Distributed Language

The concept of distributed language characterizes a novel approach to the nature and function of language used by the Distributed Language Group (DLG), an interdisciplinary international academic community. Instead of positing that symbols are represented in the brain, language is taken to constitute a way of relating each human being to the world. It is, therefore, mistaken to separate language from either the individual or the environment. Echoing Timo Järvilehto’s one-system view (Järvilehto 1998), the DLG challenges the view presented in the article on Language. Instead, language is viewed as a heterogeneous meshwork of events, processes and material artifacts, when language dynamics influence what individuals do, think and, thus, how the meshwork evolves. Far from being reducible to the so-called symbolic function of , language exploits cognitive dynamics. By sensitising to dynamics, humans link their bodies to cultural events whose patterning has non-local spatial and temporal origins. Linguistic behavior is thus not reducible to formal input/output but is, rather, behavior in a consensual domain (Kravchenko 2007a). In Humberto Maturana’s (1978) terms, it exploits a domain of interlocked conducts that result from ontogenetic reciprocal structural coupling between structurally plastic organisms. It is thus an additional dimension of the cognitive domain of orientational interactions. This domain is established by interactions of the orienting organism and the organism to be oriented with states of relative neuronal activity. In short, language is a relational domain.

Language and codes
The distributed view denies that language is a code or symbolic system (Kravchenko 2007b), although phonetics and verbal patterns (i.e. linguistic forms) are important to language behavior. The contrast with tradition comes in emphasizing that real-time activity integrates verbal patterns with cultural practices. Further, especially in learning to talk, this occurs under the joint control of several persons (and brains). Infants enter language by using biomechanics to make sense of local customs and practices. As Edwin Hutchins (1995) demonstrates for cognition, language is also distributed. Interaction thus comes to incorporate both talk and aspects of expression that make up complex multi-scalar organization. Language - and brains - are dialogical, implicated in behavior (gossip, song, religious rituals, science, using information technology, etc.), and arise from the whole history of human expression.
The DLG approach contrasts language with codes like Morse. First, according to the distributed language view, such coding is incompatible with current knowledge of brains, biology, communication and cognition. Complex social behavior, including language, arises in infants who already act intelligently. In spite of traditional beliefs, cognition and communication are inseparable. Second, as Roy Harris (1981) and the integrational linguists (Sutton 2004) put it, the orthodox view of language rests on attempts to scientize lay perspectives on talk. In everyday life, humans adopt the (false) belief that they communicate by sending messages from one brain to another (see the article on communication) because of ‘shared’ knowledge of language-systems (or a code). By contrast, on a distributed language view, meaning is not readily shared (Zlatev 2003), and communication is difficult.
Contrasting language with Morse code frees proponents of the distributed language view from seeing it as a system (or system of systems). For the DLG, it is a heterogeneous array of resources that include both biomechanics and various ways of using verbal patterns. Language is part of action. In Nigel Love’s (2004) terms, first-order language - or languaging - is integral to behavior. As such, it must not be identified with the second-order constructs highlighted in post-Saussurian tradition. Verbal patterns derive from a history of using language to talk about language (i. e., how grammar, meaning, logic, rhetoric, etc. shape verbal patterns).

Language as dialogical activity
As stressed by Per Linell (1998), first-order language is full-bodied dialogical activity based on segmental and prosodic patterns that are accompanied by changing patterns of gaze, posture, facial expression, gesture, etc. At times verbal patterns dominate and, at others, they background interpersonal events. By convention, descriptions focusing on verbal patterns are said to describe ‘conversations’. While first order language shapes real-time activity, humans also use material artifacts such as pens, prepared surfaces, and computers together with written signs. These allow for slower forms of language-behavior which, in history, reshaped the cultural patterns that can be described as the activity which constitutes total language. This makes use of second-order cultural constructs as a range of artifacts that are embedded in complex practices.

Cognition and communication
Because language is distributed, no neat line separates cognition and communication. First-order language shapes human affairs by prompting individuals to self-construct as persons (with selves, wants, and beliefs). To develop this insight, the DLG focuses on how individuals interact. They ask how self-conscious agents use circumstances to contextualize experience by means of signs and, conversely, interpret signs against experience. The issue can also be approached philosophically by asking about communicative and supracommunicative functions. As Andy Clark (1997) emphasizes, language shapes thoughts, simplifies the environment and influences other agents. http://www.uab.edu/philosophy.ross.html (2007) argues that language has a part in constructing selves. Much can thus be learned from examining how verbal patterns are integrated with biomechanics during decision-making based in distributed neural processes. While language is typically idealized as independent of bodily activity, dialogical events exploit embodiment (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991). In distributed terms, they rely on biomechanics or first-order language. In exploring biomechanics, weight is given to gesture, facial expression and prosody as well as both ‘non-verbal’ behavior and the manifold material factors that contribute to circumstances.

