Fields, Waves, and Particles: Finding Common Ground in Understanding Language as a Public Activity

• Published in: Ecological psychology 2015-07, Vol.27 (3), p.175-189
• Main Authors: Hodges, Bert H., Fowler, Carol A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1040-7413; 1532-6969
• DOI: 10.1080/10407413.2015.1068647

One of the most common activities in which humans engage is talking with each other, yet scientists reflecting on that activity have found it difficult to engage. Some have denied the possibility of scientific accounts of public language, but a broad array of theoretical, empirical, and methodological developments in the past 2 decades have challenged that pessimism. Interdisciplinary efforts are beginning to provide new possibilities for studying ordinary conversations as dynamic, embodied, dialogical activities that function in crucial ways in collaborative tasks. This special issue, which grew out of a conference, "Finding Common Ground: Social, Ecological, and Cognitive Perspectives on Language Use," explores a small sample of these efforts. These articles, and others that are forthcoming, indicate something of the range and complexity of issues facing researchers, and they also illustrate the diversity and coherence required to address them successfully. Some of the themes that emerge are those of synergy, complementarity, conventions, affordances, idioms, specificity, and complexity matching. In each case, the arguments and evidence generate new questions and pose new possibilities.