Talking as doing: Language forms and public language

Abstract

I discuss language forms as the primary means that language communities provide to enable public language use. As such, they are adapted to public use most notably in being linguistically significant vocal tract actions, not the categories in the mind as proposed in phonological theories. Their primary function is to serve as vehicles for production of syntactically structured sequences of words. However, more than that, phonological actions themselves do work in public language use. In particular, they foster interpersonal coordination in social activities. An intriguing property of language forms that likely reflects their emergence in social communicative activities is that phonological forms that should be meaningless (in order to serve their role in the openness of language at the level of the lexicon) are not wholly meaningless. In fact, the form-meaning “rift” is bridged bidirectionally: The smallest language forms are meaningful, and the meanings of lexical language forms generally inhere, in part, in their embodiment by understanders.

Phonetic convergence across multiple measures and model talkers

“…Although direct realism is not an account of speech production, Fowler has repeatedly proposed that the perception of speech directly and rapidly yields the same vocal tract gestures that are used when producing speech, effectively goading imitation (Fowler, 1986;Fowler et al, 2003;Sancier & Fowler, 1997). In contrast with Pickering and Garrod's integrated account of communication in dialogue, the motor theory and direct realism were developed mainly to account for speech perception, and Fowler has pointed out that phonetic forms serve multiple roles of specifying linguistic tokens, contributing to interpersonal coordination, and expressing social identity (Fowler, 1986(Fowler, , 2010(Fowler, , 2014. Taken together, accounts of language comprehension provide support for and predict phonetic convergence, within limits set by other factors that are outside their scope.…”

“…To support phonetic accommodation in production, speech perception must resolve phonetic form in sufficient detail, and detailed phonetic form must persist in memory. Fowler's direct realist theory of speech perception asserts that individuals directly perceive linguistically significant vocal tract actions, or phonetic gestures (e.g., Fowler, 1986Fowler, , 2014Fowler et al, 2003;Fowler, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 2016;Goldstein & Fowler, 2003;Shockley et al, 2004). The motor theory of speech perception and Pickering and Garrod's interactivealignment account both claim that speech perception processes recruit speech production processes to yield resolution of motor commands (e.g., Liberman, 1996;Pickering & Garrod, 2004.…”

Articulatory imaging implicates prediction during spoken language comprehension

“…Articulation is a dynamic, highly flexible process, which maps to its acoustic consequences in a complex, many-to-one manner. Importantly, however, it adapts online to changes in environmental, physical, linguistic, and psychological circumstances (Fowler, 2014;Garnier & Henrich, 2014;McMillan & Corley, 2010;Pianesi, 2007). As an utterance unfolds, speech-motor behavior is influenced by both recent and upcoming demands on the speech execution system.…”

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

“…We set them up.We decide how to think the model in its projective relation to the world; that can't be determined for us by the intrinsic properties of the model itself. (Noë, 2012, p. 101) The language stance idea is clearly not a complete naturalistic explanation in itself, and so this sort of account introduces a second major element having to do with covariance and self-organization on multiple timescales (see Bickhard, 2007;Fowler, 2014;MacWhinney, 2005;Port, 2009Port, , 2010aRą czaszek-Leonardi, 2013;Thibault, 2011;Uryu et al, 2013). On the code view, languaging events on millisecond and second scales instantiate forms which themselves are 'real' only in some abstract sense, for example through their inclusion in someone's mental lexicon.…”