Grammar as semiosis and cognitive dynamics

Alexander V. Kravchenko Baikal National University of Economics and Law, Russia

1. An epistemological mirage Much of linguistic “science” practiced today is a set of beliefs, sanc-

tioned by long tradition, about what it is to “do linguistics”. As observed by Don Ross (2007), the domain of linguistics “is both the most transpar-ent site of traditional errors about human peculiarity, and—for much the same reason—provides an ideal perspective from which to diagnose and correct those errors” (p. 2). This chapter addresses the concept of grammar in orthodox linguistics, arguing that it is a good example of how erroneous science can be, especially when its object of study has not been satisfacto-rily defined, nor, for that matter, adequately understood.

The root of all trouble lies in the fact that live spoken language as in-teractive activity of complex dynamics is identified with lifeless texts as cultural artifacts (graphic markings, or, inscriptions) which, of themselves, don’t possess any dynamics whatsoever. Such identification underlies the current use of the term “discourse”, which, regardless of the original meaning of the word, has come to be used with reference to texts as narra-tives. Thus, so-called “discourse grammars” (see, e.g., Longacre 1996; Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008) are misleading in their names as they are, in fact, grammars of texts, and since writing and speech are ontologically dif-ferent phenomena (Kravchenko 2009a), such “discourse grammars” do not (and hardly can) tell us much about languaging as coordinated semiotic behavior of humans in a consensual domain of interactions.

In the literature grammar is defined as, on the one hand, the system by which the words of a language are organized into larger units, such as sen-tences, perceived as existing independently of any attempt at describing it, and on the other hand, as a particular description of such a system, as em-bodied in a set of rules (Trask 1993). Correspondingly, the branch of lin-guistics dealing with the construction of such descriptions and with the investigation of their properties is also called “grammar”. Since language is traditionally defined as a “system of signs” (cf. Götzsche & Filatova,

this volume), and grammar as a branch of linguistics is, thus, concerned with signs, the term grammar is often used as a synonym to linguistics (e.g., descriptive/generative/functional/cognitive grammar/linguistics). This explains why in educational institutions the discipline of English (or whatever happens to be the students’ mother tongue) is largely constituted by the study of grammar as a set of rules – morpho(no)logical and syntac-tic. However, such standard approach is hardly justified as it raises im-portant issues which haven’t been resolved in linguistic theory. Conse-quently, practical tasks in applied linguistics, such as teaching or learning a second language, cannot be adequately solved within the existing theo-retical framework.

Firstly, linguists cannot boast a uniformly accepted non-controversial definition of the object of their study, as the science of linguistics has not come up with a comprehensible answer to the question, “What is lan-guage?” The standard institutionalized definition (“a system of signs”) rei-fies language, making it a kind of thing or tool used for communication, thus sustaining the classical dualist approach, whereby language and thought are segregated and viewed as ontologically independent. Second-ly, it is not quite clear what is understood by “linguistic signs”. The term sign is used to refer both to acoustic phenomena and graphic markings (cf. Götzsche & Filatova, this volume, p. 5), the latter believed to be in one-to-one correspondence to spoken words and utterances; hence continuing at-tempts to construct real discourse grammar (that is, a grammar of verbal behavior) using the same methods of grammatical analysis as in texts. Yet writing does not represent speech, and what works for text cannot be ex-pected to work equally well – if at all – for speech. And thirdly: because of lack of insights into the nature of language in general, and acoustic lin-guistic signs in particular, there is no agreement or clarity as to the func-tion of language.

The general belief that the human language faculty is a complex bio-logical adaptation which evolved by natural selection for “communication in a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle” (Pinker 2003) doesn’t hold water. From the point of view of the biology of cognition (Maturana 1970), knowledge is something that characterizes the state of a living system in its meaningful interactions with the environment, it is something internal and does not go “beyond the skin”, nor can it be shared with others. Language is something material, but as a kind of adaptive be-havior it does not convey information, it provides a description of the state of an observed organism to an observer. The observer interprets this de-scription using his experience of interactions with the observed in their consensual domain, and this interpretation triggers changes in the observ-

er’s state as a structure determined living system1 which the observer de-

scribes as “understanding”. In other words, language is values realizing activity (Cowley, this volume). There is no knowledge transfer, knowledge is constructed by a living system “on the go”, it is an emergent phenome-non. As for communication, its most fundamental aspects are seen as “bio-logical adaptations for cooperation and social interaction in general, whereas the more purely linguistic, including grammatical, dimensions of language are culturally constructed and passed along by individual linguis-tic communities” (Tomasello 2008: 11). Thus, attempts to come up with a grammar of discourse while viewing the function of language as that of an “instrument of communication between human beings” (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008: xi) can hardly be successful.

The inadequacy of the view that the function of language is communi-cation as exchange of information has been often emphasized (Reddy 1979; Harris 1981; Sperber 1995; Glasersfeld 2001; Kravchenko 2007a inter alia); in what we call “communication” there is no transfer of thoughts from one head to another for the purpose of informing the other about the world, and the conduit metaphor is just that – a metaphor, not even a remotely accurate description of what happens when humans en-gage in languaging as dynamically complex interactional behavior grounded in the physical context of the here-and-now.

The mainstream approach to language is two-faceted. Internalism (cognitive centralism) claims that words and rules exist in the head (Aitchison 1987; Pinker 1999). On this view, rules are innate (pre-wired), while words possess (encode) stable meanings; this enables communica-tion as exchange of meanings between the heads (“telementation”). Exter-nalism is the view that language is “out there”, in “objective reality”, it must be acquired as a tool for expressing/exchanging thoughts, because language is a code with fixed meanings shared by a community – some-thing not unlike the Morse code. The assumption that language is a fixed code (or “digital code” – cf. Desalles 2007) unites both views and lies at the core of the language myth (Harris 1981; Love 1998; 2004) sustained by the written language bias (Linell 2005). In the code model of language, grammar is a set of procedures for organizing the elements of this code into “messages”, and the mind works like a computer. The code model is deeply ingrained in the metalanguage of linguistics, having become part

11 “A structure determined system is a system such that all that happens in it or with it arises as a consequence of its structural dynamics, and in which nothing external to it can specify what happens in it, but only triggers a change in its structure determined by its structure” (Maturana 2000: 461).

and parcel of any theoretical construal pertaining to language — from lan-guage evolution to discourse analysis. This model underlies almost all the-orizing in mainstream cognitive science, including cognitive linguistics. Guided by common sense, orthodox linguists believe that regularities ob-served in the linguistic behavior of others are “independent” of the lan-guaging subjects, just as cognitive scientists believe in the autonomy of cognition (for a discussion, see Kravchenko 2007b).

