Linguistic embodiment and verbal constraints: human cognition and the scales of time.

Summary

Language is symbiotic: its dynamics between agent and environment arise as linguistic embodiment is managed under verbal constraints, granting humans a unique form of phenomenal experience through co-action. Evidence from 750 ms of mother-daughter talk shows how parties attune using a dynamic field to co-embody speech with experience of wordings, which emerge in making and tracking phonetic gestures that mesh artifice, cultural products, and impersonal experience. Rather than processing verbal content in brains, linguistic symbiosis grants access to diachronic resources, redefining language as "activity in which wordings play a part."

Study at a glance

Abstract

USING RADICAL EMBODIED COGNITIVE SCIENCE, THE PAPER OFFERS THE HYPOTHESIS THAT LANGUAGE IS SYMBIOTIC: its agent-environment dynamics arise as linguistic embodiment is managed under verbal constraints. As a result, co-action grants human agents the ability to use a unique form of phenomenal experience. In defense of the hypothesis, I stress how linguistic embodiment enacts thinking: accordingly, I present auditory and acoustic evidence from 750 ms of mother-daughter talk, first, in fine detail and, then, in narrative mode. As the parties attune, they use a dynamic field to co-embody speech with experience of wordings. The latter arise in making and tracking phonetic gestures that, crucially, mesh use of artifice, cultural products and impersonal experience. As observers, living human beings gain dispositions to display and use social subjectivity. Far from using brains to "process" verbal content, linguistic symbiosis grants access to diachronic resources. On this distributed-ecological view, language can thus be redefined as: "activity in which wordings play a part."