Hello,
For the revision of a monograph on grammatical change (to appear with Oxford UP), I was invited to add a chapter on parallels between natural evolution and linguistic change. One of my most essential claims as far as grammatical constructions go, is that the decline and eventual loss of a construction may depend primarily on global changes in the grammatical system, rather than on the outcome of its competition with a functionally overlapping construction (as e.g. I'll do it vs. I'm gonna do it). Overall, I argue that competition as a mechanism of change is overrated in linguistics and that it is often only part of a linguistic item's uses that compete with part of another item's uses, making it hard to explain why either one would disappear entirely.
In the biological literature I stumbled across the following quote which immediately appealed to me in this respect: “A realistic view of interspecific competition must acknowledge that it often proceeds not in isolation, but under the influence of, and within the constraints of, a patchy, impermanent or unpredictable world”. (Townsend et al. 2003. Essentials of ecology, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 201.)
What I would like to know, then, is:
1. Do you know any case studies (preferably recent & of high quality) where interspecific competition and changes in the environment/ecosystem are weighed against each other in the observation of the decline of the population of a certain species vs. the thriving/stability of a second one? (E.g., what I already found: 2010. Species interactions in a changing environment: elevated CO2 alters the ecological and potential evolutionary consequences of competition. http://www.cedarcreek.umn.edu/biblio/fulltext/Evolutionary%20Ecology%20Research%202010%20Lau.pdf))
2. Are there influential handbooks/articles of a more general nature where similar views (catchy quotes) are expressed?
3. What is currently the dominant view on the respective weight of environment/ecosystem vs. interspecific competition (or the interaction of the two); is this an important debate or not (currently or in the past)?
All help will be greatly appreciated!
Regards,
Peter Petré (http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/ling/fest/members/peter-petre/)
