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Interaction Studies 16:3 (2015), –. doi 10.1075/is.16.3.06cow
issn 1572–0373 / e-issn 1572–0381 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Coordination in language
Temporality and time-ranging
Stephen J. Cowley1, 2 & Sune Vork Steensen2
1e Cognition, Management and Communication Research Cluster, University
of Southern Denmark\ 2Centre for Human Interactivity, Department of
Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark
Temporality underpins how living systems coordinate and function. Unlike
measures that use mathematical conventions, lived temporalities grant
functional cohesion to organisms-in-the-world. In foxtail grasses, for example,
self-maintenance meshes endogenous processes with exogenous rhythms. In
embrained animals, temporalities can contribute to learning. And cowbirds
coordinate in a soundscape that includes conspecics: social learning allows them
to connect copulating with past events such that females exert
‘long-distance’ control over male singing. Using Howard Pattee’s work, we
compare the foxtail’s self-maintenance, gender-based cowbird learning and
how humans manage multi-scalar activity. We argue that, while all living things
coordinate, temporal ranging is typical of vertebrates. As primates, humans
too use temporal ranging – they can draw on social learning, anticipate winter
and manage coordinated action. However language behaviour (or languaging)
grants new control over the scales of time. People connect the impersonal to
lived experience in narratives, as they draw on autobiography and enact cultural
practices. Humans become singular individuals who use temporal experience
to manage aect, relationships, beliefs, ctions, and knowledge. Individual
subjectivity permits collaborative and competitive activity based on linking events
with quite dierent histories. As a result, alone of the vertebrates, we claim that
humans become time-rangers.
Keywords: time; temporality; distributed language; social interaction; ecological
psychology; interactivity
1. Introduction
In this article we argue that temporality is the key to understanding not only
coordination but many other kinds of behaviour. Although our main concern is
with linguistic coordination, we trace temporality to the multiscalar, aperiodic
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Coordination in language
rhythms that living organisms depend on to discern and create structures as
part of a domain of processes and events. While humans also use temporali-
ties to deal with extant structures, they also create artifacts, institutions, social
roles and language. ey become persons who make individual and social use
of temporal resources to shi awareness, draw on the past, and project possible
futures.
In order to survive and reproduce, living systems must connect temporali-
ties that link, above all, a changing environment, genetic factors and the work-
ings of metabolism. Where embrained, creatures can coordinate movements,
learn and use the physical and social aordances of a niche. ey cohere as
living systems whose structures derive from various time-scales. Organism-
environment relations grant functional, temporal cohesion to species, lineages
and individuals. Our focus, however, is on how human beings develop and hone
capacities for controlling how various temporalities mesh in given situations.
Further, we trace strategies based on time-ranging to the human capacity for
language. While functional temporal cohesion uses brains, learning and phe-
nomenology, humans actively reach across multiple timescales and multiple
(at time conicting) causal frames. ey tend to attend to mid-range events
because much of the world happens too fast or too slow for human perception.
For example, while beyond experience, human lives draw on the expansion of
the universe and quantum leaps of electrons. What people experience, and how
they experience, is conditioned by multiple timescales; but experience per se
collapses these into a single enchronic scale (Eneld, 2014). Phenomenology is
therefore insucient to understand human existence even though it is crucial to
understanding how the human life-world can be co-determined by understand-
ing of human existence.
Rather than emphasise phenomenology, we review recent work on time and
temporality in interaction with reference to papers that pursue the links between
cognition, language and time (see, Madsen & Cowley, 2014). Drawing selectively
on this and other literature, we argue that, given how human individuals and
groups wilfully use temporality, persons are aptly called time-rangers. In begin-
ning with temporality, we extend attempts to describe physical changes in time
with the help of dynamical systems theory (or DST) (elen & Smith, 2006; G. C.
Van Orden, Holden, & Turvey, 2003; Guy C Van Orden, Kloos, & Wallot, 2011).
DST champions a concept of timescales or observer-dependent means for regis-
tering dynamics and change. For Van Orden and colleagues, this can be exempli-
ed in relation to catching a bar of soap in the shower: the event “can be described
on many dierent timescales. ese include relatively slow timescales of cultural
change in hygiene […] intermediate timescales of goal-like intentions to shower
[…] as well as the multiple fast timescales of the limb movements that catch the
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Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
soap” (G. C. Van Orden et al., 2003, p. 333). To focus on timescales reduces events
to scales of chronological time. Such a procedure allows the establishment of
facts: using a mathematical basis (Robinson, 2012), it maps observations onto an
equidistant chronology. As such, the theory presupposes, and indeed generates, a
clock-based, chronometric and impartial observer.
In contrast, we emphasise time for the organism which, following Ruhnau
(1997), we call temporality. Crucially, time for the organism is irreducible to time
as lived by the organism; hence, we stress how aperiodic regularities sustain the
living system’s viability. e contrast between time and temporality ts a musi-
cal metaphor: while equidistant, chronometric time resembles a metronome’s
beat, lived time permeates the meandering melodies of polyphonic chorales.
Timescale measurements must be discontinuous because their data points exclude
processes “faster than the pace of data collection” (G. C. Van Orden et al., 2003,
p.338). Incontrast, temporality is evolutionarily, developmentally and historically
continuous and owing: it maps an expanding arc of increasingly rich organism-
environment coordination.
