Reconciling symbolic and dynamic aspects of language: Toward a dynamic psycholinguistics

The present paper examines natural language as a dynamical system. The oft-expressed view of language as “a static system of symbols” is here seen as an element of a larger system that embraces the mutuality of symbols and dynamics. Following along the lines of the theoretical biologist H.H. Pattee, the relation between symbolic and dynamic aspects of language is expressed within a more general framework that deals with the role of information in biological systems. In this framework, symbols are seen as information-bearing entities that emerge under pressures of communicative needs and that serve as concrete constraints on development and communication. In an attempt to identify relevant dynamic aspects of such a system, one has to take into account events that happen on different time scales: evolutionary language change (i.e., a diachronic aspect), processes of communication (language use) and language acquisition. Acknowledging the role of dynamic processes in shaping and sustaining the structures of natural language calls for a change in methodology. In particular, a purely synchronic analysis of a system of symbols as “meaning-containing entities” is not sufficient to obtain answers to certain recurring problems in linguistics and the philosophy of language. A more encompassing research framework may be the one designed specifically for studying informationally based coupled dynamical systems (coordination dynamics) in which processes of self-organization take place over different time scales.