Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Language Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci

The reflexivity of human languaging and Nigel Love’s

two orders of language1
Paul J. Thibault a, b, *
a
Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of Agder, Kristiansand S, Norway
b
Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Nigel Love’s distinction between first-order language and second-order language exposes
Available online 31 December 2016 the fallacy of the code view of linguistic communication. Persons do not ‘use’ the forms
that are said to constitute a pre-existing language system; they adapt and shape their
Keywords: bodily behaviour, including their vocalizing, in accordance with community-level norms
First-order language and practices that have historical continuity and thus define the cultural-historical tradi-
Second-order language
tions of a community. Individuals normatively orient to these continuities and self-
Language stance
reflexively engage in forms of situated appropriation of them as they flexibly adapt them to
metalanguage
Reflexivity
the requirements of situations in the pursuance of their goals. Love has shown how the
Written language bias capacity of languaging agents to evoke a linguistic ‘same’ depends upon their capacity self-
reflexively to enter it dialogue with this tradition so that, for example, first-order utterance
activity on a given occasion can be referenced with respect to the manner in which that
utterance is experienced, to an aspect of how we are engaging with it. First-order lan-
guaging is an experiential flow that is enacted, maintained, and changed by the real-time
activity of participants. To construe this flow as sequences of abstract forms is a radical
misconstrual of what people are doing in their languaging. For a start, it is assumed that
‘language’ is constituted out of formal entity-like units that can be segmented and iden-
tified on analogy with the metalinguistic analytical practices afforded by alphabetic
writing. Accordingly, language is seen, in part, as constituents (parts) and their combina-
tions into wholes. Combinations of these constituents thus generate new wholes. This
assumption is grounded in traditional entity-based (or substance-based) metaphysics. On
the other hand, the term languaging serves to direct attention to the fact that processes and
their organization across different spatial and temporal scales are fundamental. Bodily and
situational processes in the here-and-now of first-order languaging interact with and
integrate with cultural processes deriving from population scale cultural-historical
dynamics.
Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1
Many thanks to Peter Jones for his insightful and very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
For Nigel in friendship and gratitude.
* Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of Agder, Kristiansand S, Norway.
E-mail address: pauljthibault@gmail.com.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2016.09.014
0388-0001/Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85 75

1. Introduction

Nigel Love’s (1990) groundbreaking distinction between first-order language and second-order language presents a
number of fertile ideas ripe for further development. In showing the agent’s belief and faith in the iterability of entities
like ‘words’ and ‘sentences’ from one occasion of languaging to another, Nigel Love’s distinction shows how what lan-
guaging agents do on any one occasiondtheir first-order languagingdis oriented to and shaped by agents’ sense of the
real effects of virtual second-order patterns that derive from and also serve to evoke the historical-cultural traditions of a
community. In so doing, agents draw upon and ground their languaging both in their first-person experience as well as
the collective and situation-transcending scale of an entire population. When someone makes a claim about a linguistic
same in Nigel Love’s sense, they are performing a meta-linguistic operation that interacts with (some aspect of) the flow of
first-order languaging. The iterability of linguistic sames identified by Love (1990, 2007) shows the recursivity and
reflexivity of human languaging and hence its historical depth: as Love notes we make our own verbal behaviour “an
object of contemplation and inquiry.” (Nigel Love, circulated Notes, January 2015). Drawing on past patterns and be-
haviours, selves are able to manage their present and anticipated future languaging activities and to fashion their self-
narratives (Ross, 2007) by evoking and adapting the iterated and consolidated habits and routines of the community in
their own projects. Love’s distinction also raises the question as to the reflexive relationship between the individual social
agent and social and cultural resources. In this paper, I will examine some aspects of the intrinsic reflexivity of human
languaging in relation to the two orders of language postulated by Love. In doing so, I offer some proposals that illustrate
the continuing relevance and potential for further development of Love’s important distinction between the two orders of
language.

2. The architecture of language according to the code view

Language is usually seen as comprising three coding levels of phonology, syntax, semantics, which, for example, Trager
(1958) refers to as the three levels of sound, shape, and sense. There have been many versions of this conception before
and since. A core assumption of this view is that the three levels and the relations between them constitute a stable linguistic
architecture of verbal language as distinct from the variables of so called ‘paralanguage’. Martinet’s notion of the doubly
articulated character of language is founded upon this principle. He makes a distinction between what is “properly linguistic”
and “what is marginally so” (Martinet, 1962: 59) that rests upon the assumption of a doubly articulated linguistic core:
It is by reference to our distinction between what is properly linguistic and what is marginally so that we may hope to
give a sound foundation to the concept of ‘normal utterance’. What we consider properly linguistic is what is achieved
in matters of communication, by means of the double articulation pattern: double articulation is what protects the
linguistic frame against interference from outside, what makes it really independent and self-contained.
(Martinet, 1962: 59)
Double articulation in Martinet’s sense is based on the notion of doubly articulated language as an (approximately)
invariant core that does not change from one set of circumstances to another. If distinctiveness is what makes it possible for
speakers and listeners to distinguish lexicogrammatical units (c.f. Martinet’s monemes), many other aspects of languaging
reflect the fact that ‘language’ is not a fixed set of doubly articulated units that do not vary from one situation to another;
Instead, languaging behaviour constitutes a flexible, adaptive means for attuning to and adjusting to specific circumstances. It
seems odd to define language as a system of invariant doubly articulated units (monemes) and to argue that these units are
“properly linguistic” whereas other features of the speech event are only marginally linguistic or not all at. Definitions of
‘paralanguage’ vary to include non-linguistic aspects of the speech signal and kinesics such as facial expressions, hand
gestures and body postures. The basic assumption is that the verbal and nonverbal aspects of speech behaviour can be
separated off from each other as distinct phenomena which are ‘combined’ in speech (Trager, 1958). Language in such a
viewde.g., the classical formalist one, but also many contemporary functional and discourse-analytical viewsdis identified
above all with abstract verbal patterns, morphosyntax or lexicogrammar.
In this view, language is a code-like system of inputs and outputs that gets separated from cognitive, affective, and bodily
dynamics in real-time (Cowley, 2007, 2008; Cowley and Love, 2006; Thibault, 2008, 2011a, b, c). Until recently, the language
sciences have conducted their research in isolation from work in the biological, ecological, and neurobiological sciences.
Linguists and discourse-analysts have been content all too often to conduct the ‘scientific’ study of human languaging on the
basis of metaphysical premises and assumptions derived from several millenia of folk-theoretical speculations about ‘lan-
guage’ in accordance with predominant intuitions that the world is grounded in and explainable in terms of substances and
fundamental entities (Taylor, 1993). Language is form, not substance. This view follows in the tradition of the Aristotelian
hylomorphic schema (see Simondon, 2011: 66–71 for discussion of the limitations of the Aristotelian hylomorphic schema).
According to Aristotle’s schema, transcendent form in the metaphysical sense is imposed on an inert and passive matter.
However, this essentialist and constructivist account of the genesis of form can now be discarded in favour of a more realistic
and realist one based on the intrinsic morphogenetic properties of the material world and its capacities for giving rise to new
forms. On this view, the material world possesses its own intensive resources for the generation of form from within its own
dynamics when it is manipulated and interacted with by bodily and technical means that modulate and channel the flows of
energy through it and thus give rise to form (Simondon, 2011: 62–66).
76 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85

