CONCLUDING REMARKS

Towards an embodied theory of language and communication

This work is an attempt to change our thinking about language. My critical claim is that
communication – the main objective of language usage – is not only a matter of abstract symbol
interpretation, instead communication can be considered mainly as a kind of bodily action.
Therefore, as any other action it should be studied. This statement is based on the assumption
that our body plays a critical role in shaping our cognitive activities, in a way that it is possible
to show how language usage and understanding, from concrete to abstracts concepts, are
affected by the biological features, the shape and the motor potentialities of our bodies.
As many other philosophers such as, among others, Wittgenstein (1967), Austin (1961),
Searle (1969) have noted, linguistic attitudes can be considered performative acts exploited to
change the state of the physical and the social environment. Notwithstanding the enlightening
character of this view, it cannot be considered the entire history about communication. Indeed,
authors such as these underestimated the existence of a deep connection linking our linguistic
acts with our motor possibilities. The main limit of such a conception resides in the implicit
assumption that communication is a special activity. According to this view actions performed
through our communicative gestures are characterized by an abstract dimension, while any
other practical act performed through our body is concrete.
As noted at the end of this work (see chapter 6), by means of a metaphor, it was possible to
note that, instead of an abstract symbolic system, language can also be considered a kind of tool.
As it occurs for any other tool, before to be expert communicators, we have to learn how to use
language, namely how to move specific parts of our body (orofacial muscles, lips, mouth, eyes,
hands etc.) with the aim of obtaining the desired outcome. Linguistic communication presumes
the acquisition of a certain expertise consisting in the ability to use specific bodily effectors, as
well as in the ability to understand others.
Communication is an intentional action performed with a purpose. When I’m using language
to talk with another person I know how to move lips and tongue, as well as when I’m writing or
gesturing I know how to move my hands or whatever bodily parts, even if my attention is not
focused on these physical activities. In this respect, when we use language we are not in a
different position as regard many other kinds of actions involving the use of different parts of
172 TOWARDS AN EMBODIED THEORY OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

our body. The same occurs when we are listening and understanding someone else. When we
interpret other’s actions our attention is focused on the meaning of what we perceive, so as part
of our skillful social ability doesn’t require a theoretical effort. Analogously, our communicative
relationships don’t require a steady and reflexive attention focused on the physical dimension of
language. Understanding speeches, writings and gestures is simply something we have learned
to do as a practical skill and form this point of view acting through language is not a so special
activity.
This line of reasoning leads to endorse what I called an enactive approach according to
which conceiving language as an embodied cognitive function means to consider it as part of a
triadic relationship involving concepts such as communication, action and perception. The
traditional view about the relationships between perception and action has been resumed as a
“snapshot conception” by Alva Noë (Noë, 2004). The snapshot conception is a common idea
about the phenomenology of visual experience concerning what seeing is like. In this view,
seeing the world is like to possess a detailed picture in mind, so that to have visual experiences
is considered the same that to possess representations of the world in the form of a picture.
Accordingly, seeing is a static and passive activity might consists in capturing pre-existing facts
exploiting the natural functioning of our camera-like sense organs.
Along this line, many linguists and cognitive scientists have conceived for a long time
language nothing but a pictorial tool. Such a kind of representational conception of language
assumes that when we learn to communicate we acquire a system of rules that allow us to
represent the world through symbols and share our representations with other people.
Accordingly, we use language to describe the world and make true (and sometimes false)
assertions about it, therefore words can be conceived as symbols referring to things and qualities,
so that, knowing a language is to know what its components refer to. In other words, knowing a
language means to have a fixed set of meanings in mind. The traditional belief about language is
that meaning is an abstract entity divorced from bodily experience. In order to obtain a
language-independent medium that can be associated with an external reference, the use and the
understanding of a language is assumed to require apportioning physical information, such as a
speech sound or a visual image, but not mention to the body seems to be necessary.
Another powerful paradigm in linguistics is that of computation or symbols manipulation.
After the first revolution in cognitive science many research projects assumed that human mind
and thought were disembodied computational processes based on the implementation of
complex formal rules (software). Accordingly, the chomskyan tradition claimed that language
CONCLUDING REMARKS 173

