Taking a Language Stance

Language rules and language ecology

“…Earlier examples are Ortega y Gasset (1963) and Pike (1967); recent examples are Thibault (2011) and Cowley (2011). From this perspective, patterning is potentially at least as powerful as rule-governedness in explaining the iterativeness of language, and has the considerable theoretical ecological advantage of integrating language with social behaviour in general.…”

Content in languaging: why radical enactivism is incompatible with representational theories of language

“…The first part of the story is a rough-and-ready recapitulation of linguistic development, strenuously avoiding pretheoretic representationalism based on the written language bias (for introductions from several perspectives, see Bruner, 1983;Cowley, 2007bCowley, , 2011bCowley, , 2012bKrueger, 2013;Raimondi, 2014;Reed, 1995;Roberts, 2002). Preverbal infants' interactions with their caretakers involve rich emotional expression and plenty of vocal activity.…”

“…Many of these actions are attentional -look at this, notice that -and so infants are using sets of syllables to regulate attention, to affect phenomenal experience in structured ways. To do this, infants must "take a language stance" (Cowley, 2011b), or treat vocal patterns as instances of something in the same way that we treat paintings as depictions of something. In Cowley's terms, the repeating structures are 'wordings' (this to distinguish them from 'words', which we usually understand as tokens of a type by virtue of their physical structure rather than by virtue of the stance that it taken towards them).…”

Dialogism and the Distributed Language Approach: a rejoinder to Steffensen

“…I recently published a short review in Language Sciences (Linell, 2013) of some work in the Distributed Language Approach (in particular, Cowley, 2011aCowley, , 2011b. Sune Steffensen has now written a long commentary (Steffensen, 2015), which also takes into account my previous comprehensive book Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically (Linell, 2009).…”