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