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 emergentismFocuses on the ways in which the learning, processing, and structure of language emerge from a competing set of cognitive, communicative, and biological constraintsExamines forces on widely divergent timescales, from instantaneous neurolinguistic processing to historical changes and language evolutionAddresses key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, making this handbook the most rigorous examination of emergentist linguistic theory ever