STUDYING LANGUAGE AS A COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM

Abstract

In the past thirty years, a variety of approaches to linguistic analysis have emerged under the name of “functionalism,” including construction grammar, cognitive linguistics, typology and universals research, the usage-based model, and evolutionary approaches to language change. All of these approaches have shed new light of the relationship between grammatical form and meaning in language. In the twenty-first century, these seemingly diverse approaches to language can be integrated into the study of language as a complex adaptive system.