language as a cultural emergent property
Language as emergent in the individual
Some recent work on language acquisition challenges nativist claims for a large degree of 'hard-wiring' to create the language faculty, pro posing instead that the biological endowment of the linguistic capacity and the individual child's experience are interactively engaged in the process. Alternative approaches
... emphasize the ways in which the formal structures of language emerge from the interaction of social patterns, patterns implicit in the input, and pressures arising from the biology of the cognitive system. The emergentist approach to language acquisition views language as a structure arising from interacting constraints.
(MacWhinney 1998: 200; see also MacWhinney 1999; Seidenberg 1997)
Where direct empirical evidence is not available, computer modelling is used to simulate the ways in which children might learn language (e.g. Steels 2000). Research involving simulations which 'teach' computers 'languages' has given rise to some counter-intuitive explanations for it. Experimenters have found that the imposition of constraints in their modelling equivalent to maturational limitations seems to enhance the ability of the program to compute 'linguistic' input. Thus Elman (1999) suggests that 'the ability which children have for learning language derives not from a special mechanism which they possess and adults do not, but just the reverse. It is children's lack of resources which enables them to learn languages fluently' (p.16). In other words, this kind of research (which, we should point out, is not central to our concerns, but illustrates interesting parallel arguments) suggests that language in the individual may be the emergent outcome of the engagement of the embodied human being with physical and cultural resources operating within particular constraints, including temporal ones. (See also Kramsch 2002a.)
In applied linguistics, these propositions have begun to be discussed in the context of second language acquisition, notably by Larsen-Freeman (1997, 2002), who concludes that language meets the criteria for complexity. It is, she argues, 'composed of many different subsystems: phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics', and 'the subsystems are interdependent. ... [T]he behavior of the whole emerges out of the interaction of the subsystems' (1997: 149). Larsen-Freeman also proposes that second language acquisition is a complex process, and that the interaction between different aspects of it (the Ll, personality, age, etc.) may be of greater significance than anyone factor in isolation. Her third proposition is that the interlanguage system, constructed by learners of a second language in the context of their facility with their first, is self-organizing, and what learners do provides evidence of the feedback and adaptability which are also characteristics of complex systems. We think these lines of speculation are likely to prove fruitful, and we will explore their implications for research in applied linguistics. Of greater interest here, however, is the issue of emergence in the context of socially situated language use.
