Complexity Applications in Language and Communication Sciences

This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally, it explores applications for discourse analysis, semantics and cognition.

Àngels Massip-Bonet is full professor in the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics at the University of Barcelona. She has promoted together with Dr. Bastardas-Boada the creation of a transdisciplinary research group  (Sociocomplexitat) at the University of Barcelona, currently part of the University of Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS). She has published several books and articles dealing with topics related to linguistic variation, history of language, dialectology and sociolinguistics, in the frame of complexity. She is researcher in Catalan Dialectology (main researcher of the project –promoted together with Dr. Veny- "Diatopia and linguistic change. Scripta and dialectal variation" FFI2016-80482-P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (Scripta).