Linguistic Frontiers

Introduction to the Special Issue on Enlanguaged Practices

Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen — 2024-08-02

This special issue of Linguistic Frontiers, titled “Enlanguaged Practices: Languaging, Semiosis, and the Human Ecology” delves into the intricate connection between languaging and human socio-practical behavior. It challenges the common tendency in traditional linguistics of separating linguistic behavior from practical action more generally, thus urging a shift towards recognizing their in-tertwined nature.

Bringing Things into Languaging or Not

Per Linell — 2024-08-02

This essay deals with how to “bring things into languaging” (enlanguaging). The theoretical background is a humanistic perspective, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and extended dialogism. It will be argued that the phenomenon of 'internal dialogue', i.e., internal interaction within individual minds, are at play in such processes. This paper will consider different activities such as perception, thinking, speaking, planning for speaking, understanding, reading, interaction, and decision-making. It also pays attention to circumstances when public talk is evaded or inhibited.

Linguistic Denotation as an Epistemological Issue

Alexander Kravchenko — 2024-08-02

Linguistic denotation is discussed as an epistemological issue that arises from the philosophy of external realism and the reification of language as a communication tool. Together, these serve as a foundation for viewing language as a sign system used for knowledge representation, when denotation is seen as the semantic property of linguistic signs – indication or reference to something, such as a thing (event, process, activity) or a concept. However, since neither the concept of sign in semiotics nor the concept of knowledge in philosophy (let alone the concept of concept itself) has a uniformly accepted informative definition, the concept of denotation, viewed by many as an implied semantic property of the linguistic sign, is highly controversial. It is argued that the reification of linguistic signs is a poor starting point in our attempts to understand language, not as a tool in the service of the mind, but as a mode of existence of humans in the world as an image of language.

Doing Language(s) and Other Communicative Practices

Mikhail Ilyin — 2024-08-02

Enlanguaged practices bring together social semiosis working as an interfacial verge or axle for even greater domains of human existence. They have mental, bodily and communicative aspects, mingle with respective practices and thus bring them all together. 4E approaches to practices help to couple them. On the one hand embodying consolidates bodies and things while on the other enacting results in processes and practices. Linguistic bodies and things are shaped as nouns and nominal forms while processes and practices mold as verbs, predicatives and other rhematic formats.

Normativity in Languaging and Practical Activity

Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen — 2024-08-02

The paper explores some of the commonalities between language and practical activity. It focuses on the normativity involved and presents an account on two different kinds of normativity which constrain both languaging and practical doings in general. In this connection, the paper engages with the first-order—second-order distinction central to the Distributed Language Perspective and shows that there is a way for proponents of this perspective to come to terms with linguistic normativity without presupposing a dualism between, on the one hand, first-order articulations and, on the other, the second-order normative constrains that condition them.

Languaging and Practices

Stephen J. Cowley — 2024-08-02

The paper rejects both mentalism and reduction of the trait of Language (capital L) to linguistic phenomena. What is termed lingualism is replaced by tracing wordings to practices that unite metabolism, coordinative activity and linguistic history. Like other partly cultural, partly natural traits (e.g. grazing), languaging enacts modelling (Sebeok 1988). In Yu’s (2021) terms, it extends how supersession informs morphogenesis, agency, sensing and acting. Having challenged lingualism, one deflates reports of experience. Appeal to practices and ontologies (not ontology) posit linguistic ‘objects’ or, in Sellars’s terms, versions of the Myth of the Given. With Sellars, therefore, I rethink the analytic/synthetic divide around the normative power of languaging. On such a view, practices, nonhumans and humans co-evolve with manifest and scientific modes of acting that are constituted by unknowable singular ontology. Knowing is inextricable from languaging and how the resources of cultural modelling are rendered and grasped by using the (simplexifying) powers of living human beings.

Rethinking Sociality in Language Evolution

Vincenzo Raimondi — 2024-08-02

A significant body of research on the roots of human language highlights the crucial role played by changes in ancestral sociality. Recent studies have revived the hypothesis of human self-domestication, arguing that it provides new insights into the development of human sociality, cultural evolution, and symbolic communication. While the concept of domestication offers an intriguing interpretation of the co-evolution of body, cognition, and behavior, its application to human evolution is controversial. This paper explores an alternative perspective, suggesting that the enlanguagement of interactions may have acted as a catalyst for evolutionary change. We propose that the consolidation of enlanguaged practices, underpinned by the amplification of social dispositions, set in motion an evolutionary spiral. We explore how this process may have reshaped ancestral developmental trajectories and niches, ultimately culminating in the distinctive mode of life that characterizes our species.

Languaging in Social Practices

Chiara De Franco — 2024-08-02

This article examines the role of languaging in shaping social practices, drawing on Maturana’s concept of consensual coordination. It posits that social practices are essentially enlanguaged activities, emerging and evolving through the conventions born from recursive interactions. Central to this argument is a reinterpretation of Maturana’s typology of conversations, suggesting it as a guide to the kinds of conventions that can emerge from consensual coordination. The article introduces an analytical framework conceptualizing narrative games as languaging mechanisms. This framework is informed by an abductive process based on radical linguistics and the analysis of 128 diplomatic conversation transcripts. In its conclusion, the article offers insights into how languaging plays a crucial role in establishing conventions and rules within social practices. It also examines the capacity of languaging to drive social change, underscoring the importance of future research in this area.

How a Child Learns to ‘Talk’ to a Smart Speaker

Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger — 2024-08-02

In this paper, I am concerned with the socio-material practice of engaging with voice-enabled machines. Far from ‘talking’ to a smart speaker, a user must master the skill of composing a command while routinely engaging with the machine. While the practice relies on practical understanding and intelligibility, attention must be paid to the trans-situational aspects that enable the situated enactment of socio-material practices. By conceptualizing engagement with the smart speaker as an enlanguaged practice, I trace the ability to engage in a seemingly individualistic practice to a person‘s history of engagement in and with the world. Specifically, I consider how a pre-literate child relies on instances of recursive bodily coordination with her caregiver to learn how to engage with a smart speaker. Informed by the languaging perspective which treats language as multiscalar bodily verbal activity, I trace enlanguaging to the intricate interplay of dialogicality, temporality, and embodiment.