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Language and Enaction
Abstract
A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social.
This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enaction offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science.
Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science.
ContributorsRenaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson
Bradford Books imprint
... La brièveté du chapitre du CLG consacré à l'arbitraire du signe tranche avec l'importance de ce principe en linguistique 1 et se pose la question du lieu réel où se situe l'arbitraire: si c'est le lien entre le signifiant et le signifié qui est arbitraire pour Saussure (arbitraire du signe), c'est au contraire le lien entre le signe et le référent qui est arbitraire pour Benveniste (1939), qui distingue l'arbitraire de la signification de la nécessité du signe. Un renversement de perspective est proposé par Bohas (1997Bohas ( , 1999Bohas ( , 2000Bohas ( , 2007Bohas ( , 2016 et par Bottineau (2010), le premier dans le cadre de la Théorie des Racines, Matrices et Étymons (TME), notamment nourrie par les travaux de Allott (1973Allott ( , 1992, le second dans le cadre de la Cognématique, ancrée dans la théorie de l'énaction en sciences cognitives. La question ne doit plus se poser ni en termes de lien entre signifiant d'un côté, et signifié de l'autre, ni en termes de liens entre symboles d'un côté, et référents de 1 Comme le rappelle Bouquet (1997 §14-17), le terme signe comporte un problème majeur selon Saussure: son sens tend à dériver vers signifiant, la forme matérielle que prend le signe. ...
La motivation du signe linguistique est une notion saussurienne considérée comme la propriété définitoire principale de l’onomatopée. Cependant, les nombreuses recherches consacrées à la motivation ont démontré l’omniprésence de ce phénomène, de l’échelle du phonème à l’échelle du discours, en passant par le submorphème. Comment, dans ce cas, la motivation pourrait-elle permettre de circonscrire le fait onomatopéique? Nous avons dirigé notre attention vers la dichotomie langue/parole. Il sera montré que l’onomatopée se distingue des autres signes linguistiques dans sa propension à être définie différemment selon qu’on l’observe en langue, en parole, et comme nous le défendrons, en corpus. À l’occasion d’un colloque principalement consacré aux recherches sur la motivation et l’iconicité dans le lexique, cette présentation exposera une approche théorique où la partie du discours la plus emblématique de la motivation du signe se trouve finalement décrite à l’aune de ses statuts en langue et en parole.
... 3 On doit à ce chercheur d'avoir posé les jalons d'une linguistique énactive qui, dans le sillage du paradigme de l'énaction -fondé par les biologistes Varela et Maturana en réaction au paradigme cognitiviste (voir notamment Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1994a, 1994bou Varela et al., 1993 -, conçoit le langage et la grammaire des langues comme un champ d'interactivité incarné et situé dans lequel le sens linguistique doit être pensé comme un phénomène émergent plutôt que comme un pré-donné. Voir notamment Bottineau (2010Bottineau ( , 2017aBottineau ( , 2017bBottineau ( , 2018. Nous revenons également sur ce parti-pris théorique tel que présenté par Marine Poirier infra. ...
Ce premier et passionnant ouvrage de Marine Poirier, La coalescence en espagnol. Vers une linguistique du signifiant énactivisante (Lambert-Lucas, 2021) se donne pour objectif de mettre au jour les mécanismes qui président à ce que l’autrice identifie comme la « coalescence » d’éléments réputés discrets en diachronie de l’espagnol (tan bien, cual quier, toda vía...) et dont la fusion graphique (también, cualquier, todavía...) s’accompagne de changements syntaxiques et sémantiques que les linguistes ne sont pas en mesure d’expliquer à l’aune des propriétés propres aux unités fusionnées envisagées isolément (i.e. dans un découpage morphématique traditionnel)...