too is a matter of symbols manipulation, that is, an activity based on the universal sharing of
formal syntax rules. Along this line, a sentence can be considered a sequence of symbols, a
language a set of such sequences, and a grammar nothing but a mathematically describable
device for generating all the sentences of any natural language. The chomskyan account to
language has nothing to do with communication, here language is the study of the form alone
(symbols and syntactic rules), while communication is a matter of situated interaction between
subjects embedded in a body and in a world. Chomskyan linguistics is based on a Cartesian
view of the mind, that is, on the idea of a disembodied and mathematically like reason,
according to which language is nothing but a computational byproduct of our abstract thought.
Necessarily, as a consequence of this view, the mainstream cognitive linguistics has radically
ignored the fundamental problem of how meanings are grounded in our ordinary experience.

Animal perception, from vision to touch, from olfaction to the sense of hearing, is always an
active human skill. We don’t perceive the environment all at once, as a camera captures the
images. Perception is a skilful activity grounded in our embodied action possibilities. Perception
involves the possession of a mastery over movements and coordination, it requires the capacity
to actually use the proper body in the environment, but it involves also the capacity to imagine
movement and bodily activity. Instead to be a static and full detailed picture, perception is a way
of exploring the environment, a way to do something in the world. In some respect, as noted by
Noë (Noë, 2004, p. 67) the content of any perceptual experience is virtual. According to an
enactive conception, the real presence of a perceived phenomenon is the consequence of a
skillful based access to it; instead to be something represented in our mind, the perceptual
presence of an object is something available to the subjects, something that can be made the
“object’ of a bodily activity.
According to this enactive theory of perception, language usage and understanding can be
conceived as a way of interacting with the environment (the social and the physical one), that is,
a way to do something. Language mastery is not based on a pure theoretical or formal stance,
but on skilful attunement with the social environment. As noted by Smith (2006, p. 981), the job
of understanding a language “is not to hypothesize about what is going on in someone else
mind”, but is an immediate and relatively secure action; communication is something we do
because we learned to do it. In this respect communication is similar to action. It is intentional
and immediate, it is a skilful activity characterized by an objective that we learned to reach
during our infancy and that we continue to improve every day of our life.
174 TOWARDS AN EMBODIED THEORY OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

Traditional view of high order cognition and communication that consider our social skills as
computational and picture-like representational processing fails to capture the importance of
embodiment in human thought. The central claim of my conception consists in assuming that the
quality of communication is not fixed neither by the referential character of language, nor by its
underlying formal structure. The inter-subjective character of communication is given at the
cognitive level, in analogy with what occurs during action processing, through the sharing of
common repertoires of intentional motor activities. This leads to assume that, as it occurs in
action execution and understanding, the concept of motor cognition (Jeannerod, 2006) is critical
for language usage and understanding as well.

Language Understanding Action Understanding

Motor Cognition

This conception of language becomes more intelligible whether we assume, as general

philosophical framework for discussion in linguistics, what is usually called an embodied theory
of mind. According to this conception the human mind emerges at the interface of the brain, the
body and the material and social environment. The assumption that our minds have an embodied
character requires us to abandon the Cartesian view according to which the mental is a distinct
dimension from that of the body; it also force us to abandon the naïve conception concerning the
existence of neat dividing boundaries between experience, action and cognition, as well as to
throw out research methods based on a divorce between our thought and our sensory-motor
abilities (see chapter 1). In this view, our cognitive life, from the control of our concrete actions
to the understanding of abstract concepts, is assumed as the consequence of our embodied
possibilities of movement and interacting with the environment. The mind is embodied and our
cognitive functions are shaped and selected by our bodily features.
According to this view, at the end of chapter 1 I have selected a restricted set of properties
concerning the relation between experience, cognition and corporeity. In my perspective,
activity, modality, constraining and dynamicity, can be considered the basic body-related
CONCLUDING REMARKS 175

