Coding and Transferring or Actions and Interactions? An Alternative Approach to Understanding Language
Coding and Transferring or Actions and Interactions? An Alternative Approach to Understanding Language

Summary/Abstract: The article undertakes the new emerging perspective of language as a dynamic form of activity between interacting human agents and redefines it as “an activity in which wordings play a part” (Cowley). Drawing on the views of Maturana, Bottineau, Harris, Thibault, Cowley and others, the author situates the concept of language in the vast field of ecology, agency and interactivity. Language thus conceived is not a code-like denotational structure but an aspect of sense-saturated communicative coordination and a result of human actions and co-actions. On this view we describe a conversation as an unfolding process of two or more interactants entering the cognitive dynamics which allows them to connect to each other and to their environments thus pursuing their individual and shared goals. This can be referred to as sense-making through dialogicality.

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