New Affordances for Language: Distributed, Dynamical, and Dialogical Resources

Abstract

In introducing the articles of this special issue on language, which grew out of the conference “Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter) Action,” we take the opportunity to reflect on fundamental aspects of speaking and listening to others that are often overlooked. The act of conversing is marked by context sensitivity, interdependency, impredicativity, irreversibility, and responsibility, among other things. Language entails real work: it involves real movements in physical, social, and moral orders that are distributed across a wide array of spatial-temporal scales (e.g., evolutionary, historical); yet there is a dimension of play “at work” as well. These workings of language are embedded and embodied in distributed ways that reveal the fundamentally social, public nature of the activity. It is a form of coaction that is dialogical and dynamic in ways that may point to deeper understandings of what it means for perception to be direct and for action to be specific. Language locates us.

Notes

¹Readers should know that it was the first author who noted these relationships and who suggested their being discussed in this introduction. This is not a case of the second author making self-serving claims to being prescient in hindsight.

²The reader is invited to consult both Fowler's (2010) challenges to Port's refutation of the idea of discrete phonological language forms being known by individual members of language communities and Port's (2010) rejoinder.

³We have omitted from this quotation some intervening misapprehensions of claims of the motor theory of speech perception and direct realism in which they are proposed to suggest that symbols are somehow involved in perception of speech.