B. Macwhinney — The Handbook of Language Emergence

Автор: B. Macwhinney
Название книги: The Handbook of Language Emergence
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Лингвистика
Страницы: 654
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This authoritative handbook explores the latest integrated theory for understanding human language, offering the most inclusive text yet published on the rapidly evolving emergentist paradigm.

Brings together an international team of contributors, including the most prominent advocates of linguistic emergentism
Focuses on the ways in which the learning, processing, and structure of language emerge from a competing set of cognitive, communicative, and biological constraints
Examines forces on widely divergent timescales, from instantaneous neurolinguistic processing to historical changes and language evolution
Addresses key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, making this handbook the most rigorous examination of emergentist linguistic theory ever

This handbook presents 27 chapters covering a wide variety of topics in the study of
human language. The core idea uniting all of this work is that alternative levels of linguistic
structure emerge frompatterns of usage across time. Emergentist analyses of this
type are grounded on three core frameworks deriving from adaptive systems theory.
The first is the Darwinian theory of evolution based on proliferation, competition, and
selection. The second is the analysis of complex systems as structured hierarchically into
levels, such that the properties and structures of higher levels of complexity are not fully
predictable from properties on lower levels. The third is the theory of timeframes that
holds that processes on different levels are linked to very different timescales that mesh
together through competition in the present. These three frameworks are not unique to
linguistic analysis. In fact, they are fundamental to scientific investigation of all physical,
biological, and social processes.
This introduction contains five parts. First, we will describe how these three frameworks
apply to the study of language. Second, we will consider how the overall emergentist
framework relates to more specific explanatory linguistic frameworks, such as
functionalism, cognitive linguistics, connectionism, embodied cognition, usage-based
linguistics, and competition theory. Third, we will examine some of the specific emergentist
mechanisms postulated by these various formulations. Fourth, we will contrast
the program of Emergentism with the program of Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1965)
in terms of their respective analyses of ten core issues. Finally, we will examine how
each of the 27 chapters in this volume contributes to our understanding of the overall
emergentist program.