Aer having presented three examples of temporalities in the world of the
living (Section2), we focus on coordination and, specically, how so assem-
bled constraints enable living systems to draw on temporality (Section3). Life
forms are traced to a multi-layered “folding” of time where here-and-now bio-
logical structures result from slow, evolutionary processes that shape organism-
environment lineages. In Section 4, we show how ecological processes of
organism-environment and organism-organism coordination are necessarily
based in the temporal cohesion of biological function. In Section5 we turn to
temporality in time-ranging: living systems integrate past events with the pres-
ent to produce anticipated future outcomes. While simple multicellular beings
exploit time-ranging, vertebrates manage time-ranging both to remain viable
and to strategise. Further, human individuals exploit yet another variety of tem-
porality: they manage their attending as they recall events, evoke history, and
bring forth possible futures. Human vertebrates exploit time-ranging by using
ontogenetic encounters to individuate, develop skills and, thus, personalise
phenomenality. ough drawing on animal bodies that attune to the encoun-
tered world, human coordination takes on a culturally derived aspect that links
norms, language and emotion. In familiar terms, people act to transcend situ-
ated interaction (Linell, 2009). Using language, artifacts and institutions, they
direct each other’s attention, co-construct awareness, enact interindividual rela-
tions and create imaginary world models. ey use social, linguistic and other
non-local resources (Steensen & Cowley, 2010) to connect personal experi-
ences with the impersonal: time-rangers draw on the past and project possible
futures.
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Coordination in language
2. Temporalities in the world of the living
Perhaps observer-independent ‘no time’ exists in the world of physics (Ruhnau,
1997). However, in the world of the living, temporal phenomena are observer-
dependent. While typically described on chronometric scales (e.g. the journey
takes about an hour), no such approach can possibly explain how temporality
contributes to life. Biology links the irreversibility of living to the dynamics of the
environment as it so-assembles timescales. As pointed out by Ruhnau (1997),
temporality pertains to a world that reaches far beyond laws. e emergence of
irreversible living systems gives rise to complex intermeshing between what hap-
pens earlier and later. Surprisingly perhaps, living beings enact many dierent
kinds of temporalities, and in this section we showcase three examples of tempo-
ralities in the world of the living.
e rst example, also discussed by Cowley and Madsen (2014), is the foxtail
plant (the Setaria species-group). As mentioned by Dekker (2003, p. 646), “one of
the most important traits a weedy foxtail possesses […] is the ability to form long-
lived soil seed pools.” Whereas the dormancy (i.e. the capacity for temporarily
suspending growth and minimising metabolism) of many living beings exploits
the annual rhythm of seasons (cf. hibernation and brumation), foxtail seeds can
survive in soil between 10 and 40 years (Dekker, 2003). Not only can a foxtail
suspend germination but the seed remains susceptible to exogenous triggers (e.g.
variations in temperature, moisture, and the gaseous composition of the soil) that
bring the plant ‘back to life’. Remarkably, the dormant seed tracks events that are
likely to benet the lineage. Metabolic and genetic aspects of organic memory
enable the foxtail to assess and manage interaction with its niche. Although the
life-cycle conforms to chronological facts (e.g. likely seed longevity), cellular and
ecological factors suspend and trigger growth. e plant is viable because, without
doing more than function in a harsh climate, it can enact its own temporality.
Our second example is the brown collared American cowbird (Molothrus ater)
(West & King, 1996; White, Gersick, & Snyder-Mackler, 2012). is bird’s song-
learning exploits an unusual mode of gender-based transmission (West & King,
1996). When juvenile males sing, certain bursts of song elicit adult female copula-
tion display. ese synergies prompt young males to incorporate similar passages
into (later) adult song. Further, as shown in experimental work, the same passages
correlate with reproductive success. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that
females from a given region show a kind of aesthetic judgement: they ‘agree’ about
which bursts to favour aer months and years. Further, as established by White
and colleagues (2012), mating success and song-based courtship routines vary
with social complexity: male cowbirds that mature in ‘static’ or unchanging groups
have signicantly lower mating success (an 80 % reduction of copulations per day)
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Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
than males which mature in dynamic groups, i.e. where males are replaced over
time. Not only do individuals depend on social learning but adult behaviour draws
on synergies that link intrinsic motivation, moments of display by female birds
and exposure to rich interaction with other males. In short, cowbird song con-
nects ontogenetic history, social learning and circumstances that elicit appropriate
singing. In that sense, the bird’s behaviour depends on integrating events whose
histories fall onto quite dierent time-scales. e bird links an unusual gender
based form of social learning: unlike the foxtail grass, individual birds exploit a
way of enacting temporalities that depends on social time-ranging.
Our third example includes the human ability to act deliberately. Whereas
cowbird singing is associated with, above all, copulation, humans also sing for aes-
thetic and religious purposes. In the 1630s, when Urban VIII held the papacy, the
Italian composer Gregorio Allegri composed the music for a Psalm which opens:
“Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.” e music of the
Miserere was composed for two choirs (one with ve voices, another with four) in
the Sistine Chapel in Rome (Byram-Wigeld, 1996; Chrissochoidis, 2010). In this
context we attend to the remarkable fact that nine persons can, even today, coor-
dinate their vocal activities in producing the Miserere as part of a social practice
that self-maintains over the centuries. While an important source for this practice
is Gregorio Allegri’s score for the Miserere,1 as Byram-Wigeld (1996, p. 17) points
out, its abbellimenti (or, ornamentations)
come from ornamentation techniques in Renaissance polyphony, and so predate
the work itself! […] such ornaments were not improvisation, as we would use the
term today, but set-pieces which the Sistine Chapel choir learnt by heart, to place
in the music whenever appropriate.
