Download or read book Language is a complex adaptive system Explorations and evidence written by Kristine Lund and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2022-10-22 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ASLAN labex - Advanced studies on language complexity - brings together a unique set of expertise and varied points of view on language. In this volume, we employ three main sections showcasing diverse empirical work to illustrate how language within human interaction is a complex and adaptive system. The first section – epistemological views on complexity – pleads for epistemological plurality, an end to dichotomies, and proposes different ways to connect and translate between frameworks. The second section – complexity, pragmatics and discourse – focuses on discourse practices at different levels of description. Other semiotic systems, in addition to language are mobilized, but also interlocutors’ perception, memory and understanding of culture. The third section – complexity, interaction, and multimodality – employs different disciplinary frameworks to weave between micro, meso, and macro levels of analyses. Our specific contributions include adding elements to and extending the field of application of the models proposed by others through new examples of emergence, interplay of heterogeneous elements, intrinsic diversity, feedback, novelty, self-organization, adaptation, multi-dimensionality, indeterminism, and collective control with distributed emergence. Finally, we argue for a change in vantage point regarding the search for linguistic universals.

Download or read book Language is a complex adaptive system written by Kristine Lund and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ASLAN labex - Advanced studies on language complexity - brings together a unique set of expertise and varied points of view on language. In this volume, we employ three main sections showcasing diverse empirical work to illustrate how language within human interaction is a complex and adaptive system. The first section — epistemological views on complexity — pleads for epistemological plurality, an end to dichotomies, and proposes different ways to connect and translate between frameworks. The second section — complexity, pragmatics and discourse — focuses on discourse practices at different levels of description. Other semiotic systems, in addition to language are mobilized, but also interlocutors’ perception, memory and understanding of culture. The third section — complexity, interaction, and multimodality — employs different disciplinary frameworks to weave between micro, meso, and macro levels of analyses. Our specific contributions include adding elements to and extending the field of application of the models proposed by others through new examples of emergence, interplay of heterogeneous elements, intrinsic diversity, feedback, novelty, self-organization, adaptation, multi-dimensionality, indeterminism, and collective control with distributed emergence. Finally, we argue for a change in vantage point regarding the search for linguistic universals.

Download or read book Grammatical systems without language borders written by Heike Wiese and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current research in grammatical analysis and sociolinguistics points to two core characteristics of language that seem incommensurable at first sight: (1) research on linguistic structure indicates internal organisation and coherence, and the workings and interactions of distinct grammatical systems, but (2) sociolinguistic research suggests that language borders and bound “languages” are counterfactual social constructs that cannot capture the diversity and fluidity of actual language use. This seems to constitute something like a “quantum-linguistic” paradox: language systems aren’t real (they are just ideological constructions), but at the same time, they are a reflection of actual structure. This book shows how this paradox can be resolved through an architecture that allows for grammatical systems without presupposing language borders: this architecture puts communicative situations, rather than languages, at the core of linguistic systematicity, while named languages are captured as optional sociolinguistic indices. The approach builds on insights from “free-range” language, a metaphor for language in settings that are less confined by monoglossic ideologies. The author looks at four different kinds of settings: urban markets, heritage language settings, multiethnic adolescent peer-groups, and digital social media. Central lessons to be learned from such free-range language settings are: (1) communicative situations support linguistic differentiation and can thus be the basis for fluid registers; (2) grammatical systematicity is grounded in communicative situations and does not require bound languages and linguistic borders; (3) named “languages” can emerge as social indices signalling belonging, but this is an optional, not a necessary development.

