Volume 15, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Languaging – the Extended Ecology of Semiosis Issue Editor: Stephen J. Cowley

Taking a unified view of life, language, and cognition, the Special Issue contests linguistic (or enactivist) models that grant “reality” to symbolic entities. Rather than focus on texts, utterances, or communication, language is traced to living in the extended human ecology. On a distributed view, languaging arises as, alone or together, people act while orienting to denotata and (physical) wordings. Languaging requires, not linguistic bodies, but skills based in common ways of understanding. While verbal entities are of immense value, they draw on a history of reflecting on languaging from a language stance; people need only imagine “symbols.” Accordingly, languaging is part of acting, observing and imagining. Using a language stance suffices for reflecting on human practices and written marks as if linguistic entities were “real.” The deflationary view extends to semiotics. As Ho and Li (2019) document, languaging-and-action enables a learner to grasp a Chinese character as a sign. While, in principle, semiosis might draw from physics or life, signs are also likely to derive from human practice. Coming to read Chinese may require not a semiotic ontology, but a human ability to self-fabricate new powers. By deflating linguistic models one can avoid appeal to observer-independent signs.

Linguistics is currently being transformed. In relating this to the return of languaging , I link the concept’s genealogy with all of its major applications. Crucially, human understanding becomes social and subjective and, thus, incompatible with linguistic theories that focus on individual knowledge of entities like languages , usage or forms of language use . As in Elizabethan times, understanding is part of socially organized practice. In leaving behind linguistic “forms,” languaging shapes an entangled meshwork that links living, observing, and social action. In welcoming the return of long-suppressed ideas, I focus on their implications for evolution, history, and human embodiment. In so doing, I hold that each person’s practical experience links a living subject with what can be, has been, and should be said. Finally, I argue that one can use the concept of languaging to build awareness that favors collective modes of action that are directed within the living world, the bio-ecology. By tracing social organization to embodied expression, a new ecolinguistics can aim to think on behalf of the world.

The paper poses the question of how the use of external artifacts contributes to the stabilization of meaning and thought. On the basis of the private language argument and the problem of objective meaning, I argue that Wittgenstein’s considerations regarding meaning-making should be sensitive to how materiality bears on the interactions with semiotic artifacts produced in speech and writing. The distributed language perspective and the concept of languaging (Cowley 2011, 2007; Steffensen 2011) is then linked to a metacognitive theory of writing (Goody 1977; Olson 1994, 2016) to clarify how social and material settings contribute to the lived experience and metalinguistic awareness that is essential to meaning-making. It is argued that, if material characteristics of symbolizations change metalinguistic awareness, the interpretation of the private language argument partly depends on the types of external artifacts the private linguist is allowed to exploit. The frameworks of distributed language and the theory of writing thus shed new light on the private language argument by making it even more radical than has previously been assumed.

This article offers an alternative view of mobile learning, moving away from a focus on technology to an emphasis on the mobilization of multiple resources by the learner and the interactivity between the learner and the environment. We present an analysis of an episode of self-directed online learning by a multilingual learner using the perspective of translanguaging. We argue that the mobilization process is a process of translanguaging whereby the learner goes beyond not only the boundaries between different-named languages but also linguistic codes, transcending modalities and making use of the technological environment and artifacts. In so doing, we highlight the need for researchers to broaden the definition of language and language learning and look more closely at the details of how learners orchestrate and coordinate their mind and body to adapt to the affordances of the diverse range of multilingual, multimodal, and multisemiotic resources.

This study adds to a new area of research that seeks to harmonize language pedagogies in classrooms and language learning in virtual environments. Harmonious languaging uses co-actional and symmetrical structural dynamics to compare three environments in a Chinese school: a baseline traditional classroom using textbooks, the virtual space of Quest Atlantis Quest Atlantis has recently changed its name to Atlantis Remixed (http://atlantisremixed.org) , and a comparable class using print-based handouts. Each has a different design and thus features, and we show that these affect languaging. We found languaging styles that were contingent upon a) the teacher (e.g. answering questions, correcting, inquiring, repeating, and writing in the form of note-taking), b) Quest Atlantis virtual material artifacts (e.g. individuating multiscalar coordination between reading and writing), and c) the teacher and the handout (e.g. answering questions, self-expressing, and reflection). These styles are important for pedagogy. In our view, the field neglects the harmonious languaging style that arises around virtual worlds. There is lack of engagement with language-as-part-of-nonlinguistic-action. From the distributed view, we show an example of how foreign language learning is facilitated in an experiential domain where verbal patterns are evaluated immediately in the coordination of reading and writing, for which avatar actions, link-clicking, and using dictionaries become other-oriented modes of ambient action.

