In line with the theoretical view of the cognitive-functional approach to natural language, meaning constructed in language communication is fundamentally rooted in the speaker’s experience of the objective world,¹ thus suggesting the epistemic stance that a speaker holds towards the entities s/he physically or mentally experiences in the reality. In this sense, language used to encode a speaker’s knowledge is embodied. For this study, the term embodiment, basically denoting that the human body matters when a speaker constructs his/her language, is construed mainly from two aspects, one of which is that in a broad sense a speaker understands the reality by dint of his/her bodily interaction with the objective world, while the other, in a more narrow sense and much more important, is that in daily conversations the language itself is the most crucial object speakers experience more frequently than other entities when they construct their dialogues. The latter point significantly indicates the embodied experience-based strategy that interlocutors employ when they take language to structure language in dialogue (cf. Du Bois, 2014; Zeng, 2021). The experience-based view of meaning construction, distinct from the rule-based structuring of meaning in the generative tradition of language studies, entails that meaning is personalized but coordinated between speakers in the communication. However, findings on how the human body functions in structuring language from a dialogic view are still rarely seen.

This study is supposed to bridge this gap to a certain degree by investigating the interactive nature of embodiment that virtually functions as the basis for interlocutors to establish joint attention, through which they produce their utterances in language communication. For this account, this research closely looks at the repeated structures in paired utterances that are produced by different speakers, proposing that explicitly and/or implicitly repeated grammatical structures are in essence the linguistic representation of the joint attention of interlocutors in dialogue, significantly indicating the speaker’s perception-based strategy of taking language to make language in dialogue.

According to Bergen (2015, p.11), in general, embodiment seems to be used to mean something about how the mind relates to the body. And in the view of Smith (2017, p.1), embodiment—having, being in, or being associated with a body—is a feature of the existence of many entities, perhaps even of all entities. For Rohrer (2007, p.27), in its broadest definition, the embodiment hypothesis is that human physical, cognitive, and social embodiment grounds our conceptual and linguistic system, while in the view of Walsh (2020), embodiment is a bi-directional link between the body and body language, where the body both demonstrates and creates our being. For cognitive linguists, language, as part of humans’ cognition, is fundamentally motivated by embodied experience (Wen and Jiang, 2021).

Remarkably, Rohrer (2007, p. 28–31) proposes that, with respect to human’s cognition, the term embodiment can be used in at least 12 different important senses, including Lakoff’s (1987, p. xiv) view that the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social nature. In line with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999, p. 37) interpretation, the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) also suggest that there are three levels of embodiment which together shape the embodied mind, namely the neural level, the level of phenomenological conscious experience, and that of the cognitive unconscious. In addition, Shapiro (2014), taking both empirical and philosophical views, investigates the properties of embodied cognition, especially focusing on such themes as embedded, extended, and enactive cognition, with the finding that there are strong interrelations between language and perception, reasoning, social and moral cognition, emotion, and consciousness, as well as human memory.

These findings have undoubtedly expanded our views about embodiment from different theoretical standpoints. But closer scrutiny of these studies suggests that most of the discussion on embodiment is not conducted from a dialogic view. This research will hopefully make a certain contribution to shortening this gap.

Utterances in dialogue are interactive in nature. Thinking in this pattern, it is natural to describe and explain how language is produced from an interactive embodiment view. To be specific, language is constructed based on a speaker’s sharing of individually embodied experience of how language is used.

Rohrer (2007, p. 26) mentions using language to establish joint attention. Tomasello and Farrar (1986), Krause (1997), Charman (2003), Robins et al. (2004), Eilan et al. (2005), Diessel (2006), and Skarabela (2007), among others, have also investigated the relationship between language and speaker’s attention, but how grammatical structures linguistically encode joint attention in conversation has not been examined with great detail.

As Figure 1 implies, language emerges in dynamic conversation, in which the interaction of the speakers’ embodied experience occurs. Linguistically speaking, grammatical structures that are shared by speakers in such interaction basically encode the mutual commitments made and the common ground shared by speakers. Or more precisely, repetitions of language resource in dialogue function to highlight the embodied interaction of individual attention, displaying how joint attention is co-constructed by different speakers in talk turns, which can be elaborated in dialogue (1).

We can see from the diagraph for this local dialogue that there are three talk turns. At the end of Speaker 1’s talk turn is a wh-question ‘what was it?’. Cognitively speaking, in contrast with the previous utterance that works as the background for speaker 1 to produce this wh-question, the what is more saliently positioned in the conversation because of its unspecified semantic content in this question. The utterance backgrounded for the wh-question in the first talk turn is in the maximal attention scope of speakers, and works as the common ground for speakers 2 and 3 to construe the instantiation of what, which is in the immediate attention scope of all speakers.

From an interactive view of embodiment, the heading position and the schematic content of what in the question are the motivation for speakers 1–3 to construct joint attention, whose focus is exactly the what. In speaker 2’s talk turn, what is specified as a canceled check, while it is a canceled check from 1992 in speaker 3’s talk turn, a slightly more detailed instance of what, demonstrating the process in which speakers 2 and 3 make their own propositional commitments to the schematic what. By doing so, the semantic content of what, the jointly attended target by the interlocutors in the ongoing conversation, is specified step by step with finer details.

