Distributed, Dynamical, and Dialogical Approaches to Language

What can be learned about language if psychologists, linguists, and related researchers approach it, not as a closed, idealized, formal symbol system, but as an open, ecologically embedded, physically distributed dynamical system? A range of positions is converging on a distributed view of language, which emphasizes that it is an activity that emerges and is sustained in complex sets of dialogical relationships. The patterns of activity studied by linguists and psychologists emerge in real-time within ecologically situated social interactions, across multiple space-time scales.

Recent work in complex dynamical systems has begun to clarify the meaning of claims that language is situated, distributed, and dialogical. From the perspective of complex dynamics, the fundamental character of linguistic activity is context-sensitivity and interdependency, rather than rule-following and modularity. The dynamics are interaction-dominant; the phenomena come into existence in a specific space-time configuration, but do not exist before or after in any of the component systems. The skill, knowledge, or ability demonstrated cannot be located in a brain, a body, a set of instructions, a set of cultural practices, an experimental setting, or an evolutionary history. All of these and more may be involved, but only in the integrity of collective action can they generate the phenomena.

It has been argued that, “contemporary models grossly underestimate the number of temporal scales on which cognitive activity is actually assembled” (Hollis, Kloos, & Van Orden, 2008). Dialogical relations are distributed across a vast array of scales; all show interaction-dominant dynamics in which control is distributed, not localized. Research has revealed pervasive, long-range patterns in linguistic performances (e.g., word pronunciation, lexical decisions, semantic categorization). These findings indicate that contexts are not a removable backdrop to intentional activities, but play a constitutive role in the creation and sustenance of the phenomena. Thus, what appear to be independent segments, invariant rules, or fixed hierarchies of relations turn out to vary. This indicates that context is constitutive of competences, not just performances. If this ecological reading of complex dynamical systems is on the right track, then the distributed, socially situated nature of linguistic skill is far deeper than almost anyone has imagined. It suggests that context-sensitivity goes all the way down. Pragmatics is central to linguistic activity, not an after-thought.