he Diccionario de afijos del español contemporáneo (Fábregas 2023) reports the presence of an unstressed suffix -i, “of uncertain origin, possibly sound symbolic”, in Spanish. Fábregas notes that this suffix is primarily found in noun hypocoristics (e.g. Paqui, Juani, Pedri) but it also attaches to other categories, including adjectives (e.g. cuqui ‘cute’) and terms of address (e.g. mami ‘mummy’, cari ‘dear’). This article has three main goals. Firstly, building on previous studies as well as an examination of additional colloquial Spanish data, I aim to describe the specific distribution of the suffix, exploring whether there are other bases to which it may attach. Secondly, I examine the main semantic and pragmatic values of the affix, noting its productivity in colloquial Spanish, particularly among certain groups of speakers. Finally, building upon traditional and more recent works on sound symbolism, and drawing from the enactive theory of language, I discuss why the suffix -i may be said to have acquired iconic meanings among Spanish-speakers.
Referendums allow people to participate in political decision-making. However, they also come with the challenge of presenting complex issues to the electorate in a concise and comprehensible way. In order to simplify the decision-making process, referendum questions are often tailored to yes/no response options. In comparison, the UK European Union membership referendum of 2016, in contrast to the 1975 referendum on the same issue, discarded this option, and a verbal and conceptually more complex alternative response option was brought into play (remain vs. leave). This potentially relevant change in the voting tradition justifies a linguistic consideration of the suitability of the choice of verbs. Verbal response options such as stay, remain and leave might activate different framing effects due to their underlying etymology. Our goal was therefore to examine whether the choice of verbs can have a biasing effect, which might be the case due to their frame-inherent structure. This investigation attempts, through both a linguistic analysis and an experimental analysis using a version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), to bridge the research gap between the awareness that there are linguistic factors that can influence decision-making processes and the lack of inclusion of framing effects. Overall, the data of two IAT studies (n = 185 and n = 355) suggest that the exact wording of dichotomic response options has the potential to influence response choice based on evaluative associations of the verbs. Specifically, when compared to leave, we found relatively more positive evaluation for stay than for remain. Furthermore - independent of the Brexit referendum - our study raises the question whether verbs are at all suitable to replace yes/no response options due to inherent framing effects. This linguistic aspect requires more attention in the design of response options in future referendums.
Explanatory diversity is a salient feature of the sciences of the mind, where different projects focus on neural, psychological, cognitive, social or other explanations. The same happens within embodied cognitive science, where ecological, enactive, dynamical, phenomenological and other approaches differ from each other in their explanations of the embodied mind. As traditionally conceived, explanatory diversity is philosophically problematic, fueling debates about whether the different explanations are competing, compatible, or tangential. In contrast, this paper takes the perspective of embodied cognitive science as its starting point and accordingly approaches explanatory diversity not as a problem to be solved, but as a phenomenon to be understood. Recent work has explored how the view of cognition as embodied motivates reflexively viewing science as a situated embodied cognitive practice. Here I argue that this reflexive turn motivates adopting a pluralistic stance when it comes to questions about theoretical and methodological disagreements. In particular, it motivates moving away from thinking in terms of explanations as disembodied entities that compete with one another, and instead thinking in terms of different explanatory styles as embodied practices of explaining, many of which might be legitimate and warranted independently of whether and how the explanations themselves relate to one another.
Philosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophically understanding science as a natural phenomenon can be enriched by drawing from different fields and disciplines, including niche construction theory in evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and ecological and enactive views in embodied cognitive science, on the other. But these insights have so far been explored in separation from each other, without clear indication of whether they can work together. Moreover, the focus on particular practices, however insightful, has tended to lack consideration of potential further implications for a naturalized understanding of science as a whole (i.e., above and beyond those particular practices). Motivated by these developments, here we sketch a broad-ranging view of science, scientific practice and scientific knowledge in terms of ecological-enactive co-construction. The view we propose situates science in the biological, evolutionary context of human embodied cognitive activity aimed at addressing the demands of life. This motivates reframing theory as practice, and reconceptualizing scientific knowledge in ecological terms, as relational and world-involving. Our view also brings to the forefront of attention the fundamental link between ideas about the nature of mind, of science and of nature itself, which we explore by outlining how our proposal differs from more conservative, and narrower, conceptions of “cognitive niche construction.”
