New Affordances for Language: Distributed, Dynamical, and Dialogical Resources

In introducing the articles of this special issue on language, which grew out of the conference "Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter) Action," we take the opportunity to reflect on fundamental aspects of speaking and listening to others that are often overlooked. The act of conversing is marked by context sensitivity, interdependency, impredicativity, irreversibility, and responsibility, among other things. Language entails real work: it involves real movements in physical, social, and moral orders that are distributed across a wide array of spatial-temporal scales (e.g., evolutionary, historical); yet there is a dimension of play "at work" as well. These workings of language are embedded and embodied in distributed ways that reveal the fundamentally social, public nature of the activity. It is a form of coaction that is dialogical and dynamic in ways that may point to deeper understandings of what it means for perception to be direct and for action to be specific. Language locates us.