The ongoing languaging revolution and more. Special Issue 2023 Introduction

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This article thematizes the language–practice divide which, in various forms, is posited by proponents of radical linguistics. In tracing the divide back to Saussure’s <italic>Course</italic>, an argument is made for its abolishment. More specifically, I unfold a criticism of Saussure’s account on the differences and similarities between the general phenomenon of language and the practice of a chess game, arguing that there are no grounds for assuming that the two differ in kind, let alone are essentially reducible to their synchronous elements. Finally, I make a move towards exploring the interplay of language and practice by stressing the enlanguaged nature of practical doings and how they emerge from basic cognitive attitudes.
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Radicalizing radical linguistics: on the need to overcome the language–practice divide

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In a process-ontological perspective, I consider some aspects of the ways in which human languaging enables persons to operate on and to actualize and de-actualize the modal potentials of their world. I examine Johanna Seibt’s notion of functional individuals to show how some aspect of the world can be selected and differentiated and thus located in some region of space-time by a particular linguistic (or other) operation. Rather than referring to an already given and present actuality, utterances actualise and situate functional individuals to varying degrees of definiteness, specificity, realness, and so on in occasions of languaging and in texts. Wordings enable and scaffold de-coupled intentional-semantic registration that coordinate selves and the functional individuals that populate their world. With reference to the nominal group and criteria of Thinghood, I consider concrete particulars and functional stuffs in relation to the capacity of our languaging to activate selective aspects of the modal potentials of the processes that we encounter in the world. This requires a process-ontological account of the world on which and in which we act in and through languaging. Languaging functions to sensibilize us to different aspects of the modal potentials that it activates.
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Mastering Languaging and Extending our Agency in and through the Virtualities of Languaging: The Interplay of Causes and Constraints in Actualising the World

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The article elaborates on substance-form aspects of integral communicative practices. Respective substance matters emerge with their shaping into formative and formal modes within the integral bio-social existence and experience of humans. Instrumentally modes help humans to shape or form their irregular substance matters into <italic>in-formed</italic> mental, behavioral and communicative practices.
The article outlines interpretations of respective transformations and processes from Aristotle, Descartes and Kant to Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin and theoreticians of ongoing cognitive and languaging revolutions. The rigid opposing of the ultimate substance/form abstractions provokes conceptual impediments that result in the notorious pseudo-Cartesian mind-body problem. It is possible to overcome it by refocusing on actual middle ground integral developments including actual psychosomatic and mental processes, human communicative interactions and their pragmatic activities. A promising way to do that is to develop intellectual instruments similar to accommodating Hjelmslevean distinction of content and expression planes or relatively integral substance-form complexes.
The article suggests a range of instrumentalities to methodologically reinterpret actual middle ground practices of languaging and language games. To that effect, it suggests a few complementary ways of their embedding and enacting, particularly new modes and procedures to conceptualize prerequisites and outcomes, externalities and affordances of the matching middle ground practices.
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How to do languaging(s), language games and languages

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<italic>Re</italic>-<italic>evoking</italic> examines how languaging enacts human social intelligence. Turning from linguistic tradition, we reduce language to neither abstracta nor form. Rather, as human activity, languaging enables people to co-act as they direct attention within what Margolis (2010b; 2016) calls an enlanguaged world. Given their embodiment, people use languaging to evoke absent others in a flow of action, feeling, judgment, and attitudes. Although based on organism-environment coupling, languaging is also activity that re-evokes the absent. In an enlanguaged world, people use emplaced activity as part of practices, events, situations, artifacts, and so on. Hence, people reach beyond the body as they re-evoke the absent by languaging or, by definition, “activity in which wordings play a part.” As we suggest, absent people are evoked by <italic>othering</italic>. In common domains (e.g. a school), social habits give rise to dispositions during a history of co-acting that, later, can re-evoke absent others and past selves. Having begun with a literary example, we later turn to a detailed case study to show <italic>how</italic> a narrator brings feeling to languaging (in this case, frustration) as she re-evokes other people as they are for her. In conclusion, we suggest that radical embodiment needs to be extended to include how human practices link coupling with social intelligence as people channel what they do with the help of languaging.
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Re-evoking absent people: what languaging implies for radical embodiment

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The paper explores multimodal languaging of objects and words as an encultured practice. We report the results of the experiment where the participants explained the difference between close synonyms, enacting them as either objects or words in speech and gesture. The basic claim of the study is that speech and gesture as second-order language reflect the way they were acquired in developing the knowledge of objects and words in reification image-schemas. We found that i) object reification occurs twice more often; ii) enacting objects and words is affected by the same image-schemas expressed in speech and gesture types, still there are differences in their distribution in speech. This observation evidences that both gesture-specific and language-specific notions are part of languaging since the speech and gesture patterns present the way of packaging the shared idea of objects of reference.
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Multimodal languaging: Reification profiles in language and gesture

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This paper mobilises posthumanism as a way to theorise and articulate what <italic>language(s)/languaging</italic> may be for nonhuman animals. This is investigated via various concepts brought together: we turn to the ontological turn in anthropology to expand on what language is, or might be, amongst humans, and then discuss <italic>Umwelt</italic> and <italic>languaging</italic> as two possible modes of exploring ontologies and biosemiosis among nonhumans. The dialogue between posthumanism and biosemiosis is so far absent in the field of critical language studies. The aim, thus, is to contribute to the nascent field of posthumanist applied linguistics by tentatively linking discrete fields of enquiry for a productive exchange across disciplines, and to further the discussion of how nonhuman language is (or may be) ontologised.
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eugeniademuro@researchstrategiesaustralia.com

Can nonhumans speak? Languaging and worlds in posthumanist applied linguistics

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 6 (2023): Issue 3 (December 2023)

Volume 6 (2023): Issue 2 (September 2023)

Volume 6 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 5 (2022): Issue 3 (December 2022)

Volume 5 (2022): Issue 2 (September 2022)

Volume 5 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 4 (2021): Issue 3 (December 2021)

Volume 4 (2021): Issue 2 (September 2021)

Volume 4 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 3 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 3 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 2 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 1 (2018): Issue 2 (December 2018)

Volume 1 (2018): Issue 1 (March 2018)

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