Taking a Language Stance

Linguists tend to view language in terms of forms and their use. For historical reasons, speaking and listening are often ascribed to knowledge of a language system. Language behavior is seen as the production and processing of forms. Others contrast language to man-made codes (see Kravchenko, 2007; Love, 2004). Instead of focusing on forms, language can be conceived of as action and, as such, 10 both dynamic and symbolic (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2009). History places us in a meshwork where public resources of language, among other things, contribute to games, mashing beans, and watching television. Speaking-while-hearing draws on cultural products (e.g., axes, social roles, pictures, and wordings). As we collabo-rate, we orient to wordings or repeated (and systematized) aspects of vocalizations 15 that, within our community, carry historically derived information. Pursuing this view, it is argued that hearing “words ” is like seeing “things ” in pictures. This is described as taking a language stance. To defend the position, it is argued that, first, we learn to hear wordings and, later, to use “what we hear ” as ways of constraining our actions. Far from depending on individual knowledge, orienting 20 to wordings makes language irreducibly collective. DYNAMICS AND LIVING BODIES Twentieth-century linguists typically identified language activity with the use of language systems by invoking theoretical entities known as linguistic forms and functions. Following de Saussure (1916/1983), they adopted naïve realism b