Language dynamics. Tra linguistica e teoria della complessità

Natural languages ​​are among the most challenging objects of investigation for the scholar. One of the aspects that has always attracted the most attention is their dynamic character (language dynamics), or mutability. This is a problem from the general perspective of culture, it is for speakers, it is for scholars, divided between those who focus on invariance and those who focus on variance. Linguistic mutability can be analyzed from two perspectives: evolution (language evolution) and change (language change). We speak of phylogeny of language if we consider the linguistic development of the genus homo. We speak of ontogeny of language, if we consider the development of the language of the single specimen of homo sapiens. Linguistic change, on the other hand, manifests itself as the variation over time of an element or function of a part of a language. If we describe the sum of all the changes that occur in the individual parts of a linguistic system in a given period of time, then we speak of glottogenesis. The problematic aspect also has to do with the question of whether it is appropriate to keep the two perspectives separate. However, there is a line of research that instead goes towards unification. These are the coevolutionary models, which are in tune with Haspelmath, who distinguishes between the "evolution of linguistics" and the "evolution of languages", but recalls that the emergence of the ability to speak cannot be distinguished from the cultural evolution of languages. In this perspective, the questions of the most recent research on the evolution of language overlap with the five fundamental problems of the science of linguistic change. Phylogeny, ontogeny and glottogenesis can therefore be seen as manifestations of a single dynamic process of non-linear changes that concern the general (languages ​​or the genus Homo) and the particular (single individuals of the genus Homo). This work goes in this direction, asking how language dynamics can meet complexity theory.