Editorial: This Special Issue

Abstract

The four precursors to the current Special Issue examined language, social interaction and text in different societal domains—classrooms (Applied Linguistics 23:3, 2002), workplaces (Applied Linguistics 24:3, 2003), legal contexts (Applied Linguistics 25:4, 2004), and other environments that foreground the role of language in social life. Last year's Special Issue specifically highlighted the defining perspective of applied linguistics as a discipline, that is to explore language-related problems in the real world (Applied Linguistics 26:4, 2005). From its predecessors’ emphasis on domains and objects of investigation, this Special Issue shifts to an exploration of language learning, use, and change from a shared conceptual perspective. As guest editors Nick Ellis and Diane Larsen-Freeman note in their introduction, emergentism views language—as it does other complex objects—as non-finite, non-linear, and self-organizing. True to its most fundamental tenet, emergentism recognizes language as a dynamic system whose interacting properties are not reducible to the sum of their parts. Because an emergentist perspective is domain-neutral, it is capable of shedding light on such diverse areas of language study as syntax and discourse, the use of metaphors in situated talk (Cameron and Deignan, this issue), and the origins of language (Ke and Holland, this issue). But perhaps most compelling for many readers of Applied Linguistics, emergentism's view on language learning offers a coherent solution to a number of theoretical conundrums in language development, such as the divergence of developmental trajectories at group and individual levels (Larsen-Freeman, this issue), the multidirectionality of lexical transfer (Meara, this issue), or what is called in generative theory the poverty of stimulus (underdetermination) problem (Mellow, this issue).