Embodied, Embedded Language Use

Abstract

Language use has a public face that is as important to study as the private faces under intensive psycholinguistic study. In the domain of phonology, public use of speech must meet an interpersonal “parity” constraint if it is to serve to communicate. That is, spoken language forms must reliably be identified by listeners. To that end, language forms are embodied, at the lowest level of description, as phonetic gestures of the vocal tract that lawfully structure informational media such as air and light. Over time, under the parity constraint, sound inventories emerge over communicative exchanges that have the property of sufficient identifiability.

Communicative activities involve more than vocal tract actions. Talkers gesture and use facial expressions and eye gaze to communicate. Listeners embody their language understandings, exhibiting dispositions to behave in ways related to language understanding. Moreover, linguistic interchanges are embedded in the larger context of language use. Talkers recruit the environment in their communicative activities, for example, in using deictic points. Moreover, in using language as a “coordination device,” interlocutors mutually entrain.

Notes

¹For Liberman and colleagues (e.g., 1967), perception of speech gestures reflected the special nature of speech perception. In their view, in auditory perception generally, the proximal acoustic signal, not its distal mechanical cause, is perceived. The view I present here is quite different: perceivers perceive the world of distal objects and events generally. Speech is not special in that respect.

²The visual modality is not the only modality besides audition that provides listeners with information for gestures (e.g., Fowler & Dekle, 1991; Gick & Derrick, 2009).