Computational construction grammar and constructional change

Abstract

After several decades in scientific purgatory, language evolution has reclaimed its place as one of the most important branches in linguistics, leading to high-profile publications in journals such as Science and Nature (e.g. Dunn et al. 2011, 2005; Gray and Atkinson 2003). This renewed interest is to a large extent driven by the development of quantitative methods that allow researchers to make powerful empirical observations about language change (Hall and Klein 2010; Heggarty et al. 2010; Kondrak 2002; Steiner et al. 2011; Wichmann et al. 2010). However, despite more sophisticated methods for retrieving which changes have taken place, the field is lacking methods for explaining how and why these changes come about, and what those changes can teach us about human cognition. This special issue aims to shed new light on these questions by exploring two important proposals: (i) language is a complex adaptive system (Steels 2000; Beckner