A growing number of linguistic attempts to explain how languages change use cultural-evolutionary models involving selection or drift. Developmental constraints and biases, which take center stage in evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo, seem to be absent within this framework, even though linguistics is home to numerous notions of constraint. In this paper, we show how these evo-devo concepts could be applied to linguistic change and why they should. This requires some conceptual groundwork, due to important differences between linguistic and biotic evolution. In biological evolution, development generates the organism's variable traits on which selection and drift act. In linguistic evolution by analogy, we say development generates the linguistic variants on which selection and drift can act. “Linguistic development” then picks out how individual speakers produce and comprehend language. It involves much more than just learning. Using this broad notion of development, we distinguish between different types of bias that could operate in the processes of linguistic innovation and transmission, which correspond to genetic mutation and biological reproduction, respectively. Having thus sharpened our conceptual toolbox, we then reanalyze two well-documented cases of linguistic change and show that, in both these cases, linguists have only considered Neo-Darwinian evolutionary explanations, falsely deploying an exclusive disjunction of selection and drift. We show that there is at least a third relevant alternative in these examples, namely developmental constraint or bias in the sense we explicate here.

越来越多的语言学尝试使用涉及选择或漂移的文化进化模型来解释语言如何变化。发育限制和偏见在进化发育生物学或 evo-devo 中占据中心位置，在这个框架中似乎不存在，尽管语言学是许多约束概念的所在地。在本文中，我们展示了如何将这些 evo-devo 概念应用于语言变化以及为什么它们应该如此。由于语言进化和生物进化之间的重要差异，这需要一些概念基础。在生物进化中，发育产生了生物体的可变特征，选择和漂移作用于这些特征。在语言进化中，我们说发展产生了语言变体，选择和漂移可以作用于这些变体。然后，“语言发展”挑选出个体说话者如何产生和理解语言。它涉及的不仅仅是学习。使用这个广泛的发展概念，我们区分了在语言创新和传播过程中可能起作用的不同类型的偏见，它们分别对应于基因突变和生物繁殖。因此，在磨砺了我们的概念工具箱之后，我们重新分析了两个有据可查的语言变化案例，并表明，在这两个案例中，语言学家都只考虑了新达尔文主义的进化论解释，错误地部署了选择和漂移的排他性分离。我们表明，在这些例子中至少还有第三个相关的替代方案，即我们在这里解释的意义上的发展约束或偏见。