The view of language taken by orthodox linguistics is incoherent. Lan-guage as a natural phenomenon, i. e., a kind of dynamically complex pat-terned (recursive) behavior, is confused with language as a system of writ-ten signs allegedly designed to represent short-lived acoustic phenomena that accompany communicative behavior. Although written language is, indeed, a system based on the use of a limited set of characters which re-sembles a code, it does not represent language as a specific kind of behav-ior (consensual coordinations of coordinations of behavior), or orienta-tional activity (languaging) in real space/time. The invention of writing was driven by a necessity – not to “represent” spoken language – but to enable a cognitive “offload”, when graphic markings served as a kind of prompts, or supports, for memory (A. Clark 1997). Spoken and written languages possess different ontologies and cannot be viewed as two dif-ferent manifestations of the same phenomenon (Kravchenko 2009a). The legacy of Cartesian dualism in thinking about natural language grammar leads to an assumption that grammars of particular languages are various realizations of the so-called “universal grammar” as the necessary set of underlying rules common to all human natural languages. Yet, as empha-sized by Phil Lieberman (2006: 5), “solid biological evidence rules out any version of innate Universal Grammar”. By employing methods used to analyze the organization of written matter (words, sentences, texts) into the realm of natural linguistic behavior which is both embodied and dis-tributed, traditional grammar studies pursue an epistemological mirage.

Languaging is behavior that arises in a consensual domain of interac-tions; as such, it constitutes a dimension of the cognitive niche of an or-ganism as a unity of interactions with which it exists in dynamic congru-ence. A comprehensive study of language is impossible without the study of perceptual processes, because meanings are perceptually grounded (Gärdenfors 1999), and much of what people say, as was noted by Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976), depends directly or indirectly on their percep-tion of the situation they are in. As a bio-socio-culturally constructed di-mension of the human cognitive dynamics, language depends on socio-cultural contingencies (Sinha 2009). The written language bias in linguis-tics – when, rather than focusing on the study of languaging, linguists have

been busy with the study of written texts as cultural artifacts – is responsi-ble for the peculiar situation the conventional linguist seems unwilling to admit: by and large, any number and any kind of “linguistic facts” gleaned from “linguistic data” (that is, written words, sentences, texts) are nothing more than educated interpretations. Thus, a grammar rule as a specific concept is the product of an observer’s interpretative activity, and its defi-nition is predetermined by the initial set of assumptions used as points-of-reference in construing this concept, i. e., by the currently accepted and used notions about language, including the notion of “grammar rule”. The entire issue of native speakers’ “competence” in defining what may be considered as “grammatical” is an issue of educationally predetermined preferences. And in linguistics, education has been usually understood and implemented as indoctrination: “An educational system based upon grammar books and dictionaries has already succeeded in institutionaliz-ing the fixed code fallacy” (Harris 1981: 12). Such institutionalization is largely responsible for the alarming growth of functional illiteracy in modern society (Kravchenko 2009b). There is a dire need to reassess some basic assumptions of current linguistic theory (Kravchenko 2009c; 2011) in an attempt to work out a more realistic language science (Kravchenko 2008a). The traditional concept of grammar needs just such reassessment.

2. Grammar as linguistics Failure to come up with a coherent definition of language has had a

dramatic effect on linguistics which has been misled in its endeavors by the “great mystification” pertaining to the nature of its object of study, that is, spoken language as patterned interactional behavior of humans. By fo-cusing on the study of writing erroneously perceived as a coded represen-tation of natural language, linguistics from the very start has been the study of grammar as the art of writing (from Gr. grámma ‘letter’ + -ar ‘pertaining to’). Grammar as the study of linguistic signs is a study of written signs, that is, sentences which make up texts. Of course, the role of written language today is understood not to be limited exclusively to “rep-resentation” of spoken language, and although written language develops later in cultural history and in language epigenesis, Per Linell (2005) is surely right when he emphasizes that it is not true that written language is simply secondary to spoken language (see also: Harris 1995; Pettersson 1996). Writing is used simply for different purposes than speech; speech and writing have a considerable amount of mutual autonomy and inde-pendence. Preoccupation of linguists with the study of cultural artifacts

such as written signs precludes any sensible talk of linguistics as a study of natural language viewed as a biological endowment of humans with a spe-cific function. As far as grammar goes, traditional linguistic theories are not only misleading, they are wrong because they misrepresent their object of analysis (Taylor 1997; Pennycook 2008).

For the generativist, grammar is “a code or protocol or a set of rules that specifies how words may be arranged into meaningful combinations” (Pinker 1999: 4; cf. also Götzsche & Filatova, this volume). This code, al-so known as “language faculty”, sits in everyone’s head, and the mind “works by words and rules” or, more generally, “by lookup and computa-tion” (ibid., p. 21). Such internalist view is characteristic of formal ap-proaches to grammar, and the computational metaphor is the hallmark of orthodox cognitivism. From the generativist, nativist view, as Goldberg, Casenhiser and Sethuraman (2004) observe, “learning a grammar can be likened to customizing a software package: everything is there, and the learner simply selects the parameters that are appropriate for his environ-ment” (p. 290). However, the human brain is not a computer.

