Note de recherche sur la place du langage dans l’appréhension des matérialités vivantes : comment discuter avec la linguistique ?

Abstract

This research note aims to question how linguistics can maintain a dialogue with the other sciences regarding the consideration of living materialities in terms of their communicative and meaning-transmitting faculties. More specifically, our contribution seeks to question how language and communication are taken into account in the recent trend to animate all kinds of materialities (from molecules to plants through fungi and viruses), and to ask how the language sciences can join in with these debates. While much research in both the social and natural sciences mobilises reflections on language, communication, and more generally on interactions, these reflections are underpinned by theories of language which, if not made explicit, are often too simple to account for the complexity of exchanges, interactions, and relationships on Earth. In this note we question these works and outline some ways of problematising language in non-human interactions.

Keywords

• interaction
• language
• materiality
• plant communication
• semiosis