This authoritative handbook explores the latest integrated theory for understanding human language, offering the most inclusive text yet published on the rapidly evolving emergentist paradigm.

• Brings together an international team of contributors, including the most prominent advocates of linguistic emergentism
• Focuses on the ways in which the learning, processing, and structure of language emerge from a competing set of cognitive, communicative, and biological constraints
• Examines forces on widely divergent timescales, from instantaneous neurolinguistic processing to historical changes and language evolution
• Addresses key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, making this handbook the most rigorous examination of emergentist linguistic theory ever

Brian MacWhinney is Professor of Psychology, Computational Linguistics, and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He has developed the Competition Model of first- and second-language acquisition, which shows how learning and processing emerge from competing patterns across divergent language levels and timeframes. He is the author of The CHILDES project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd Edition (2000) and editor of Mechanisms of Language Acquisition (1987) and The Emergence of Language (1999). He is also the creator of the TalkBank system for spoken language data-sharing.

William O'Grady is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has undertaken extensive research in syntax and language acquisition, focusing on the idea that linguistic phenomena are best understood in terms of the interaction of more basic factors and forces, especially processing cost. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Syntactic Carpentry (2005), in which he first set out his ideas on the centrality of the processor to the study of syntax and language acquisition.