Language Development Hinges on Communication: An Emergentist Perspective
Studies on the human language system have brought to the fore two key aspects. First, the prime function of language is communication. Second, language exists in the social world. According to the emergentist perspective, during the language learning process communication plays the central role in the emergence of a language system in a learner. Thus, the grammatical structures emerge through discourse as a result of the interaction between the learner and the environment. This article explicates, from the emergentist perspective, the vital role of communication, particularly authentic communication. It also sums up the pedagogical implications of this understanding.
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.
Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax
presents a groundbreaking approach to the study of sentence formation.
Building on the emergentist thesis that the structure and use of
language is shaped by more basic, non-linguistic forces—rather than by
an innate Universal Grammar—William O'Grady shows how the defining
properties of various core syntactic phenomena (phrase structure,
co-reference, control, agreement, contraction, and extraction) follow
from the operation of a linear, efficiency-driven processor. This in
turn leads to a compelling new view of sentence formation that subsumes
syntactic theory into the theory of sentence processing, eliminating
grammar in the traditional sense from the study of the language
faculty. With this text, O'Grady advances a growing body
of literature on emergentist approaches to language, and situates this
work in a broader picture that also includes attention to key issues in
the study of language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and
agrammaticism. This book constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in syntax
and its place in the larger enterprise of cognitive science. The primary objective of this book is to advance the emergentist thesis
by applying it to a difficult and important set of problems that arise
in the syntax of natural language. The particular idea that I explore
is that the defining properties of many important syntactic phenomena arise from the operation of a
general efficiency-driven processor rather than from autonomous
grammatical principles. As I will try to explain in much more detail in
the pages that follow, this sort of approach points toward a possible
reduction of the theory of sentence structure to the theory of sentence
processing.
