Taking the language stance in a material world

Abstract

This paper investigates a special kind of social meaning-making manifest in how we experience static objects and properties of our everyday world. This happens, for example, when we recognize objects like vacuum cleaners, sliced tomatoes, and sneakers as placed in special sites in the environment. Given the compositional features of such images, we see them as designed to accomplish communicative functions. It is argued that object configurations of this kind are recognized as externalized ostensive cues. They are seen as having been created with the intention of setting off an intersubjective mode of perception. This significantly changes the perceiver's semiotic exploration of the scene. From a 'private' mode of sense-making mostly structured by reference to episodic, autobiographical experiential content, the perceiver takes a language stance. In other words, the perceiver adopts a qualitatively different meaning-constructing strategy in dealing with such images. Defending this claim, we present evidence from an empirical investigation of 20 participants' construals of photographic images depicting everyday static objects. We show that a subset of these object configurations (signals) evoke a special kind of socially responsive attitude as manifested in participants' introspective reports. The importance of these findings is brought out by discussion of parallels in neuro-cognitive work and how ostensive cues influence infant behavior.

Carving language for social coordination

“…Deprived of any other channels of coordination, they could only do so by the movement of their figure. Participants were thus facing the challenge of how jointly to mark and differentiate patterns of movements as communicative 'gestures' referring to shared meanings (the colors and their locations) while other movements would still be simple instrumental displacements (for related discussions, see Noordzij et al 2009;Tylén, Philipsen & Weed 2009;Tylén, Wallentin & Roepstorff 2009). Through repeated trials, most pairs were eventually able to solve the task and settle on differentiated movement patterns (e.g.…”

A design approach to team coordination

“…PowerPoint presentations or contracts) or conventions (e.g. organizational hierarchies) to align their interdependent individual contributions (Klein, Feltovich, Bradshaw & Woods 2005;Tylén, Philipsen & Weed 2009).…”