An alternative viewpoint eliminates structure as a serious basis for linguistics. Those who hold this viewpoint worry that structural linguists abstract only a trivial part of the communicative process and reify it, thereby making language an autonomous entity. This perspective sees grammar as an evolving response to an environment or to discourse. . To the emergent theorist there are no biological foundations to language except the ability to make vocalizations. Any appearance of structure in grammar arises from certain regularities in the reference to previous utterances.
Language is in constant flux as it is used in practice.
In this view structure does not precede actual individual uses of the language system but is constantly being renegotiated by individual users of the language system. Modifications found to be necessary in the real-time use of the language are added to the cumulative structure of the system in a constant process of feedback. Thus grammars, like language, are emergent. Emergent theory inverts the structural linguistic notion of the synchronic language in which each component can be seen simultaneously and studied independently as it interacts with other elements in a holistic fashion. Emergent theory sees structure as fragmented and distributed.