A short critical review on Evolution of Morphology by Carstairs-McCarthy

In his book, Evolution of Morphology, Carstairs-McCarthy deals with linguistic data, actually every linguist does.

But when he was dealing with the data concerned to the topic, he pretended to set himself as a language user at times, and then he gave a try to explain the phenomena in terms of the language user.

His effort seems to has failed to achieve a relevant result, however, and it's mainly because not a normal language user processes linguistic data like him; not a single language user contrasts, compares, and analyzes his/her own language in such details, and based on such a systematic viewpoint before s/he speaks or after listened.

As he has mentioned in a earlier part of the book, a language is an adaptive being, an evolutionary result. Therefore the compensatory distribution(in his term, synonymy avoidance) of forms and meanings is a result of many potential states which could have emerged in order for adapting itself to the linguistic environment of the history of the language and the linguistic community. 

Synonymy-avoidance expectation might have concerned in forming the current state's language of any language, but, I can say, not that strong way. 

Synonymy-avoidance expectation doesn't matter to the extent that the language user can communicate w/o considerable problem. That's how the adaptation in the sense of Darwin works.

Here is an example: Sociolinguistics distinguishes two different kinds of linguistic communities in terms of the ability for the speakers to refer to sociocultural and conversational contexts to make sure that the communicative comprehension is to be done. So the linguistic communities using that strategy a lot is  high contextual, and the other, low contextual.

As you can infer, it is very possible that high context communities like Korea, Japan, and China, have much more endurance against the synonymy-avoidance expectation.