Using Language

Herbert Clark argues that language use is more than the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners, writers and readers perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles. In contrast to work within the cognitive sciences, which has seen language use as an individual process, and to work within the social sciences, which has seen it as a social process, the author argues strongly that language use embodies both individual and social processes.

In this, his major work to date, Herbert Clark sets out the thesis that language use is really a form of joint action. A joint action is one thing that is carried out by an ensemble of people acting in coordination with each other.