The Handbook of Language Emergence

This comprehensive exposition of the emergentist paradigm reflects the shifting landscape of linguistic theory, and provides advanced students and researchers with the most up-to-date research in our understanding of language emergence. 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, operating across widely divergent time scales. This handbook is the most in-depth and inclusive attempt yet made to bring together studies from the most prominent advocates of emergentism.

Phenomena ranging from syntax and typology to language learning, and processing,  to sociolinguistics and computational modeling are  explored with reference to the competing forces that shape the emergence of language across nano and intergenerational timescales. The contributors each address key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, making this volume the most rigorous examination of emergentist linguistic theory ever published.