In other words, actual performance links a dynamic interplay between Allegri’s
score from the 1630s, performance practice from the 15th and 16th centuries, and
the activity of nine living beings in the present. In themselves none of the factors
can produce the Miserere: the music depends on skills and rehearsal that allows
individuals to perform as a choir. Experience of the Miserere, and temporality,
bind individuals and history as they ‘represent’ belief in the innite.
Both avian and human singers draw on past experience (e.g. the rote learning
of abbellimenti techniques) during situated activities. However, while cowbirdsrely
wholly on social learning, their Sistine counterparts draw heavily on an individu-
al’s subjective abilities (and, in some cases, beliefs). ough human coordination
1. e philological problems of the score, as evidenced by Byram-Wigfield (1996) is itself an
intricate problem that we will not touch upon here.
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Coordination in language
has a mimetic basis (Donald, 1991) that enables people to learn from each other by
regulating bodily movements (including articulatory actions), the Sistine singers
depend on more than imitation. ey exploit careful and aesthetically managed
meshing of patterns with varied histories. In short, while cowbird time-ranging
arises in a social ecology, the human time-ranger acts wilfully. As persons, indi-
viduals draw on a singular history to manage crucial aspects of experience: they
range in – and across – time-domains.
Taken together, the examples make our point: organisms coordinate each
other and the environment and, in so doing, exploit multiscalar temporality. Not
only does temporality sustain life but, given brains, organisms came to create
modes of time-ranging. In human interaction, routines combine skill, deliberation
and sensitivity to tradition. ere is, we argue, reason to understand coordination
with respect to, not just chronologies, but in relation to the many temporalities
that sustain the living.
3. Coordination with symbolicity
Coordination can be traced to physical laws as exemplied by how, over time, two
pendulums use vibrations to synchronise their swing (Strogatz & Stewart, 1993).
For our purposes, following Turvey (1990), the term is used in relation to its func-
tional value for living systems. Paraphrasing, coordination arises when a multi-
part dynamical system selects relevant degrees of freedom such that it generates an
adaptive structure or perform an adaptive behaviour. On this view, coordination
is ubiquitous among the living: it appears within the cell, between cells, within
and between organs and, of course, as whole organisms—foxtails, cowbirds and
humans—live their environments. How, then, is functional coordination possible?
Let us begin with how a person walks across a rough environment. As rst
grasped within the tradition of functional systems theory (Red’ko, Prokhorov,&
Burtsev, 2004), this ability pertains to, not an environment or the brain, but, how
an embodied brain/embrained body attunes to the detail of its surroundings.
In Nikolay Bernstein’s (1967) terms, dynamical systems select relevant degrees
of freedom and, using the ecological and social setting, bodies come to sustain
adequate behaviour. It is this normative requirement that shapes the coordination
of the living. Even walking uses a selection history: rather than micro-manage
the musculoskeletal system through neural messaging, the brain dampens cer-
tain bodily processes as soon as certain parameters reach functionally dened
limits. is understanding sustains the insight, taken up in enactivist writings,
that sensorimotor activity can be managed by learning that meshes action with
perception. In a recent development of this line of thinking, Anthony Chemero
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Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
(2009) proposes that radical embodied cognitive science develop the hypothesis
that agent-environment interactions sustain all kinds of knowledge. Whatever the
truth of this view, it permits one to regard human social interaction as one kind
of agent-environment coordination. With this in mind, we stress that coordina-
tion enables the foxtail lineage an opportunity to so-assemble the temporalities
needed in an arid environment. Further, in considering the power of functional
temporal cohesion, we generalise to birds, singers, and even human-articial
systems (as in using computers).
Observed systems need not grasp the functionality of coordinating. A fox-
tail no more knows that it is tracking variations in climate than my computer
‘realises’ what I am writing. e relevant temporalities pertain to an organism-
environment system (i.e. a foxtail in a desert setting or a person using a com-
puter). In these cases, conventional measures describe coordination: we classify a
foxtail’s growth or how events exploit computer ‘real-time’. However, clock time
can take on no explanatory role.2 Although dynamical models can describe rel-
evant physical change, they cannot be used to clarify the system’s viability. e
foxtail’s ability to track the weather depends on its lineage’s functional history. Its
growth patterns are partly situated and partly due to evolution. e grass exploits
a regulatory system that connects a multi-cellular history with exogenous factors.
Its function (and switching o) arises as RNA exploits folding to connect with
molecules arising from DNA translation. e resulting dynamics generate pro-
teins through physical constraints that depend on evolutionary history. In paral-
lel, a computer’s programs run, not because of its structures, but as constraints
exert an inuence on the programs, operating systems, and, above all, the human
beings who construe the output. Echoing Pattee (Pattee & Rączaszek-Leonardi,
2012), both kinds of systems exploit a symbolic-dynamic complementarity. Coor-
dination arises, in the one case, as a cell’s RNA structures co-function with DNA
to regulate growth and, in the other, as the workings of soware serve to regulate
the program’s physical properties by virtue of how machine codes and hardware
are implemented.
Temporalities, thus, arise as so-assembled parameters constitute a functional
system. is can be seen, echoing Pattee (with a slight variation), when systems
exploit symbolicity to constrain their own dynamics.3 In this context, symbolicity
2. is contrasts with the two pendulums whose periodicity is, by definition, defined by
temporal equidistance between waves.