We offer a theoretical and empirical exploration of parental or guardian hope through an enactive, ecological, and reflective lifeworld research framework. We examine hoping as a practice, or know-how, by exploring the shape of interviewees’ lives as they prepare for lives to come. We pursue hoping as a necessarily shared practice–a social agency–rather than an individual emotion. One main argument is that hoping operates as a kind of languaging. An enactive-ecological approach shifts scholarly conversations around hope, in part by including voices of non-scholars and considering lifeworld factors like class privilege. We aim to identify particular impediments to or facilitators of hope, which may be thought of as classes of restrictive and generative thought-shapers, respectively. Results from our qualitative study indicate that uncertainty is deeply salient to hoping, not only because hope as a concept entails epistemic limits, but more vitally because not knowing, when done skillfully and when supported through education and some degree of socio-economic security, leaves room for others to reframe utterances, and so for the family or community to resist linguistic enclosure.
A popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to understand cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, ecological, and so on. While some of the work under the label of “embodied cognition” takes for granted key commitments of traditional cognitive science, other projects coincide in treating embodiment as the starting point for an entirely different way of investigating all of cognition. Focusing on the latter, this paper discusses how embodied cognitive science can be made more reflexive and more sensitive to the implications that our views of cognition have for how we understand scientific practice, including our own theorizing about cognition. Inspired by the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, I explore the prospect of an analogously “strong” program in embodied cognitive science. I first draw from Dewey’s transactional notion of “situation” to identify a broad sense in which embodied cognitive science takes cognition, as an embodied phenomenon, to be situated . I then sketch a perspective I call situated reflexivity , which extends the Deweyan analysis to understand scientific practice in the same terms, and thereby illustrates what research in line with a strong program in embodied cognitive science can look like. This move, I propose, has the potential of setting up a new inquiry situation that makes more salient the embodiment of scientific practice and that, through this, can help organize our own embodied cognitive activities as we try to make sense of scientific work, including our own.
The linguistic path has been explored through several works (Talmy, 2000a; Dan I. Slobin, 2003). The present paper investigates a path underlain by the fictive motion (FM) phenomenon: The plateau goes east along the river. This itinerary, here called the ‘localization path’ discloses the FM of an item along a trajectory to highlight its immobility in space. This linguistic path is here inspected through a corpus-based analysis displaying the verbs come and go. If experiencing language is first vocal, this process also implies kinetic, non-verbal modalities. The languaging experience will hence be explored through the interaction between language, space and the speaker’s body through an enactive approach. A prototypical syntactic configuration mirroring the interpretative grid of FM reality will be defined. Recurrent syntactic patterns revealing the way the speaker projects his own world through simplex models will highlight the way the complexity of visual scenari is converted into linguistic sequences.
In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, non-representationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can “scale up” to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned.
This article addresses the issue of pedagogical materials development for the learning of the relation between the compound past (passé composé) and the imperfect (imparfait) in narrative in French as a Foreign Language in endolingual context. Should the viewing choice on the situation be favored, or or should we teach that tenses are used based on contextual clues that need first to be identified? The first position was represented, for example, in the textbook Libre Échange (2001), but later on abandoned (Gündüz, 2005). Our own analysis of 17 textbooks published between 2006 and 2016 confirms this trend. Not one example has been found of the same situation viewed under both bounded and unbounded aspects (j’ai voulu / je voulais), as though this option had been banned. However, the aspectual approach is not completely absent, as demonstrates the case of one textbook that tends to acknowledge both the agency of a subject choosing a view on the situation and norms in the using of the two tenses. Finally, a different material is proposed, that exploits the syntax of utterances with the imparfait and the passé composé. In an enactive framework (Bottineau, 2010, 2014), it is envisaged that two states are being achieved: the perception of an imagined present, or the “possession” of a bounded event. A theoretical account is given, visuals from the material are described and pedagogical gesture suggested to show how this approach can be conducive to the learning of tenses in narrative.
