Table Of ContentWhat if we thought of language not as a system of symbols to be manipulated, but
as a living process by which we more complexly embed ourselves in the social
ecology around us and thereby enlarge our capacity to understand and influence
it? What if we viewed language in use not as something originating in “minds” or
thoughts, but in our biological processes of perception and action, exploring and
being emotionally enmeshed in our social and natural environment?
Paul Thibault’s Distributed Languaging offers a detailed alternative model
of how language works, based on an extensive synthesis of recent and classical
research and his own sophisticated insights, with numerous detailed examples
and analyses. Part of a larger intellectual movement toward post-representational
and enactive accounts of how we deal meaningfully with life, this major synthesis
opens up many new avenues for research and inquiry.
—Jay Lemke, Professor Emeritus,
City University of New York
What does it mean to become a self in a society of selves? How do we develop
the capacity to participate in dialogically coordinated processes of stance-taking
in and through our languaging with others? Why is human culture irreducible
to subjective structures, individual agency and social interactions as emphasised
in post-modernist discourse analytic, social semiotic, and socio-linguistic
approaches? Why can’t human consciousness be explained in terms of natural
processes as emphasised in recent brain sciences? What is human consciousness?
One can only be impressed by the vastness and immensity of the scope and depth
of Paul Thibault’s project as he takes up these tremendous questions and carves
out an accessible and convincing exposition that interweaves insights and wisdom
from Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Gibson’s affordance theory,
and Ingold’s process anthropology, among many others, into a theory of “extended
human ecology” emphasising process, flows and movement, in-betweenness,
and relationality. I highly recommend this book to students and researchers in
the language sciences, socio-linguistics, education, anthropology, psychology,
neurosciences, artificial general intelligence (AGI), and cultural sciences.
—Angel M. Y. Lin, Professor & Tier 1
Canada Research Chair in Plurilingual and
Intercultural Education, Simon Fraser University
In the 20th century, linguistics was completely dominated by abstract
objectivism. Since then a paradigm shift has taken place in both theoretical and
empirical studies. The new experience-based network focuses on activities and
products of languaging in terms of embodiment, temporality, multimodality,
heterogeneities, and multilevel sense-making. This book is the perfect guide to
these new trends.
Paul Thibault is one of the world’s leading experts in interdisciplinary language
sciences, especially spoken languaging. Here he explains the multifarious matters
with great clarity. His text is a necessary read for anybody who is interested in
following the development of language studies.
—Per Linell, Professor Emeritus in
Communication (Gothenburg University)
and in Language and Culture
(Linköping University), Sweden.
The modern linguistics of languages, inaugurated a hundred years ago by
Saussure’s famous Cours, is principally concerned with theorising about the
acquisition and use by human beings of the systems of form-meaning pairings
that allegedly permit linguistic interaction among those who have such a system
as their shared possession. Latterly it has become ever more obvious that such
systems are ultimately the result of metalinguistically organising and regulating
the decontextualised products of languaging, as conducted within an interpersonal
network or speech community whose members are constrained by societal norms
to aim at linguistic convergence, and that although they undeniably exist as the
cultural constructs we call “languages”, retrojecting them on to languagers as the
basis for their languaging is a fundamental conceptual error. As Paul Thibault puts
it in this magnificently learned, wide-ranging survey of the prospects for forging
a coherent discipline from multifarious nascent attempts to articulate and analyse
the ingredients of a linguistics of languaging, “an understanding of languaging
and its place in the human ecology requires a new synthesis of biology, complex
systems thinking, cultural psychology, ecology, ecological psychology, the
cognitive sciences, the language sciences, social theory, and much more”. This
book will be compulsory reading for anyone interested in contributing to that
synthesis.
—Nigel Love, Department of Linguistics,
University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701,
South Africa
In this erudite and provocative book that deepens and extends his decades
of discipline-transforming contributions, Paul Thibault cogently argues that
relational entanglements connect language, culture, and biology to meaning,
action, and affect. His core critique is that a linguistics premised on static formal
abstractions is anemic and reductionistic, just as a shadow is to the polychromic
figure casting it. In contrast, Thibault ardently argues for a theory of languaging
or communicative action that is multimodal, embodied, and integrated across
multiple space-time scales. As we have come to expect from Thibault’s prior
research, his voraciously broad intellectual horizons allow him to artfully
integrate ideas from ecological psychology, linguistics, semantics, philosophy,
and distributed language approaches, among others, to create a transdisciplinary
paradigm that will inform, and perhaps reform, the epistemogy, ontology, and
methodology of the language sciences for decades to come.
—Steven L. Thorne, Portland State
University & University of Groningen
This book is by a linguist interested in gifts of imagination that lead to mastery
of talk and reading. It will guide parents and teachers to enjoy the creative and
emotional expressions of children, how they show purposes, experiences and
feelings playfully to friends of all ages. We learn language as a tool, crafted to
describe purposes and experiences of objects and events in cultural understanding.