Linguists further assumed that entities corresponding to their formalismsdphonemes, words, sentences, etc.dsomehow
existed in or are represented in the brain. However, the brain does not work like that. Instead, our brains, in co-regulating our
activities with others and coordinating our actions with the world, help us to attune to the body dynamics of vocalizations,
facial expressions, eye movements, and so on (Cowley et al., 2004; Hart, 2008/2006; Trevarthen, 1992, 1998). Language
became abstracted from these processes and reified as verbal abstracta and/or text (Thibault, 2011b: 2–5), rather than seen as
the integration and orchestration of neural, bodily, situational, social, and cultural processes spanning a diversity of time
scales. In reducing ‘language’ to reified abstracta of this kind, linguists failed to see that persons and their brains respond to
and are animated by the dynamics of living, feeling, moving bodies, not abstract forms. This is the basis on which infants
attune to the language of others and learn to adapt their own brains and bodies to it. Infants don’t ‘acquire’ language; they
adapt their bodies and brains to the languaging activity that surrounds them. In doing so, they participate in cultural worlds
and learn that they can get things done with others in accordance with culturally promoted norms and values.
A primary goal of twentieth century linguistics was to establish correlations between language forms and their functions
or meanings. This approach in its various guisesdformal, functional, cognitiveddominated twentieth century scientific
approaches to language. Most linguistic theory has been based on the idea that language is some sort of code consisting of
pairings of abstract forms with abstract meanings. Linguists in the Saussurean tradition assumed an ontological commitment
to ‘language’ as some kind or organic totality that was unified by the internal relations between its formal components.
However, ‘language’ so conceived is a “reified generality” (see Delanda, 2010: 3 for this term) on a par with other reified
generalities like ‘society’ or ‘mind’ as distinct from concrete historically emergent wholes with their properties, capacities,
and tendencies. Reified generalities have no explanatory power and little grounding in empirical constraints. It is important
therefore to focus on the historical processes that give rise to and individuate concrete, historically emergent wholes as
distinct from reified generalities like language as code or abstract system.
Human agents do not make use of a pre-existing language code. Instead they engage in various forms of co-action whereby
languaging activity is orchestrated in real-time through the integration of a variability of distinctive cultural and biological
systems and resources that cannot be reduced to the formal abstracta typically taken to define the properties of ‘language’. On
this view, human languaging activity is radically heterogeneous and involves the integration of processes on many different
time-scales, including neural, bodily, situational, social, and cultural processes and events. Human agency has evolved to take
adaptive advantage of this radical heterogeneity (of language) as a way of potentiating and augmenting human cognitive
activity and agency. The term ‘languaging’ therefore refers to the praxis in and through which language events are achieved
and recognized in culturally saturated interactivity between persons (Thibault, 1991).
The code view can be related to the overriding tendency in linguistics to identify languages with determinate form-
meaning correlations derived from the writing systems of literate cultures (Linell, 2011/2005; Kravchenko, 2016: 109). In
the present account, writing systems and the linguistic units and relations based on them are second-order cultural con-
structs. These second-order constructs are an inadequate and misleading foundation for theorizing and analyzing the entirely
different dynamical processes that constitute talk in first-order languaging. The failure of linguistics to take this point seri-
ously along with the concomitant modelling of talk using analytical and descriptive abstracta that are based on writing ac-
counts for many of the difficulties that twentieth century linguistics has evidenced in overcoming its “written language bias”
(Linell, 2011/2005; Harris, 1987: 1–18, 1996: 6–7).
The code view is founded on the idea that determinate linguistic forms are correlated with determinate meanings (e.g.,
Taylor, 2012: 241). On this view, the language system functions to specify the rules for mapping forms to meanings and
meanings to forms. In adopting this view as their definition of language, many linguists (and psychologists, philosophers,
neural scientists, etc.) have assumed that the language system exists to provide and guarantee consensus, commonality, and
conformity so that persons can ‘communicate’ on the basis of a shared system of form-meaning mappings (see Harris, 1996:
244). They therefore fail to account for the ways in which human languaging is flexible, adaptive and creative contextualizing
activity (Harris, 1996). Languaging in this sense (not ‘language’ qua determinate system) was Maturana’s (1970) term for
exploring how ‘talk’ is a complex behaviour oriented to the creation and sustaining of consensual domains. The biological
basis of human languaging qua complex behaviour means that human infants in the first instance depend on value biases that
enable them to exploit dynamical patterns in the vocal and other activity of adult interlocutors. In doing so, they learn how to
align their behaviour with and to integrate it with the dynamics of complex socially coordinated languaging behaviour. At the
same time, they also learn, in time, to discriminate higher-level phonetic patterns (Kuhl, 2007) and to exploit their affor-
dances (Gibson, 1986/1979) in their coordinated first-order languaging with other persons.
Nigel Love’s (1996, 2004, 2007) work points the way towards the development of investigative tools that are freed of the
code model of language for inquiring into and better explaining how in the coordinated dynamics of real-time first-order
languaging between persons, they confer linguistic sense and identity on aspects of these dynamical behaviours in order to
manage their relationships both with other persons and with aspects of the situations in which they participate.