3. Pattee prefers to invoke ‘symbols’. We have preferred to write of symbolicity for two
main reasons. First, the claim is not that genetic material consists in symbols (or is sym-
bolic). Rather, the plant’s lineage has given rise to measures that enable the cell to exploit
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Coordination in language 1
applies to both how material DNA constrains all forms of metabolism but also to
other systems of measures that establish organic memories that serve to constrain
dynamics. e selection history of a foxtail lineage establishes non-genetic modes
of self-sustaining in harsh conditions. ey use the environment to ‘predict’ when
it can gain from growth: symbolicity allows measures of plant-environment rela-
tions to serve in restricting degrees of freedom and, thus, driving growth. Its
coordinative capacity is endogenous. In the computer, by contrast, restrictions on
degrees of freedom are exogenous: they depend on the hardware, programs and
human users who interpret output. In Turvey’s (1990) sense, both cases exemplify
coordination where symbolicity constrains dynamics.
e dynamic-symbolic complementarity grants viability to both the foxtail-
in-arid-surroundings and the computer-in-a-social-system. Not only do they
operate in time but, as specied, their so-assembly grants what we have called
functional temporal cohesion. While facts about chronology can describe func-
tion, (e.g., the seed seemed dead for 15 years; the calculation took 4 minutes),
the resulting descriptions throw no light on how systems self-maintain. Organ-
ism-environment dynamics depend on, not memories alone, but how these grant
cohesion to the wider functional system.4 Following Dale, Fusaroli, Duran, and
Richardson (2013); Fusaroli, Rączaszek-Leonardi, and Tylén (2014); Fusaroli and
Tylén (2012) it seems that, like cowbird synergies, language behaviour depends on
a related symbolic-dynamic complementarity. Dialogue connects (among other
things) what we say with how we speak: linguistic embodiment is managed under
verbal constraints (Cowley, 2014). In the terms presented above, symbolicity
develops as people learn to constrain how they speak and act. Mills (2014) shows
the process in an experiment where subjects develop a mode of communication as
they undertake a maze task. Over time, some dyads become ecient users of pro-
cedural conventions. Relevant functional cohesion arises as each orients to both
what happens and how the other acts to give rise to forms of coordination that
symbolicity in the sense that it draws on self-configured measures to manage dynamics that
link RNA folding with the transcribed DNA. In itself, the DNA does nothing—it is purely
inert. Second, on this functional view, symbolicity applies to, not just dynamics within the
cell, but also the processes that occur when a person gets a computer to run a program (on
a device) or in construing a formula that is written in the language of physics (not just the
inscriptions).
. e concept relates to the better known Varelian idea of ‘autonomy’ (Varela, 1991):
Following Collier (2002), cohesion arises as coordination gives rise to viability that, in living
systems, depends on holistic organization of a hierarchy where aspects of lower level pro-
cesses are closed at higher levels. In contrast to autopoietic systems, this closure need never
be complete.
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2 Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
demand no awareness. Without knowing what they are doing, parties use sym-
bolicity or, in a metaphorical way, act as if following rules (Garner, 2014). As each
party coordinates, they take each other’s measure and, by so doing, bring dynam-
ics under emergent forms of control.
e same argument applies to the Sistine singers. eir articulatory ges-
tures are inseparable from how these are felt/perceived. In part, the process is
endogenous: singing is learned. However, as with computers, singers use cultural
history, for instance when an exogenous component appears in abbellimenti and
in vocalising “Miserere mei, Deus…” e dynamics of articulation depend on
so-assembled constraints (symbolicity) that are amenable to rough description
as patterns such as tonality, wordings, and religious practices.
In connecting endogenous and exogenous symbolicity, embrained creatures
use coordination in learning. is applies in the cases of walking, talking or wag-
gling one’s ngers (Kelso, Southard, & Goodman, 1979). In Bernstein’s terms, while
synergies ground endogenous skills, articulatory habits, and sensorimotor actions,
these are extended by historically derived practices such as speaking and making
music. Such skills arise in all human communities, but sociocultural factors ensure
massive variation. In language, as Darwin (1998) saw, far from relying on arbitrary
symbols, speech is half-natural and half-articial: its symbolic-dynamic comple-
mentarity depends on how individual habits (e.g. the lowering of one’s pitch range
when angry) mesh with collectively derived forms of symbolicity (e.g. using pitch
accent, distinguishing/not-distinguishing dark and light ‘l’). Crucially, both indi-
vidual and collective symbolicity serve to regulate talk (“Don’t be angry!” or “are
you from Ireland?”). at is hardly surprising: talk emerges from mother-infant
dynamics as, over time, dyads use local norms to grasp events, objects and situa-
tions. Human ontology is shaped as each party is moved by the movements of the
other. In infancy, inter-aectivity relies on intrinsic motive formation (cf. Trevar-
then & Aitken, 2001); later, however, the perceived becomes highly motivational.
Above all, speech serves to achieve, maintain and clarify opportunities that arise
from a play of joint attention. Various forms of concerted action develop, and,
towards the middle of the second year, infants connect linguistic embodiment with
what they are beginning to hear as wordings. e dynamic-symbolic complemen-
tarity allows them to adopt a language stance (Cowley, 2011e) and, thus, access
a domain of cultural products. Accordingly, being moved by the movements of
others grounds microsociality (e.g. turn-taking), the public display of self (e.g.
attention to face), and features of institutions (e.g. cultures and languages). On this
view, language becomes coordination (based on so-assembled symbolicity) that
arises as parties master skills that depend on talking rather like each other. Living
beings thus sensitise to temporalities that connect language with circumstances
in what, famously, Wittgenstein (1958) calls ways of ‘going on’ (see also Shotter
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Coordination in language 3
(1996)). us, human beings achieve individual ways of using temporal trajec-
tories; they develop a range of skills that grant abilities based on, above all, evok-
ing past events and, thus, imagining futures. As time-rangers, people link ways of
recalling (e.g. autobiographical memory) and with cultural resources (e.g. ledgers,
languages, phones).
