UNCORRECTED PROOF ARTICLE INFO Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Linguistic theory Dialogue Distributed language Ecological psychology Enactivism Languaging Philosophy of language ABSTRACT From Nigel Love's perspective, language is a multi-scalar process that connects people, history and nature. In leaving behind the Saussurian tradition's object based views, he contrasts first and second order language. However, the ‘orders’ do not explain each other and, implicated as they are in change, cannot be defined. Indeed, Love suggests that language can describe everything under the sun – except language. I concur that how people speak cannot explain language and, conversely, that linguistic analysis cannot explain how people speak. By tracing language to interdependency between two ‘orders’, Love makes use of carefully crafted tautologies. Such a perspective illustrates the kind of abduction that Gregory Bateson finds across nature. In showing this, I compare how contingency-driven change serves birds with Love's use of beguiling tautologies. These, I claim, contribute much to the productivity of his perspective. While integrationists celebrate his tautologies as paradoxes, in dialogism, there is a tendency to relate them to the- ses. Others make unexpected changes: the Distributed Language Approach traces language to interactivity between ecological beings and, echoing hylomorphism, others trance human plasticity to the interplay of language, nature and peculiar kind of social agency. As the effects of Love's perspective ripple across the human sciences, I conclude, they are changing the idea of language. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Language Sciences xxx (2016) xxx-xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com Changing the idea of language: Nigel Love's perspective Stephen J. Cowley Centre for Human Interactivity and the COMAC Cluster, Department of Language & Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Slagelse Campus, Denmark Tautology occurs in nature because nature does not “think” in either inductive or deductive terms. (Harries-Jones, 1995: 179) 1. Introduction Ferdinand De Saussure's synchronic perspective dominated Western linguistics for a hundred years. As all linguists know, he takes a point of view that picks out a linguistic ‘object’ –roughly, one said to be ‘known’ to a speaker of a given language. Nigel Love's œuvre challenges all such ‘object’ based views. In seeking a replacement, Love argues that people connect first and second order language. The claim perplexes because, first, the orders are not defined and, second, neither explains the other. Language, Love says, can describe everything under the sun – except language, or, in short, it is ‘interpretatively terminal’ (2007: 705). Thus, utterance acts can be heard in a specific sense and, in speaking, people engage in acts of meaning. From this an odd conclusion follows: how people speak cannot explain language (because no analysis of speech can clarify the particular sense of an utter- ance act) and, conversely, linguistic analysis cannot explain how people speak (because people mean as they speak). Thus, unlike chemists, geologists or sociologists, linguists cannot describe what-they-study as an object-in itself. Even if based in scrupulous observation, formal analysis of language merely confers ‘unstable digitality’ (Love, 2007: 708) on acts of utterance. Formal ab- stracta bear indirectly on the ‘analogical process’ of first-order language or, precisely, “contextually determined behavior (vocal, gestural and other) with semiotic significance” (Love, 2004: 530). Love (2004) denies explanatory value to what linguists usually describe (e.g. phonetic features, grammar, language systems) by contrasting linguistic cognizing (e.g. making and construing first-order language) with use of human cognitive powers (e.g. understanding, singing, explaining). If people explain or understand, they need neither encode nor decode thoughts (see, Love, 2004; Kravchenko, 2007; Cowley, 2014). Yet, no paradigm, reframing or approach is offered to replace object-based views. In Email address: cowley@sdu.dk (S.J. Cowley) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2016.09.008 0388-0001/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.