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A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when "everything is connected." This paper offers a framework for tackling that challenge by identifying *scale* as a conceptual mooring for the interdisciplinary study of language systems. The paper begins by defining the scale concept--simply, the possibility for a measure to be larger or smaller in different instances of a system, such as a phonemic inventory, a word's frequency value in a corpus, or a speaker population. We review sites of scale difference in and across linguistic subsystems, drawing on findings from linguistic typology, grammatical description, morphosyntactic theory, psycholinguistics, computational corpus work, and social network demography. We consider possible explanations for scaling differences and constraints in language. We then turn to the question of *dependencies between* sites of scale difference in language, reviewing four sample domains of scale dependency: in phonological systems, across levels of grammatical structure (Menzerath's Law), in corpora (Zipf's Law and related issues), and in speaker population size. Finally, we consider the implications of the review, including the utility of a scale framework for generating new questions and inspiring methodological innovations and interdisciplinary collaborations in cognitive-scientific research on language.

Linguistic practices allow individuals to build conceptions of experience that are culture specific and community shared. We examine this process in relation to a metalinguistic convention for describing vocal sounds in upland central Laos. We argue that linguistic practices are moorings, in two ways. First, for individuals, a linguistic practice is a public fixture to which action, status, and experience are conceptually tied. Second, for communities, the category serves as a communal fixture that associates may coordinate around. We elaborate a model of the community calibration of experience, proposing mechanisms that motivate and guide people in constructing effectively shared representations. This results in intersubjectively shared moorings for action, status, and experience. Such moorings play a fundamental role in coordinating human society and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on findings of long-term field research in upland central Laos, examining the rapidly changing dynamics of language among multilingual Indigenous communities in the upper reaches of Laos's massive Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project. The case study of sudden language shift in the context of new transport infrastructure finds disruption of distributional flow at multiple levels, from natural forces to built networks to the circulation of communicative norms and social encounters. This is understood in terms of layered infrastructures, which are distinguished at three main, interarticulated levels: natural (e.g., river systems), technological (e.g., transport networks), and institutional (e.g., language ecologies). A key finding is that linked infrastructures are causally interdependent through mechanisms of flow piracy (intercepting flows and transforming them for new purposes) and percolation (denuding networks and critically reconfiguring them). The case study from Laos of rapid change in the context of a hydropower dam not only refines our conception of infrastructure, but the idea of language itself as an infrastructure helps us to better understand its spatialized dynamics, foregrounding language as a new empirical domain in the study of infrastructure and other socially spatialized networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary addresses the challenge of linking an individual‐grounded theory of concepts to a phenomenon that assumes conceptual conventions at population level (linguistic relativity). We distinguish I‐concepts (individual, interior, imagistic) from L‐concepts (linguistic, labeled, local) and see that quite different causal processes are often conflated under the term "concepts." I argue that the Grounded Cognition Model (GCM) entails linguistic relativity only to the extent that it imports L‐concepts into its scope, which it can hardly avoid doing given that practitioners require language to coordinate around their theory and findings. I conclude that what entails linguistic relativity is not the GCM but language itself. Grounded cognition links agents to environments while linguistic relativity links agents to conventions within populations of other agents. Grounded cognition models may appear to entail linguistic relativity, but this is because they seldom distinguish between I‐concepts (individual, interior, imagistic) and L‐concepts (linguistic, labelled, local). This commentary uses this distinction to argue that any model of grounded cognition must be integrated with a model of airborne/social cognition if it is to link mental representations and social conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide an annotated coding scheme for other-initiated repair, along with guidelines for building collections and aggregating cases based on interactionally relevant similarities and differences. The questions and categories of the scheme are grounded in inductive observations of conversational data and connected to a rich body of work on other-initiated repair in conversation analysis. The scheme is developed and tested in a 12-language comparative project and can serve as a stepping stone for future work on other-initiated repair and the systematic comparative study of conversational structures.