Monday 4 July 2011

Reference: Rethinking language

I have been made aware of a citation of my work, in a text by Stephen Cowley, or more precisely:
Cowley, Stephen J. and Zheng, Dongping 2011. '"The turning of the tide: Rethinking language, mind and world'". Review of Per Linell: Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 2011 (1?): 1-14. First published online 18 March 2011 (DOI: 10.1080/17447143.2011.554642).
The paragraph in which I am cited, on page 10, reads as follows (note that 'Tønneson' should be spelled 'Tønnessen'):
Linell regards dynamics as ‘‘an ontology for the living’’. These ground dialogue in the pre-conceptual, the pre-conscious, and the pre-verbal (254). Indeed, Linell views the sub-personal as dialogical. Not only is there neural evidence for this (Damasio 1994), but it is consistent with turning from ‘‘meaning’’ to sense-making. Breaking with Schu¨ tz (1962), Linell denies that entities identified in transcriptions are basic (or first-order). Rather, order emerges from the dynamics of the voice, face, and body that prompt us to perceive as we do: we rely on embodied variability. Indeed, direct sense-making makes conversation the basis for learning about mediated activities as perception-action systems prompt judgments. When made explicit, conversations link them to sociocultural norms: these extend the ecology by allowing silent-thirds to shape human skills. Interworlds are independent of the processes and products of talk: they arise from unmediated responsivity in, for example, Tønneson’s (2009) ‘‘ontological niche’’ that allows a pack of wolves to orient similarly to a changing environment. Similarly, Stuart (2010) traces sense making to enkinaesthesia, an affectively driven, fluctuating sense of the other (and the enkinaesthetic response of the other). While, Linell uses the verbal to evoke reality, his hermeneutics link with both Bakhtin’s responsive understanding and a mild realism. By tracing dialogue to an extended ecology, languaging can connect both the living and the non-living. Here we go beyond Linell by tracing even monological projects (e.g. science) to dynamical roots. While controversial, this echoes the logic of Rethinking. It is our hope that, in voicing another perspective, we open up new conversation.

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