Following the relational turn that has been observed in the areas of therapy and medical care (cf. Dinis 2010), a similar trend is beginning to develop in education. One didactic manifestation is in academic tutoring, and can be considered as a prototype of personalized education, which is founded on interactivity, dialogicality, and languaging. In our text, we focus on the phenomenon of interactivity and, predominantly, languaging as the substrate for the emergence of a special domain. Here, the learning space is defined as “a cognitive situation where a learner attunes in his/her own epistemic change.” We observe that a learning space occurs as a teacher/tutor engages with aspects of the student’s/tutee’s epistemic frame by questioning, commenting on, or perspectivizing the utterances of the student. It follows that a learning space can be necessary but not sufficient for effective learning. As we show, some research into tutoring excessively idealizes it as an effective teaching tool. In the course of our brief scrutiny we find that success of the learning process also draws on factors like: being prepared being good at hearing and using hints being willing to improvise a learning trajectory allowing some degree of interdependence with the tutor using many kinds of first-order activity

This paper applies a multiscalar interactivity perspective in the study of how healthcare professionals enact skilled embodiment in ways that allow them to animate their rich environment during task performance. However, in focusing on interactivity, we are not only interested in the characteristics of embodiment as they are enacted in the here-and-now. While task performance involves not only the whole body (as a multi-sensory organ), but a historical, skilled body that affects the ecology in which a person is embedded, action-perception must be viewed as direct and distributed. That is, habitual performance and skilled embodiment emerge in coordination with lived experience and real-time affordances for action. Specifically, this paper investigates two real-life cases of how patients and medical staff engage in interactivity through rich embodiment including languaging. From an interactivity perspective, the first case indicates a novice doctor’s inability to pick up relevant information in the emergency medicine ecology. The outcome can be crucial and span patient dissatisfaction, erroneous results, and generally insufficient, and unsatisfactory healthcare. The second case provides a counterexample and illustrates how novice doctors can be supported in picking up task-relevant information as they can rely on other team members’ skilled embodiment. The article concludes that an interactivity perspective has implications not just for model-building in linguistics, semiotics and the cognitive sciences but also for practice where educational initiatives adopt the epistemologies behind such linguistic, communicative and cognitive models.

This paper clarifies the relation between interactivity and languaging. Hitherto proponents of interactivity have tacitly distinguished between two ways in which “interactivity” can be used. While sometimes espousing a wide view, empirical work on the phenomenon has focused on interactivity in a much narrower sense. Having clarified this distinction, I pursue the more important wide sense in tracing the role of interactivity to the emergence of languaging in early infancy. Occurrences of interactivity allow the child to orient toward nonlocal events and resources that, gradually, enable his or her experience to draw on linguistic denotation and an emerging sense of personhood. Finally, I propose that this can be understood in relation to existential meaning. When considered as intrinsic to both languaging and interactivity, such meanings can guide how wordings are brought into play as people attune to cultural norms and expectations.

The notion of languaging provides a new understanding of the intimate relationship between sociality and language. In this paper, I address the evolutionary emergence of language by subscribing to the autopoietic theory of natural drift (Maturana and Varela 1987; Varela et al. 1993; Maturana and Mpdozis 2000) I show that this systemic approach to evolution can offer the ideal epistemological background to evaluate the role of languaging throughout hominization. The central idea is that the languaging-based way of living acted as an attractor for the evolutionary process. This claim relies on three interrelated assumptions: 1) behavioral and relational habits may channel the course of genetic and structural change; 2) recursive coordination and specific forms of sociality set the systemic conditions for coexistence-through-languaging to be conserved over generations; 3) the conservation of these systemic conditions gives rise to a spiraling, positive-feedback process that involves body, cognition, and culture.

This article responds to the papers in this special issue, considering the consilience of semiotics and “extended ecology.” It compares both approaches with reference to the relation of language and Umwelt It suggests that one concept in semiotics which can contribute to the ecolinguistics in respect of avoiding solipsism in the consideration of phenomena of experience is “suprasubjectivity.”