Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone (Dec 2012)
Submorphémique et corporéité cognitive
Abstract
Speech has long been regarded as the encoding of ideas, and languages as formalisms providing conceptual and representational patterns mobilized by a given cultural language-speaking community for the encoding of ideas with a view to communicative exchanges. In this paper, it is shown that ‘languaging’, in the sense given to this term by Varela and Maturana in the theoretical framework of embodied enactivism, is best defined as a coordination of embodied actions: the lexicon as units of vocal actions triggering reminiscences of dialogical notions, grammatical morphemes activating dynamic combinatory procedural schemas, the syntax as a set of routinary sequences. This coordination of motoric behaviours is used to foster perceptual events to be semiotized both by the addressed interpreter and by the reflexive speaker, who can thus “cause herself to think” in the same way as she can “cause the addressee to think” on the basis of these procedural resources: each language is used as a cognitive technique, an embodied discipline whose function is to produce acts of awareness using the corporal-cognitive gestures available in a given lexicon and grammar. It is also shown here that lexical submorphology is instrumental in profiling the cognitive processes which are mobilized by the vocal forms used in speech production. In the English language, lexical submorphology, especially consonant clusters known as ‘phonæsthemes’, is dedicated to anchoring lexical notions in semantic fields concerning the typical sensorimotor experience by which the language-speaking community is trained to conceptualize the notion. Grammatical morphology, for its part, involves more basic submorphemic units whose effect is to activate radical cognitive procedural schemas, or ‘cognemes’, mobilized in the elaboration of complex dynamic patterns (deixis, representation of space and time, modality, interpersonal relations). Coordinating lexical and grammatical submorphology makes it possible to provide a partial modelization of the way in which meaning is produced by experiencing the motoric and perceptual effects of the vocal forms recruited in the sense-making process.
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