Download or read book Sound structure and sound change written by Rebecca L. Morley and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-07-17 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research in linguistics, as in most other scientific domains, is usually approached in a modular way – narrowing the domain of inquiry in order to allow for increased depth of study. This is necessary and productive for a topic as wide-ranging and complex as human language. However, precisely because language is a complex system, tied to perception, learning, memory, and social organization, the assumption of modularity can also be an obstacle to understanding language at a deeper level. This book examines the consequences of enforcing non-modularity along two dimensions: the temporal, and the cognitive. Along the temporal dimension, synchronic and diachronic domains are linked by the requirement that sound changes must lead to viable, stable language states. Along the cognitive dimension, sound change and variation are linked to speech perception and production by requiring non-trivial transformations between acoustic and articulatory representations. The methodological focus of this work is on computational modeling. By formalising and implementing theoretical accounts, modeling can expose theoretical gaps and covert assumptions. To do so, it is necessary to formally assess the functional equivalence of specific implementational choices, as well as their mapping to theoretical structures. This book applies this analytic approach to a series of implemented models of sound change. As theoretical inconsistencies are discovered, possible solutions are proposed, incrementally constructing a set of sufficient properties for a working model. Because internal theoretical consistency is enforced, this model corresponds to an explanatorily adequate theory. And because explicit links between modules are required, this is a theory, not only of sound change, but of many aspects of phonological competence. The book highlights two aspects of modeling work that receive relatively little attention: the formal mapping from model to theory, and the scalability of demonstration models. Focusing on these aspects of modeling makes it clear that any theory of sound change in the specific is impossible without a more general theory of language: of the relationship between perception and production, the relationship between phonetics and phonology, the learning of linguistic units, and the nature of underlying representations. Theories of sound change that do not explicitly address these aspects of language are making tacit, untested assumptions about their properties. Addressing so many aspects of language may seem to complicate the linguist's task. However, as this book shows, it actually helps impose boundary conditions of ecological validity that reduce the theoretical search space.

Download or read book Construction Learning as a Complex Adaptive System written by Annalisa Baicchi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-25 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the current state of the art on Construction Grammar models and usage-based language learning research. It reports on three psycholinguistic experiments conducted with the participation of university-level Italian learners of English, whose second language proficiency corresponds to levels B1 and B2 of the ‘Common European Framework of Reference for Languages’ (CEFR). This empirical research on the role of constructions in the facilitation of language learning contributes to assessing how bilinguals deal with L2 constructions in the light of sentence-sorting, sentence-elicitation, and sentence-completion tasks. Divided into two parts, the book first introduces the main theoretical prerequisites and then reports on the experimental studies. It provides a comprehensive review of the current research in a range of disciplines, including complexity theories, cognitive semantics, construction grammars, usage-based linguistics, and language learning.

Download or read book Explanation in typology written by Karsten Schmidtke-Bode and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ‘target-driven’ by overarching functional-adaptive motivations. On this view, recurrent pathways of reanalysis and grammaticalization can lead to uniform synchronic results, obviating the need to postulate global forces like ambiguity avoidance, processing efficiency or iconicity, especially if there is no evidence for such motivations in the genesis of the respective constructions. On the other hand, the recent typological literature is equally ripe with talk of "complex adaptive systems", "attractor states" and "cross-linguistic convergence". One may wonder, therefore, how much room is left for traditional functional-adaptive forces and how exactly they influence the diachronic trajectories that shape universal distributions. The papers in the present volume are intended to provide an accessible introduction to this debate. Covering theoretical, methodological and empirical facets of the issue at hand, they represent current ways of thinking about the role of diachronic sources in explaining grammatical universals, articulated by seasoned and budding linguists alike.

Download or read book Language as a Complex Adaptive System written by Nick C. Ellis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-12-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores a new approach to studying language as a complex adaptive system, illustrating its commonalities across many areas of language research Brings together a team of leading researchers in linguistics, psychology, and complex systems to discuss the groundbreaking significance of this perspective for their work Illustrates its application across a variety of subfields, including languages usage, language evolution, language structure, and first and second language acquisition "What a breath of fresh air! As interesting a collection of papers as you are likely to find on the evolution, learning, and use of language from the point of view of both cognitive underpinnings and communicative functions." Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Download or read book Human Spoken Interaction as a Complex Adaptive System written by Paul Seedhouse and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Spoken Interaction as a Complex Adaptive System explains how human spoken communication functions, combining two separate complex adaptive systems: the universal 'interaction engine' and language(s), which now number around 7,000. Siegel and Seedhouse offer a comprehensive overview of how the components and processes of the interaction engine work together to enable us to understand each other, whatever the language. Through combining Complexity Science and Conversation Analysis, this book explains how to simultaneously analyse spoken interaction on micro and macro scales. Detailed analyses of L2 learners reveal them to be simultaneously expert in using the interaction engine and inexpert in using the specific language. The study shows that the basic characteristics of the interaction engine are the same as for other life-related complex systems and that it is possible to access the perspectives of participants inside this complex adaptive system as it is evolving.

