The reflexivity of human languaging and Nigel Love's two orders of language1

Nigel Love's distinction between first-order language and second-order language exposes the fallacy of the code view of linguistic communication. Persons do not 'use' the forms that are said to constitute a pre-existing language system; they adapt and shape their bodily behaviour, including their vocalizing, in accordance with community-level norms and practices that have historical continuity and thus define the cultural-historical traditions of a community. Individuals normatively orient to these continuities and self-reflexively engage in forms of situated appropriation of them as they flexibly adapt them to the requirements of situations in the pursuance of their goals. Love has shown how the capacity of languaging agents to evoke a linguistic 'same' depends upon their capacity self-reflexively to enter it dialogue with this tradition so that, for example, first-order utterance activity on a given occasion can be referenced with respect to the manner in which that utterance is experienced, to an aspect of how we are engaging with it. First-order languaging is an experiential flow that is enacted, maintained, and changed by the real-time activity of participants. To construe this flow as sequences of abstract forms is a radical misconstrual of what people are doing in their languaging. For a start, it is assumed that 'language' is constituted out of formal entity-like units that can be segmented and identified on analogy with the metalinguistic analytical practices afforded by alphabetic writing. Accordingly, language is seen, in part, as constituents (parts) and their combinations into wholes. Combinations of these constituents thus generate new wholes. This assumption is grounded in traditional entity-based (or substance-based) metaphysics. On the other hand, the term languaging serves to direct attention to the fact that processes and their organization across different spatial and temporal scales are fundamental. Bodily and situational processes in the here-and-now of first-order languaging interact with and integrate with cultural processes deriving from population scale cultural-historical dynamics.