Two features of human vitality give us these special powers. From birth we use
clever hands and voice to tell others stories of imagination in creative projects.
And we seek to do this in love with playful friends, imitating and advising what
we want to share. We discover “facts” as tricks to possess and to recall what
is discovered by our imagination-in-action, the affordances of “reality” for
enjoyment. This descriptive, psychobiological approach helps us accept the gifts
of children for companionship with emotion. How we share the joys and dangers
of life in our special ecology which has accumulated beliefs through thousands
of years, remembered as symbols in work and art. Paul Thibault gives us a
compassionate guide for parents and teachers, not just an expert review of the
science of speaking and writing.
—Colwyn Trevarthen, PhD, FRSE,
Professor (Emeritus) of Child Psychology
and Psychobiology, School of Philosophy,
Psychology and Language Sciences,
The University of Edinburgh
This is a monumental two-volume project that challenges the received wisdom
in contemporary linguistics. The Languaging approach, comprehensively and
systematically advanced in the book, emphasises the living and experiencing
process. Through many varied and real-life examples, the author demonstrates
how languaging forms an integral part of the human ecology. It is a major
contribution to knowledge, with far-reaching and long-lasting implications for
language teaching and learning, human cognition, and human sociality.
—Li Wei, Chair of Applied Linguistics,
University College London
Distributed Languaging, Affective
Dynamics, and the Human Ecology
Volume II
Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term “language” as
defined in the language sciences of the 20th century and the traditions these have
drawn on, have arguably limited our thinking about what language is and does.
The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault’s study articulate crucially important
aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language—the Distributed
Language view—that is now receiving more and more attention internationally.
Rejecting the classical view that the fundamental architecture of language can be
localised as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organisation that
function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language
view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organisation of process
that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales.
Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively
human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology
and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also
means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the
conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault’s
book grounds languaging in process theory: languaging and the forms of
experience it actualises is always an event, not a thing that we “use”. In taking
a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of
human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking
about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-
individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking
this approach, the book considers the coordination of selves in social encounters,
the emergent forms of self-reflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the
implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something
that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the
endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other
selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that
populate the extended human ecology.
The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging
closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how
languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue
with cultural tradition. Volume I focuses on the shorter time scales of bodily
dynamics in languaging activity. Volume II connects the shorter time scales of
body dynamics to the longer cultural-historical time scales of the linguistic and
cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are integrated.
Paul J. Thibault, who grew up in Newcastle, Australia, and completed his PhD under
Michael Halliday’s supervision at the University of Sydney in 1984, is Professor in
Linguistics and Communication Studies at the University of Agder, Kristiansand,
Norway. He was Hans Christian Andersen Academy Visiting Professor at the
University of Southern Denmark, Odense (2015–2018). He has held academic posts
in Australia, China, Italy, and Hong Kong. His research interests and publications
are in the areas of applied and general linguistics, development, distributed
language and cognition, graphics and interactivity, human–animal interaction,
human interactivity, learning, multimodality, narrative, social theory, learning
theory and teaching and learning in higher education, philosophy of language,
philosophy of mind, and systemic-functional linguistics. He is also currently
working on two new books entitled The Linguistic Imagination and Language,
Body, World: A critical rereading of Hjelmslev. He is currently on the editorial
boards of six international journals. With Mark King, he is developing theoretical
frameworks and methodological tools for the study of human learning in tertiary
settings using the perspectives of distributed cognition, eye tracking, interactivity,
and Multimodal Event Analysis. With Anthony Baldry, he is developing the idea of
multimodal ecological literacy. He has a deep interest in ecological questions since
he was seven years old. He believes that the predominantly mechanistic theories
of human cognition and semiosis need to be replaced by a new account of what it
means to be a living, feeling human self in the human ecology.
Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory
Series Editor: Adrian Pablé
Language and History: Integrationist Perspectives
Edited by Nigel Love
Language Teaching
Integrational Linguistic Approaches
Edited by Michael Toolan
Rationality and the Literate Mind
Roy Harris
Critical Humanist Perspectives
The integrational turn in philosophy of language and communications
Edited by Adrian Pablé
The Reflexivity of Language and Linguistic Inquiry
Integrational Linguistics in Practice
Dorthe Duncker
Integrationism and the Self
Reflections on the Legal Personhood of Animals
Christopher Hutton
Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology
Volume I
The Sense-making Body
Paul J. Thibault
Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology
Volume II
Co-articulating Self and World
Paul J. Thibault
For more information about this series, please visit https: // www . rout ledge . com
/Rout ledge -Adva nces- in -Co mmuni catio n -and -Ling uisti c -The ory /b ook -s eries /
RACL T
Distributed Languaging,
Affective Dynamics, and the
Human Ecology Volume II
Co-articulating Self and World
Paul J. Thibault
