Reconciling symbolic and dynamic aspects of language: Toward a dynamic psycholinguistics

Abstract

The present paper examines natural language as a dynamical system. The oft-expressed view of language as ''a static system of symbols'' is here seen as an element of a larger system that embraces the mutuality of symbols and dynamics. Following along the lines of the theoretical biologist H.H. Pattee, the relation between symbolic and dynamic aspects of language is expressed within a more general framework that deals with the role of information in biological systems. In this framework, symbols are seen as information-bearing entities that emerge under pressures of communicative needs and that serve as concrete constraints on development and communication. In an attempt to identify relevant dynamic aspects of such a system, one has to take into account events that happen on different time scales: evolutionary language change (i.e., a diachronic aspect), processes of communication (language use) and language acquisition. Acknowledging the role of dynamic processes in shaping and sustaining the structures of natural language calls for a change in methodology. In particular, a purely synchronic analysis of a system of symbols as ''meaning-containing entities'' is not sufficient to obtain answers to certain recurring problems in linguistics and the philosophy of language. A more encompassing research framework may be the one designed specifically for studying informationally based coupled dynamical systems (coordination dynamics) in which processes of self-organization take place over different time scales. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Keywords: Symbol; Information; Semantics; Psycholinguistics; Dynamical systems Language disguises thought. So much so, that from outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body.

Meaning in Nature: Organic Manufacture?

“…Whatever the outcome of this debate, it is clear that we are unlikely to find universal grammar or identify proposition based neurosystems. This is in line with challenges to views of language that presuppose its semantics 'represent' determinate knowledge (Varela 1991;Love 2007;Ross 2007;Port 2007;Bickhard 2007;Raczaszek-Leonardi and Kelso 2008). Further, if biology has little need for recognition, cultural sense-making may well also depend on process, constraints and self-regulation.…”

“…Since language is expression, there can be no pure symbols. Human intellect uses-not just knowledge-but also language process (Bickhard 2007;Raczaszek-Leonardi and Kelso, 2008). Events unite time-scales of evolution, history and ontogenesis with those of the lived present, biomechanics and the brain (Cowley 2007).…”

Interactional Trouble and the Ecology of Meaning

“…Despite some suggestions along these lines from Witt genstein and some general remarks from Garfi nkel and Sacks, this possibility seems to have been overlooked by almost all the scholarship in this area (see however Rączaszek-Leonardi and Kelso, 2008;Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2016;as well as Enfi eld, 2014). Th e rather radical position I want to provisionally propose here is that meanings do not exist, primarily, in the minds of individuals or the collective consciousness of a community but rather in particular contexts of situated interaction.…”

The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement

“…By characterising language as a 'persisting, though never stationary symbolic edifice' (Clark, 2008), Clark focuses on the code-like products of linguistic activities rather than the processes that produce, engage and evolve linguistic forms (Rączaszek-Leonardi & Kelso, 2008;Steffensen, 2009). This focus echoes a more general bias in philosophy of mind, linguistics and cognitive science that implicitly and unreflectively have treated literacy and written text as the prototypical case of language (Linell, 2005).…”