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Dynamics of Language

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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

Definition of the Subject

Language has been a topic of great interest at least since the Greek philosophers. Clearly speech isone of the most sophisticated and complex of human capabilities and has remained a major puzzlethrough the centuries. Complex systems promise to provide analytical tools that will help breakthrough some of the mystery. From this perspective, it appears that there are three complex systemsrelevant to speech. The first is natural selection, the slow influences on the gene pool of thespecies that give us whatever innate skills we need to learn at least one language. However, we willhave nothing further to say about this issue here since the time scale involved is so long relativeto human history. The remaining two complex systems are highly relevant. They are, first, thelanguage itself, viewed here as a particular type of social institution, a set of cultural practicesthat present the language learner with a broad range of linguistic materials with which...

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Abbreviations

Phone :

A ‘minimal’ speech sound whether consonant or vowel , the unit that is represented bya single letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet . A phone is invariant across syllablepositions, neighboring context, speaking rate, speaker, etc.

Phoneme :

An abstract speech sound unit in a particular language, typically consisting ofseveral phone types that are treated as the same (despite any differences) by speakers of thelanguage. Thus, English /t/ (slashes indicate use of a symbol as a phoneme, not a phone) includesboth an allophone (a particular phoneme variant) that is aspirated (as in the word take), another allophone that is a glottal stop (in the usual American pronunciation of cotton) and another that is a flap or tap (as in butter).

Phonology :

The branch of linguistics that studies the nature of the speech sound patterns ofparticular languages, such as the inventory of phonemes, the patterns of syllable construction,stress patterns, etc. Thus for the English word stops, the st- is the onset ofthe syllable, the vowel is the nucleus and the coda is the –ps. Phonology should beconcerned with intonation and speech timing as well, although these are not traditional interests.

Meter :

An underlying temporal pattern of a fixed number of ‘beats’ within a larger cycle.Thus, there are meters consisting of 2 beats per measure, 3 beats or 4, 5 or 6. Speech oftenaligns itself with such patterns, e. g., in chant or song, by locating vowel onsets close in timeto the pulse of each cycle.

Orthography :

The set of conventions about how to write a language. This includes conventionsabout which letters are used and what sounds they represent in the ideal case. The conventionsalso include standard spellings for every word, plus conventions of capitalization, punctuation,the definition of a sentence and so forth.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics/Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    Robert Port

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  1. RAMTECH LIMITED, 122 Escalle Lane, Larkspur, CA, 94939, USA

    Robert A. Meyers Ph. D. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

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Port, R. (2009). Dynamics of Language . In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_143

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