Many research programs have been worked out in recent years in order to account for an apparently trivial aspect of the human language activity. We refer to the fact that every speaker hears the sound of his own words. Our paper aims to embed this empirical insight in the theoretical framework of the so-called enactive grammar. This choice is justified by the fact that the enactive grammar introduced a formal distinction which allows to provide a clear formulation of the jakobsonian assert. In order to highlight this point, the paper will be subdivided into seven sections. The first section will be devoted to the experience of the hearing oneself speak. The second one will examine this experience from an enactive point of view. The third and forth section will try to show in which sense every speaker is his own interpreter (or co-speaker). The fifth one will analyze some theoretical consequences deriving from the remarks developed in the first four parts of the paper. Finally, the sixth and seventh section will seek to outline a realistic description of the so-called self-listening process. In the conclusion, we will give a synthetic résumé of the principal steps of our analysis.
Cognition, enaction, perculturation: Towards a characterisation of the English vocabulary in a typological perspective
The lexicon of present-day English displays lexical pairs such as freedom and liberty, resulting from the encounter of Germanic and Romance languages during the Norman conquest of Saxon England and from later contacts and borrowings. This study shows how the collision between lexical systems introduced by endo- and exocentric languages and symbolizing conflictual and hierarchized relations between communities brought about a renewed self-organized system which distinguishes alternative ways of enacting verbal interactions and collaborative sense-making. This process is analyzed with reference to the paradigm of enaction in linguistics.
This article reports the results of a corpus-based investigation, which evaluates the way French and English native speakers depict motion events. Space markers’ distribution (prepositions, particles, etc.) is here assessed through the insertion of the selected items in French and English depictions. The inclusion of both languages’ space markers is scrutinized within French and English reports – both languages’ syntactic patterns illustrating the Talmian typology, which opposes English as a satellite-framed language to French as a verb-framed language. According to the hypothesis of this work, when one individual is made to describe some other individual’s motion experience, the linguistic structuring of her report is likely to be influenced by the physical activity she goes through before the descriptive task. This assumption implies that depicting identical phenomena can present language differences, if the speaker goes through a kinesthetic or a static physical performance before delivering her/his report. To test this hypothesis, two groups of speakers are interviewed and they are submitted to distinct sensorimotor constraints before describing the spatial progress of some other individual in the experimental scene. The individual’s spatial navigation to be described is identical in both groups. Through the non-linguistic variable of this investigation, the impact of speakers’ kinesthetic and stationary processes on the linguistic data collected is evaluated, hence assessing the potential relationships between two kinds of phenomena – linguistic and kinesthetic ones. Language is here apprehended through the enactive paradigm, according to which the experiential and sensorimotor dimensions contribute to the structuring of linguistic meaning.
This chapter examines the ways in which French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers conceptual resources for an enactive account of language, in particular his extensive consideration of language in The Logic of Sense. Specifically Deleuze’s distinction between the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau creations and that of Antonin Artaud’s “transla- tion” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky highlights the need for an enactive, rather than merely embodied, approach to sense-making, particularly with regard to the general category of what Jakobson and Halle (1956) call “sound symbolism”.
This chapter considers the ethical and epistemological consequences of the enactive notion of “languaging” as whole-bodied, intersubjec- tive sense-making. Making sense in language is defined as a process of moving from stable, shared sense, through idiosyncratic non-sense, to a locally produced, co-available or interactively afforded sense. Enactive concepts of autonomy, autopoiesis, adaptivity, and precariousness imply radical idiosyncrasy in how individuals incorporate the means and moves needed to cope in enlanguaged environments. Differences in sense-making style s predict misunderstanding in social interactions. How do participants of linguistic sense-making share meaning? Presenting meaning as a consequence of mindfulness and misunderstanding, this chapter attempts to include the interiority and variety of experience in descriptions of linguistic participatory sense-making. It gives semantic weight to particularity without losing sight of interactional sources of normativity and intentionality.
