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<p><font face="Cochineal">Dear colleagues,<br>
I am pleased to invite you to the upcoming Wiener
Sprachgesellschaft talk by Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger from
Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). <br>
</font> </p>
<p><font face="Cochineal">Title: <i>Languaging: The Intertwinement
of body, time, and the Other </i>(abstract below!)<br>
Location: Hörsaal 1, Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Wien<br>
Date & time: November 19th, 18:00<br>
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<p><font face="Cochineal">Herzlich,</font></p>
<p><font face="Cochineal">Carina Lozo<br>
</font> </p>
<p><font face="Cochineal">-----<br>
</font> </p>
<p><font face="Cochineal">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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Cochineal">Cowley, S. J. (2014). Linguistic
embodiment and verbal constraints: Human cognition and the
scales of time. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(OCT). <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01085">https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01085</a><br>
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. <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://doi.org/10.2478/lf-2023-0012">https://doi.org/10.2478/lf-2023-0012</a><br>
Fester-Seeger, M. T. (2024). Human presencing: an alternative
perspective on human embodiment and its implications for
technology. AI and Society, 2003. <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01874-7">https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01874-7</a><br>
Thibault, P. J. (2011). First-order languaging dynamics and
second-order language: The distributed language view. Ecological
Psychology, 23(3), 210–245. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2011.591274">https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2011.591274</a></font><br>
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