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Adaptation is a crucial part of history throughout civilization. Adaptation is also key to changing cultural opinions, fashions, and language. Even within generation of speakers and individual speakers undergo changes in language use, vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax. The variation that is natural to language occurs because it is a complex system. If a language is living and in current use, then it is always adapting and emerging according to the properties of a complex system.

Language is a complex system, and displays each property of a complex system. Components are realizations of linguistic features as they are deployed by human agents, speakers. Activity consists of our conversations and writing Exchange is our comparison of different components used by different speakers/writers in different conversations/writings Reinforcement is the changing likelihood of components occurring in future cases of situations for conversations and writing Emergence is configuration of components, whether words, pronunciations, or constructions, that comes to occur in the local communities, regional and social, and in circumstances for speech and writing.

Complex systems are present throughout nature. Some examples and areas of study include the ocean-land borders, fractal behavior in trees, leaves, plants, and also ants, ant behavior, and ant-hills. Climate change and weather events are at times chaotic systems and sometimes complex systems. Human behavior, including language, is another natural example of a complex system. Complex Systems in Nature

Discourse analysis is a subfield of linguistics that is focused on conversation and the interaction of speech and large amounts of language. This is quite different from a focus on formalized, abstract grammars like generative syntax. Complexity science can provide more options in the researcher’s toolbox for analyzing language in use in terms of both the fractal properties of grammar, showing prevalent usage and also how this works in terms of the discourse analyst view of language as a social practice.

Economic markets are an example of a complex system, in which are variety of interdependent parts engage in interaction. This yields emergent patterns. They are also exceptionally dynamic, the involved data unfolds and evolves quickly. In addition to this, self-similarity occurs across different scales or levels of economic markets, which is another notable characteristic of a complex system. This is a quality that researchers can utilize to enhance whatever aspect of financial markets they are working on.

Fractals are a major part of the underlying nature of complexity science. They occur because of the interaction emerging in any given complex system. Fractals are self-similar at every level; some examples are tree branches, leaf structures, the retina, and coastlines. Fractals are also part of the complex system of language, in every aspect of language in the form of nonlinear asymptotic hyperbolic curves. Fractals

Language as a Complex System: Emergence & the History of English English’s unique history as a language, and the way it is currently spoken today is a result of the interaction in the complex system of language. English has changed dramatically since it was first used and all along the way to now. Many words from English are examples of borrowings from French, Old Norse, and Germanic languages. Even now it is changing.

Below are additional articles, websites, and books for further reading and exploration of Complex Systems and the Humanities. Articles and Books Burkette, Allison. 2012. Parlor Talk: Complexity from a Historical Perspective. American Speech. 87.4 Burkette, Allison. 2016. Language and Material Culture. John Benjamins Studies in Language and Culture. Burkette, Allison, and William A. Kretzschmar. 2018. Exploring Linguistic Science: Language Use, Complexity, and Interaction. Cambridge University Press. Ellis, Nick. 2015. Cognitive and Social Aspects of Learning from Usage In T.

Sociolinguistics, especially within North America tends to focus on describing language variation in terms of different rule systems, often of a specific speech community. Labov pioneered this work specifically as system approaches to both external and internal mechanisms affecting and motivating language change (Principles of Linguistic Change, 1994, 2001). The emphasis is placed on local settings for language, which is essentially a complex system. Understanding local settings through complexity enables thorough and scientific assessments of language data at hand.

Most scholars from North America who study syntax adhere to Universal Grammar and generativism, first promoted by linguist Noam Chomsky. Universal Grammar argues that language is innate rather than learned. Generative grammarians work to list out the most succinct set of rules possible for producing grammatical structures in a given language, while structuralists prefer including a wider set of rules for anything that could be considered grammatical by a native speaker of a language.