0000000000414091
AUTHOR
Paul J. Thibault
The reflexivity of human languaging and Nigel Love's two orders of language
Abstract Nigel Love's distinction between first-order language and second-order language exposes the fallacy of the code view of linguistic communication. Persons do not ‘use’ the forms that are said to constitute a pre-existing language system; they adapt and shape their bodily behaviour, including their vocalizing, in accordance with community-level norms and practices that have historical continuity and thus define the cultural-historical traditions of a community. Individuals normatively orient to these continuities and self-reflexively engage in forms of situated appropriation of them as they flexibly adapt them to the requirements of situations in the pursuance of their goals. Love ha…
Interactivity, Values and the Microgenesis of Learning in a Tertiary Setting
Student learning is a hot topic in tertiary education circles these days. However, it is not always clear what words like ‘learning’ and ‘learner’ mean. It is important for educationalists to understand learning as it actually occurs in real-time learning situations. We build on Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition and Gibson’s ecological psychology to show how human learning is an interactive process. We propose Multimodal Event Analysis as a tool for analyzing a University tutorial in which students attempt to solve a problem of regression analysis. We investigate how participants’ multimodal interactivity with the changing affordance arrays of the learning situation is the driver an…
First-Order Languaging Dynamics and Second-Order Language: The Distributed Language View
This article articulates some aspects of an emerging perspective shift on language: the distributed view. According to this view, languaging behavior and its organization is irreducible to the formal abstracta that have characterized the focus on a de Saussure-type system of formal regularities in mainstream linguistics over the past century. Language, in the distributed view, is a radically heterogeneous phenomenon that is spread across diverse spatiotemporal scales ranging from the neural to the cultural. It is not localizable on any one of them, but it involves complex interactions between phenomena on many different scales. A crucial distinction is thus presented and explained, viz. fir…
The look of writing in reading. Graphetic empathy in making and perceiving graphic traces
This article presents preliminary considerations and results from a research project designed to investigate the relation between (i) gestures, (ii) graphic traces and (iii) perceptions. More specifically, the project aims to test the hypothesis that graphic traces, including handwriting, can set up graphetic empathy between writers and readers of traces across long temporal and spatial distances. Insofar as a graphic trace is lawfully related to the gesture by which it came into being, the trace itself will hold information about the gesture, which may resonate with the sensorimotor system of a perceiver as if they themselves performed the gesture. If this is in fact so, it will have impor…
Selves, interactive representations and context
Abstract In this paper, I re-examine the notion of ‘clause-as-representation’ in Michael Halliday’s systemic functional theory of language. I argue that ‘representation’ is a mode of linguistic action that cannot be understood in terms of the experiential metafunction alone. Instead, a theoretical account of representation must be undertaken in relation to all the metafunctions. Rejecting encodingist accounts of representation, I develop the argument that representations are interactively constituted and emergent in languaging activity. The paper develops these arguments in relation to a process ontological account of the relations between language and the world-side phenomena that language…
Simplex selves, functional synergies, and selving: Languaging in a complex world
Abstract In this paper, I present selves as simplex structures (Berthoz, 2012/2009) that construct themselves and are constructed in and through the embodied socio-cognitive dynamics of ‘selving’. Selves are, following Vygotsky (1986 : 59–73; see also Ratner, 2017), individuations and crystallisations of the concrete social relations in which the self has participated along its life-trajectory. Selving arises and takes place in dialogically coordinated languaging activity. In complex social and cultural worlds, simplex selves-in-languaging constitute and stabilise their own and others' experience and living bodies in and through norm saturated languaging. Thus, while human subjectivity is f…
Integrating self, voice, experience
AbstractThe experience of hearing one’s own voice during the act of speaking is a form of self-awareness and self-reflection that occurs in relation to and in interaction with the flow of experience, including the experience of other selves and their voices. Self-communication is deeply implicated in and necessary for interpersonal communication (Harris 1996). And yet, it is the latter which is generally taken to be the paradigm case of human languaging. The fundamental role of self-communication is neglected in the language sciences. Starting with the important fact that we hear our own voice when we speak (Harris 1996, chap. 11), this paper examines the central role of self-communication …