In generativism, disembodiedness of grammar is a core methodological tenet. It is based on the premise, endemic in modern sciences, that an in-sight into the nature of a totality can be gained by decomposing it into its component parts and studying them separately. Sometimes parallels are drawn between grammar and chemistry (Fedor, Ittzés & Szathmáry 2009) on the assumption that analysis into components can lead to revealing truths about their totality (Wierzbicka 2004). Yet this naïve reductionism is hardly justified, as different levels in the complexity of the organization of components into a whole often lead to emergent phenomena that cannot be explained by the properties of the components themselves (Deacon 2011a; cf. also Linell, this volume). For example, the fact that a molecule of water consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen (H2O), each of which is a gas, and the fact that hydrogen is a highly flam-mable substance, while oxygen is a component that makes combustion possible, do not of themselves help understand how a particular structural combination of the two elements yields a substance (water) so radically different in its properties as to be used to put out fires. “Disembodied” grammar, understood as something that can be singled out as a universal invariant among human beings, as a totality of molecules that can be formed using a limited set of components, is a fiction. As Don Ross and David Spurrett (2005) observe, “it is to be sure an immensely powerful folk hunch that complex structures are made of little “things” and that pro-cesses decompose into the bringing together of these little things. Howev-er, it is not science” (p. 643). As a consequence, various theoretical

frameworks for explaining grammar have not achieved much in terms of facilitating “grammar acquisition”, machine translation, and other applied tasks which traditional linguistic theory sets out to resolve.

Counter to orthodox views on language as a means of information ex-change, the primary function of spoken language is to exert, in the course of interactions with others, orientational influences on human behavior in real time-space (Maturana 1978), while the primary function of written language is to serve as the external analog of internal, or biological, memory, as a storage and retrieval system that allows humans to accumu-late experience and knowledge (Donald 1991). It makes no sense, argues Herb Clark (1996: 24), “to adopt an approach to language use that cannot account for face-to-face conversation, yet many theorists appear to have done just this”. As pointed out by Per Linell (2005),

we can talk about a paradox in modern linguistics: one claims the absolute primacy of spoken language, yet one goes on building theories and meth-ods on ideas and experiences of a regimented, partly made-up language de-signed for literate purposes and overlaid with norms proposed by language cultivators, standardizers and pedagogues (p. 30). In his thorough analysis of the written language bias, Linell (2005) has

shown how the great mystification of linguistics came about, what histori-cal and cultural developments helped reinforce the false belief that writing represented speech and, above all, what makes written language so radical-ly different from spoken language. The most important distinction be-tween speech and writing is the relationship between language production, perception and interpretation. Speech is dynamic behavior distributed across time, space and bodies (Cowley 2007a; 2007b), and its inherent dynamics must be subject to on-line monitoring and analysis by both communicating parties. Spoken language and interaction are embodied. At the same time, the whole interaction between speaker and listener is inter-dependent with the situation and other contexts in many important ways. The situation as perceived by participants will change as the interaction moves ahead.

As convincingly shown by Per Linell (2005), written language is dif-ferent from spoken language in many ways. Unlike speech, written texts are typically not perceived and interpreted at the same times and places as they are produced. The analysis of written language necessarily focuses on the products of the writer’s activities, whereas the production process it-self is inaccessible and unimportant for the normal reader. A text and its component parts (letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.) have the character of persistent and static objects, which are spatially rather than

temporally organized. A text is made up of discrete symbols, i.e. letters and written words, which are organized in certain regular spatial patterns. These symbols are only very approximate counterparts of some of the structural features of spoken language (such as segmental-phonological, grammatical, lexical); as for the prosodic features and the non-verbal sig-nals of the communicative acts, they have almost no correspondence in writing. The written text exists as a symbolic artifact, which is not embod-ied by its users, the communicating people. Importantly, written language is disembodied with respect to the human agent.

Embodiment and dependence on the situation (physical context in real time) are the two dividing lines between spoken and written language making them empirically non-identical and non-equivalent. Counter to the written language bias assumption, no one-to-one correspondence between the sign and what it “stands for” is observed either in natural spoken lan-guage characterized by a large number of contextual variables affecting its actual outcome (Love 2004; Farrow 2005), or in written language, which seldom allows single unified interpretations of particular pieces of writing. Historically, this multiple interpretability of texts motivated the emergence of hermeneutics as the science of interpretation.

The ontological difference between spoken and written language is the difference between first order activity, that is, doing what you talk about when you talk about action and perception (having both a neural and be-havioral aspect), and second order activity involving operations on (se-cond order) cultural constructs (words, phrases, sentences, etc.) that make up the “ultimate” artifact, written language. Just in the same way as verbal descriptions of the environment cannot make it present to the blind person the way eyesight does, a written “representation” of spoken language can-not make present all the minutest details of the actual utterance-in-situation that our hearing, along with all the other senses, does. The origi-nal function of written language is not related to representation of spoken language. The idea that written language represents spoken language springs from the time-old belief that words of spoken language represent objects in the world, that physical words as acoustic phenomena are spe-cial signs that “stand in” for something not necessarily visible or otherwise perceptible to the senses, and thus possess stable, fixed meanings. Like-wise, by an obviously trite analogy, written words as visually perceived graphic patterns (something “present”) begin to be viewed as signs of acoustic phenomena which, for one reason or another, are inaccessible to auditory perception (that is, they are “absent”). However, our everyday linguistic experience tells us that interpretation of written expressions as if they were representations of spoken expressions often creates cognitive

problems which affect our ability to choose adaptively appropriate behav-ior in a particular situation (for a discussion, see Kravchenko 2009b).

The view that grammar should be understood as an innate system of rules governing the functioning of language as a means of communication according to generative principles has been criticized for its biological im-plausibility (Elman et al. 1996; Deacon 1997; Sampson 1997; Bates & Goodman 1998; Locke 2009), and a new approach to grammar as cogni-tion has become remarkably popular (Langacker 1987; 1991; Geeraerts 1988; Goldberg 1995; Heine 1997). While the traditional approach to grammar attempts to provide an explicit set of features of meaning alleg-edly associated with a given form, in cognitive linguistics these features are viewed as an assembly of concepts we have about the world which emerge in the cognitive domain of linguistic interactions. The outcome of such interactions is the sum total of our linguistic experiences, which are part and parcel of the natural environmental domain inseparable from any other non-linguistic aspect of human existence. As argued by Rens Bod (1998: xi ff),

the productive units of natural language cannot be defined in terms of a minimal set of rules (or constraints or principles), as is usually attempted in linguistic theory, but need to be defined in terms of a redundant set of pre-viously experienced structures with virtually no restriction on their size and complexity. By viewing regularities in the use of written signs as rules which un-

derlie the use of natural language, orthodox linguistics commits a categor-ical mistake. Disembodied texts do not represent physically embodied and socially distributed linguistic interactions grounded in the physical context as their essential prerequisite feature. Refusing to admit the essential role of context (i.e., the consensual domain in which languaging takes place) in understanding and interpreting linguistic behavior, orthodox linguistics insists that it studies language by studying disembodied cultural artifacts. As a result, it hasn’t been particularly productive:

