1 Language as an emergent system.

Human language is a biological system: All humans are neurologically predisposed to acquire whatever language they are exposed to in their early years. Language itself is socially transmitted. A rich interaction between genetic (brain) structures and social behavior gives rise to what linguists call a “grammar”, which is the knowledge (part innate, part learned) of language complexity found inside the brain of every speaker. The task of Linguistics, properly a sub-field of Neurobiology in our opinion, is to describe and explain the complex patterns found in all languages. This apparent complexity, with its simpler underlying components, make language an emergent system par excellence. The paradigm of emergence set forth in this volume is very well-suited to the study of Linguistic patterns on at least two distinct (though interrelated) levels. While we believe there is no exact diagnostic that can characterize an emergent system, there is a consensus that emergence manifests itself as complexity at a global level that is not locally specified or only very weakly so!. There is also a ‘surprise ’ factor when complex behavior is not what we expect, given our (limited) knowledge of the underlying components