Language Variation and Complex Systems

Abstract

Modern notions of language and linguistics embody a paradox, that language appears to be systematic and yet, at the same time, we know it to be variable. The paradox results when we attempt to apply rule-bound systems, the “axiom of categoricity,” to language in use, to speech as people actually use it. Taken together, the basic elements of speech correspond to what has been called a “complex system” in sciences ranging from physics to ecology to economics. Order emerges from such systems by means of self-organization, but the order that arises from speech is not the same as what linguists study as grammars. In both texts and regional/social groups, the frequency distribution of features occurs as the same curve: an asymptotic hyperbolic curve, or “A-curve.” Speakers perceive what is “normal” for regional/social groups and for text types according to the A-curve: the most frequent variants are perceived as “normal,” less frequent variants are perceived as “different,” and because particular variants are more or less frequent among different groups of people or types of discourse, the variants come to mark identity of the groups or types by means of these perceptions. Our perceptions of the whole range of “normal” variants, at any level of scale, create “observational artifacts.” That is, the grammars we describe are actually observational artifacts that come from our perceptions of the available variants, at one point in time and for a particular group of speakers, as mediated by the A-curve. Thus, the regularities we observe in speech are not the product of speakers' prior agreement on a systematic grammar, but rather what we perceive as a linguistic system is a consequence of how we perceive our language behavior.

Preferências dos ouvintes em relação ao sotaque regional em contexto formal e informal de comunicação

“…speaker from short passages of speech, and may even indicate the region of origin and other social categories (occupation, educational and economic levels), although they have more ability to recognize variants used in their area and surrounding regions [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] . This capability reflects the fact that listeners would have mental representations of the linguistic variants and the different categories associated with them.…”

Advances in Dialectometry

“…Whereas in one dialect one variant may be dominant, this does not mean that it is the only form being used. Kretzschmar (2012) argues that speech is a complex dynamical system (also see Kretzschmar 2010) and that the distribution of variants of a linguistic variable always shows a nonlinear distribution (i.e., an A-curve, or Zipf curve); only a few variants are highly frequent, and there are many infrequent variants. Recently, Kretzschmar et al (2013) introduced the Gini coefficient (from the field of economics) as a way to identify the shape of the A-curve.…”

Computer Simulation of Dialect Feature Diffusion

“…Complex systems, as described in physics, evolutionary biology, and many other sciences, are made up of massive numbers of components continually interacting with one another, and this results in self-organization and emergent order. For speech (as described in Kretzschmar, 2009Kretzschmar, , 2010, the randomly interacting ''components'' are all of the different variant realizations of linguistic features as they are deployed by human agents, speakers. These ''variants'' might be different pronunciations, or different words for the same thing, or different ways of saying or writing the same thingreally any aspect of speech that is recognizable for itself and therefore countable.…”