is plausible to consider linguistic changes as social actions. They are explained by corresponding reasons, i.e., goals entertained by speakers and their beliefs about available means. On the one hand, reasons possess the status of (non-mechanistic) causes; on the other, actions which are means adequate to ends qualify as rational. Therefore causal explanations of linguistic changes should be more narrowly defined as rational explanations, the rationality involved being subconscious in nature. RSUM Le langage est un fait social; les changements linguistiques sont caractriss par 1'absence de nomicit; la linguistique diachronique se sert presque uniquement de 1'explication tlologique. De tout cela il s'ensuit que les changements linguistiques doivent tre considrs comme dos actions sociales. Ils sont expliqus par les raisons corrlatives, c'est-a-dire les buts adopts par les sujets parlants ainsi que les moyens dont ceux-ci croient disposer. D'un ct, une action servant de moyen adquat un but est qualifie de rationnelle; de l'autre, les raisons remplissent la fonction des causes (nonmcaniques). Par consquence, les explications causales des changements linguistiques doivent tre dfinies, plus prcisement, comme des explications rationnelles, la rationalit en question tant de caractre subconscient.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Sprache ist ein soziales Phnomen; Sprachvernderungen sind nicht-nomischer Natur; die diachrone Sprachwissenschaft bedient sich fast ausschlie $lich teleologischer Erklrungen. Hieraus folgt, da $ Sprachvernderungen berechtigterweise als eine Art von sozialen Handlungen betrachtet werden. Sie werden dadurch erklrt, da $ die Grnde (= 'reasons') der Sprecher, d.h. einerseits ihre Willensziele und andererseits ihre Auffassungen ber die vorhandenen Mittel, dargestellt werden. Grnde besitzen den Status (nicht-mechanistischer) Ursachen (= 'causes'), wohingegen diejenigen Handlungen, die geeignete Mittel zum Zweck sind, als rational gelten. Folglich mssen kausale Erklrungen von Sprachvernderungen enger als rationale Erklarungen definiert werden, wobei eine unbewu $te Art von Rationalitt angenommen wird.