If languages do indeed evolve then they must show the three crucial aspects of an evolving system: variation of traits, inheritance of those traits, and the differential survival—that is selection—of those traits (Lewontin 1970). We know that languages vary (otherwise the fields of linguistic typology and sociolinguistics would be boring). We know that variation is passed through speech communities and inherited from parent language to its daughters (otherwise historical linguistics would likewise be boring). However, whether linguistic traits are selected for is much less clear (Ramsey and De Block 2016). Nor is it clear just where selection might operate (Dediu et al. 2013). Despite these issues, many possible candidates for selective effects have been proposed in the linguistic literature. Selection might operate at the level of the speech act . For example, the more lexical items are used, the more stable they are over time, which may be consistent with frequency-dependent selection (Pagel et al. 2007; Calude and Pagel 2011), while the length of these more frequent words appears to be shorter to increase communication efficiency (Piantadosi et al. 2011). Alternatively, perhaps rate of speech is constrained as there …

中文翻译：

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概述：辩论环境对语言的影响

如果语言确实进化了，那么它们必须显示出进化系统的三个关键方面：特征的变异、这些特征的继承以及这些特征的差异生存——即选择（Lewontin 1970）。我们知道语言各不相同（否则语言类型学和社会语言学领域会很无聊）。我们知道，变异是通过语言社区传递的，并从母语遗传给它的女儿（否则历史语言学同样会很无聊）。然而，是否选择语言特征则不太清楚（Ramsey 和 De Block 2016）。也不清楚选择可能在哪里起作用（Dediu 等人，2013 年）。尽管存在这些问题，但在语言学文献中已经提出了许多可能的选择性效应候选者。选择可能在言语行为的层面上运作。例如，使用的词项越多，它们随着时间的推移就越稳定，这可能与频率相关选择一致（Pagel et al. 2007; Calude and Pagel 2011），而这些更频繁词的长度似乎与频率相关的选择一致（Pagel et al. 2007; Calude and Pagel 2011）更短以提高沟通效率（Piantadosi 等人，2011 年）。或者，也许语速受到限制，因为......