The sterility of modern linguistic orthodoxy is precisely that it relegates the essential features and conditions of language to the realm of the non-linguistic (Harris 1981: 166). Externalist approaches to language must be dropped for their epistemo-

logical implausibility. Language is not an object, it cannot be acquired. Sentences do not “exist independently” of languaging humans, they are descriptive construals; as cultural constructs, they are artifacts used in se-

cond order activity when we do what we do when we talk about language − for example, when we “analyze” written texts. In normal everyday dis-course we never speak in sentences typically defined as grammatical, i. e. syntactically organized, units expressing independent and/or complete thought. The concept of sentence itself is a second-order cultural construct pertaining to strings of written signs that “stand in” for words of natural spoken language; that is why judgments about “grammaticality” of sen-tences often vary among native speakers of a particular language, because “the correctness of sentences is a social fact” (Itkonen 2003: 114).

There is much less regularity in natural linguistic behavior (languag-ing) than in graphic artifacts we call “texts”. It becomes obvious as soon as we look at any of the many available corpora of “spoken language” (which are still only transcripts of actual discourse and do not in any way represent the physical context in which the transcribed linguistic behavior was enacted). Could this mean that we should, probably, speak of two types of grammar for any single language with a literate tradition? Be-cause grammar remains the study of signs, and because written signs are different from, and don’t function as, natural linguistic signs, shouldn’t linguistics approach it as a semiotic phenomenon in general, and as two distinctly different, although interdependent, kinds of semiosis in the case of written and spoken language, in particular?

3. Grammar as semiosis 3.1. Signs as relational phenomena Semiosis is a process in which currently experienced phenomena are

interpreted as referring to other, experientially absent, phenomena, thereby becoming meaningful entities, or signs (Lat. signum ‘mark’). The refer-ence of a sign is made possible by memories of past interactions with the components of the environment. A sign is always a sign to someone or something capable of interpreting it as such; without this initial condition, the notion of sign is void. In a broad sense, interpretation is an organism’s adaptive response – meaningful interaction with the environment (or, val-ues realizing – cf. Cowley, this volume). Although the degree of adequacy of such response may vary (errors in interpretation do occur), what matters is that something is re-cognized as a sign – something experientially pre-sent related to something experientially absent. Speaking of interpretation as essentially a holistic enterprise, Hilary Putnam (1983: 150) makes the following observation:

...the only criteria that we actually have for the ‘content’ of any signs, or sign-analogs, are our intuitive criteria of successful interpretation; and to formalize these would involve formalizing our entire conception of what it is to be human, of what it is to be intelligible in human terms.

Without interpretation as a procedure for establishing the reference of a sign the latter cannot be categorized as such, and any talk about signs without interpretation as their distinctive constitutive feature is simply nonsensical because signs are experientially grounded relational phenom-ena.

An experientially present entity becomes a sign when an interpreter re-lates it to his past experiences of this entity and its co-occurrence with an-other entity which was perceptually present in that experience. In the “ob-jective” world, for example, palm-trees in a desert do not relate to water that may be found in an oasis. It is our experience of the world that tells us more or less reliably that water will be found in a desert if we see a cluster of trees in a particular spot. Past experiences retained in memory lie at the basis of “historically created semiotic interaction mechanism” (Hoffmeyer 2007: 152) essential for life. But because interpretation always occurs in a specific context and depends on a plethora of factors characterizing the here-and-now of the situation, its outcome can never be predicted with ab-solute accuracy. This is why interpretation is an open process, allowing an infinite number of possibilities in establishing the reference of an entity drawn into the observer’s/interpreter’s relational domain of interactions: “The fact that language is inherently ambiguous and uncertain can lead to problems, but it is also the source of the power of language” (Lieberman 2006: 32).

3.2. Semiotics of languaging vs. semiotics of writing Different versions of generativism aim at providing a formula for de-

scribing and/or calculating all possible sentences for a given language (cf. Götzsche & Filatova, this volume), as if the latter existed “out there”, in-dependently of their human “generator”. By contrast, from a cognitive dynamics perspective, grammar should be understood as some general principles underlying the mechanisms for integrating human interactional experience in semiosis. Yet linguistic semiotics (Saussurean semiology) focuses on signs as things (i.e., sign vehicles) and claims that a semiotic system is a combination of two worlds between which there is no neces-sary link (see, e.g., Barbieri 2007; 2010), thus rendering language a code.

As a basic orthodoxy of modern linguistics, the fixed-code model of lan-guage derives from a cultural tradition in literate societies that privileges monologue and uses texts to define linguistic units such as words, phrases, or sentences. An alphabet is, in fact, a kind of code system which, based on convention, establishes arbitrary relationships between graphic images (letters) and sound types. A language is characterized by a finite set of sound types used by its speakers, so the number of letters in an alphabet is also finite. Because of this, alphabetic systems of writing may be convert-ed into any other such system by replacing one kind of sign vehicle (e.g., graphic marks we call “letters”) by any other kind (such as dots and dashes in Morse), given that the new sign vehicles may be manipulated with rela-tive ease. Literacy in this context is typically seen as an ability to perform a three-step operation of matching and identification: (i) a particular letter or a combination of letters (graphic encoding, or symbol) is matched with a particular acoustic phenomenon (sound type); (ii) a particular concatena-tion of letters (the written word) is matched with a particular concatenation of sound types (the spoken, or physical word); (iii) the written word is identified with the spoken word. However, as has been argued by Kravchenko (2009b), when graphic symbolizations constituted by code symbols (letters) are viewed as standing for the structural elements of spo-ken words (sounds), an insurmountable problem arises. To explain how letters can stand for spoken words and, by extension, for their meanings, demands some kind of vitalism. While the letter-sound relationship is at least approximately code-like (even if it is seldom strictly rule governed), the word-meaning-reference relationship is considerably more complex. To identify written marks with a living word is to make a category mis-take. A change of certain artifacts – such as a particular kind of graphic images used by a community to represent their vocalizations – does not transform their language as a relational domain in which they exist as uni-ties of interactions into another relational domain. That is why Morse code is not a language, just as, e.g., Tajik Persian written in the Cyrillic alpha-bet is not a language different from Tajik written in the Persian alphabet.

