Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new
ideas, meet new people, and experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individual …

Like an increasing number of linguists and other scholars especially interested in the
evolution and/or the ontogenetic development of language, the author claims that languages …

The author justifies the title of this chapter by offering a general approach to the perspective
of complexity and introducing the wide range of language used in connection with …

1.1 Aims For nearly hundred years, researchers have noticed how language ubiquitously
follows certain mathematical properties. These properties differ from linguistic universals that …

In May 1984 the Swedish Council for Scientific Research convened a small group of
investigators at the scientific research station at Abisko, Sweden, for the purpose of …

My primary aim in this chapter is to be provocative, hoping to arouse further discussion of
concepts and positions that deserve more attention than they have received either in the …

Over the past two decades, studies of the phylogenetic emergence of language have
typically focused on grammatical characteristics, especially those that distinguish modern …

A feature of human creativity is the ability to take a subset of existing items (eg objects,
ideas, or techniques) and combine them in various ways to give rise to new items, which, in …

We present an agent-based model of innovation processes, based upon a theory of
innovation by Lane and Maxfield. The theory inspires and constrains the features of the …

While the field of variationist sociolinguistics has advanced rapidly since Labov (1966), it
remains the case that a socially informed theory of language change continues to be …