properties that makes it possible human experiences and cognitive abilities. It is in force of these
features evidenced over the last twenty years of phenomenological and cognitive studies that it
is now possible referring to an embodied character of our mind. As it is easily arguable, the fact
that our experience is embodied, that is, structured by the nature of the bodies we have and by
our neurological organization, has considerable consequences for many aspects of our cognitive
activity, and language is one of them.
According to an embodied theory of language, I have assumed in chapter 5 that the
conceptual representations accessed during linguistic processing are, in part, corresponding to
the sensory-motor representations required for the enactment of the concepts described during
communication. Like a simulation process, the use and the understanding of a language is a
matter of retrieving and exploiting past experiences connected with the use of our body. In other
words, communication is an action based on the exploitation of our past expertise where the role
of our body emerges as a critical aspect.
In order to appreciate the embodied character of communication it’s possible to make
reference to a large class of experiments addressed to analyze different aspects that characterize
the interaction between our linguistic practice and the body. According to the experimental
evidence introduced within sections 3 and 4, we know that the linguistic practice is shaped by
cognitive processes such as, for example, affordances recognition (Gentilucci & Cangitano,
1998), action preparation (Boulanger, 2006) and the direction of a bodily movement (Glenberg
& Kaskas 2002), while many neurobiological findings have shown that language processing is
somatotopically modulated by the same motor areas involved in action planning and execution
(Fadiga et al. 2002, Pulvermuller et al. 2006, Tettamanti et al. 2005) (to list only few items).
Starting from these evidences, the Embodied theory of language hold up the idea that the
comprehension and the communicative employment of, at least, action-related words and
sentences should involve the emergence of motor-resonance made possible by the multimodal
functioning of the human motor apparatus. Accordingly, some of the cognitive processes
involved in planning and executing an action should be also recruited with the aim of processing
linguistic constructions concerning the same kind of action.

Drawing a balance: what has been done, what has to be done and what is possible to do

Notwithstanding the wide number of experimental evidences and the great theoretical effort
characterizing studies concerning the embodied nature of our communicative activities, the
176 TOWARDS AN EMBODIED THEORY OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

development of an embodied theory of language usage and understanding is still at the

beginning.
As this work aims at illustrating, contemporary interactions between phenomenology,
cognitive science and neuroscience have made it possible the development of a great deal of
work against traditional prejudices concerning the nature of language and communication.
Today, different lines of research converge in recognizing the role of the human body in several
aspects of our life. From the phenomenological point of view, today we are witnessing to a
widespread agreement around the necessity to give up a dualistic stance dividing mind and body
potentialities. Seminal works such as those of Husserl concerning the distinction between the
physical and the lived body, and those of Merleau-Ponty regarding the pervasiveness of our
bodily activity in perceiving the world have been accepted and refined by a new generation of
philosophers characterized by wider and more multidisciplinary conceptions. Johnson’s image
schemas, Gallagher’s theory of embodied mind, Noë’s enactive conception of perceptual
consciousness and Clark’s idea of extended mind, are paradigmatic examples of that.
In cognitive science a central role is played by the notion of affordance introduced by
Gibson, as well as by the related concept of perceptive salience. Within this ecological
framework the interaction between action and perception is based on the very intuitive principle
according to which we must perceive in order to move, as well as we must move in order to
perceive. This makes perception an exploratory and purposeful activity instead of a passive and
static one, suggesting new ideas for further experimental tasks. Evidences such as those
introduced by Klatzky, Fikes e Pellegrino (1995), Tucker & Ellis (1998; 2001; 2004), Creem
and Proffitt (2001), Craighero, Fadiga, Rizzolatti (1999) represent today a well accepted ground
over which conceiving a new idea of the interactions between basic bodily features and high
cognitive capacities. A trend, that of the embodied theory of cognitive functions, that is raising
its influence in many other fields such as, over all, computer science and robotic (Pfeifer,
Lungarella, & Iida, 2007; Galantucci & Steels, 2007).
Finally, the development of cognitive neuroscience has given the most impressive and
controversial contribution. The role of the sensori-motor apparatus is today the critical target of
many research projects aiming at defining the function of motor cognition in shaping more that
our motor and sensible activities. Among others findings in the field of social neuroscience, the
discovery of mirror neurons represents one of the most intriguing challenge of the contemporary
scientific debate. Their multimodal functioning, linking and blending radically different
cognitive functions, such as language and motor activity, has opened new scenarios about the
CONCLUDING REMARKS 177