Towards a multimodal meaning analysis. Constructional perspectives on co-grammatical gesture
On the basis of two empirical case studies, one on indexical and one on iconic co-grammatical gestures, this contribution aims to mark out the status of gesture in grammar. The main idea of this multimodal grammar is that words and gestures, although belonging to two distinct semiotic channels, have to be integrated into one single construction. This is in line with the cognitivist hypothesis that grammatical constructions combine linguistic elements into one single schematic conceptual representation. This integration of gesture, typically situated at the edge of the grammatical construction, would thus meet the requirements imposed on cognitive linguistics, and especially on construction grammars, by gesture studies.
Rather than rely on functionalist or enactivist principles, Cognition Beyond the Brain traces thinking to human artifice. In pursuing this approach, we gradually developed what can be deemed a third position in cognitive science. This is because, like talking, doing things with artefacts draws on both biological and cultural principles. On this systemic view, skills embody beliefs, roles and social practices. Since people rely on interactivity or sense-saturated coordination, action also re-enacts cultural history. Bidirectional dynamics connect embodiment to non-local regularities. Thinking thus emerges in a temporal trajectory of action that takes place within a space populated by people and objects. Utterances, thoughts and deeds all draw on physical, biological and cultural constraints. Even plans are shaped as first-order activity is shaped by second-order structures. Intentions and learning arise as dynamics in one time-scale are co-regulated by dynamics in other scales. For example, in ontogenesis, interactivity prompts a child to strategic use of second-order language. By linking cultural scales to inter-bodily dynamics, circumstances are coloured by resources that serve in using simulation to manage thought, feeling and action. The systemic nature of cognition connects now, the adjacent possible, implications for others and, potentially, social and environmental change.
This investigation relies on the hypothesis that sensorimotor processes are a primary factor in the construction of meaning and therefore influence language production. Our research draws mainly on Talmy’s typological framework (Talmy, 2000a) and spoken corpora were collected in an experiment involving English and French speakers. Both groups were subjected to sensorimotor constraints before being asked to describe specific scenes requiring the use of prepositions in order to depict motion phenomena. Based on these results a particular variable bound to the speakers’ kinaesthetic processes enables us to assess (i) the robustness of the typological definition of each language in a spoken context with several interactive participants and (ii) the relevance of the non-linguistic variable in the construction of meaning. A correlation will be shown between the speakers’ linguistic behaviour and the sensorimotor constraints the subjects were submitted to before depicting the visual scenes. This will allow us to place our argument at a second level of analysis, free from strict linguistic considerations. An epistemological discussion will then be carried out about the mutual influence of the two orders of phenomena, linguistic and kinaesthetic. In the final part of this paper language will be examined under a new paradigm – the enactive paradigm.
Enactivist accounts of language use generally treat concrete words in terms of motor intentionality systems and affordances for action. There is less consensus, though, regarding how abstract words are to be understood in enactivist terms. I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy to argue, against the representationalist paradigm that has dominated the cognitive scientific and philosophical traditions, that language is fundamentally a mode of participation in our world. In particular, language orients us within our milieus in a manner that extends into the depth of the idea-endowed world (where “ideas” are construed in a specifically Merleau-Pontian sense). This conceptualization of language allows us to see that abstract words orient us bodily just as surely as concrete words do, albeit in a manner that is more diffuse across the entirety of given situations, as I will show with an example of abstract language use in Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld. These insights are applied to some of the recent enactivist discourse to suggest some ways in which representationalism maintains a latent presence in this discourse. I conclude by pointing to developments in conceptual metaphor theory that can enrich our sense of how abstract language is involved in embodied understanding.
