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

如果你花一些时间观察超市的结账队伍，你很快就会发现，每一条队伍中排队的人数大致相同。在高峰期，你可能会发现有五六个人在排队等着结账。 在较慢的时间，排队只有两个或三个等待。 这种模式没有固定的规则。 相反，“结构”是从购物者和超市经理的目标和行为的其他基本事实中出现的。这种通过约束满足而涌现的简单想法目前被认知科学和神经科学的许多领域援引为中心解释机制。目前的建议侧重于探索这一概念在语言学习和语言处理研究中的应用。 涌现主义解释了各种各样的语言现象，包括音段目录、重音模式、音位限制、形态音位变化、词汇结构、洋泾浜化、第二语言学习、历史变化、在线短语附加和修辞结构。 已经被用来分析这些形式的涌现性质的形式主义包括连接主义网络，动态系统理论，神经竞争模型，分类系统，生产系统架构，贝叶斯模型，最优理论，原则和参数理论，语料库研究和话语语境分析。值得注意的是，像功能主义语言学和原则参数理论这样明显不同的方法，似乎在学习和处理的涌现主义解释方面有一些共同点。 本提案的具体目的是通过举办一次研讨会，让来自这些不同观点的研究人员聚集在一起，分享他们的发现、想法、愿望和关切，来促进我们对这些关键问题的理解。 特别是，研讨会的目的是：1。注意到“涌现”的概念是语言学和心理语言学中一些最令人兴奋的新工作的主题。 更充分地探讨如何使涌现主义观点为旧问题提供真正的新答案，而不是重新包装旧答案，3。考虑如何将孤立的突现主义账户链接到一个更大的突现主义概念框架中;探讨如何在其中一个新兴的框架可能有助于克服或抵消某些悬而未决的问题，从早期的语言和心理语言学理论的发展。

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.