<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In a view of language as part of embodied and situated cognition, reduction of its meaning to individual mental representations ceases to be sufficient. Language relies on and at the same time enables distributed cognition thus the key aspects of meaning are in the interaction of individuals within their world. This special issue is an outcome of a workshop, which gathered representatives of several disciplines in a common effort to find appropriate theoretical concepts for the characterization of those aspects of meaning that lie in the mutual constraining between language and collective practice. The emerging picture is complex, involving multimodal participatory construction of meaning in multiple systems and on multiple timescales. The Authors, however propose also several innovative methods to navigate this complexity. In this short introduction we aim at placing the works contained in this issue on a broader map of ongoing efforts to understand language as a proper part of human ecology.</abstract>

Rethinking Meaning: An Ecological Perspective on Language

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Drawing on the methods of conversation analysis (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_plc-2016-0006_ref_020_w2aab2b8b4b1b7b1ab1ac20Aa">Sidnell, 2010</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_plc-2016-0006_ref_024_w2aab2b8b4b1b7b1ab1ac24Aa">Sidnell and Stivers, 2012</xref>) and the data provided by recordings of ordinary interaction, in this paper I ask what a radically empirical approach to word meaning might look like. Specifically, I explore the possibility that we might investigate linguistic meaning through a consideration of interactional troubles. That is, when participants in interaction confront apparent troubles of meaning, what do those troubles consist in? What is the missing something that leaves participants in interaction feeling as though they do not understand what another means? Four types of trouble in interaction are discussed: troubles of exophoric or anaphoric reference, troubles of common ground, troubles of lexical meaning, troubles of sense.</abstract>

Interactional Trouble and the Ecology of Meaning

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I review evidence of three kinds relating to leakages in modularity within language domains and between linguistic and nonlinguistic action. One kind of evidence shows that the form-meaning “rift” in language that enables the important principle of duality of patterning and the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems is bridged in many ways. Segmental language forms have iconic meanings, and form-meaning correlations of other kinds emerge cross linguistically. A second kind of evidence occurs in parallel transmission of linguistic prosodic information with iconic and emotional information conveyed suprasegmentally. The final kind of evidence shows the integrality of linguistic and nonlinguistic action (deictic points, speech-accompanying gestures, head motions, facial expressions, etc) in conveying communicative information in public language use. I suggest that these violations of modularity within language and between linguistic and nonlinguistic action reflect the dynamic effects of sets of competing and cooperating constraints including, among others, parity and learnability of language forms that shape communicative actions in social activity.</abstract>

Meaning in Phonology and Other Departures from Modularity in the Living Language

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Experimental semiotics is a new discipline developed over the last decade to study human communication. Studies within this discipline typically involve people creating novel signs by associating signals with meanings. Here we suggest ways this discipline can be used to shed light on how people create and communicate meaning. First we present observations drawn from studies in which participants not only construct novel signals, but also have considerable freedom over what these signals refer to. These studies offer intriguing insight on non-saussurian signs (where a single unit of meaning is associated with different signals), communicative egocentricity, private and public meaning, and the distinction between meaningful and meaningless units in linguistic structure, that is between morphemes and phonemes (or analogous entities). We then present a novel quantitative approach to determining the extent to which a signal unit is meaningful, and illustrate its use with data from a study in which participants construct signals to refer to predetermined meanings. Aside from these specific contributions, we show more generally how challenging investigating meaning in Experimental Semiotics is, but we argue that this reflects the difficulties we must face when studying meaning, outside the lab as well as in it.</abstract>

Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut

Investigating Meaning in Experimental Semiotics

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This article is an empirically based theoretical contribution to the investigation of meaningmaking in the ecology of human interaction and interactivity. It presents an ecological perspective on meaning-making that pivots on how agents pick up information directly in their organism-environment-system; i.e. as an activity that does not presuppose inner cognitive operations. We pursue this line of thought by presenting an analysis of how a doctor and a nurse make a decision about a specific medical procedure (catheterisation) based on meaning-making activity. As we do not see meaning as a linguistic (symbolic) or a cognitive (representational) phenomenon external to an agent/user, but as emergent in coordinated interaction, we zoom in on how the practitioners recalibrate the organism-environmentsystem by shift ing between a multi-agentive mode and an individual mode. We use <italic>Cognitive Event Analysis</italic> to investigate how the agents oscillate between being a multi-agent-system with shared, tightly coordinated agency and a loosely coupled dialogical system where the individuals bring forth an understanding based on their professional backgrounds and expertise. On this view, an ecological approach to meaning-making takes a starting point in how local interaction is constrained by previous events, emergent affordances in the environment, and real-time inter-bodily dynamics. Accordingly, meaning-making is seen as a joint activity emerging from the system’s coordinative actions rather than as a result of individual interpretation of symbolic content.</abstract>

Meaning Emergence in the Ecology of Dialogical Systems

Book review: Beata Stawarska, <italic>Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology: Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics</italic>. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015, 286 pp.

Jerzy Bobryk, the humanities professor, eminent scholar and erudite, passed away on October 10, 2016

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 28 (2024): Issue 1 (January 2024)

Volume 27 (2023): Issue 1 (January 2023)

Volume 26 (2022): Issue 1 (January 2022)

Volume 25 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021)

Volume 24 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 23 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

Volume 22 (2018): Issue 1 (January 2018)

Volume 21 (2017): Issue 1 (January 2017)

Volume 20 (2016): Issue 3 (December 2016)

Volume 20 (2016): Issue 2 (November 2016)

Volume 20 (2016): Issue 1 (October 2016)

Volume 19 (2015): Issue 3 (December 2015)

Volume 19 (2015): Issue 2 (October 2015)

Volume 19 (2015): Issue 1 (May 2015)

Volume 18 (2014): Issue 3 (December 2014) Children's Language and Communicative Knowledge, Part Two. In childhood and beyond, Issue Editor: Barbara Bokus

Volume 18 (2014): Issue 2 (August 2014) Children's Language and Communicative Knowledge, Part One. In Memory of Professor Grace Wales Shugar, Issue Editor: Barbara Bokus

Volume 18 (2014): Issue 1 (May 2014)

Volume 17 (2013): Issue 3 (December 2013)

Volume 17 (2013): Issue 2 (September 2013)

Volume 17 (2013): Issue 1 (June 2013)

Volume 16 (2012): Issue 3 (December 2012)

Volume 16 (2012): Issue 2 (December 2012) Language as a Tool for Interaction, Issue Editor: Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi

Volume 16 (2012): Issue 1 (June 2012)

Volume 15 (2011): Issue 2 (December 2011)

Volume 15 (2011): Issue 1 (June 2011)

Volume 14 (2010): Issue 2 (January 2010)

Volume 14 (2010): Issue 1 (June 2010)

Volume 13 (2009): Issue 2 (January 2009)

Volume 13 (2009): Issue 1 (June 2009)

Volume 12 (2008): Issue 2 (December 2008)

Volume 12 (2008): Issue 1 (June 2008)

Psychology of Language and Communication

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