3. The sameness trick

Love (1990, 2007) shows how we attribute ‘sameness’ to verbal patterns that show considerable variation in the physical-
bodily processes that actualize them. First-order languaging is situated vocalizing (and other bodily activity) that has the
capacity to affect experience normatively by means of the replication of routines, e.g., discourse patterns and abstract verbal
patterns. In other words, languaging is not reducible to acoustic, auditory, and articulatory dynamics. It also has situation-
 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85 77

transcending capacities (Linell, 2011/2005). To understand this more clearly, we need to distinguish ‘phonology’ and ‘lex-
icogrammar’ from ‘wordings’. Phonological constructs (phonemes, syllables, etc.) and lexicogrammatical constructs (words,
clauses, sentences, etc.) are ideal institutionalized objects (Fortescue, 2001: 234–235). They are not transcendent forms in the
manner of Aristotle’s entity realism that are stamped on inert matter. Instead, they are immanent in the collective socio-
cultural dynamics and socio-cognitive interaction practices of a given population of languaging agents together with the
social institutions and agencies that act to codify, disseminate, enforce, police, and promote these forms, both formally and
informally. These ideal constructs are not the same as wordings. Wordings, as Cowley explains, are ‘nonce events’ that are
perceived and construed in relation to a person’s sociocultural experience in particular occasions of utterance-activity
(Cowley, 2011). A wording is not an abstract phonological or lexicogrammatical form in the ideal sense described above,
but the experiencing of a synthesis or meshing of second-order phonological and lexicogrammatical constraints with the
speaker’s voice dynamics in a particular utterance on a particular occasion. Phonological and lexicogrammatical form are best
seen as information constraints. They are not transcendent abstracta that are imposed on matter, but the means of harnessing
and directing the potential of a system so as to maintain it in a constant condition of metastable equilibrium in relation to its
environment. A languaging agent is, then, a system that recursively self-individuates by tapping into and sustaining
potentialsdbodily, situation, circumstantial, social, culturaldby manufacturing semantic syntheses in its utterance-activity
as it seeks solutions to the problematics that it encounters in its world.
The integration of second-order phonological and lexicogrammatical constraints with voice dynamics leads to the se-
mantic synthesis of a linguistic artefact (an utterance) in which agents are able to perceive a pattern of wording that the
utterance actualizes. Agents develop a repertoire of culturally learned techniques, routines and skills for bringing off such
semantic syntheses. The ability to recognize sames in utterances is a culturally learned perceptual ability. Humans learn to
perceive the events, processes, and ‘things’ in the world as recognizable kinds of events, processes, things, etc. (Ratner, 2008/
2006: 80). They do not perceive sensory properties per se though these can also be attended to and explored. Human
perception is conceptually organized and learned through a history of relevant experiences that promote recognition of
events, processes, and things as categories. We see and/or hear an aeroplane, we hear a lawnmower starting up, we perceive
storm clouds, a galloping horse, an aeroplane, and so on. The recognition of sames in the flow of languaging is no different.
The ability to recognize linguistic sames is based on the same ability to perceive things conceptually. Humans do so in ways
that draw on both individual and collective (cultural) dimensions of experience so that they can modify each other’s per-
ceptions and actions in order to get on in our worlds by adopting what Cowley (2008, 2011) has referred to as the ‘language
stance’. Utterances prompt the individuation or actualization of the virtual potentialities of phonology and lexicogrammar as
patterns of wordings that we perceive in utterances. Utterances give rise to spontaneous self-organizing processes that may
generate many different physical instantiations. Utterances have an irreducible articulatory-auditory-acoustic dimension that
is situated and embodied. The task of the producer and perceiver is to individuate a wording in the material dynamics of
utterances by actively manipulating, attending to, and perceiving their affordance layouts through processes of comparison
and differentiation grounded in rich phonetic memory.
Every utterance is unique; every occurrence of a particular wording is a historical individual (a singularity): variation is the
norm. It is not a question of instantiating an invariant form from an overarching linguistic system or code consisting of
abstract, unchanging forms. There is no a priori essential form that is materially realized as a copy of the form, as in the system
or code view. The virtuality of lexicogrammar offers us another explanation that frees us from the strictures of the code view,
as follows. Every occurrence of a particular wording is itself a variation for no two occurrences are exactly the same in every
respect (Love, 2007). Every occurrence of a wording in some utterance is a singular event in a population of such events whose
variant relations to each other are established by statistical causality: there is systematicity in the variation (Halliday, 1991).
The identity of an individual wording (as well as any resemblances among the individuals belonging to a given population)
needs to be accounted for by the details of the individuation process that historically generated the entity in question. Any
regularities in the processes themselves, e.g., regular or recurrent features in different processes, must be accounted for in
terms of an immanent (not transcendent) structure of virtual potentialities.
To use Deleuze’s (2004/1968) term, a wording is a virtual multiplicity of differences and variations together with
recurrent aspects of these that can be actualized in divergent ways (variations) by individual speakers and listeners. On
this view, wordings are actualizations in divergent ways of the purely virtual potentialities of socially distributed
phonology and lexicogrammar (Port, 2010). Phonology and lexicogrammar thus refer to community/population scale
dynamics on historical-cultural time scales that arise as a statistical consequence of the entrainment of individuals’
languaging behaviour to the collective dynamics of the population (Thibault, 2011a). Individuals entrain their languaging
to the collective dynamics. The collective dynamics are virtual patterns that individuals seek to replicate though always
only approximately. The collective dynamics on the community scale thus confer a sense of continuity and tradition on
individual languaging behaviour and in this sense the collective dynamics are ‘situation-transcending’ (Linell, 2011/2005:
213, 216).
Second-order phonology and lexicogrammar are socially distributed constraints and norms that are actualized in utter-
ances as patterns of wordings when meshed with utterance voice dynamics. Individuals learn to sensitize to aspects of dy-
namics through participation in culturally promoted fields of action (Reed, 1996). What’s important is the coupling relation
between an agent and the affordances of the vocalization/phonetic gesture (Chemero, 2009; Thibault, 2014a). We develop
skills in hearing one occurrence of a wording as “the same” as another. Sameness is not defined by formal criteria alone; formal
criteria, as we saw above, do not exist in utterances as pre-existing segments but instead are meta-linguistic tools that shape
78 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85