As the study of written linguistic signs and meaningful relations be-tween them based on interpretation, grammar is, intrinsically, a study of semiotic relations. However, although the expression “linguistic sign” is used in modern linguistic orthodoxy to refer both to the graphic markings of writing and to verbal patterns as acoustic phenomena, written words as semiotic phenomena differ essentially from the words of spoken language. There is an important distinction between semiotic relations found in texts and in natural language. Some of them have already been mentioned when discussing the written language bias in linguistics; yet the crucial differ-

ence is in the interpretative interactional dynamics characteristic of mono-logical activity in the case of writing versus dialogicality of natural lin-guistic interactions (Linell, this volume). The term “language” refers to phenomena found in the relational domain of interactions of humans as living systems. The dynamics of these interactions, distributed over differ-ent time-scales (evolutionary, historic, developmental) are radically differ-ent from the dynamics of interactions with texts as cultural artifacts.

The art of writing is essentially different from the cognitive mecha-nisms governing languaging. Sentences are structural units of disembodied texts, and as such they are symbolic artifacts. Being second-order cultural constructs, they are not grounded in first-order activity. As symbols, sen-tences are grounded in second-order linguistic activity such as speaking about sentences, for example, in an English class at school. A sentence is a concatenation of graphic images designed to represent acoustic phenome-na we call “words” which serve as orientational signals in our interactions with others. Because of their orientational impact, words are believed to possess meanings; in reality, however, meanings are constructed on the spur of the moment by assigning orientational values to physical words which are integrated in the complex behavioral dynamics of humans dis-tributed across space in real time. As emphasized by Per Linell (2005), sense-making is neither contained in a subjective “inner world”, nor in an objective “outer world”, it lives in the relations between these, in an “in-ter-world” between the organism and the external world. In other words, it is based in our experience of previous interactions in our cognitive do-main. At the same time, it involves real time “processing” of all the per-ceptual cues provided by the physical context in which linguistic interac-tions take place.

From the distributed language view (Cowley 2007a), and counter to the assumption that language is a set of fixed abstract forms, or an infinite set of sentences (Chomsky 1957), language is conceptualized in terms of potentialities, as something constituted by resources to be used in produc-ing utterances and in associating understandings with utterances:

These resources <…> are designed to be completed only in situated mean-ing-making. They do not ‘encode’ or ‘contain’ their meanings; rather, they index, cue or prompt understandings in terms of reference, conceptualiza-tion and intervention (Linell 2007: 611).

Language is not verbal patterns (Kravchenko 2010) which exist auton-

omously as symbols – whether in the head (internalist accounts of lan-guage) or in the world (linguistic externalism); it is a specific dimension of the consensual domain of interactions (interlocked conducts, or consensu-

al coordinations of coordinations of behavior) between organisms. It is in the course of these interactions that meaning emerges as the outcome of interpretative activity. In the case of natural language, meanings are not contained in words, while for fixed-code systems such containment is a condition sine qua non. Various aspects of verbal behavior, such as speech dynamics, body language (see Kreydlin, this volume), physical context, etc., play a crucial role in the interactive process and its interpretation. Natural linguistic signs are inherently indexical (Peirce 1932; Putnam 1986; Kravchenko 1992; Deacon 2003; 2012).

By contrast, in texts understanding is not cued or indexed with refer-ence to ever changing real-time situations in which communicating indi-viduals find themselves, because texts, unlike spoken communication, are not intrinsically dialogical. While languaging is orientational because, functionally, it is an extension of the human sensorium (Morris 1938), written language is a prosthesis for memory that allows humans to load off the cognitive burden of tracking past interactions in their niche. This is, indeed, where the concept of language as a symbol system (that is, a “thing”) does come in; however, a divide must be drawn between the con-cept of sign and the concept of symbol.

As has been argued by Kravchenko (2003), and counter to the estab-lished tradition to use sign and symbol interchangeably, these terms are essentially non-synonymous; while the meaning of the Lat. signum is ‘mark’, symbolum (a later borrowing from Greek: συµβολον) means ‘put together’, ‘thrown in’. Thus, one is based in perception and experience, while the other presupposes an intentional stance. Intentionality is the ca-pacity of a living system to modify its state of reciprocal causality with the world in order to sustain the ecological system which enables such recip-rocal causality (Kravchenko 2007b). With this in view, physical spoken words are indices — perceived empirical phenomena which function as “marks” of other phenomena known from previous experience. Unlike Saussurean semiology, scientific (Peircean) semiotics is not so much about signs as things but about relations between things determined by an inter-preter based on his experience/memory of these things. This approach makes a semiotic system such as language a combination of two (or more) worlds between which there must be a link in the form of a perceptual-ly/experientially grounded interpretant.

A symbol is always a kind of sign, while a sign is not always and nec-essarily a symbol. As argued by Terry Deacon (2011b), the true nature and function of symbol may not be understood if symbolic reference is nega-tively defined with respect to iconic and indexical referential relationships:

Whereas iconic reference is identified by its dependence on form simi-larity between sign vehicle and what it represents, and indexical reference depends on contiguity, correlation, or causal connection, symbolic refer-ence is often described as being independent of any likeness or physical linkage between sign vehicle and referent. This negative characterization of symbolic reference—often caricatured by describing it merely as arbi-trary reference—unfortunately fails to specify what must be the case, and gives the false impression that symbolic reference is nothing but simple unmediated correspondence (Deacon 2011b).

For children learning to take a language stance (Cowley 2011), lin-guistic structures function, first and foremost, as indices, thus ensuring perceptual groundedness of language as orientational activity in a consen-sual domain, or adaptive behavior in an organism’s cognitive niche. For that matter, all nervous systems support indexical reference as a meaning-making process of interaction with the environment. However, organisms with nervous systems can’t go beyond their limited realm of first-order consensual domain; to do so requires language as a second-order consen-sual domain not limited by the here-and-now of the physical context of communicative interactions. This freedom from the here-and-now of the cognitive niche is a distinctive property of language, yet this freedom does not mean “simple unmediated correspondence”. It is, in fact, quite the op-posite: freedom from the here-and-now of the cognitive niche, typically taken to be the diagnostic feature of linguistic signs aka symbols, is not absolute, and what is called “symbolic reference” is mediated by a net-work of iconic and indexical relationships established in languaging as a second-order consensual domain in which elements of the first-order con-sensual domain (linguistic signs perceptually grounded in the physical context – indices and icons) are used without the consensual domain.

