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 it means 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
postmodernist 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 lan-
guage sciences, socio-linguistics, education, anthropology, psychology, neuro-
sciences, artificial general intelligence (AGI), and cultural sciences.
—Angel M. Y. Lin, Professor and Tier
1 Canada Research Chair in Plurilingual
and Intercultural Education, Simon Fraser
University
In the 20th century linguistics was completely dominated by abstract objectiv-
ism. 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 multi-level 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 fol-
lowing 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 sys-
tems 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 dis-
cipline-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 abstrac-
tions 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 com-
municative 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 lan-
guage approaches, among others, to create a transdisciplinary paradigm that will
inform, and perhaps reform, the epistemology, ontology, and methodology of the
language sciences for decades to come.
—Steven L. Thorne, Portland State
University and 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 emo-
tional 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 discov-
ered 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 volume that challenges the received wisdom in contempo-
rary 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 knowl-
edge, 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 I
Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term “language,” as
defined in the language sciences of the twentieth century and the traditions these
have drawn on, has arguably limited our thinking about what language is and
does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault’s study articulate crucially impor-
tant 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 expe-
rience it actualises are 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 think-
ing 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, Thibault's two volume study 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 languag-
ing enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with
cultural tradition. Volume I focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics
in languaging activity. Volume II connects the shorter timescales of body dynam-
ics to the longer cultural-historical timescales 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, narra-
tive, social theory, learning theory and teaching and learning in higher education,
philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, 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 devel-
oping 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 had a deep inter-
est 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
Words—An Integrational Approach
Hayley G. Davis
The Language Myth in Western Culture
Edited by Roy Harris
Rethinking Linguistics
Edited by Hayley G. Davis & Talbot J. Taylor
The Written Language Bias in Linguistics
Its Nature, Origins and Transformations
Per Linell
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 :/ /ww w .rou tledg e .com /Rout
ledge - Advan ces-i n -Com munic ation -and -Lingu istic - Theo ry/ bo ok- se ries/ RACLT
Distributed Languaging,
Affective Dynamics, and the
Human Ecology Volume I
The Sense-Making Body
Paul J. Thibault