. Functional temporal cohesion
Space limits discussion of time and temporality, but as cross-cultural work con-
rms (Pavlenko, 2014), one must reject the schoolboy view that time is a univer-
sal. Indeed, time is neither an uninterrupted arrow, nor an aggregate of temporal
points. Nevertheless, much can be gained from dening time by a set {T} of ele-
ments that are strictly ordered in earlier-later relations, {t1, t2, t3,…, tn}. Indeed,
once time is treated as ‘given’, the linear ordering of real numbers can be used to
specify structures of unlimited observability. On this view, observability provides
a matrix for measuring (what can be termed) facts. e mathematical trick is that
of positing an equal distance between each unit and, once this is done, making a
temporal measurement. By using a conventional scale, the fact becomes detached
from subjective experience—indeed, this goes towards explaining why the inven-
tion of clocks coincided with the rise of science. e facts measured pinpoint an
event trajectory, and because they are dened by a mathematical convention, they
depend on human judgement.5 While applicable to any scale or rate, they are never
facts about ‘time’. For the same reason, chronology cannot be used as the basis for
modelling temporal phenomena (Smith, 2003). Either one must seek out the ‘no
time’ of physics (if such a domain exists) or one must begin with the observer’s
view of how temporality is enacted by living systems.
Temporality enables the foxtail to rely on a complex functional history and, as
a result, to thrive in arid conditions. As in all living systems, the lineage has so-
assembled measures that function to control dynamics (in short, the grass exploits
symbolicity). While simpler systems are constituted by complex temporalities,
more complex ones use action and perception in self-regulating while using exog-
enous phenomena. It is thus hardly surprising that clocks and rhythms permeate
. While accepting the functionality of clock-time, we argue that cognitive skills exploit the
temporality of the living. is cannot be plotted onto equidistant measures because tempo-
ralities feed into situated experience. Human beings are notoriously bad at estimating weight
in absolute measures, but their estimations of size-weight relations of objects to throw are
remarkably precise (Anderson, 2014, p. 174–177). Likewise, lived temporality underpins all
subjective probabilistic estimations.
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Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
the world of the living. Further, this supports to the view that temporality itself
evolves. Fraser’s (1975) account is perhaps the best known. In his terms, chaotic
atemporality gave rise to quantum dynamics and a proto-temporal level. Later, the
eotemporal level and clock-time arose and, with evolution, came what he terms
biotime. Most recently, living beings gave rise to the nootime which arises with
history and culture. While the details of Fraser’s model are controversial, its intui-
tive distinctions give further reason for scepticism about a priori models of time
or, indeed, aspirations to reduce it to physics. Above all, this is because, in liv-
ing systems, temporalities are functional. Foxtails survive because history enables
them to track the environment’s irregular changes. Indeed, aperiodic dynamics
serve all organisms in both self-sustaining and in coordinating with the world.
is appears in, for example, saccadic eye movements, breathing, ambulation,
avian winging, and circadian cycles. In short, given environmental embeddedness,
not only do temporalities make organisms viable but the self-same processes allow
living-systems to create, assess, and manage a range of temporalities.
Proprioreceptive feedback is a crucial mechanism for tracking movement.
Accordingly, it can give a sense to temporal experience: manipulating a pendulum
reveals how its frequency co-varies with its force. Indeed, organisms are so depen-
dent on the timing of movement and, in some cases, experience of so doing that
they have been dened as systems that ‘isolate their own temporalities’ (Smith,
2003): to function, living beings need to self-maintain independently of the envi-
ronment. An interplay of lived temporalities and external temporalities gives rise,
among other things, to the use of recurrent environmental patterns. us, circa-
dian rhythms only serve as Zeitgebers because there is no ‘total’ synchronicity with
the environment. Indeed, were there close covariance between organismic and
environmental variables, it would be impossible to discriminate between them.
While not functionally basic, as Stetson (1905) noted more than 100 years ago,
human rhythm is grounded in sensing irregularity.
Conventional scales map onto mechanisms that give temporality functional
cohesion. While discussed elsewhere (Pedersen & Steensen, 2014; Steensen&
Pedersen, 2014; Uryu, Steensen, & Kramsch, 2014), the argument is briey
rehearsed here. Timescales serve to identify facts by using the timescale continuum
shown vertically in Figure 1 below. By convention, epistemological divisions are
shown with ‘slow’ scales (e.g. macrophysics) at the top and ‘fast’ ones (e.g. quan-
tum physics) nearer the bottom. Like Fraser (1975), we can place other scales in
the range between. In this context, we focus on temporalities that can be traced to
how RNA and DNA co-function within a living cell. In such systems, tightly regu-
lated coordination (based on symbolicity) regulates metabolism and thus gives
functional temporal cohesion to the system. Genetic material serves as organic
memory that enables a history of agent-environment interaction to transform
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Coordination in language
the functions (and properties) associated with metabolism. In evolutionary time,
living systems sensitize to environmental aordances as organisms perform nor-
mative selections that can be measured with respect to various time-scales: from
species to species, these involve varying combinations of genetic change, learn-
ing, aectively based choice, and more skilled or deliberate behaviour. us, in
humans, epigenetic processes connect learning, bodily development and the use
of phenomenal experience. e horizontal dimension of Figure1 thus shows the
changing scope of temporalities. As argued in Steensen and Pedersen (2014),
these map onto time-ranges that serve to manage, say, individual awareness,
utterance-activity, dialogical systems, human ontogeny and variable modes of
sociocultural organisation.