how we experience and anticipate the flow of utterance activity. The capacity to recognize and identify sames is grounded in a
phenomenology of first-person experience and its history (Cowley, 2008; Steffensen, 2011; Thibault, 2011a). The sameness
and iterability of wordings are defined by the functions the phonetic gesture is perceived to serve in regulating agents’ re-
lations to situations in various ways. Wordings evoke past situations thus enabling wordings to differentiate situations, to
operate on and transform them, and to enact social agents who individuate as selves in situations. Phonological and lex-
icogrammatical forms are virtual and non-local: they are actualized by short time scale (local) acts of perception in utterances.
Wordings correspond to what (Deleuze, 2004/1968) calls a virtual multiplicity rather than realizing a possible predefined
form or type that exists in some transcendent code or system. Languaging agents learn to attend to and to perceive some
material patterns as significant, relevant, and valuable: we individuate or actualize these patterns as having this or that
linguistic identity. The phonology and lexicogrammar of a language is, then, a set of second-order culturally evolved con-
straints that enable us to attend to and to perceive pattern in the population of variants. In this way, languaging agents learn to
adopt a ‘language stance’ (Cowley, 2008) towards vocal tract gestures in order to individuate them as linguistic utterances
that are heard as manifesting or actualizing a particular wording, which is always values-realizing. Cowley (2011) shows how
infants learn to adopt a ‘language stance’ once they learn the skills of treating different occurrences as ‘the same’. In so doing,
agents learn to connect utterances in meaningful ways to the circumstances in which they are uttered. This also means that
individual languaging agents, on encountering a new occurrence of a “same”, draw on memory of prior experience of similar
or overlapping stimulus information in concert with present circumstances, aims, and activity so as to expand the relevant
same to incorporate the newly encountered stimulus pattern. Memory of past encounters thus re-evokes sames at the same
time that it revises, modifies and updates them in the light of current experience. Sames are never quite the same from one
occasion to another.
When utterances are perceived to actualize the same wordings, the relation of sameness can only be defined phenom-
enologically (Cowley, 2011). Speakers never produce identical acoustic-articulatory patterns. They produce patterns that are
treated as ‘the same’ (Love, 1990, 2007). Once we learn the sameness trick, we learn how to normatively affect our own and
others’ experience, to evoke and transform specific situations and their conventions in accordance with cultural norms. In
other words, the ability to orient to and to exploit the affordances of verbal pattern in utterance-activity means that infants
self-organize as persons with cultural selfhood who modify their bodily activity to coordinate with other people in accor-
dance with cultural norms and values.
Against Cartesianism, there is no such place as ‘the mind’ ‘in here’ in this account. Instead, as persons, we have learnt to
engage in a range of mental practices that are not confined to the inside of the organism. Wordings have a phenomenological
existence: they depend on an individual’s history of participating in culturally embedded utterance-activity. How does the
phenomenology of wordings stabilize bodily dynamics? Words, sentences, concepts are ideal or virtual ‘entities’ that are
ontologically defined by and constituted by population level dynamics that play out over long cultural-historical time scales of
language communities. They are non-local generic processes that are not located in a particular region of space-time (Seibt,
2001). In this sense, they are real, but virtual (with many variant local actualizations).

4. The language stance: self-reflexively experiencing the flow of languaging

In taking a language stance on the given event and in getting others to do the same, we individuate such events as lin-
guistic events. Linguistic events are not manifestations of the set of all possible sentences in a given language. Nor are they the
outputs of ‘choices’ from a system of meaning options. Both of these perspectives are partial views which do not explain how
or why persons determine why one event is a linguistic one and some other is not. Instead, linguistic events are those
multimodal events which we agree express linguistic meanings through the adoption of the language stance with respect to
at least some aspects of the culturally valued and promoted patterns manifested in them and which we orient to. The ability
to take the language stance on such events presupposes a knowledge and understanding of second-order cultural patterns
and their potentialities for being integrated to first-order interactivity. The ‘language stance’, like Dennett’s (1989/1987)
‘intentional stance’, is a turning of a judgement onto the unbroken flow or stream of experience and, as such, constitutes a
partial withdrawal from and a reification of selected aspects of the flow (Pred, 2005: 7–8).
First-order languaging is an experiential flow that is enacted, maintained, and changed by the real-time activity of par-
ticipants. To construe this flow as sequences of abstract forms is a radical misconstrual of what people are doing in their
languaging. For a start, it is assumed that ‘language’ is constituted out of formal entity-like units that can be segmented and
identified on analogy with the metalinguistic analytical practices afforded by alphabetic writing. Accordingly, language is
seen, in part, as constituents (parts) and their combinations into wholes. Combinations of these constituents thus generate
new wholes. This assumption is grounded in traditional entity-based (or substance-based) metaphysics. On the other hand,
the term languaging serves to direct attention to the fact that processes and their organization across different spatial and
temporal scales are fundamental. Bodily and situational processes in the here-and-now of first-order languaging interact with
and integrate with cultural processes deriving from population scale cultural-historical dynamics.
Languaging is, then, a multi-scalar organization of processes that enables the bodily and the situated to interact with
situation-transcending cultural-historical dynamics and practices so as to give languaging its distinctive properties, affor-
dances, and capacities. When someone makes a claim about a linguistic same in Nigel Love’s sensede.g., she said
“look”dthey are performing a meta-linguistic operation that interacts with (some aspect of) the flow of first-order lan-
guaging. It is in this way that specific qualities of our experience of languaging whether of the present situation or some other
 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85 79