To a child learning to language in a natural way, the process consists mostly in making sense – through interaction with the components of the consensual domain – of what is observed as happening in the child’s cog-nitive niche. Vocalizations the child hears do not have any intrinsic mean-ing; being components of the first-order consensual domain, they are per-ceived as playing a certain part in the network of causal relationships be-tween the components of the consensual domain, thus acquiring meaning. Establishing causal relations is the beginning of semiosis as an interpreta-tion process. Importantly, what is usually referred to as sign use does not imply creation of material forms as sign vehicles – any component of the first-order consensual domain may become a sign by simply entering the network of reciprocal causal relationships. In other words, just as vocaliza-

tions may be signs of other entities or phenomena, the latter may be signs of vocalizations retained in memory (Kravchenko 2003).

To a child developing in a normal socio-cultural context, linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena are not two worlds independent of one another, they are facets of a network of causal relationships between words and things (or an interworld), which function as indices with respect to one an-other. The mistake of orthodox linguistic semiotics is that by describing linguistic signs as intentionally produced arbitrary symbols with a repre-sentational function, it imbues semiosis with a misunderstood and misin-terpreted idea of language evolution. Semiosis cannot be explained through language evolution, while we may get a better understanding of language evolution by understanding semiosis. What is known under the label “natural language acquisition” is spontaneous semiosis grounded in the physical context of interlocked conducts (a consensual domain of in-teractions), and as such it predetermines intrinsic indexicality of each and every component of the consensual domain – that is, their orientational function.

As for corresponding graphic images we call “words”, they are not words understood as indexical signs in the above sense, but symbolizations of such signs abstracted from all the specifics that physical words possess in real space-time. Texts are symbolizations of signs organized in a certain way determined by cultural convention, they are cultural artifacts created and used for a specific purpose. Graphic images, such as letters of which written words are made, are just that which has been “put together” and “thrown in”, and, once thrown into the relational domain of human lin-guistic behavior (languaging), written words, along with spoken words, begin to play a crucial role in human cognitive development, sustaining our ecological system:

…[O]ur language and our communicative interactions influence and

are influenced by the way our societies are organized, which in turn influ-ences and is influenced by our environmental surroundings, which in turn influence and are influenced by our language and our communicative in-teractions (Steffensen 2007: 3). 3.3. The cognitive dynamics of interactions with texts As symbolic artifacts, written words as semiotic phenomena differ

from spoken words as natural linguistic signs. This difference creates a cognitive hurdle by introducing an additional level of interpretation: to recognize that a particular graphic image symbolizes a natural linguistic

sign is not enough to understand the text if the linguistic sign in question is not grounded in the reader’s experience of natural linguistic interactions in the first-order consensual domain. Guided by the erroneous assumption of orthodox linguistics that written words represent spoken words, education-al systems in literate societies ground learning in texts which are often viewed as the basis of “knowledge acquisition”, overlooking the fact that, in order to be adequately interpreted (“understood”), texts – especially ed-ucational texts for children – must contain symbolizations of linguistic signs most of which have already been experientially grounded in their first-order consensual domain, becoming indices with an orientational function. If this is not the case, learning becomes an unmotivated enter-prise seriously taxing the developing cognitive powers of children.

A written word does not symbolize something which is outside and above the concrete experience of a concrete language user (the so-called invariant), it serves as a scaffolding device that helps restore a relevant part of subjective experience from a person’s memory. If a particular con-catenation of symbols, by analogy with other similarly looking concatena-tions which belong to the same code, is recognized by the reader as a writ-ten word, he may, more or less correctly, utter the sequence of sounds en-coded by these symbols, but these sounds would not have any particular meaning in the sense that they would not help restore from memory a fragment of relevant experience, and there will be no value realizing. If, however, the reader encounters symbolic representations of physical words which are part of his accumulated experience of interactions in his cognitive domain, they will have a certain orientational effect, even though it will differ from the orientational effect of similar physical words uttered in the course of dialogical communication. Does this mean that graphic symbolizations of words which have not been perceptually and dynamical-ly grounded in the readers experience of the first-order consensual domain lack meaning and may not be understood? Certainly not.

Although, on first encounter, immediate interpretation may appear somewhat of a problem, just because written words help the reader restore relevant experience of his interactions with the world, thus giving this ex-perience structure, novel symbolizations are viewed as gaps in this struc-tural lattice to be filled in the course of interpreting the structure as a whole (as, e.g., in translation of legal texts – see Janigová, this volume). Symbolizations of known physical words, being spatially and sequentially (that is, semiotically) organized, serve as a scaffolding for construing in-terpretations of novel symbolizations by providing indices of possible ref-erents in the first-order consensual domain. Skills in identifying these ref-erents – and vesting new graphic symbolizations with meanings – grow as

the amount and scope of reading grow. These, in turn, facilitate the devel-opment of good writing skills. Writing is not a dialog with another human in real space-time. At best, it may be viewed as a dialog with the self, when its cognitive purport is not the same as when talking to others. Be-cause we happen in language, speaking to oneself helps in defining our identity as conscious cognizers operating in the relational domain of lin-guistic interactions. Writing as a symbolic representation of our self-addressed speech enables our recollection of that meaning, it allows us to re-evaluate it from a different point in time when we have changed as structure determined organisms, and depending on the result of such re-evaluation we may come to a new understanding. Writing becomes think-ing (Menary 2007). It is in such cases that we are fully justified in speak-ing of the orientational effect of writing.

3.4. Grammatical categories as metasigns Ontologically, natural linguistic signs are a kind of category, a class of

phenomena singled out by the observer in his domain of interactions. In semiotics these are further categorized into kinds of signs depending on the kind of semiotic relationship (iconic, indexical, symbolic) between the sign vehicle and that to which it refers. In linguistic semiotics they go fur-ther and speak of the relationships between signs and what they stand for (the conventional domain of semantics), between different signs viewed as a system (the conventional domain of syntax), and between signs and their users (the conventional domain of pragmatics). So, in the case of linguistic categories one may speak of categorization of categorization, when an en-tity, already being a category of a kind, i.e., a significant entity, is used to express a category of another kind, becoming a signifying entity.