Physics
Inorganic chemistry
Organic chemistry
Metabolism
Action/perception
Language
Computing
Temporal ranges
Scales said
to be slow
Scales said
to be fast Timescale continuum
Figure 1. Temporal ranges. e gure is adapted from Uryu et al. (2014) and Steensen and
Pedersen (2014)
Figure 1 shows an iterative narrowing of the range within which processes func-
tion. In the range of physics, facts conform to laws, and importantly, this unites
© 2015. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
macrophysics with quantum regularities (the slow and the fast). Such regulari-
ties give rise to properties that characterise, say, inorganic chemistry. By contrast,
while organic chemistry pregured life (perhaps in an RNA world of polymers),
its temporal range both constrains and is constrained by the organic memories of
living systems. Similarly, much later in evolution, living in the human niche gave
rise to cultural products that allow the species to coordinate by exploiting past
events. While many species use coordination to communicate, this temporal range
allowed language to emerge as a species-specic way of coordinating. Even if the
symbiosis between the dynamic and the verbal remains underspecied (Cowley,
2011a), language has transformed human life (brain, body and environment) over
some tens of thousands of years. Further, humans have developed writing systems,
print technology and, most recently, the use of symbolic computation. Our sug-
gestion is that by pursuing the embedding of such phenomena, one can trace the
rise of language back to the kinds of functional coordination that grant viability to
fox-tail grasses. Further, given that temporalities serve all living systems, it ceases
to seem surprising that, in hominids, the evolution of social practices permits the
rise of an ever increasing range of timescales.
What we argue, then, is that life, human sociality, and language unfold in nar-
rowing temporal ranges where each evolutionarily subsequent time-range (a) pre-
supposes the preceding one, and (b) reorganises a subset of processes within the
preceding (i.e. evolutionarily more basic) time-ranges. is evolutionary model
of temporal ranges nds explanation in the adiabatic principle: “the faster some-
thing happens, the less energy is transferred. Conversely, slowly varying processes
appear as a stable background on the timescale of faster ones” (Lemke, 2000,
p.279). To Lemke, the processes of living are slower than linguistic activity, and
those which shape human language are outpaced by the causal processing of a
carefully chosen computer program. In this way, a hierarchy of enabling condi-
tions (or causal frames, as they are termed by Eneld (2014) and Steensen and
Pedersen (2014)) is established: without physics, there can be no metabolism;
without metabolism, there can be no action/perception (and no brains); without
action/perception, there is no language; without language, there could be no com-
plex human sociality—or von Neumann computation. e hierarchy of enabling
conditions blocks reductionism: sociality is irreducible to physics because physics
fails to explain dynamics in the scales of biology or sociality. Further, reductionism
is ruled out by the fact that time-ranges vary across agent-environment relations.
Within the stable context of complementary relations of DNA-RNA duality, many
forms of action/perception co-evolved with biological structures. e mere fact
that life gave birth to the foxtail, the cowbird, and the Miserere, shows that each
temporal range allows for many narrowings, i.e. multiple speciations, multiple
specialisations, and multiple individuations.
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Coordination in language
. Time-ranging in human and non-human systems
Ways of controlling ‘time’ evolve as living species connect events across timescales.
As they develop ways of establishing temporal cohesion, they become capable of
temporal ranging: they gain what observers see as epistemological resources. us,
temporal ranging is like ranging in a spatial environment. e organism comes to
act as if it knew about its world as it orients eectively to available resources. In
temporal ranging, however, the aordances themselves may matter less than how
the behaviour is regulated. us, in cowbirds, social co-regulation prompts indi-
viduals to gain singing skills. is is possible because, like the foxtail, cowbirds
have ecient ways of tracking specic classes of events. In order to come to terms
with how this ability arises, we have stressed that, even in species without a cen-
tral nervous system, an organism can coordinate detection of weather conditions
with signalling by RNA messengers, protein folding and epigenetics. e foxtail’s
time-ranging connects the scales of the weather (external Zeitgebers) to an evolu-
tionary history (internal ‘clocks’) whereby RNA-DNA dynamics coordinate pro-
cesses of growth. ese agent-environment rhythms sustain foxtail functionality:
by hypothesis, all living systems are sustained by analogous dynamics.
Vertebrates exploit more complex forms of time-ranging because, as embrained
animals, they can draw on learning. In a social form, this allows cowbirds to link
the slow scales of evolution and development with inter-individual activity (and
learning). In this respect, there are many parallels with humans. However, in our
species, individuals gain control of time-ranging. For example, as Tulving (1985)
rst noted, people do mental time-travel: they recall and re-evoke events from the
past. In our view, this alone justies the claim that humans act as time-rangers:
individual human move upstream and downstream in time (i.e. to evoke the past
and project onto the future),6 and thus balance how dierent temporal ranges
impact on behaviour. In cooking a meal, for example, we may shi between using
a recipe, skills in mixing herbs with vegetables and tasting that evokes childhood
memories. More simply, people suppress biological needs because of social nor-
mativity (e.g. when avoiding yawning, farting, and promiscuity) or, indeed, allow
themselves to give in to less than chivalrous drives and feelings.
Many forms of time-ranging depend on individual use of symbolicity. Con-
sider the last chapter of our Miserere narrative. In 1770 a boy aged 12, having heard
the Miserere twice in the Sistine Chapel, allegedly7 managed to write down the full
. We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing the future-oriented projections to the fore.
. Many myths on this incident circulate. For a critical discussion see Byram-Wigfield
(1996) and Chrissochoidis (2010).
