2019.09.18 Prof. Chu-Ren Huang

Chair Professor

Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Profile

Chinese as a Complex Self-adaptive System: Some Preliminary Studies

Complexity and complex systems have been central to the study of topics ranging from galaxies to genes. Language as a complex system has in turn been at the fore-front of language sciences (Beckner et al. 2009). I will start with the multiple meanings of the term ‘language’ to suggest that this fact could reflect the nature of language as a complex self-adaptive system. That is, as such a complex system at all levels, language can be either aggregated and/or partitioned and will result in another complex selfadaptive system. Based on this, I introduce some studies from my group to capture the overall systemic characteristics of the complex systems, in terms of both the power function relation between units and constituents captured by the Menzerath Law and the small world properties of phonological neighbourhood. The last part of the talk will focus on my speculation of the nature of adaptation by introducing the emerging paradigm/perspective of multi-brain frame of reference (Hasson et al. 2012) and our Conversational Brains (CoBra) EU2020 project. In sum, I argue that self-adaptation Is motivated most strongly by the need to align and exchange information with another brain. The participation and need for interaction with other brains makes the system both dynamic and complex. And the dynamic complexity accounts for the seeming dilemma of constant changes and variations in language vs. the unchanging identities of different languages. This conclusion also points to a fundamental fallacy of current theories studying language from a single brain perspective with static parochial features in terms of taking a wholistic view of modeling the dynamics and complexity of the system.