Take, as an illustration, grammatical categories constituted by formal oppositions of sign vehicles of similar nature, such as morphological tense or number: every member standing in opposition to the other member ex-presses both general categorical and specific categorical meaning on con-dition that it is analyzed in the formal context of this kind of contrast. A change in the formal context which profiles a particular contrast may re-sult in the change of meaning attributed to the form; this is usually de-scribed in terms of grammatical homonymy. However, if the meaning of a grammatical category is constituted by regular juxtaposition of sign forms with a particular type of context constituted by other signifying entities, then the categorical meaning is not a feature of a particular sign form but of an intersign relationship which acquires a semiotic status. It means that a grammatical category is a kind of sign, or metasign (Stepanov 1981).

Guided by a lifetime of experience of recursive linguistic interactions in our cognitive domain, we choose particular sign forms in a particular situ-ation knowing that we may quite reasonably anticipate a particular effect on the individual to be oriented — all because we have knowledge of how particular linguistic resources usually work in particular situations. Thus, knowledge is categorized experience, and knowledge of grammar is cate-gorized experience of intersign relationships which function as metasigns. Importantly, once we define grammatical categories as kinds of signs, they may be characterized as prototypically close to one of the three Peircean types of signs − icon, index, or symbol. At the same time, as semiotic phe-nomena, grammatical categories do not have rigid boundaries; they are fuzzy sets which often display features of “family resemblance” − that is why linguists have always had problems with drawing a complete list of discrete grammatical categories found in texts written in a particular lan-guage.

The importance of grammar as a certain, although at times fuzzy, set of regularities in the use of written language responsible for the organization of texts, must not be underestimated. But neither must it be overestimated when we are concerned with spoken language. Far from being a represen-tation of natural linguistic behavior, writing is subject to rules and norms essentially different from the “rules” and “norms” of spoken language. Quotation marks are used here to emphasize the sheer arbitrariness of the-se concepts when applied to spoken language. Indeed, if there be rules that govern natural linguistic behavior, they could not possibly be understood and formulated in separation from the cognitive dynamics of communica-tive behavior. These dynamics are the result of an organism’s unique his-tory of fine structural coupling with the environment. The cognitive do-main of linguistic interactions, which cannot be identical from one indi-vidual to another inasmuch as one living system

2 cannot be identical to

another living system, is constitutive of this dynamic environment; there-fore, actual linguistic behavior of individuals cannot be identical, either. Yet meaningful linguistic interaction between individuals is possible if they operate in a consensual domain in which what we call linguistic signs are perceptually and experientially grounded.

2 In biology of cognition, an organism is a living system as long as it is autorefer-ential and specified by its circular organization. A cell is simply a first order living system, an individual human – a second order, and a human community – a third order living system.

Natural linguistic signs are not symbols; they are indices that cue hu-man understanding in oral communication with regard to all the multifari-ous aspects of the physical context in which communication occurs, par-ticularly, with regard to the speaking observer as the ultimate point-of-reference. Such indexing is, basically, the cognitive function of many, if not all, grammatical categories in natural human language. These cuing aspects of natural linguistic signs underlie what linguists call grammatical meaning, and, thanks to grammatical meaning “expressed” in grammatical categories as metasigns, a second-order consensual domain is established in which the components of a consensual domain of interactions are recur-sively applied without the consensual domain. The unity of a community of human individuals as a third-order living system is sustained by an un-interrupted continuity of the second-order consensual domain over space and time. In regard to spoken language, the purpose of grammar under-stood in a broad sense is, thus, to construe and organize the relational do-main of interactions — a second-order consensual domain in which we exist as humans and the components of which we use to describe what we call the “world” — by partitioning it with the help of linguistic signs grounded in first-order activity.

In writing, understanding may be cued only with the help of symbol-ized linguistic items themselves organized in such a manner as to compen-sate for the absent physical context by indexing points-of-reference used in simulating a second-order consensual domain. In this, grammar is a sys-tem of metasigns.

4. Grammar and the world Traditionally, grammatical categories are singled out and identified by

analyzing written texts from the point of view of relations between written words, phrases and sentences, and when a particular written sign is found to be used recursively under certain conditions, linguists speak of a cate-gory and try to formulate a grammar rule that underlies the use of this cat-egory. However, the nature of grammar understood as some general prin-ciples underlying semiotic mechanisms cannot be explicated without ad-dressing the issue of human cognitive activity, particularly, perception. By establishing a second-order consensual domain, communicatively interact-ing individuals orient one another in regard to their first-order consensual domains. This becomes possible due to perceptual groundedness of lin-guistic signs, including grammatical categories as metasigns. Phenomeno-logically, linguistic signs are components of the environment, and gram-

matical categories as metasigns index the relationships between signs which, in their turn, index the relationships between the cognizer and those aspects of the environment which stand in a reciprocal causal relation to signs of natural language. Spoken utterances, by partitioning the world of which they themselves are an essential part, help construe and organize this world as a structured system of categorized experience. In the case of natural language, this structured system, being perceptually grounded in individual experience of multi-modal cognitive interactions with the world, integrates all aspects of such experience, both conscious and un-conscious. But as soon as we turn to writing as a symbolic artifact, most of the cues and indices, provided in spoken communication by the so-called non-linguistic aspects of the consensual domain, disappear. To make un-derstanding of written language possible, the loss of the scaffolding in the form of a first-order consensual domain must be compensated for, and this is where we meet grammar—not as “the system by which the words and morphemes of a language are organized into larger units”, but as a symbol-ized sign system for storing categorized cognitive experience (knowledge) wherein every grammatical category relates to some essential aspect of cognitive processing in the first-order consensual domain. Accordingly, an analysis of linguistic categories both on the morphological and syntac-tic levels should aim at explaining the relationship between them and the cognitive processes which affect the resulting structure of a sentence (text) by imposing constraints on its organization.