prior situation with which it is compared or correlated are normatively experienced as ‘objects’ of (self)-reflection. Thus, to
experience a particular aspect of the vocal dynamics of someone’s utterance as the actualization of a particular wording
means that one is operating at a different level of experiencing than that of the first-order experiencing of the flow of the
languaging in which one is immersed. Cowley’s (2011) idea of the ‘language stance’ means that when a culturally skilled
languaging agent is immersed in the flow of languaging he or she is able to detect patterns of wordings. The language stance
involves two operations. First, the agent is actively and purposefully exploring the affordance layout of the real-time flow of
languaging in order to anticipate such patterns of wordings. Secondly, and at the same time, the agent is reflectively expe-
riencing the qualities of his or her awareness of wordings. The flow, as described here, is constituted by and manifested by
bodily processes in concert with situational factors.
For diehard Cartesians of various stripes, this poses a problem: How is it that these physical systems and processes are also
mental? For the Cartesian, the mental and the physical inhabit separate realms. On this view, language was seen as form, not
substance, as for example in Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign as a relation between two mental (formal) abstracta
though Saussure also conceded that language had to be manifested by phonic or graphic ‘substance’ that can be apprehended
by the senses (Saussure, 1971: 190, 1993: 297). But this view leaves intact the separation of the physical and the mental. It is
time to think of a new way of thinking about the relationship between the flow of languaging and our experiencing of that
flow. The mainstream view of language as a system of formal abstracta has promoted a phenomenology of language as ab-
stract form, not substance, it is now time to give that view the boot once and for all. In its place, we need a phenomenology of
languaging that is grounded in time-extended bodily experience. Experiencing is self-organizing temporally extended ac-
tivity that involves: (1) active, exploratory perceptual activity that is always embodied and neural; and (2) a higher-level flow
of process that operates on and interacts with the former at the same time that the first and second order flows are inex-
tricably entangled with each other on account of positive and negative feedback loops that link them in many complex,
nonlinear ways (Bickhard, 2005).
As Bickhard (2005) argues, human mental life entails higher levels of the overall self-system that interact with and
contentfully experience the first-order flow of the awareness of the self’s experiencing. The perceptual exploration of the flow
of activity and the flow of activity are not separate experiences, but are mutually interdependent. Perception is generated by
and occurs in the flow of activity at the same time that activity depends on perceived affordance layouts for its guidance and
ongoing sequencing. The idea of separate mental and physical domains of experience is itself quite possibly an artefact of a
reified language stance shaped by subject-predicate logic that fosters the separation and detachment of the self from the flow
of experiencing. Just as William James understood the formation of a thought to be the formation of a thinker, we can say that
the formation and individuation of linguistic events in the flow of first-order languaging is the formation of a languaging self.
Like thought and thinker for James, languaging and languaging self are a unity rather than a dualistic separation of subject
from object of experience (Thibault, in press).
The language stance enables us to orient to wordings as sames whereby we are conscious of the qualities of our expe-
riencing of the flow of first-order languaging. We have developed the capacity (the cultural skills) self-reflectively to expe-
rience the experiential flow of languaging as manifesting or actualizing wordings which we orient to, interpret, and which
have the capacity normatively to affect experience (Cowley, 2008, 2011). The culturally promoted skills of orienting to
wordings that parents and infants make emerge in the child’s development is an emergent meta-level of mental organization
that is embedded in and promoted and guided by specific cultural practices. These cultural practices incentivate and reward
the emergence of those meta-linguistic skills and capacities that enable the higher-level experiencing of the flow of first-
order languaging as sequences of wordings. The emergent capacity to recognize and identify linguistic sames is based on
feedback mechanisms that enable multiple levels of mental process of the flow of languaging experienced as self-reflective
awareness of languaging activity. The developmental emergence of these meta-level capacities thus enables us to reflect on,
and to feedback in order to manage and control, the flow of languaging activity on the first level, and in adjusting our
attention to focus on particular aspects of the flow, to segment them and reify them such that we treat them as if they are
separable from the flow.
On this basis, we are able, for instance, to compare one wording with another and to say that they are the same or that they
are different. Or to say at a still higher meta-level that we prefer this wording to some other wording, and give our reasons why.
And so on. The development of the cultural skills for recognizing sames in our languaging is a higher level of emergent self-
organizing mental processing that enables us to be aware of these actualizations of virtual constructs (wordings) as mental
contents that we can contemplate and orient to in awareness at the same time that we can constitute them as informing our
self-perspectives on aspects of the world. This architecture of emerging meta-levels of awareness means that humans have
developed the cultural skills for using wordings to normatively affect experience in ways that transcend the embodied and the
situated. These skills enable us to evoke, be aware of, and to keep track of processes in the past, the present, and the future, to
manipulate purely virtual processes, and to entertain virtual forms of extended action and perception that have no basis in
stimulus information in the here-&-now other than that specified by the affordance layout of the utterance itself.
Verbrugge (1985: 184) has pointed out that phonetic gestures serve to trigger and guide a whole range of both overt and
covert actions and processesdawareness, cognitions, feelings, etc. The linguistic pattern that is detected in phonetic gestures
serves to constrain and guide these processes. Language is above all a highly productive action system. Wordings that are
detected and oriented to in phonetic gestures constitute intrinsic functional constraints on language as action system. The
grounding of utterance-activity in the familiar kinetic dynamics of vocal tract action and the tracking of this action by per-
ceivers means that utterances prompt events that integrate voice and other bodily dynamics, prosodies, elements in working
80 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85

memory, previously experienced percepts, and expectations such that dynamics are integrated to a heard pattern or wording
(Cowley, 2008: 331). Actual (utterance) events therefore are operators that act upon and give rise to events that cohere into an
overall pattern. As Cowley (2008: 331) argues, meanings are synthesized from the real-time assembling or meshing of factors
such as those mentioned above: “artefacts (utterances) prompt brains to fill out incomplete information” (Cowley, 2008: 331).

5. First order languaging and second order language

Languaging behaviour is both grounded in our situated interactivity at the same time that it has situation-transcending
properties and capacities that link persons and situations to cultural-historical traditions and their associated norms.
Rather than disembodied formal abstracta or bodily events per se, language is a form of skilful values-realizing and
contextualizing activity (Cowley, 2011; Hodges, 2007, 2009; Thibault, 2011a, b, c, 2014b) that can transcend localized place
and time by drawing on and connecting with the cultural traditions of a community. Sedimented regularities in languaging
behaviour arise through what Linell calls “socioculturally constituted continuities of practice in which experiences and
knowledge have been dialogically appropriated over time (sociocultural dialogicality)” (2011/2005: 216). On this view, per-
sons do not ‘use’ the forms that a said to constitute a pre-existing language system; they adapt and shape their bodily
behaviour, including their vocalizing, in accordance with community-level norms and practices that have historical conti-
nuity and thus define the cultural-historical traditions of a community. Individuals normatively orient to these continuities
and self-reflexively engage in forms of situated appropriation of their meaning potentials (Halliday, 1978) as they flexibly
adapt them to the requirements of situations in the pursuance of their goals.
A central task of theory is to focus on the explanation of the functional capacity of persons in their languaging activity to
affect others and to be affected by them. To this end, languaging agents harnesses material bodily dynamics and individuate
them in order to make things happen: dialogically coordinated interactivity between persons get bodies (human and non-
human) to behave in new, unexpected ways. Languaging activity is influenced by the flow of pico-scale or micro-temporal
events in voice dynamics and other aspects of bodily expression (Cowley, 2008; Thibault, 2008, 2011a, b, c). Dynamical as-
pects of languaging behaviour enable us to feel and experience the flow of interactional events between people. Such a
perspective is not possible in a code view, based as it is on abstracta that are disconnected from the dynamics of real-time
languaging behaviour. Dynamical aspects of embodied language coordinate bodies over space and time. They are also
directly cognitively salient: they affect perception, affect, action, and understanding. As Cowley points out, inter-individual
bodily dynamics are irreducible to the abstracta that are central to description and explanation in code and form-based
theories of language (Cowley, 2008: 328).
Following Love (1990), first-order languaging is embodied and situated inter-individual activity (Thibault, 2011a). It is
enacted on the much faster time-scales of fine-grained and co-orchestrated bodily activity. It is therefore more appropriate to
focus on and develop explanations that are based on the very rapid pico-scale bodily dynamics of first-order languaging. Most
languaging is embodied inter-individual activity that is co-constructed by the participants in this activity. Verbal patterns are
more appropriately seen as second order cultural constructs. They are the reified products of first-order languaging. However,
they are only a part, albeit an important one, of overall languaging behaviour. They are folk-psychological constructs which we
have learned to orient to, define and evaluate as ‘language’.
Persons exploit the dynamics of audible and visible bodily behaviour to coordinate perspectives, to attune to aspects of
their worlds, and to move each otherdaffectively, cognitively, interactivelydin ways that are value-realizing (Hodges, 2007,
2009) or norm oriented. Persons respond to aspects of the pico-scale dynamical properties and how these are or may be
integrated with wordings and act accordingly. This puts the emphasis on the primacy of interactional history and also how the
relevant brain structures evolved as adaptations for coordinated, inter-individual behaviour. This allows us to develop al-
ternatives to the dominant view of language as a code consisting of form-meaning mappings. In such a perspective, we need
to understand the following:

– How does first-order languaging behaviour prompt the coordination of agents, their attunement to aspects of their
worlds, their being moved by each other?;
– How do infants learn to hear verbal patterns in vocal behaviour?;
– How do the expressive bodily dynamics of first-order languaging integrate with second-order cultural constructs such
as wordings?

