Welcome to Exploring Linguistic Science! This textbook aims to introduce students to the scientific study of language, using the basic principles of complexity theory. The application of complexity to language highlights the fact that language is an ever-changing, ever-varied product of human behavior. We will begin with an introduction to the new science of complexity and its application to language. As we continue through the different areas of language study (i.e. how linguists talk about the sounds, meaning, and structure of languages) and the different ways that we experience language as speakers (in terms of cognition and the social aspects of language use), we address many theoretical perspectives. But we always come back to complexity.

As you read these chapters, note that key terms used in the study of language are found within each chapter in bold, with their definitions or explanations close by. These words can also be found in a list at the end of each chapter as Keywords. In terms of what you can do as you move through your exploration of linguistic science, we encourage you to dive into the Applications at the end of each chapter. We believe the best way to learn about language (and about the different approaches to the study of language) is by doing; therefore, at the close of each chapter, the reader can find a set of Applications that ask you to consider big questions and/or evaluate linguistic data in light of that chapter’s discussion. Unlike traditional textbook “exercises,” there isn’t necessarily a “right answer” or “wrong answer” for these Applications; our goal is to get you to think, discuss, and explore the concepts and ideas (and data!) that we present. Following the chapter Applications, you can find a short list of relevant Further Reading, annotated to give you an idea of how these works relate to the topic of the chapter. Our hope is that, by engaging with the material in this book, the reader becomes aware of the academic dialog that takes place between purveyors of different perspectives on the study of language and, through that awareness, continues as an educated consumer, able to think critically and independently about what language is and how it works.

The key challenge for students and instructors in Exploring Linguistic Science will be the incorporation of complex systems into the mainstream coverage of linguistics. If you are not aware of this, you might think that the title refers to linguistic science as something fixed that everybody agrees about. Not so much. This book is always talking about “emergence,” which is the key term from the study of complex systems. The science of complexity describes how massive numbers of random interactions can give rise to order – regularities that “emerge” from the interactions without specific causes. Complexity science is currently useful in physics, genetics, evolutionary biology, and economics, among fields that study large numbers of elements that interact with each other, but it is also a perfect fit for language. When we think of people as talkers, we can ask what happens when they mutually influence each other. The drive of twentieth-century linguistics to make the study of language more scientific as a logical system has never been as successful as linguists might have hoped. Speech, language in use, is first and foremost not a logical system but the output of a complex system, as demonstrated from first principles and copious evidence in Kretzschmar’s The Linguistics of Speech (Cambridge, 2009) and Language and Complex Systems (Cambridge, 2015), and Burkette’s Language and Material Culture (Benjamins, 2015). Emergence in languages continues wherever people are talking and writing, in every locality and in every kind of conversation or text. Thus in this book, while the text will talk about the common terms and concepts of contemporary language study and linguistics, the underlying story will be about continual emergence and re-emergence of lexical, phonological, grammatical, and discourse forms out of the interaction of speakers and the contingencies of their history.