Abstract :
It seems that three essential conditions have to be met for language to work the way it does: Speakers have to use a given language for communication.Each individual speaker must have a mental representation of the language.The members of a given speech community must share and adhere to the linguistic conventions that constitute the language. In usage-based and complex-adaptive dynamic models of language, it is assumed that individual knowledge and collective conventions emerge from communication and are continually sustained by it.In my talk I will present the outlines of the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, a usage-based complex-adaptive dynamic model of language that I have developed over the past 10 years. My aim is to explain how exactly communication, cognition and convention interact and how this interaction brings about and sustains linguistic structure, change and variation. I will discuss implications of the model for various issues of concern to the field of applied linguistics.