Rather than viewing language as dependent on input/output processing models, a more fundamental question comes into
view: how do dynamical aspects of languaging behaviour connect persons across places and times? We need to take seriously
the dynamical properties of first-order languaging behaviour, which is not reducible to code-like mechanisms. The dynamical
properties of talk have the capacity to evoke cultural values and local norms when interactional events between persons are
coordinated around wordings, bodily dynamics and aspects of specific situations. The emphasis is on dynamics and history
rather than on abstract, disembodied systems that are said to process linguistic forms in the brain/mind, as in mainstream
formal, functionalist, and cognitive accounts of language. How, then, do individuals integrate wordings with more basic vocal
and other bodily dynamics? In attending to first-order dynamics, individuals make sense of what they hear, see and feel in
audible and visible bodily behaviours by integrating aspects of the dynamics to locally salient cultural meanings and values.
Investigation is focused on how the intrinsic motivations of agents connect experience with normative cultural categories and
 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85 81

patterns in ways that reshape motivations around cultural norms (Cowley, 2008). How, then, do persons tune into and use
what they hear in the dynamics of coordinated first-order languaging to harness second-order constructs such as lex-
icogrammar and its enhanced capacity to partition the world?
To answer these questions, the bodily dynamics of coordinated first-order languaging become of primary theoretical
importance. The dynamical properties of first-order languaging are intrinsically expressive, cognitive and semioticda fact
which is supported by experience. This is evidenced by the fact that persons respond to real-time bodily dynamics of first-
order languaging as both meaningful and cognitively salient in their worlds. In orienting to each other in their first-order
languaging, agents respond to and adapt to each other’s bodily dynamics on very rapid time scales of fractions of seconds
to milliseconds in the process of determining the relevant value biases that enable them to get oriented. Unlike code views,
researchers can focus on how agents hear and feel voices and respond to dynamics. Individuals thus focus on affect, feeling,
and aspects of events through expressive dynamics such as pitch, cadence, rhythm, tempo, duration, loudness, etc. As these
value biases play out over longer time scales, they are adapted to more remote aims that set up anticipations of future activity
that are value-saturated. In this case, the merest suggestion of an appropriate stimulus may be amplified into the appre-
hension of a full-blown wording and a response to it. This semantic priming or anticipation shows how individuals dialog-
ically coordinate and align their vocalizations and related bodily behaviours in ways that give rise to the discovery of wordings
in utterance-activity. The categorization of some aspect of a person’s vocal dynamics on a particular occasion in interaction
with memory of past experiences of aspects of voice dynamics selectively attended to as sames constitutes semantic-
conceptual categorization of wordings that have the capacity to normatively affect experience. Bodily coordination be-
tween persons thus depends on the subtle coordination of not only wordings, but also voice dynamics, gestures, gaze, and
aspects of agents’ cultural worlds.
The co-presence of humans in their cultural worlds leads them to exploit body feelings, mood, cognition, and bodily
orientation that drive co-orientation, co-affiliation and co-action. The difficulty lies in understanding how the feel of the
social flow of events is felt in and depends on the flow of the micro-temporal events evidenced in voice dynamics and
other bodily modes of expression that are coordinated with vocalizations. This is an important aspect of first-person
experience of interaction. How, for instance, do persons orchestrate and align their vocal and other dynamics? We need
to account for the ways in which persons experience the felt flow of languaging events. Mainstream linguistics has been
silent on these questions with the results that a theoretical monstrosity has been produced that bears little resemblance to
how persons actually experience their own and others’ languaging behaviour (see Harris, 1996: ix). The continuously
varying bodily dynamics of first-order languaging enables individuals to coordinate their actions and perspectives with
those of others. Cognition merges with coordinated languaging behaviour as events take on a first-person experiential
feeldthe ‘feeling of what happens’ (Damasio, 1999, 2010). In the real-time of interactivity, one agent’s orientation and
action affects or inhibits how the other acts and orients. The other modifies his or her responses on the basis of experience-
based sensitivity to aspects of events. Experience is historical. As agents modify the environment of each other’s actions,
they hear and feel what actions mean on the basis of dynamical inter-individual patterns of coordinated behaviour that
have occurred over time. The resulting coordination and realigning of orientation that prosody enables leads to semantic
priming based on how we perceive wordings in dynamical languaging behaviour, as well as in an experienced history of
such events.
First-order language is time-locked and time-extended self-organizing activity; it is a process that integrates many
different place and time scales of organization within and beyond the body-brain of the individual. It is based on co-
constructed inter-individual body dynamics that are spread between people in complex processes of circular causation.
These body dynamics have the potential to connect bodies across multiple time and space scales. Moreover, they have the
capacity to coordinate experience around second-order verbal patterns, bodily processes and particular situations. The body
dynamics of first-order languaging behaviour can bias perception and action in ways that partition the world on the basis of
the semantic differentiations enacted by these expressive dynamics. Expressive body dynamics compress and synthesize
semantic information that can modify the experience and perspectives of the co-acting agents in interaction. This suggests
that hominids who developed this capacity live in a cultural ecology that allows them to modify each others’ perceptions,
cognitions, feelings, identities and values through the semantic and other information that is specified by the co-orchestrated
pico-scale body dynamics of first-order languaging behaviour. The co-synchronization in micro-time of body behaviour
transforms perspectives, values and experiences. This depends on the subtle and fine-grained coordination of body dynamics
and features of the world that also exploit affect and cultural patterns. ’Wordings’ do not exist independently of bodily
processes.
Following Love, a number of researchers (Cowley, 2007, 2008; Steffensen, 2011, 2013; Thibault, 2008, 2011a, 2012) have
postulated a first-order languaging activity of co-constructed body dynamics that occur in micro-time in order to develop
appropriate descriptive and explanatory model of face-to-face communicative behaviour. First-order languaging can there-
fore be distinguished from the second-order language of verbal patterns such as lexicogrammar and discourse, which have
become stabilized cultural patterns on longer, slower time scales. We learn to exploit first-order languaging in ways that get
linked to cultural norms and values that connect selves to longer, slower cultural-historical time-scales. In this way, first-order
languaging enables us to synchronize with and to engage with the perspectives of others as well as the historical flow of ours
and others’ lives on multiple timescales.
Language is not a determinate thing in the sense, for example, of a single unified ‘language faculty’ in the human brain or a
free-standing code or system that people use. Moreover, it is not a natural kind; it is not of the kind or class of thing that occurs
82 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85

