Languaging, Corporality, the Individual and Society: embodiment between Representationalism and Embodied, Distributed, Biosemiotic and Enactive Cognition in Cognitive Linguistics

In cognitive linguistics, the word embodiment refers to the conceptualization of the subject’s embodied relation to the world through her motoric and multimodal sensorial involvement, along with the traces left by these representations within natural linguistic formalisms (the lexicon and constructions). In this paper, it is shown that in LC, embodiment has not beenintegrated into the definition of the signifier and in the characterization of speech in terms of living experience, or languaging. To account for this fact, it is to be resituated in the historical context of the emergence of LC within the cognitivist revolution paradigm; its ambiguous positioning in relation to generativism is to clarified, along with its connection with pre-cognitivist models such as the psychomechanics of language. And in order to go beyond those limitations, the paper presents a currently growing paradigm which paves the way for a refounding the problematic of languaging at the interface of the subject’s embodied cognition on the one side and intersubjectively distributed social cognition on the other. This correlation makes it possible to evade a representationalistic approach based on encodingism. It reconsiders speech as a process and a modality of action, defines the content of this dynamic, and specifies how this research programme is to be applied by redefining in this perspective the traditional analytical categories (lexicon, morphosyntax, prosody) in their typological variations among natural languages..