CO-OPTING EXAPTATION IN A THEORY OF LANGUAGE CHANGE 1 Co-opting exaptation in a theory of language change * Livio Gaeta Department of Humanistic Studies University of Turin livio.gaeta@unito.it Abstract In contrast with exaptation, which has been widely discussed over the last years, its conceptual counterpart in evolutionary biology, namely adaptation, does not seem to play any significant role in the actual linguistic debate. In the paper, the attempt is made to integrate this conceptual pair into our linguistic epistemology basically extending Lindblom’s (1998) model of adaptive changes beyond the domain of phonological change. In this light, adaptive changes are characterized as oriented and responding to a general design of economy and plasticity, while exaptive changes are normally non-oriented and result from the refunctionalization of (partially pre-adapted) linguistic material. keywords: language change / adaptation / exaptation / refunctionalization 1. Introduction According to Lass (1990, 1997), who has made the term popular in linguistics, two properties should be attributed to exaptation (see the survey in Simon 2010). First, functional renewal, corresponding to its current employment in evolutionary biology, consists in the reuse of already extant grammatical material for new purposes. This is not simply to be understood In: Muriel Norde & Freek Van de Velde (eds.), Exaptation in language change, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, to appear.