Complex systems in aggregated variation analyses
William A. Kretzschmar · 2014
In an influential 1987 paper, Paul Hopper described "emergent grammar" as "always in a process but never arriving." This wonderful phrase suggests that we can conceive of grammar as a rational object, a structure, but one which is never instantiated in the speech that generates it. Subsequently, Hopper became associated with "grammaticalization" (Hopper and Traugott 1993) and is cited regularly in new "usage-based" grammars such as construction grammar (e.g. Bybee 2001, Tomasello 2003, Goldberg 2006, Ellis and Larsen Freeman 2009). It turns out that complex systems, a growing movement in modern sciences such as ecology and genetics, is an excellent fit for "emergent grammar" as Hopper originally described it. Complex systems in language (Kretzschmar 2009) show non-linear frequency distributions of feature variants, possess scaling properties, and above all display emergent order. Unfortunately, usage-based grammars assume that the linguistic structure of a language should be identified with the order that emerges from complex systems, when in fact Hopper was right all along. This paper will consider the current usage-based literature, and show how one might use the non-linear distributions and the scaling property of complex systems to create grammars and typologies that more accurately reflect the emergence that comes from language in use.