centrality of the motor system for our social abilities. Researches mentioned above shed new
light on the role of our embodiment and motor repertoires in the ontogenesis of our high
cognitive abilities, contrasting a widespread modular conception of the mind.
The “intrusion” of the body in traditional linguistics has generated radical refinements down
to the core of the discipline. One of them concerns the relationships between language and
meaning. An increasing number of evidences from linguistic and psychological research
supports the claims that embodiment shapes the reasons why certain words and phrases express
the particular meanings they do, evidencing an underlying schematic structure (see chapter 2).
Moreover an embodied theory of meaning makes it possible to show that people’s common
understanding of the meaning of various words, phrases, and gestures, share inter-subjective
communalities concerning their cognitive constraints. Accordingly, the relation between
language and meaning is not defined by an arbitrary link, or a more abstract cultural power, but
is mediated by the presence of not-representational cognitive processes.
Recent cognitive linguistics evidences the possibility to relate grammar structures to a
restricted number of bodily patterns that organize everyday experience. The assumtion adopted
in this field is that there are commonalities in the ways humans experience and perceive the
world and in the ways human think and use language. However, these commonalities are no
more than cognitive constraints, setting the limits of a shared range of possibilities allowed in
structuring both experience and language. Starting from recent experimental acquisitions in
psychology and linguistics evidencing the role of recurrent patterns in conceptualization and
categorization it seems possible to advance the idea that understanding the meaning in
communication is a not-picture-like-representational process, forcing us to turn our attention to
the embodied and interactive nature of cognition.

While a great deal of work as been done in the definition of a theoretical framework, the
development of an embodied theory of language and communication needs more empirical
support. Even if encouraging behavioral and neural evidences show the actual role of bodily
features and motor activities in shaping our communicative skills, there is room for developing
many other experiments in this field. Particularly relevant appears the definition of what have
been repeatedly called embodied parameters, that is, the system of cognitive aspects that have a
critical salience in both our motor and communicative experience. Parameterization is one of the
most intriguing features characterizing our cognitive activity. The relevance of certain
perceptual and cinematic traits over many other conscious and unconscious attributes makes it
178 TOWARDS AN EMBODIED THEORY OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