The marker ‘en’ in enactive instructional linguistics
The question whether the marker en in the various categories in which it appears (as a preposition and as various types of pronouns) has been widely debated. The present study is conducted in the theoretical framework of instructional grammars, which define signifiers as the activators of interpretive processes rather than as symbolic markers encoding mental representations, and it refers more specifically to enactive grammar. It is shown that it is possible to envisage a transcategorial core value of dynamic, non-representational nature, which applies to the whole range of grammatical categories in which this marker is manifested (preposition, gerundive particle, various types of pronouns and “fuzzy” particles).
Oops ! On Emotiwords, the Little Words of Emotions, some Major Actors of Interactive Verbal Cognition
In this paper, it is shown émotimots (“emotiwords” and “emotiphrases”) and émotiphrases (“emoticlauses”) (interjection, idioms and set phrases with an interjective undertone) are far from functioning as mere verbal responses in reaction to emotional stimuli. They are described as genuine interactive operators which distribute differentiated cognitive processes among the participants in the conversation, including the speaker herself, reflexively : emotiwords play a key role in the active processing of emotional events as disturbances of the verbal interplay. A series of cases is presented, ranging from verbal reflexes through semi-automatic interpersonal regulation to theatrical-like improvisation, in relation a the scale of formal fluctuations ; and the language-specific values of interjection are set against a contrastive background.
Tense and mood sequence in the Breton sentence
The Breton verb, whose conjugations are notoriously known for the way in which they vary according to the syntactic structures and interlocutive interplays in which they are inserted, displays remarkably original phenomena in the field of tense sequence. Firstly, the Breton verb has two simple tenses, the potential and the unreal, both of which can be used in simple sentences as well as in complex sentences, in the main and/or subordinate clauses, with uses analogous to those of romance subjunctives and conditionals ; secondly, the tense of the subordinate verb, which is usually determined by the meaning of the verb in the main clause, displays a whole range of fluctuations which are determined by the presence of other modal indicators such as negation and the imperative. In this study, it is shown that in classical Breton there is a competition between a modal sequence in present contexts and a temporal sequence in past contexts, with the latter acquiring the variations of modal sequence in present-day Breton on account of the possibilities offered by the tense system.
Towards an enactive approach of languaging in languages
The paradigm of enaction in cognitive science identifies cognition with the (interaction) of the living bodies of a given species in the environment as it has construed it following its own modalities. This conception of the cognition/embodiment relation has a crucial impact for language science. This study itemizes its various facets in the domains of speech, pronunciation, and the grammar of languages.
Cogrammatical gesticulation : from spontaneous gestural action to controlled metagestural activity. ‘Maybe’ and epistemic wavering in English
Grammar does not escape the general rule of multimodal expression that applies to spoken language. Although grammatical forms are not systematically paired with gestural forms, facial expression and bodily motion are crucially involved in the coarticulation and corealization of many grammatical notions, functions and meanings. Grammatical processes are not simply “encoded” or “expressed” but realized verbally and physically during the situated performance of speech. A clear instance of this process is provided by the rocking or oscillating movements that are sometimes synchronized with might and maybe. The moves may be regarded as living forms of psychological wavering – or embodied manifestations of uncertainty. We describe the dynamics and schematicity of this particular kind of symbolic action, then report an experiment carried out with a group of bilingual schoolchildren aged 9-11. We analyze the grammatical imagery produced in the schematic or figurative drawings obtained after the children were physically engaged in the vocal and gestural “replays” of modal moves.
The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making.
Towards a typology of deflexivity
This study sketches an outline of the morphosyntactic variation of deflexive markers in the light of a theory of human speech defined as a set of motoric actions (words, morphemes, syntactic sequences) whose perception, both by the hearer and by the speaker (in the case of reflexive thinking), guides the elaboration of meaning following a regulated procedure. In this perspective, one can distinguish creative deflexives (which carry out a formerly implicit morphosemantic process) and translative deflexives (which relocate the marking of some grammatical parameter out of the lexical unit it concerns) ; and one can oppose progressive deflexivity (which delays grammatical specifications) and regressive deflexivity (which anticipates them). Examples are drawn from various romance and germanic languages, along with Basque, Breton and Japanese.
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