Stephen J. Cowley

My father used to ask me why people talk. Reiteration of this odd question puzzled me -I was highly social. Later, however, it came to haunt me:  how do ideas get off the ground? It is perhaps for this reason that, in my academic life, I have come to focus on the beginnings of language, cognition and communication. Rather than identify languaging with ‘use’ of cultural constructs –words or languages –I came to view these as fictions that arise from a history of coordinating. Movement and vocalization suffice to orchestrate beliefs in a cultural-physical world where people engage with each other, artifacts and institutions. As we do so, we talk: we realize values that are, at once, felt, ecological, dialogical and non-local. On this distributed view, language becomes a constitutive part of action and perception. It aids human organisms to individuate as persons whose strategies draw on the constraints of objects/events, languages, culture and the interaction order. Pursuing this, my empirical work probes human modes of life and living. I examine how problem solving and coordination serve to balance emotion, relationships, expertise and decision making. Emphasis falls on, on the one hand, prosody and, on the other, experimental studies. This allows me to connect work on puzzle completion with seeking to understand and improve health interactions. True to a focus on beginnings, I emphasise biological and biosemiotic sources of human modes of life and, inseparably, how the technologies of late modernity are changing what it is to live as part of the world.

Nigel Love and I founded the Distributed Language Group (DLG) in 2005; Since then, I have coordinated our growing community.  In 2012, its energy led to the emergence of the International Society for the Study of Interactivity, Language and Cognition (issilc).
Phone: not applicable
Address: Language & Communication
University of Southern Denmark,
Sdr. Stationsvej 28,
DK-4200 Slagelse,
Denmark