ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the possibilities presented by the emergent grammar postulate for the discipline of linguistics; there are more general implications that take the whole question of the communicative basis of language beyond the narrower concerns of linguistics. It presents some points of comparison between the two different perspectives to be known as the a-priori grammar perspective (APG) and the emergent grammar perspective (EG). The chapter argues the language that normally assumed by linguists and psychologists. Language is seen as something that is indeterminate, constantly under construction, and structured only by emergent patterns that come and go as the forms that carry them are found useful for their speakers. There are no discretely bounded 'modules' of syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, and pragmatics, but only contextually conditioned ways of saying things. They are handed by people's personal and institutional biographies, as they are handed to those from whom people heard them.