Download or read book The Dynamics of the Linguistic System written by Hans-Jörg Schmid and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. Schmid argues that linguistic structure is not stable, but continually refreshed by usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. This wide-ranging volume will be of interest to linguists from a wide range of fields.

Download or read book Constructions in Cognitive Contexts written by Franziska Günther and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what ways are language, cognition and perception interrelated? Do they influence each other? This book casts a fresh light on these questions by putting individual speakers’ cognitive contexts, i.e. their usage-preferences and entrenched patterns of linguistic knowledge, into the focus of investigation. It presents findings from original experimental research on spatial language use which indicate that these individual-specific factors indeed play a central role in determining whether or not differences in the current and/or habitual linguistic behaviour of speakers of German and English are systematically correlated with differences in non-linguistic behaviour (visual attention allocation to and memory for spatial referent scenes). These findings form the basis of a new, speaker-focused usage-based model of linguistic relativity, which defines language-perception/cognition effects as a phenomenon which primarily occurs within individual speakers rather than between speakers or speech communities.

Download or read book The Mind The Brain And Complex Adaptive Systems written by Harold J. Morowitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based upon a conference held in May 1993, this book discusses the intersection of neurobiology, cognitive psychology and computational approaches to cognition.

Download or read book Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference Speech and Corpora written by Massimo Pettorino and published by Firenze University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded).

Download or read book An Introduction to Self adaptive Systems written by Danny Weyns and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise and practical introduction to the foundations and engineering principles of self-adaptation Though it has recently gained significant momentum, the topic of self-adaptation remains largely under-addressed in academic and technical literature. This book changes that. Using a systematic and holistic approach, An Introduction to Self-adaptive Systems: A Contemporary Software Engineering Perspective provides readers with an accessible set of basic principles, engineering foundations, and applications of self-adaptation in software-intensive systems. It places self-adaptation in the context of techniques like uncertainty management, feedback control, online reasoning, and machine learning while acknowledging the growing consensus in the software engineering community that self-adaptation will be a crucial enabling feature in tackling the challenges of new, emerging, and future systems. The author combines cutting-edge technical research with basic principles and real-world insights to create a practical and strategically effective guide to self-adaptation. He includes features such as: An analysis of the foundational engineering principles and applications of self-adaptation in different domains, including the Internet-of-Things, cloud computing, and cyber-physical systems End-of-chapter exercises at four different levels of complexity and difficulty An accompanying author-hosted website with slides, selected exercises and solutions, models, and code Perfect for researchers, students, teachers, industry leaders, and practitioners in fields that directly or peripherally involve software engineering, as well as those in academia involved in a class on self-adaptivity, this book belongs on the shelves of anyone with an interest in the future of software and its engineering.

Download or read book Polylogues on The Mental Lexicon written by Gary Libben and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings, the study of the mental lexicon has been at the crossroads of research and scholarship. This volume presents a polylogue--a textual conversation of many voices. It is designed to capture the excitement within the field and generate a deeper understanding of key issues and debates for established researchers, students, and readers interested in language and cognition. The first chapter examines how the mental lexicon itself can be seen as a polylogue. In the following six chapters, authors tackle the fundamental questions concerning future research on lexical representation and processing in an interactive structure that presents new perspectives and captures the excitement of the field. The themes include the value of cross-linguistic megastudies, the nature of meaning, how to capture truly natural language, what can be learned from lexical acquisition, the advantages of a functionalist perspective, and the role of schemas in understanding morphology and the lexicon.

Download or read book Language and Complex Systems written by William A. Kretzschmar (Jr.) and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the relationship between language and complexity.

Download or read book Crossing the Quality Chasm written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-07-19 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

Download or read book Complexity Theory and Language Development written by Lourdes Ortega and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is both a state-of-the-art display of current thinking on second language development as a complex system. It is also a tribute to Diane Larsen-Freeman for her decades of intellectual leadership in the academic disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition. The chapters therein range from theoretical expositions to methodological analyses, pedagogical proposals, and conceptual frameworks for future research. In a balanced and in-depth manner, the authors provide a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of second language development, with a wealth of insights that promise to break the status-quo of current research and take it to exciting new territory. The book will appeal to both seasoned and novice researchers in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, bilingualism, cognitive psychology, and education, as well as to practitioners in second or foreign language teaching of any language.