On agency in situated languaging: Participatory agency and competing approaches

•Different theories in linguistics have distributed the decision-making in utterance building in quite different ways.•Structuralism and generativism have strongly emphasised impersonal systems.•Dialogism, based on social action theory, favours limited participatory agency.•New theories of interbodily dynamics emphasise bodily mutual interdependencies.•The paper suggests how dialogism and intercorporeality can be reconciled.

This theoretical paper discusses different linguistic theories that have dealt (or in some cases: not dealt) with how situated utterances are built in natural language: What is the role of abstract systems of linguistic norms or impersonal brain mechanisms? Can individual speakers make decisions about their own utterances? In this paper some traditional, structuralist, interactionist and dialogist theories are mutually contrasted. Starting out from a dialogist framework, a notion of participatory agency will be developed, based on the fact that speakers' situated languaging occurs in various activity types in direct or indirect interaction with others. Recent theories of interbodily dynamics, or intercorporeality, are discussed. A version of extended dialogism is proposed.