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Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
score from memory. How did the boy, named Wolfgang A. Mozart, do so? While
the details of this remarkable achievement are elusive, it demands controlled time-
ranging. Further, we can hypothesise some time ranges involved. First, Mozart
drew on social learning regarding musical score conventions. Even if equipped
with eidetic memory, recollection is not sucient for written representation. It
further requires mastery of writing technologies which enable living beings to
encapsulate various experiential scales in the written—and to use texts to create
new types of functional temporal cohesion. Second, he was acquainted with the
genre of a capella church music, which equipped him with the mimetic skills of
imaging what Allegri would do next. ird, Mozart had “educated his attention”
(Gibson) to pick up chords based on the embodied sentience for frequencies and
harmonies, i.e. micro-temporal relations between multiple oscillations. Finally, we
hypothesise that Mozart’s mastery of Latin enabled him to use the Psalm to organ-
ise composition, e.g. by using it as a scaold for placing remembered patterns in a
sequence, or by using religiously informed interpretations to reconstruct emotion-
laden musical patterns. Time-rangers thus exploit technologies based in writing-
systems, experience, history, autobiography, and, crucially, impersonal resources.
As humans create temporalities, they becomes selves, i.e. persons who experience
and seek out ways of time-ranging.
e Mozart example shows how humans anticipate time-ranging. A history
of coordinating gives rise to narratives and modes of understanding that become
crucial to their lives. Indeed, this may be why folk explanations of actions, for
example, emphasise how living beings (and anthropologists) experience action
as ‘making sense’. In Nick Eneld’s work (Eneld, 2014; Eneld & Sidnell, 2013),
facts of this kind fall onto an enchronic scale. It appears, for example, that con-
versation uses a normative process of turn-taking and that ‘face’ concerns sustain
the public presentation of self (Goman, 1959). Indeed, the importance of this
scale may go some way to explaining why some reduce coordination to so-called
talk-in-interaction or, simply, conversation. Yet, human action is only partly situ-
ated—only partly managed under the auspices of an interaction order: what I do
in the here-and-now is inuenced by past events, experiences, and expectations.
Indeed, the ‘I’ that acts is better regarded as a temporal trajectory than a subjec-
tive being at a point in time. No doubt something similar underpins views of the
self as inseparable from narrative (see, Dennett, 1993). By stressing that people
act as time-rangers, however, one looks far beyond language. In Per Linell’s (2009)
terms, talk transcends situations: much depends on, not just local movement (and
orienting to local norms) but also, for example, how people mention or allude
to what is absent, and how others follow. is characterizes the normative or, in
Linell’s terms, how the said evokes a ‘silent other’ (Linell, 2009). In bringing this to
the fore, we stress the complexity of human time-ranging.
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Coordination in language
Since the slow scales of biology are based in DNA-RNA dynamics, it is unsur-
prising that they have experiential counterparts. However, it is notable that per-
sons and collectives show massive variation in time-ranging. Evidence appears in
how caregivers talk to children and, as a result, shape styles of autobiographical
memory, or temporal ranging, that vary between Asian and US cultural groups
(Fivush & Nelson, 2004). Equally, in transactive memory (Bietti, 2012; Wegner,
1987) related sets of skills are found to be dierently used in, say, premodern soci-
eties and ones where people live in cities. Given how human language (and other
cultural routines) stabilise temporal trajectories to allow deliberate time-ranging,
we discover aspects of the world that are otherwise hidden. Cultural resources sat-
urate the here-and-now and, by so doing, create an extended ecology ( Steensen,
2011) where sociocultural sense saturates what the senses perceive. Our experi-
ence is lived as a past historicity informs a present as human selves cross into
ancient modes of understanding and experiencing.
What does this way of conceptualising temporality and time-ranging oer to
the study of real-life interaction between living, human time-rangers? On the 14th
of April 1770, Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s father, wrote in a letter to his wife,
Anna Maria:
You have oen heard of the famous Miserere in Rome, which is so greatly prized
that the performers are forbidden on pain of excommunication to take away a
single part of it, copy it or give it to anyone. But we have it already. Wolfgang has
written it down and we would have sent it to Salzburg in this letter, if it were not
necessary for us to be there to perform it.
(Quoted in Byram-Wigeld, 1996, p. 16f.)
What emotional response is this passage to evoke? Let us imagine that MrsMozart,
upon reading these lines, reacted with pride. But what enables the capacity for
such complex reactions, prompted only by subtle cues like congealed gestures
performed on a piece of paper? Evidently, Mrs Mozart must have been a time-
ranger: his handwriting might grant a feeling of her loved ones’ presence. His
long description of the protected music sheet for the Miserere might conjure up a
vivid image of Rome, Urbi et Orbi. But then, contrasting the unattainability of the
music, comes Leopold’s short, exultant: “we have it already.” How? Anna Maria
might have thought, and Leopold replies: “Wolfgang has written it down…” Oh,
how proud and happy Wolfgang’s mother must have felt! A complex bodily, emo-
tional reaction arises from how Leopold composed his letter, combined with her
trajectory of moving through autobiographical and sociocultural memories and
imaginations. Or perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps this fantasy reects two male
academics’ images of how wives at home long to share in their husbands’ joy and
pride. Perhaps Anna Maria thought to herself, “we have it…? Necessary for us to
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Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
be there? What are you talking about Leopold – it’s Wolfy who’s the genius, you’re
just a miserable salesman who has abandoned his family at home!” And, as need
hardly be said, this too is human time-ranging.
Acknowledging temporality and time-ranging provides an interpretational
frame for the investigation of human interaction and interactivity; but evidently, it
must be used in concord with other investigatory methods that take us beyond the
ctional account oered above. Examples of such work can be found in Uryu et
al.’s (2014) analysis of the “We are the Pope!” and Pedersen and Steensen’s (2014)
“faeces colour” example.
