A Report on the Workshop on Complexity in Language: Developmental and Evolutionary Perspectives

1. Overview Complexity can be viewed as " the property of a real world system that is manifest in the inability of any one formalism being adequate to capture all its properties " (Mikulecky 2001: 344). In the past few decades, this notion has raised significant interest in many disciplines, from physics to biology, mathematics, artificial intelligence, etc. more recently, this cross-disciplinary endeavor has reached linguistics, and scholars of various theoretical backgrounds have been keen to test its relevance to language (e. it is still unclear what complexity actually means in linguistics, what yardstick can be used to measure complexity, especially in comparing language varieties, and what conceptions are relevant to accounts of structures and functions of languages. For the purposes of fostering a dialog between scholars of diverse but complementary backgrounds on these topics, Salikoko S. Mufwene, then a fellow at the Collegium de Lyon, in collaboration with researchers at the Laboratoire " Dynamique du Langage " at the Université de Lyon, convened a workshop on Complexity in Language: Developmental and Evolutionary Perspectives on 23–24 May 2011. Participants included linguists, anthropologists, statistical physicists (mod-eling communal aspects of language), computer scientists, and mathematicians. Most of them agree on seeing language as a complex adaptive system as described by Steels (2000) and Beckner et al. (2009). According to this view, a linguistic system involves a number of interacting units and modules that generate structural and interactional complexity on several levels. Meanwhile, these scholars, based on their expertise, have distinct research foci on linguistic complexity. The workshop consisted of 14 talks touching upon various topics related to linguistic complexity, such as (i) where linguistic complexity lies, (ii) how it emerges and evolves ontogenetically or phylogenetically, and (iii) how it is measured using