Symposium on Emergentism, Pittsburgh, PA, May 29-31, 1997

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If you spend some time watching the checkout lines at a supermarket, you quickly find that the number of people queued up in each line is roughly the same. At peak times, you may find five or six people in a line waiting to check out. At slower times, lines have only two or three waiting. There is no fixed rule governing this pattern. Instead, the "structure" emerges from other basic facts about the goals and behavior of shoppers and supermarket managers. This simple idea of emergence through constraint satisfaction is currently being invoked as a central explanatory mechanism in many areas of cognitive science and neuroscience. The current proposal focuses on an exploration of the use of this concept in the study of language learning and language processing. Emergentist accounts have been formulated for a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, ranging from segmental inventories, stress patterns, phonotactic constraints, morphophonological alternations, lexical structures, pidginization, second language learning, historical change, on-line phrase attachment, and rhetorical structures. Formalisms that have been used to analyze the emergent nature of these forms include connectionist networks, dynamic systems theory, neuronal competition models, classifier systems, production-system architectures, Bayesian models, Optimality Theory, principles-and-parameters theory, corpora studies, and discourse-contextual analysis. It is remarkable that approaches as apparently divergent as functionalist linguistics and principles-and-parameters theory seem to nonetheless share some common ground in terms of a mutual interest in emergentist accounts of both learning and processing. The specific aim of this proposal is to advance our understanding of these pivotal issues by hosting a symposium in which researchers from these various perspectives come together to share their findings, ideas, aspirations, and concerns. In particular, the symposium is designed to: 1. draw att ention to the notion of "emergence" as a theme underlying some of the most exciting new work in linguistics and psycholinguistics, 2. explore more fully the ways in which emergentist views provide truly new answers to old questions, as opposed to repackagings of old answers, 3. consider ways in which isolated emergentist accounts can be linked into a larger emergentist conceptual framework, and 4. examine ways in which an emergentist framework may serve to overcome or neutralize certain unresolved issues remaining from earlier periods in the development of linguistic and psycholinguistic theory.