. Conclusion
As dened in ecological traditions, coordination sustains, not just language and
human interaction but all modes of living. Given its basis in the living cell’s DNA-
RNA dynamics, coordination shapes, rst of all, the self-maintenance of an organ-
ism, i.e. how life sustains functional cohesion. Its functionality arises by linking
one’s lineage together with biological structures that enable the world to be used
to self-maintain. us, all living systems enact temporalities. For the same reason,
temporalities contrast with measures of time. Timescales describe, not temporal-
ity, but facts that can be observed. ey permit impersonal description of when
things happen, how oen, and with what kinds of periodic and aperiodic variabil-
ity. In making this point, we focus on coordination that is more complex than that
which allows the so-assembly of temporalities in bacteria and plants. Accord-
ingly, we stress that embrained animals use coordination in learning and, by so
doing, develop new kinds of temporal-ranging. In the brown collared cowbird, a
complex interplay of events gives the bird’s singing special properties. Its potential
for reproductive success correlates with abilities that, as is the norm in vertebrates,
are both endogenous and exogenous: male cowbirds use social learning to develop
songs that attract females, and remarkably, their songs lose their power if the
males travel too far from their native territory. e relevant temporality depends
on species-specic gender-based learning. Even greater complexity can be found
in human social coordination: while cowbirds use temporalities to create shared
ways of hearing song, humans also use them in manufacturing traditions that
allow people to learn to act as singular individuals. As we have argued, humans are
time-rangers: individuals learn to create and inhabit their own temporal domains
(and hence also to construct present and future selves).
e argument also claries how the term ‘coordination’ applies to talk-in-
interaction and, inseparably, how such events are usually interpreted, reported
and explained. is is striking because, as is so oen emphasised, much of what
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Coordination in language 1
we do, feel and think, depends on an enchronic timescale. While not disputing the
importance of the enchronic, his is a narrow view of time and temporality. It con-
ates facts about aperiodic events with facts about time and, thus, overlooks the
inter-individual—let alone how such events can have eects that reach beyond the
situation. Above all, it leaves out aect, relationships, beliefs, ctions, and knowl-
edge and, just as crucially, the collaborative, competitive and strategic ways of
acting based on coordination. In short, it leaves out the skills of the human time-
ranger and fails to note that, just as language is distributed in space, it is distributed
across time (Cowley, 2011c).
In conclusion, we suggest that, as individuals with special forms of social sub-
jectivity, we live lives that feature many granularities. We draw on the rehearsed,
skills with impersonal resources, and ways of changing awareness of circum-
stances, i.e. of shiing between the aordances of the perceived, the remembered,
the rehearsed, the imagined, and the anticipated. As time-rangers, we plan, dream,
and, in following fantasies, draw on, not just conversation, but other modes of
action. In humans, the key of the coordinative, however, lies in inter-bodily musi-
cality that serves to attune interpersonal aect, linguistic embodiment and lived
experience—factors inuencing the emergent sense of self. Given the harmonies
and disharmonies between living time-rangers, people learn to sensitise to each
other in many temporal, and indeed musical, scales.
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Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steensen
Authors’ addresses
Stephen J. Cowley
Department of Language and Communication
University of Southern Denmark
Sdr. Stationsvej 28
4200 Slagelse
Denmark
Email: cowley@sdu.dk
Sune Vork Steensen
Centre for Human Interactivity
Department of Language and Communication
Campusvej 55
DK-5230 Odense M
Denmark
Email: s.v.steensen@sdu.dk
Authors’ bionotes
Stephen J. Cowley is Professor of Organisational Cognition at the Slagelse campus of the Uni-
versity of Southern Denmark. Having written a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Cambridge, he moved to
South Africa and into Cognitive Science. Pursuing work in Psychology Departments, he devel-
oped ways of integrating the study of language, cognition and the sociocultural world. In 2012,
he took up his current position in Denmark where he leads a team who investigate cognition
in organsations. His empirical work explores the cognitive role of interaction: he has done pio-
neering work on prosody in conversations, mother-infant interactions, robots as social media-
tors, and teamwork in medical simulations. He founded the DLG, a community who aim to
transform the language sciences by focusing on how directed, dialogical activity imbues human
intelligence with a collective dimension. He was also a co-founder of the International Society
for the Study of Interactivity Language and Cognition (ISSILC). In recent years, he has edited
volumes entitled Distributed Language (Benjamins) Cognition Beyond the Brain (Springer).
Sune Vork Steensen is Associate Professor of Interpersonal Communication and Cognition
at the University of Southern Denmark. Having written a Ph.D. in linguistics at University of
Aarhus, he took up his current position at the University of Southern Denmark in 2008. In 2012
he became the founding director of the Centre for Human Interactivity, which investigates how
language, social organization, and cognition intersect in complex social and dialogical systems.
His research interests include: interaction and interactivity; ecological, dialogical and distrib-
uted approaches to language and interaction; the functioning of cognitive ecosystems. He has
pioneered the so-called Cognitive Event Analysis, a qualitative method for studying distributed
cognitive processes in cognitive systems consisting of individuals, dyads or teams, working in
complex social and material environments. In recent years, he has co-edited volumes on dia-
lectical linguistics (Continuum, 2007), biosemiotics and health interaction (Braga University
Press, 2010), the distributed dynamics of language (Language Sciences, 2012), and ecological
approaches to language (Language Sciences, 2014). Since July 2015 he has been acting as Editor
in Chief of Language Sciences.
