This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It
discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling and provides clues on how the
close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for
science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to
various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact language change
diachronic linguistics and the potential enhancement of classical approaches to historical
linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics biology and agent systems theory.
It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to
integrate social structures in the evolution of language and how this can give rise to a new
way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally it explores applications for discourse analysis
semantics and cognition.
