Talking as doing: Language forms and public language

• Primitive language forms are vocal tract action adapted to their public use.
• They are vehicles for public language use that have roles, e.g., in coordination.
• The form-meaning rift implied by the foregoing discussion is only approximate.
• “Meaningless” language forms have some meaning.
• In turn, meanings of forms emerge from their “lineages” of public use.

I discuss language forms as the primary means that language communities provide to enable public language use. As such, they are adapted to public use most notably in being linguistically significant vocal tract actions, not the categories in the mind as proposed in phonological theories. Their primary function is to serve as vehicles for production of syntactically structured sequences of words. However, more than that, phonological actions themselves do work in public language use. In particular, they foster interpersonal coordination in social activities. An intriguing property of language forms that likely reflects their emergence in social communicative activities is that phonological forms that should be meaningless (in order to serve their role in the openness of language at the level of the lexicon) are not wholly meaningless. In fact, the form-meaning “rift” is bridged bidirectionally: The smallest language forms are meaningful, and the meanings of lexical language forms generally inhere, in part, in their embodiment by understanders.