Acknowledgements
This book, the sequel to my 2009 book The Linguistics of Speech, began before the first book was even published. Chapter 1 began as a talk at a 2008 conference organized by Manfred Krug, himself one of the earliest to write about string frequency. While The Linguistics of Speech laid the foundations for the study of speech as a complex system, the chapters in this book apply complex systems to many fields within linguistics. I am grateful to the audiences of the many papers on applications in different fields that I prepared and improved over time. These audiences, some at professional meetings and many at universities where I was invited to speak, were always enthusiastic, always full of questions about how complexity science might help them to understand better the linguistic phenomena in which they were particularly interested.
I would also like to thank Jane Willson, whose generosity to the University of Georgia created the professorship I hold. Resources from the professorship allowed me to keep up a busy schedule of presentations in order to bring the idea of complex systems to new audiences of linguists and people in digital humanities. Without the kind of assistance provided by Jane and her late husband Harry, using resources from their Sunnyland Farms business, new ideas would have a much harder time getting out to be considered in the marketplace of ideas. They were thus benefactors not only of the university but of science more generally. I will continue to give pecans from Sunnyland Farms to friends, and I remain proud, Jane, to be your nutty professor.
Finally, I would like to thank my predecessors on the Linguistic Atlas Project for their friendship and support over many years. Raven and Virginia McDavid brought me into that fold when I was just a graduate student, and Lee Pederson has shared ideas with me for nearly thirty years. Without the Atlas, of course, I would be unlikely to have seen the distributional properties that prove speech to be a complex system. Pederson and the McDavids kept Atlas survey research alive while many others pursued sociolinguistics instead, and so preserved the chance for an independent viewpoint.
