Concluding Remarks

Abstract

This final chapter outlines some conclusive observations and discusses further the import of constructional priming as a clear example of language as a complex adaptive system. In any system, agents and processes interact at and across layers of its organization, thus giving rise to unpredictable outcomes. In their complex and erratic interactional behaviours, the agents prompt the whole system to go through spontaneous self-organization, which leads to emergent patterned outputs. In turn, the system, being itself part of a broader environment, adapts to the changes of the environment, and, as a result of the novel adaptive behaviour of the system, the environment evolves in a never-ending cycle of changes. Likewise, language is a complex adaptive system where the speakers’ joint discursive actions remould its internal configuration in dynamic and unpredictable ways into a by-product of communication emerging from competing social, cognitive and physical factors. Language is a meaning-making instrument that emerges from the constant interplay between the discursive context, the physical body and the mind within the complex dynamic system of enaction, a form of coupling where the agents and the environment are not separated but they mutually influence and determine each other. Meaning construction is motivated by well-rooted and recurring patterns of embodied experience in the form of image-schematic structures, and neuroscience research has proved that it involves partial re-enactment of the sensori-motor states. Hence language patterns are entrenched neuro-motor routines following from the high-frequent usage in communicative events: repetition of linguistic expressions produce bio-chemical mental traces that engender entrenched behaviours, which recent usage-based theories of grammar ascribe to the ontological status of constructions that, being systematically associated with unitary mental representations, consist of nodes of entrenched patterns along degrees of complexity and schematicity in the linguistic system. In the light of recent research results in neurolinguistics and banking on evidence from psycholinguistic experiments with priming methodologies, language acquisition can be equated to the learning of constructions not only in L1 speakers but also in L2 learners.

If the units of language are constructions, then language acquisition is the learning of constructions.

Ellis (2013, p. 368)