LANGUAGE IN BIO-SOCIO-CULTURAL CONCEPTION: LEXICAL AND GRAMMAR “LEVELS”

It has been an object of ongoing linguistic research to investigate the mechanisms of ‘generating’ words and word combinations in real speech, and defne their semantic status as lexico-grammatical units of language-as-a-system. Te article encourages the reader to look at the outlined problem from the bio-socio-cultural perspective on language as a domain of cognitive (biological and social) interactions between an individual and his/her environment. Te authors claim that the study of the lexical part of language should be different depending on whether words are analyzed in speech interactions (frstorder languaging) or in text (second-order language). Te meaning of a word is neither subjective (belongs to the reader only) nor objective (as part of the text only); it emerges every time anew from interactions of a perceiver with the perceived graphical sign which is an affordance for generating a particular hic et nunc contextual meaning. As for the grammatical part, it is asserted that the ‘generation’ of syntactical constructions is a biological ability of a human organism to renew and activate potential cognitive resources (‘storage’ of all the knowledge) which result from recursive (and recurrent) contingency with the language environment and which enable the organism to feel confdent of the success and effectiveness of adaptive acts in every new situation of the environment dynamics.

bio-socio-cultural approach, embodied cognition, languaging organism, meaning, knowledge-action, affordances, a word, syntactical constructions, cognitive resources

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