Introduction: Theoretical Prerequisites

Abstract

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.