[PLing] Invitation: 19.11., "Languaging: The intertwinement of body, time, and the Other" - WSG talk by Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger

[Carina Lozo]

Dear colleagues,
I am pleased to invite you to the upcoming Wiener Sprachgesellschaft 
talk by Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger from Europa-Universität Viadrina 
Frankfurt (Oder).

Title: /Languaging: The Intertwinement of body, time, and the Other 
/(abstract below!)
Location: Hörsaal 1, Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Wien
Date & time: November 19th, 18:00

Herzlich,

Carina Lozo

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Abstract: How do people do language? As one of the central questions of 
the languaging perspective, its proponents treat language as 'something 
people do together' (e.g. Thibault 2011). In contrast to traditional 
views where words are understood to be a priori stable entities as part 
of a closed, homogeneous language system, languaging goes beyond the 
notion of the written word. Deeply rooted in non-traditional approaches 
to cognition that do not reduce human thinking to the inner workings of 
the brain alone, languaging understands language as a human bodily 
activity, 'in which verbal aspects play a role' (Cowley 2014). 
Languaging emerges through people's direct engagement in and with their 
immediate environment, other people, material artifacts (e.g. 
technology), and their own histories. As cognition, the view is that 
language is also distributed across the brain, the body, and a 
socio-cultural world.
Once human activity is placed at the centre of language, due attention 
can be paid to how people experience language: how they draw on what is 
not physically 'there' (Fester-Seeger, 2024) and how they manage lived 
situations (see Cowley and Fester-Seeger 2023). Language thus goes 
beyond the written word as it is spatiotemporally distributed, 
ecological (i.e., linked to our environment), embodied (i.e., dependent 
on our bodily actions), and highly dialogical (i.e., dependent on our 
engagement with others). Treating language as a human social bodily 
activity connects words to people. Through people’s bodily coordination 
with others, language is constantly brought forth.
In this talk, I will introduce the history and key ideas of the 
languaging perspective, showing how languaging must be situated at the 
intersection of various disciplines, such as distributed cognition, 
radical embodied cognition, integrative linguistics, ecological 
linguistics, interaction studies, multimodal communication, biological 
views of language, and dialogical approaches to language. Starting from 
the premise that language is a bodily activity, in the second part of 
the presentation I explore how current trends in AI can be rethought 
through the lens of language. Starting from a small case study based on 
video data, I show how the activity of giving a command to a smart 
speaker in one’s home environment is highly dialogical, ecological, and 
embodied. I conclude that language cannot exist outside of humans, it 
only exists through humans.

Cowley, S. J. (2014). Linguistic embodiment and verbal constraints: 
Human cognition and the scales of time. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(OCT). 
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01085
Cowley, S. J. and Fester-Seeger, M. T. (2023). Re-evoking absent people: 
what languaging implies for radical embodiment, Linguistic Frontiers, 6 
(2), pp.64-77. https://doi.org/10.2478/lf-2023-0012
Fester-Seeger, M. T. (2024). Human presencing: an alternative 
perspective on human embodiment and its implications for technology. AI 
and Society, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01874-7
Thibault, P. J. (2011). First-order languaging dynamics and second-order 
language: The distributed language view. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 
210–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2011.591274

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