Annalisa Baicchi

Complex Adaptive Systems: The Case of Language

This chapter outlines current perspectives on language conceived of as a ‘Complex Adaptive System’. A complex system is composed of diverse and autonomous parts that are interrelated and interdependent. With a view to circumscribing research on grammar under the scope of Complexity Theories, the notion of system is introduced along with core concepts in Ecological Linguistics, such as dynamic systems, emergentism and affordance, interacting agents and environment, adaptation and variation. Systems thinking has been a central issue in many diverse disciplines since Whitehead’s Process Philosophy. A general science of organized complexity turned into a robust General Systems Theory thanks to Von Bertalanffy, Weiss, Boulding and Prigogine who, among others, offered detailed studies on emergentism in both the natural and the social sciences. In the 1980s the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, elaborated a theoretical framework for complex systems that represents a solid basis for an entirely new approach to the study of organizational behaviours between the entities constituting different types of systems. Complexity research shed new light onto the study of language as a Complex Adaptive System that links the two realms of nature and culture. Language is a system composed of many speaking agents that linguistically interact in their speech communities and overtime their communicative interactions produce emergent changes at many different levels of the linguistic system. As it happens in the natural world where small organisms reorganise themselves into more complex systems, a form of ‘emergentism’ occurs in grammar, which is not an inventory of steady rules, but an ever-changing by-product of communication, whereby systematic linguistic patterns are the outcome of a process of ‘sedimentation’ of frequently used forms. Language is thus always provisional, subject to negotiation and change, an open-ended set of forms that actual use constantly restructures and resemanticizes, and it is therefore constantly far from completeness and stabilization.

Ception and the Discrepancy Between Vision and Language

This chapter deals with the sensory perception of vision and investigates the correlation between body, mind, and language in a corpus of English written descriptions of pictorial material. Expressions such as The track plunges down the mountain or The biceps muscle goes from the shoulder to the elbow represent a specific type of event verbalisation, which Talmy (1983) named ‘Fictive Motion’, whereby a degree of discrepancy exists between the visual experience of a stationary scene (track, muscle) and its linguistic description as a motion event (to plunge, to go). The production of such sentences requires the percipient/describer to mentally simulate motion along a path or linear configuration, although the subject noun phrase is a stationary entity. The frameworks of Cognitive Semantics (Talmy 2000) and Embodiment (Gallese and Lakoff 2005; Boulenger et al. 2008) along with the cognitively-oriented version of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006; Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Uson 2008) are the main theoretical approaches brought together (1) to address the category of General Fictivity and the Embodied Cognition Theory, (2) to analyse the syntactic patterns of Fictive Motion expressions, (3) to show the inconsistency of Matlock’s (2004) “binary typology”, and (4) to pin down the internal and external constraints that licence the wording of nonveridical motion events.

Construction Grammar(s)

This fourth chapter offers an overview of the basic tenets of Construction Grammar(s), which postulates that the basic unit of grammar is the construction, a free-standing theoretical assembly of one form and one meaning or function. Constructions are assumed to be stored as symbolic units alongside lexical items. Phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical information, representing the structural pole of the construction, combines with semantic, pragmatic and discursive properties, i.e., the functional pole. Construction Grammar(s) rejects the separation between lexis and grammar because the knowledge of the lexicon and the knowledge of syntactic rules is not clear-cut, as idioms well exemplify, and it instead proposes a constructional continuum, which enhances a description of the idiosyncratic behaviour of idiomatic expressions ranging from fixed strings to more flexible stretches of language, and may accommodate different words and different grammatical patterns. Construction Grammar(s) encompasses a range of models, defined a ‘family of Construction Grammars’, which share some basic assumptions; at the same time, each of them contributes peculiarities about specific linguistic phenomena. This chapter is meant to outline the most representative constructional models following a chronological path, and to pin down similarities and differences across them. The Lexical Constructional Model will be singled out as a more complete theoretical framework of meaning construction able to account for all levels of linguistic description: it is in fact able to provide full treatment of argument structure constructions at the level of core grammar as well as of implicature, illocutions and discourse at the higher levels of its overall constructional architecture.

Sentence-Sorting Experiment

This chapter tackles the issue of constructional priming and shows how L1 and L2 speakers achieve sentence interpretation. The pioneering psycholinguistic experiment conducted by Healy and Miller showed that native speakers of English relied on the matrix verb to determine sentence meaning. However, Bencini and Goldberg undermined such a claim: they used an improved version of the sentence-sorting protocol designed by Healy and Miller and demonstrated that native speakers rely on argument structure constructions as language categories to process and interpret sentence meaning. With a view to ascertaining whether Italian university learners of English were influenced by the matrix verb or by syntactic configurations in their interpretation of sentences, Bencini and Goldberg’s experiment has been replicated with bilingual subjects: the results offer insightful cross-linguistic observations following from two typologically unrelated languages.

