Language Is a Complex Adaptive System: Position Paper

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Usage‐Based Language: Investigating the Latent Structures That Underpin Acquisition (2013, background): “CAS are characterized by their robustness to different kinds of perturbations and local random variations, by their scale-free properties, and by their structures emerging from the interactions of agents and Language Learning 63:Supp.”
What Do We (Think We) Know About Formulaic Language? An Evaluation of the Current State of Play (2012, methodology): “Beckner et al.’s (2009) position paper on language as a complex adaptive system is heavily influenced by observations directly pertaining to multiword constructions and, thus, formulaic language.”
Pragmatic markers: the missing link between language and Theory of Mind (2020, background): “Agrowing body of work in cognitive science defends that human language is a learned product of cultural evolution, rather than being biologically endowed (Christiansen and Kirby 2003; Beckner et al. 2009; Evans and Levinson 2009; Heyes 2018; Smith 2018).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “This hypothesis figures prominently in many recent theories of language evolution (e.g., Arbib 2005; Beckner et al. 2009; Christiansen & Chater 2008; Hurford 1999; Smith & Kirby 2008; Tomasello 2003; for a review of these theories, see Dediu et al. 2013).”