Furthermore, the explicitly paralleled structures ‘it:it; was:was’ within the question-answer 1(QA1) and ‘what: a canceled check’ in QA 2, as well as the symmetrical structures ‘a canceled check: a canceled check’ between speakers 2 and 3’s talk turns, work together to indicate the common grounds for the speakers to further interpret what. The syntactic parallelism in this sense significantly reveals the linguistic evidence of the speakers’ joint attention on what. The alignment of speakers’ attention at the same time signifies that three speakers successfully build cooperation to specify the schematic content of what as a canceled check and a canceled check from 1992.

The way that joint attention is constructed in dialogue is also observed in child-to-child interaction, as shown in dialogue (2), a case of Mandarin-speaking children’s conversation.

As demonstrated in this diagraph, repetitions of words (marked as italics) are obviously produced along with the ongoing dialogue process, simultaneously displaying the emergent shared template structures ‘pronoun + modal word + verb + noun’ and ‘noun + auxiliary word + noun’, with ‘zhe ge hui chang ge (this one can sing songs)’ and ‘laohu de ge (songs about tigers)’ as the instances. These patterned structures, jointly attended to by these two child speakers, are also the common grounds for them to develop the size of the local discourse.

To be more specific, within talk turns 342–344, both of them focus on the schematic event ‘X hui Y (X can do Y)’ and its instance ‘zhe ge hui chang ge (this one can sing songs)’, while in talk turns 345–346, child 1 and child 2 attend the same and more specific object, which is ‘laohu de ge (songs about tigers),’ revealing the cognitive coordination and interpersonal cooperation between the child interlocutors by making commitment to each other. In the last talk turn (347), the particle ‘haha’ indicates that, at the end of this episode of a short conversation, child 2’s attention is successfully directed by child 1 to the instance of ‘ge (songs)’, namely laohu de ge (songs about tigers).

In this sense, repeated structures are viewed as the linguistic encoding of the joint attention of speakers in dialogues (1) and (2), which at the meantime implies the interplay of interlocutors’ syntactic-pragmatic knowledge in structuring utterances, thus bringing forth dialogic resonance (cf. Du Bois, 2014) in communication, as can be further observed in dialogue (3).

As seen in this diagraph, SHERRY first made a commitment with a negative statement introducing ‘ice tea’. SHERRY’s negative attitude towards ice tea primarily functions as the partial common ground for BETH to structure her expression containing ‘hot tea’. The partially repeated structures ‘ice tea: hot tea’ based on ‘tea’ shows that both speakers have mental contact with ‘tea’. That is to say, the categorical entity encoded by tea is jointly attended by the two speakers when they make speech acts concerning SHERRY’S preference of the instance of tea. Meanwhile, this parallelism suggests SHERRY and BETH have their own allocation of attention in the joint attention scope, with the former on hot tea but the latter on ice tea.

Notably, the shared structural pattern ‘X like Y’ abstracted in talk turns 1–2 based on the joint attended ‘tea’ is the background for SHERRY to structure her utterance ‘I love hot tea.’ The partial symmetry in the semantic structure between love and like, which in this case indicates a certain degree of preference for tea, also signifies the interpersonal interaction founded through the structural alignment ‘I: you: I.’ In addition to that, grounded on this grammatical pattern, the two speakers’ embodied interactive stance-takings are entirely presented via the negative tone of talk turn 1, the interrogative tone in talk turn 2, and the assertion in the last talk turn, altogether displaying the pragmatic function of joint attention in the dialogue.

To sum up, as Figure 1 and dialogues (1)–(3) suggest, utterance interaction in conversation entails the speakers’ co-construction of joint attention, which is rooted in the speaker’s general ability to perceive the world through the human body. Language production is hence driven by the formation of the speaker’s joint attention, that is, the interaction of individual attention in the communication. More precisely, the interlocutors in dialogue take language to structure language through setting up joint attention. In doing so, the speakers at the same time make commitment to each other and establish common ground for the ongoing dialogue, based on their embodied experience of their partner’s language use in situated context. At the linguistic level, repeated language structures are in essence the encoding of speakers’ joint attention. In this sense, language is interactively embodied in nature. Human’s interactively embodied experience of other persons’ language use essentially reveals interlocutors’ cognitive coordination and interpersonal cooperation in communication. According to Wang (2019), the embodiment view of natural language, one of the fundamental claims in cognitive linguistic studies, cannot be overemphasized and the theoretical assumptions in Cognitive Linguistics should be reinterpreted or redefined within the framework of Embodied Cognitive Linguistics. This study will, hopefully, widen the views of the sense of embodiment from a dialogic perspective on language and shed some light on the research concerning the relationship between language and cognition as well as how language is constructed in dialogue from the interactive view of the syntax–pragmatics interface.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent from the patients/ participants or patients/participants' legal guardian/next of kin was not required to participate in this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

This work was supported by National Social Science Fund of China (Grant number: 18BYY076).

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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