L’Albert Bastardas i Boadas, Catedràtic de Sociolingüística i d’Ecologia i Política Lingüístiques al Departament de Lingüística General de la Universitat de Barcelona, acaba de publicar ‘Restricted’ and ‘General’ Complexity Perspectives on Social Bilingualisation and Language Shift Processes al llibre Complexity Applications in Language and Communication Sciences editat Massip Bonet, Bel-Enguix, & Bastardas-Boada i publicat a la prestigiosa editorial Springer Nature.
Abstract
Historical processes exert an influence on the current state and evolu-tion of situations of language contact, brought to bear from different domains: theeconomic and the political, the ideological and group identities, geo-demographics,and the habits of inter-group use, among others. Clearly, this kind of phenomenonrequires study from a complexical and holistic perspective in order to accommo-date the variety of factors that belong to different levels and that interrelate withone another in the evolving dynamic of human languaging. The need in my viewis for the restricted and general complexity approaches to come to a meeting of the minds, and take steps toward a mutual integration based on the acceptance of the shortcomings of each approach, achieving progress through a non-contradictorycomplementarity of perspectives. It must be conceded that the practical and method-ological applications of basic complexical ideas need to be developed much fartherin order to apply them to specific research. At the same time, the limits of complexadaptive systems as computational strategies must be accepted in the pursuit of abetter understanding of the dynamic and evolutionary processes typical of humanbeings. New tools for the conception, apprehension and treatment of the data willneed to be devised to complement existing ones and to enable us to make head way toward practices that better fit complexical perspectives. It seems obvious that human complexics must be seen as multi-methodological, insofar as necessary combining quantitative-computation methodologies and more qualitative methodologies aimed at understanding the historical mental and emotional world of people.
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