in nature and evolved in a unified way. The term “languaging” thus refers to an assemblage of diverse material, biological,
semiotic and cognitive properties and capacities which languaging agents orchestrate in real-time and across a diversity of
timescales. They are the multimodal products and processes that result from the orchestration of resources and events and
which we ‘agree’ to individuate as language events. Learning a ‘language’ therefore involves participating in and learning how
to orchestrate these multimodal assemblages and the social practices they are embedded in. A useful though provisional
metaphor might be the idea of the ‘language symphony’. Languaging agents adapt and integrate normative cultural patterns
(e.g., wordings) to multimodal interactive events by the successful adopting of a culturally developed ‘language stance’
(Cowley, 2011). Experiencing or sensing a particular eventde.g., someone’s phonetic gesturedas a languaging event depends
on how we are interactively engaging with and are affected by that event. Sensing a particular pattern of wording in a
phonetic gesture describes a particular quality of experience. The ability to adopt the language stance depends upon the
interdependence of action and perception that generates such experience as emergent properties of the agent’s interactivity
with the affordances of phonetic gestures. Experiencing phonetically is qualitatively distinguishable from experiencing a
particular pattern of wording in that event and the two experiencings refers to two distinct levels of our engagement. The
ability to experience wordings in phonetic events depends on the normativity of how we engage with such events and can be
said to occur on another level of epistemic engagement. The pattern is experienced as a pattern of a particular kind, e.g., an
occurrence of the wording ‘Fine thanks þ rising intonation’ (perhaps in response to the question ‘how are you?’).
Agents detect variation in speech melody, intensity, tempo, rhythm, rate and duration of pausing, and timing. For example,
‘Fine, thanks!’ uttered in a high pitch in response to ‘how are you?’ indicates that the respondent probably really does feel in
good spirits, in good health, etc. whereas low pitch tends to indicate a negative evaluation of one’s state of well-being. In-
terlocutors may converge along a range of parameters in their phonetic gestures (and related bodily activity) as they interact.
For example, they may entrain to one another’s speech rhythms in ways that create and sustain interpersonal coordination
(Fowler, 2014: 178; Thibault, 2011a: 7–14, 2015: 234–240). Agents do not only detect the kinds of patterns referred to here.
Agents perceive and feel aspects of phonetic gestures and in so doing they take stances on them and assume that others do
too. The perceiving and feeling of aspects is embedded in a relational dynamic such that social skills are developed and
refined, for example, as infants learn to view utterances under a verbal aspect (Cowley, 2011). A history of such stance-taking,
as Cowley points out, enables agents to relate to a shared cultural world. Exemplar memory thus requires us to consider the
internal nature of agents. It refers to a kind of relational thinking, as distinct from population thinking. Relational thinking
emphasises the often complex and diverse relational dynamics in which agents unfold and become what they are with their
feelings, memories, stances, skills and sensibilities (Ingold, 2013: 13). The remembering of exemplars of phonetic gestures and
the distinctive forms of patterning agents detect in them cannot be divorced from the relational dynamics and their re-
flexivities in which we encounter them, adopt stances on them, and respond to them. Agents detect utterances of a particular
phonetic gesture as, for example, ‘sarcastic’, ‘angry’, ‘friendly’, ‘comforting’, ‘coercive’, and so on, that connects utterances to
the agency of speaker-hearers (Thibault, 2014b: 272).

6. A process ontology of languaging as intensive flow

The ontology of languaging that comes into view here is very different from the more usual one that we have inherited
from Aristotle. According to the Aristotelian view, the world is already carved up into logical categories on different onto-
logical levels corresponding to generic categories, specific categories, and the members of particular categories. According to
Aristotelian logic, the world exists as already segmented into different categories on different ontological levels, some more
generic than others, and so on. Higher-level categories or schema are the formal causes that generate the existence of actual
entities in the world as members of the categories of existence. The latter are instantiations of the higher-order categories and
for this reason they resemble the categories. Aristotle’s language-inspired ontology is based on predicate logic: a member of a
category is said to be predicated of that category. This way of thinking is deeply ingrained in how we think about the world,
including in linguistics (e.g., schema-instance, type-token, class-member). To be sure, these distinctions can serve useful
purposes. The problem arises when they are taken to be the basis for an explanation of how the world is.
On this view, utterances are instantiations of this or that phonological, lexical, grammatical, or semantic, etc. category. It is
assumed that actual utterances come as already segmented into phonological, morphological, lexical, grammatical, and other
units that are instantiations of higher-order or more generic categories. In partially disengaging us from the experiential flow,
the language stance gives rise to a new capabilitydthe ability to hold something in mind, to lift it out of the flux, and to reify it
as something withdrawn from process and to treat it as an ‘object’ of reflection in its own right (Pred, 2005: 275). A linguistic
tooldthe subject-predicate distinctiondthus makes the predicate or quality inhere in a separate substance in accordance with
the dualistic mode of thinking operated by Aristotelian predicate logic. Rather than seeing the subject-predicate distinction as
a characteristic of how an agent interactively perceives the flow of experience, the predicate or quality is taken to inhere in a
separate substance. The irony is that this linguistic tool is applied to our mode of experiencing the flow of languaging itself such
that wordings are seen to inhere in the flow rather than being understood as an aspect of our phenomenological engagement
with the flow, of how we experience it, and how it affects us just as we affect it. We are inextricably entangled with the flow
rather than being disembodied subjects who contemplate the flow in a detached and disembodied way.
Nigel Love’s account of linguistic sames shows that the first-order flow of languaging cannot come into the world already
segmented in the way I suggested above. Utterances are processes that occur in a world that is constituted by many other
kinds of processes and the inter-relations between processes of many different kinds. In accordance with Deleuze (2004/
 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85 83

