Fields, Waves, and Particles: Finding Common Ground in Understanding Language as a Public Activity

Abstract

One of the most common activities in which humans engage is talking with each other, yet scientists reflecting on that activity have found it difficult to engage. Some have denied the possibility of scientific accounts of public language, but a broad array of theoretical, empirical, and methodological developments in the past 2 decades have challenged that pessimism. Interdisciplinary efforts are beginning to provide new possibilities for studying ordinary conversations as dynamic, embodied, dialogical activities that function in crucial ways in collaborative tasks. This special issue, which grew out of a conference, “Finding Common Ground: Social, Ecological, and Cognitive Perspectives on Language Use,” explores a small sample of these efforts. These articles, and others that are forthcoming, indicate something of the range and complexity of issues facing researchers, and they also illustrate the diversity and coherence required to address them successfully. Some of the themes that emerge are those of synergy, complementarity, conventions, affordances, idioms, specificity, and complexity matching. In each case, the arguments and evidence generate new questions and pose new possibilities.

Acknowledgments

We thank all those who participated in the conference “Finding Common Ground: Social, Ecological, and Cognitive Perspectives on Language Use” and especially the contributors to this special issue.

Notes

¹ Pike's 1959/1972 article was not a one-off bit of whimsy. He later published detailed studies making use of his field, wave, particle scheme, including “Grammar as Wave” (1967); “Beyond the Sentence” (1964); “Nucleation” (1960), in which he compared the initial difficulty of language learning with the formation and growth of crystals; and “Matrix Permutation as a Heuristic Device in the Analysis of the Bimoba Verb” (1968), which explores a field approach to grammar. All of these are reprinted in Brend (1972).

² We are not sure that Baggs is right about Golonka and others who have talked of conventions and constraints as having regressed into dualism. What may be central to the disagreement between Baggs and Golonka is their differing ways of understanding affordances.

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of the article and this special issue was supported by National Science Foundation grant SES-1352717 to Bert Hodges and Carol Fowler.