Emergent Grammar is a project that promotes a framework for human language which aligns communicative interaction, social indexicality, social conventions, and other aspects in a way that lends more dynamicity to grammatical and lexical structure. The main claim is that language is inherently variable and context-dependent – i.e., variability and situation-specific conditions are seen as central to linguistic explanations rather than marginal factors that impact language only exceptionally. Such a fluid view on language and on the linguistic sign doesn’t defy the systematicity of human language, but the notion of ‘system’ must be thought of as a dynamic, open, adaptive and emergent system. Speaking is not ‘using’ a pre-existing toolkit, but the systematicity results from people interacting with each other.

One of the main concepts on which the framework is based is the notion of ‘recontextualization’ which I proposed in von Mengden & Kuhle 2020. It describes how individual speakers reemploy linguistic material (expressions, constructions) by transferring it from one communicative task to the next. Recontextualization is thus the linguistic equivalent to observations made in cultural evolution (‘bricolage’) or in non-human behavior (flexible transfer). Recontextualization therefore is a link between language-related cognitive activity and human (or non-human) cognition other interactive phenomena.