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Applied Linguistics 2006 27(4):691-716; doi:10.1093/applin/aml033
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© Oxford University Press 2006

Language Origin from an Emergentist Perspective

Jinyun Ke and John H. Holland

University of Michigan, USA


  Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a surge of interest in the origin of language across a wide range of disciplines. Emergentism provides a new perspective to integrate investigations from different areas of study. This paper discusses how the study of language acquisition can contribute to the inquiry, in particular when computer modeling is adopted as the research methodology. An agent-based model is described as an illustration, which simulates how word order in a language could have emerged at the very beginning of language origin. Two important features of emergence, heterogeneity and nonlinearity, are demonstrated in the model, and their implications for applied linguistics are discussed.


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