possible the definition of a common and shared cognitive code linking different internal mental
processes. The assumption that animal cognition is characterized by a restricted number of
shared constraints sheds new light over the astonishing phenomena characterizing social
interactions, making available a new powerful explanation of how people (and other creatures)
understand each other. To improve this line of research today, it is required that a list of
cognitive parameters actually involved in different human abilities, such as action execution and
understanding, as well as language usage and comprehension, can be made explicit through new
experimental analysis and refinement.
Accordingly, further experiments should be performed to evaluate what aspects concerning
the cognitive processing involved in our communicative activity are actually influenced by
action perception and execution. The influence of motor parameters on communication is a
matter of experience. It requires devising new refined behavioral experimental sets with the aim
of evaluating in a selective way what reciprocal effect characterize the execution of both the
linguistic tasks and the motor activities. Only by explicitly attempting to find how patterns of
embodied experience relate to the conceptual structure and language, and doing this in a way
that a hypothesis can, in principle, be falsified, can an experimental case be made for, or against,
a scientific definition of an embodied theory of language.
An exciting development in neuroscience is the finding that the neural substrate of action and
perception is usually exploited during high cognitive activities such as conceptualization and
language comprehension. From the point of view of the neurobiological investigation, the
confirmation of an embodied theory of language need more support concerning the functional
involvement of motor system in semantic processing. In particular, while the presence of a
somatotopic motor resonance at the content level (see chap. 4) is empirically established in both
the use and the understanding of action-related portions of language, further researches should
be addressed to analyze the functional role of this activation. Even if the availability of many
damage studies supports the assumption that the activation of the motor system is functionally
connected with the understanding of action-related portion of language, researches such as these,
based on brain injured patients, can’t be used as prototypical evidences. Although the study of
brain injured patients is an insightful source of information for cognitive neuroscientists, there
are some inherent limitations to this method. For example, lesion size and location can vary
drastically among subjects, moreover local damages or ablations makes it possible that
concomitant damage to fibers of passage routed beneath the motor cortical areas produce
unrelated effects at distant in unexpected locations. Moreover, people differ in their degree of
CONCLUDING REMARKS 179

neural plasticity, and show difference in the way their brains “rewire” to compensate for the
damaged tissue. For this reason more accurate analyses about the physiology and the functional
role of motor system during the execution of high cognitive tasks are still necessary.
This work focused mainly on the analysis of action related parts of language and
communication, that is, on those aspects semantically related with action and motion. But can an
embodied theory of language be extended to the totality of our linguistic and communicative
activity? This question leads our attention on the problem posited by the use of metaphors. The
great deal of work in cognitive science and neuroscience showing that simulation processes are
critical to many aspects of social interaction and non-metaphorical language use can be
exploited to develop the role of embodied cognition in understanding metaphors.
As noted by Gibbs (2008) the state of the art in metaphor studies is a “rich colorful mosaic
of research and activities” involving also questions concerning links between the brain and the
body. An embodied theory of metaphor states that metaphors are meaningful when they are
grounded first by an embodied source domain. Certainly, when people use metaphorical
language, they are not simply mapping rational features of source domains onto a target domain,
instead using metaphor people are constructing an embodied simulation. Today there is a large
amount of empirical evidence from linguistics and psychology supporting the hypothesis that the
metaphorical practice gains much of its conceptual and meaningful character from the mappings
of embodied source domains onto more abstract target domains of experience (Gibbs, Lenz
Costa Lima, & Francozo, 2004).
According to this view, the analysis of metaphors use and understanding at the neural level
follows developments in simulation semantics (see chapter 4 and 5). Neural mechanisms
involved in processing the understanding of meaning of words like “grasp” are also activated
when one imagines and perceives grasping. Accordingly, this sense of meaning based on the
recruitment of the same neural processes involved in action execution and language
understanding can also be applied to the creation and the use of metaphorical patterns such as
those associated with “grasping” concepts like “to grasp a concept”.
Theories about the neural explanation of metaphor practice are usually based on the Hebbian
principle according to which neurons that fire together wire together, that is through a
mechanism by means of which connections strength between two neurons increases as a
function of correlated firing; so that neural mapping circuits linking two domains (the source
and the target) can be generated through repetitive associative experiences (Lakoff, 2008). This
would explain why similar metaphors are learned the same way all over the world, that is,
180 TOWARDS AN EMBODIED THEORY OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

because people have the same bodies, the same relevant features of the environment and
therefore almost the same experience.
Taking aside speculations, researches on how the neural substrate of action execution and
perception are involved in higher level processes have suggested new fruitful paths of research.
Future enquires should investigate the differences occurring between sensible, kinesthetic and
topological metaphors showing how relate with the primary source domain of the body. Along
this line, it will be possible to show how abstract concepts can emerge in our bodies embedded
in the physical, the social and the cultural world.

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