Communication as a Life Process: Beyond Human Cognition - Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2024)

This volume presents the meta-proposals of the ecolinguistic paradigm within contemporary language and communication studies, and will serve to incite further scholarly work within this research program. Eclectic and interdisciplinary as the contributions gathered here are, they all pertain to a dynamic, multilayer approach to human communication.

The ecolinguistic framework delineated and put forth for consideration here is founded on the large and vibrant scientific plane of the holistic paradigm, also referred to in the book as the post-Newtonian paradigm. As such, the contributions complement the mainstream linguistic focus on the cognitive and material forms of the language system with another perspective, pointing to non-cognitive communication modalities active in the communication process along with the (neuro-)cognitive machinery. The human communication process is seen here as a life process occurring in the context of other life processes, intraorganismically, interorganismically, transpersonally and ecosystemically, to enumerate these layers of the communication grid.

This book is part of a series. View the full series, "Studies in Ecolinguistics", here.

Marta Bogusławska-Tafelska is an ecolinguist, and is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies at the University of Warmia and Mazury, Poland, where she is the coordinator of the ecolinguistic studies program for MA students of linguistics. In her linguistic work, she has been observing that the communicative activeness of humans extends beyond the framework of the language system, as well as the cognitive system. Her publications include Ecolinguistics: Communication Processes at the Seam of Life (2016) and Towards an Ecology of Language, Communication and the Mind (2013).

Małgorzata Haładewicz-Grzelak is a Senior Lecturer in the Opole University of Technology, Poland. Her research interests include beats-and-binding phonology, social semiotics, and the sacred-profane dimension in culture. Her current projects include the semiotactics of wayside shrines and the iconography of Saint Nicholas. For 2015–2017, she is a member of the international jury for the Mouton d’Or Award.