Language in the brain
Language is often taken to be - in some as yet unexplained way - a biological property of the brain. Today, however, it is increasingly recognized that while brains enable humans to speak, first-order language need not rely on mapping linguistic forms to non-linguistic meanings. Once language is contrasted with Morse code, there is no point thinking that brains ‘represent’ second-order cultural constructs. Humans act in rule-following ways by learning from their fellows. Accordingly, first-order language may map onto neural parameters that control how humans act in the physical and cultural environment (Maturana, Mpodozis & Letelier 1995).

Language and culture

Second-order cultural constructs

While language is grounded in first order activity, languaging humans also repeat aspects of utterances and, in literate societies, analyze these in terms of notational units. As argued by http://www.wm.edu/english/directory.php?personid=5062 (1997), language is ‘reflexive’. Its cognitive and communicative functions exploit language about language - the second order cultural constructs of literate tradition. Equally, as beliefs about these constructs change in time and space, so do the institutions that they support. For this reason, there can be no single approach to linguistics. Given the heterogeneity of language, the language sciences need both interpretative studies of linguistic phenomena (both verbal and full-bodied) and methods which link language to scientific models. These will model cognitive dynamics across time domains that include both the microevents of first-order activity and the slow changes that characterize evolutionary and historical processes.

Cultural selection

The evolutionary emergence of second-order language probably draws on cultural selection, development, social learning and the complex dynamics of co-evolution and natural selection. It is of special interest to consider how first-order language and social strategies impact on learning the modern total language.

Language and the interaction order

Language interacts with particular modes of life: what humans do with language - and language to humans - varies between settings. This was one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s greatest insights: language is inseparable from cultural contexts. Human modes of life are the customs that humans enact which, in complex ways, form a web of constraints on experience. Erving Goffman called the norms that shape how humans live the ‘interaction order’. From the point of view of distributed language, macrosocial constraints enable agents to develop linguistic sensitivity. In Hutchins’ terms, they are nodes around which cultural processes flow.

Total language

Language is more dynamic than the form-based systems described by orthodox linguists. By allowing humans to connect rapid local dynamics with patterns associated with slow structural and social change, language is in constant flux. Individuals become familiar with aspects of the meshwork that serve in changing physical, biological and cultural circumstances. Humans exploit biomechanics and second-order cultural constructs in ways that both react to, and create, circumstances - including neural events. Even if, on a distributed view, there is no prospect of a single theory of language, the enterprise has a common core. The DLG are a community who examine how dialogical activity shapes both interpretative practices and the multi-scale dynamics of total language.

Language and robots
When compared to Morse code, language reduces to disembodied symbols. By contrast, on the distributed view, it shapes how actual people experience social and cognitive events. The approach is thus inseparable from embedded, embodied cognitive science. This has important implications for modeling. Instead of appealing to software models, robotics can be used in linguistic modeling. In tracing language to first-order activity, aspects of dialogue can be simulated in human-robot encounters. Indeed, increasingly human-like robots will be test-beds for exploring what can be done with language. Pursuing this view, Stephen Cowley (2007a, b) rejects the traditional view of symbol grounding by suggesting that language is triply grounded into the brain, first-person experience and the norms that shape our modes of life. In building robots that simulate how humans draw on such patterns, the distributed perspective sets the goal of showing how human agency it transformed through experience of language.

References
Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cowley, S. J. (2007a). How human infants deal with symbol grounding. Interaction Studies, 8/1: 81-104.
Cowley, S. J. (ed.) (2007b). Cognitive Dynamics in Language (Special issue of Language Sciences 29).
Harris, R. (1981). The Language Myth. London: Duckworth.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Järvilehto, T. (1998). The theory of the organism-environment system: I. Description of the theory. Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 33. 317-330.
Kravchenko, A. (2007a). Whence the autonomy? A reply to Harnad and Dror." Pragmatics & Cognition 15(3). 587-597.
Kravchenko, A. (2007b). Essential properties of language, or, why language is not a code. Language Sciences, 29(5). 650-671.
Linell, P. (1998). Approaching Dialogue: Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Love, N. (2004). Cognition and the language myth. Language Sciences 26(6). 525-544.
Maturana, H. (1978). Biology of language: The epistemology of reality. In G. Miller and E. Lenneberg (eds.), Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought. New York: Academic Press. 28-62.
Maturana, H., J. Mpodozis, and J. C. Letelier (1995). Brain, language, and the origin of human mental functions. Biological Research 28. 15-26.
Reed, E.S. (1996). Encountering the World: Toward an ecological psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, D., (2007). H. sapiens as ecologically special: what does language contribute? Language Sciences, 29/5: 710-731.
Sutton, J. (2004). Representation, levels, and context in integrational linguistics and distributed cognition. Language Sciences 26(6). 503-524.
Taylor, T. (1997). Theorizing Language. Amsterdam: Pergamon Press.
Varela, F. J., E. Thompson and E. Rosch (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Zlatev, J. (2003). Meaning = life (+ culture): an outline of a unified biocultural theory of meaning. Evolution of Communication 4(2). 253-296.

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