1968), the world is a continuum of intensive processes that become segmented only as certain tendencies are manifested and
certain capacities are exercised (DeLanda, 2010: 91). Utterances are assemblages of component processes that have one foot
in the actual and one foot in the virtual. Actual processes such as the co-articulation of the articulators to yield phonetic
gestures have emergent properties. The virtual refers to a distributed field of differential relations that structure the possi-
bility space of utterances. The possibility space of a community’s languaging is massively complex and necessarily open-
ended. It is immanent in the cultural-historical dynamics that play out over long time scales. It is not a transcendent code
or system consisting of transcendent forms that generate actual utterances as materialized instantiations of the forms.
Instead, in their collective efforts to find solutions to the coordination problems that arise in different socio-cognitive do-
mains, statistical tendencies emerge as the unintended consequences of these collective efforts.
The utterance-activity of individuals are trajectories that tend to or are attracted to special or singular points in the phase
space no matter what the starting point of the trajectory was. An n-dimensional phase space like that of a community’s
languaging practices clearly has very many potential trajectories. A particular socio-cognitive domain would be characterized
by a sub-set of such trajectories though not in ways that are totally insulated from the overall phase space. The presence of
several attractors (singular points) in a phase space means that a ‘basis of attraction’ is constituted that affects the devel-
opment of trajectories that exist within the basis on attraction. A particular socio-cognitive domain of linguistic praxis can be
defined as a basin of attraction that stabilizes trajectories around a particular set of properties and functional values and
constrains their development in ways that serve to maintain the particular socio-cognitive domain (Thibault, 2015: 240–241).
Genres can be understood as basins of attraction in this sense.
The virtual structures the possibility space as tendencies (attractors) towards which individuals’ utterances aim but never
fully actualize. Trajectories are never fully actualized because the trajectory of an utterance in this phase space is never clearly
defined, but inhabits a fuzzy space of statistically distributed potentialities. The taking up of the ‘language stance’ is thus a
virtual capacity or set of capacities of agents that may (or may not) be exercised in relation to the affordance layout of a given
utterance. It is the exercising of this capacity that actualizes particular tendencies that are constituted by the possibility space
of the utterance. First-order languaging activity is a continuum of intensity that is however not entirely undifferentiated.
Phonetic gestures have an internal structure that is defined by differences of co-articulation and degree of intensity of co-
articulation of the articulators in conjunction with respiration and phonation. The metalinguistic segmentation of the flow
of movement of phonetic gestures is not already given, but is structured by a space of virtual potentialities that can be
actualized in different even divergent ways. Utterances are actualities that consist of relations that are not themselves
actualized unless they are actualized in meta-linguistic statements about the object-utterances they refer to. In meta-linguistic
languaging practices, values (differential relations) objectify and therefore constitute a statement as to what the utterance is
about. Values are non-actual though actualizable. This means that all of experience is a differential field of relations that feels
real whereas, in actual fact, it is a potential, a becoming that has no final actuality. From the epistemic perspective of the
individual person, the utterance affords a particular sub-network of interaction potentialities that is open-ended, not finalized.
Persons in their languaging orient to, experience and exploit the regularities of the flow of their interactivity. This flow
links to the capacity of persons, self reflexively, to evoke cultural-historical traditions and make them relevant to situated
linguistic praxis. In this sense, the meta-linguistic capacity to evoke sames serves as a guide to linguistic praxis on particular
occasions. This view stands in contrast to the standard view that forms are an end in themselves that can be described and
categorized as if they exist in utterances. Linguistic praxis and the know-how it is based on is a largely tacit knowledge that is
developed and honed as a guide to everyday languaging behaviour. It is a know-how form of knowledge that guides linguistic
praxis in the many different sociocultural domains in which languaging has a role. This know-how knowledge stands in
contrast to the abstract and hierarchically organized conceptual/theoretical knowledge of linguists, seen as a domain of
specialized theoretical knowledge that is codified in linguistics and its various subdisciplines. Theoretical knowledge in this
sense is know-that knowledge that is specialized to conceptual-theoretical generality rather than practical know-how.
However, the specialized conceptual-theoretical knowledge of the linguist has its origins in the practical problems of the
linguistic pedagogue (Linell, 2011/2005: 21–27). The latter knowledge arose and was developed in the first instance out of the
practical problems of teaching writing and reading in ways that inaugurated the written language bias identified and
critiqued by Linell (2011/2005). Linguists took the assumptions and biases of this tradition and elevated them to scientific
status in the conceptual/theoretical sense without calling into question these assumptions and biases. In time, the appro-
priation and further transformation (recontextualization) of these same assumptions and biases by modern (post-Saussur-
ean) linguistics led to their elevation to conceptual-theoretical status. It was simply taken for granted by many (not all)
linguists that language is a system of abstract forms separate from people, their bodies, the living of life, activity, and cultural
practices. The result was a theoretical ‘object’ that bore little resemblance to the linguistic praxis of persons. Moreover, it was
unable to provide an adequate scientific foundation for the study of linguistic praxis as distinct from the reified notion of a
language system that constituted the object of study of many linguists.
Saussure (1971: 23; see also Thibault, 1997: 14–18) claimed that the theoretical point of view constructs the object of study,
viz. la langue in his account. However, Saussure was only partly right. He was right to the extent that knowledge is socially
structured and organized. However, the idea that the theoretical point of view constructs its object is not free of solipsism. It
severs the link with the world and the dialectical relation between theory and the world which theory strives progressively to
apprehend. Saussure jettisoned the observable phenomenon of peoples’ languaging (le langage) in favour of a position that
was uniquely determined by the theoretical perspective rather than the dialectical relation between observable phenomena
and theoretical perspective. This does not mean that the phenomenon is reducible to observables per se. Instead, observable
84 P.J. Thibault / Language Sciences 61 (2017) 74–85

phenomena form the basis for theory construction in the sense that they provide a basis for inferring and deducing the
unobservable aspects of the phenomenon that form the basis of explanation. In effect, Saussure’s theoretical construction of la
langue as a system of abstract forms bypasses observables and draws on the unquestioned assumptions of the written lan-
guage bias inherited from tradition to yield a synchronic conception of la langue that is separated from the historical-cultural
dynamics that derive from the population scale and yet play out through the real-time situated, embodied first-order lan-
guaging activity of persons. This is a necessary component of the explanation of first-order languaging.

7. Conclusion

Humans are collectively meshed in a cultural ecology in which neural processes prompt individuals to integrate on very
rapid time-scales dynamical bodily events such as vocalizations with perceptual processes. Neural processes prompt
dynamical, socially coordinated behaviours. These behaviours (e.g., vocalizations), perceptual activity, and selected aspects of
situations are all components of a distributed cultural-cognitive process that depends on a history of coordinating activities
with others. Humans learn how to believe in and have faith in second-order constructs such as words and to use these as the
basis for meta-linguistic and folk-theoretical descriptions and rationalizations of our actions and languaging, e.g., in attrib-
uting intentions to self and others in ways that make human behaviour predictable according to normative standards and
values that can be made explicit if required. Second-order constructs thus put normative constraints on actions qua values-
realizing behaviours. This is important in the human world. People implicitly feed off their beliefs about second-order
constructs to theorise their languaging behaviour in terms of second-order ‘language’. The code view, which has been
decisively critiqued by Nigel Love, entails a complete commitment to reified second-order constructs in ways that totally
obscure the primacy of dynamical, adaptive biosocial behaviours as the gateway into an understanding of languaging as a
dynamical process across multiple time-scales.

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