While taking a language stance (or, in the established linguistic par-lance, “acquiring” natural language grammar), a child develops an ability to categorize perceptual “data” as concepts whose structures incorporate causal relationships between linguistic and non-linguistic objects, and to assign them specific cognitive values. These values are the experiential outcome of interactions with the world, and they determine what is known as the speaker’s linguistic competence because, ultimately, the point-of-reference in the formation of any concept associated with any linguistic structure is perceptual experience. The process of taking a language stance relies heavily on the trial-and-error principle in building the experiential sign-object and sign-concept “data bases” which are, in fact, interconnect-ed networks of representations as states of relative neuronal activity. These two data bases account for the binary principle in the organization of grammatical categories. Consequently, following Goldsmith and Woi-setschlaeger (1982), two types of knowledge may be distinguished as dif-ferent cognitive values of grammatical categories: phenomenological (based in iconic and indexical metasigns) and structural (based in symbol-ic metasigns). Phenomenological knowledge is the result of identification,

based on conceptualization and categorization, of observed objects and phenomena in the cognitive domain of interactions; it belongs to the epis-temological level of the Observer. Structural knowledge is the result of categorization of linguistic interactions in the speaker’s cognitive domain. Because language is a second-order consensual domain distributed over space and time, an individual observer/speaker categorizes it as part of the generalized experience accumulated by past generations and “stored” in linguistic structures (recursive patterns) used by a community of speakers. Since structural knowledge belongs to the community as a whole, to any given individual speaking the language of this community it appears as something existentially given; so it may be described as something that belongs to the epistemological level of the Speaker. Since the speaker is always the observer, but the observer is not always the speaker, the dis-tinction between the two types of knowledge is not always rigid and clear-cut, but it does have a systemic status (cf. Kravchenko 2008b) and consti-tutes an important part of many grammatical categories often described in traditional grammar as a means for expressing evidentiality (cf. Willett 1987).

As a “prosthesis” for memory, written language operates on two levels: the level of text and the level of linguistic items used to produce a text. To the reader, the ability of a text to have an orientational effect (its “in-formative” value ) stands in direct relationship to the orientational poten-tial of physical signs and metasigns grounded in the reader’s experience and symbolized as graphic images which constitute the text. Therefore, to understand a written text the reader must relate his personal experience of individual signs of natural language symbolized by the discrete units of the text (phenomenological knowledge) to the structure of the text, or its grammar, which determines how the reader construes his phenomenologi-cal linguistic experience into a possible world as a result of text interpreta-tion. What it means is that the reader assigns experientially grounded val-ues to linguistic items symbolized in written form and tries to make sense of these by organizing chunks of available personal experience according to the schemata provided by the way written words and constructions are organized into sentences. Since the reader’s experience may very little, if at all, overlap with the writer’s experience, the reader’s understanding of a text as a result of his interpretative effort will never be identical to the writer’s understanding of the same text — which, by the way, explains why literary criticism, as a way of earning a living, will never cease to be an attractive occupation — at least, to some languaging humans.

5. Conclusion: What’s next? In the preceding discussion I have posed a number of questions about

the concept of grammar in orthodox linguistics, none of which can be co-herently answered in the established traditional paradigm which views language as a tool (a code) for the transfer of thoughts. The traditional ap-proach stems from reification of both language and thought − which thus become disembodied manipulable things − and ignores the cognitive dy-namics of languaging as a species-specific manner of operating in the cog-nitive domain of humans. Such reification is rooted in the written language bias of language studies in general and modern orthodox linguistics in par-ticular, spawning a set of beliefs about language aptly described by their critics as the language myth.

The written language bias and the language myth are responsible for the theoretical ineptitude of existing approaches to grammar; not only is grammar far from being a clearly defined concept, but it is also misleading inasmuch as the purpose of grammar is understood to be the setting of procedures (rules) for organizing words and morphemes into larger units. The logic behind such understanding of grammar leads to admitting that words and morphemes exist “out there”, that they have meanings, and that these meanings are combined and re-combined to express thoughts. In other words, the traditional conception of grammar is based on the same old myths linguistics lives by, and it is not surprising that little progress has been made in applying the theory of grammar thus conceived to solv-ing practical tasks.

While not claiming to have given definitive or exhaustive answers, I believe I have shown that the traditional concept of grammar needs re-thinking and/or re-evaluating. Using the epistemological lining in the study of language provided by the biologically oriented cognitive science (Kravchenko 2011), grammar studies should take into account the cogni-tive dynamics of languaging as consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behavior, or, semiosis. By confusing natural language as a kind of interactional behavior integrated in the complex dynamics of hu-man cognition with writing as symbolic representations of physical words which are orientational devices used in dialogical interactions in real space-time, orthodox linguistics makes a categorical mistake of viewing regularities in the use of written signs as rules which underlie the use of natural language.

Although “universal grammar” as conceived by generativists is a fic-tion, there is no denying the universality of the process of recursive struc-tural coupling that takes place in humans. Because such structural cou-

pling takes place in a consensual domain of interactions, and because hu-man individuals belong to the same biological species and have similar physiologies regardless of the language they speak, phenomenological as-pects of their interactions with the environment are necessarily character-ized by similar patterns and co-variance, and they necessarily affect their linguistic behavior. Taking a language stance, children enmesh their bodi-ly cognitive dynamics with the dynamics of languaging as spatially and temporally distributed interactions aimed at value realizing through semio-sis. This meshwork is a unique result of their developmental history as an ecological adaptation; therefore, it varies across different physical contexts and different time-scales. In other words, observed regularities in the ver-bal behavior of humans as structure determined systems cannot be ex-haustively formalized. To understand this is to admit that the categorical apparatus of traditional grammar studies with their written language bias cannot be used in explaining the function of languaging as a specific di-mension of coordinated behavior of humans; recursion in writing is of a different nature than recursion in languaging inasmuch as the semiotics of writing in literate cultures is different from the semiotics of languaging. Yet these semiotics are not mutually exclusive; through education systems and institutionalized social norms and practices they come to merge into a complex cognitive system uniquely characteristic of the species Homo sa-piens. With this in mind, a more coherent view of natural language gram-mar can be developed by taking into account the cognitive dynamics of languaging, the cognitive dynamics of writing, and the semiotic mecha-nisms that underlie them.

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