In my dissertation, “Preferential attachment and the emergence of the German periphrastic constructions with werden”, I study language changes within a complex network framework. Specifically, my research focuses on the emergence of constructions such as the passive and future, using a large corpus of  Middle High German  and Early New High German texts. I analyze the elements with which werden was combined and represented such combinations as syntactic networks. I applied then measurements such as degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and eigenvector centrality, and found evidence of one of the most common processes involved in the growth of complex networks, namely preferential attachment. I argue that the emergence of the werden periphrastic constructions in syntactic networks follow the same dynamics of the growth and development of new links in other extra-linguistic networks, showing similarities with ecological webs, genomes, brain networks, and the internet.