Naturalizing language: linguistic flow and verbal patterns

Introduction The ontology of words is highly variable. Such patterns are spoken, heard, imagined and, in a sense, ‘mirrored’ in texts and programs. While moves to naturalize language usually start with words, ontologically varied entities cannot easily be grounded in either physics or biology. Turning to contemporary cognitive science, therefore, the paper denies that brains or minds store verbal patterns. Rather, to naturalize language, words are treated as intrinsic to human activity. On this novel view, much weight falls on how, from birth, infants use the flow of expression. It is stressed that real-time coordination links nonverbal co-action with social experience. By three months, caregivers can prompt babies to use norms that index cultural contingencies. Unlike other primates, human infants orient to historical patterns that induce others to use values in responding to their doings. In adults, modes of co-ordination shape talking, praying, shouting, silent thinking and, oddly, construing and creating written signs. Experience unites language with bodily dynamics. Co-ordination integrates speech, affect and action. While linguistic flow is bodily, we report words or, precisely, verbal patterns. Using biodynamics, we align expression, artifacts and experience while enacting social practices. Use of routines and affect also draws on convention. Events stabilize round verbal patterns or, in Love’s (2004) terms, first-order language evokes second-order cultural constructs. Variable modes of expression conspire to align speaking, hearing and feeling with normative, formal, symbolic, and other descriptions. Given a first/ second order distinction, language becomes part of a person. In humans, cognition is culturally distributed (Hutchins, 1995a). While embodied, language is also collective. Its verbal patterns, in Wittgenstein’s image, resemble an ancient city. Given its twists and turns, we talk about the charming ruins while making what we can of its resources. As our surroundings become familiar, we master language. Hearing enables us to integrate compressed (Shannon) information with verbal patterns. To naturalize language, therefore, we stress that dynamics matter more than symbols. The paper concludes with consequences for the language sciences.