Sentence-Elicitation Experiment

The experiment described in this chapter aims to provide evidence of the centrality of semantic roles in structural priming in Italian university learners of English. It takes the veil from the empirical research in a SLA context reported in the previous chapter. Those experimental results showed that Italian subjects have recourse to constructional configurations when instructed to pile English sentences on the basis of the overall sentence meaning. Given the evidence that also L2 learners possess constructional configurations in their mind, a second research question has been posited with the aim of checking whether, and to what extent, syntactic priming and constructions have a part in the language learning process of Italian university students of English. The empirical studies conducted with native speakers of American English by Bock and Loebell (Cognition 35:1–39, 1990) and Hare and Goldberg (Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society:208–211, 1999) represent our point of departure for investigating priming effects in L2 learners.

Sentence-Completion Experiment

Results from the two experiments described in the preceding chapters made further investigation needed in order to test whether constructional priming in Italian L2 learners of English occurred also in a written context. The experiment that Pickering and Branigan conducted in 1998 represents the point of departure. They asked their participants, who were native speakers of English, to complete sentence fragments, which could be completed as a double-object construction or as a prepositional dative construction. Their results showed that syntactic priming occurred during written language production even when the structure was not repeated between prime and target fragments and the matrix verb was either the same or different; yet, when the verb was repeated, stronger syntactic priming occurred. Comparable results have been obtained from the experiment conducted in the Italian second language context, which is further evidence of the ontological status of constructions also in the mind of L2 learners.

The Complex Dynamics of Meaning Construction

In consonance with the assumption that language is a complex adaptive system, the third chapter summarizes the complex dynamics of meaning construction in current theoretical frameworks. Language is definable as an embodied, semiotic, and symbolic instrument, a meaning-making system composed of many interconnected levels that speakers use in order to communicate and interact. This definition follows from a conception of meaning construction which is far from the old-fashioned idea of meaning as an algorithmic computation of the compositional interplay between linguistic units; meaning is instead a by-far more complex process which is not limited to language but permeates any form of human interaction, due to the fact that it correlates mind, body and context within the complex dynamic adaptive system of enaction. Meaning construction is also the outcome of the intertwining between linguistic knowledge and encyclopaedic knowledge: language users internalize linguistic knowledge on the basis of entrenchment through symbolic activity with the meaning of words and constructions, and combines it with encyclopaedic knowledge. Meaning construction is an elaborate process that draws on both types of knowledge, as well as on all available resources (linguistic, cognitive, or contextual) for employing such knowledge. Meaning does not reside in linguistic units, but it is constructed in the minds of the language users. Consequently, the patterns of linguistic structure are underspecified prompts that require conceptual completion through metonymic processes in any act of meaning construction. Language exhibits only partial compositionality and linguistic units are simple points of access to more elaborate conceptual structures. Embodied Semantics goes a step further and postulates that concepts acquire meaning when they are associated with their neural representations in the brain, representations that are produced by way of the same neural apparatus that activates in the planning and perception of real referents for linguistically perceived concepts. The semantic content expressed by language correlates to brain responses involving bodily effectors. Semantic information is grounded in the action-perception system of the human brain, and meaning is embodied in our mind through the sensori-motor system that guides our interaction with the world.

Introduction: Theoretical Prerequisites

Current research of meaning construction conceives of language as a ‘Complex Adaptive System’ and claims that some basic criteria regulating the behaviour of those systems can be employed to understand and describe linguistic behaviour. This chapter introduces the prerequisite theoretical notions that backbone the research questions discussed in the volume. First, the Complex Adaptive System Approach is explained in detail and its main steps of development are illustrated as they occurred interdisciplinarily in those fields such as biology, philosophy, physiology, the natural and social sciences. The focus in then placed upon language as is conceived of in Ecological Educational Linguistics: speakers are equated to system agents interacting in the communicative environment where human cognition and language encounter; taking advantage of affordances, salience and variation, the speakers’ linguistic behaviours give rise to forms of emergentism in grammar. Second, meaning construction is defined as the outcome of complex synergistic dynamics across language levels and between neurophysiological and cognitive abilities: concepts acquire meaning when they are associated with their neural representations, which occur through recourse to the same neural apparatus that activates in the planning of real referents for linguistically perceived concepts. Meaning construction theories subsume the language faculty under a more general framework of conceptual principles that handle all human cognitive abilities. Finally, constructionist theories of grammar are discussed and similarities and differences across nine Construction Grammar models are pinned down. They converge on the crucial notion of construction as the basic unit of grammar, a free-standing theoretical assembly of one form and one meaning or function.