This chapter starts with the observation that languaging is a form of collaborative interactivity between persons that is interwoven with the many other forms of collaboration between persons that constitute human social life. In accordance with the relational ontology of the self that I articulate in this study, collaborative projects rather than individual persons or abstract social groups are the basis of social life. Collaborative projects, as Andy Blunden (2014: 15) points out, are founded on concrete social relations between selves. Languaging plays a crucial role in the coordination of the conceptual-ideational structures, the self-concepts, and the actions of the diverse selves who participate in a collaborative project. Languaging is a highly productive form of action that is constrained by the intrinsic functional organisation of utterances. An utterance is a concrete functional unity in the form of a gesture-sound-wording complex. The ecological work of an utterance is a unity of functional capacities that is both constrained and enabled by linguistic (e.g., lexicogrammatical) pattern.

I draw on and extend Michael Halliday’s (1979, 1985, 1994/1985, 2004/1985, 2014/1985) metafunctional account of the layered organisation of lexicogrammar in terms of a number of diverse yet overlapping functional regions. The metafunctions work in heterarchical synergy to yield linguistic actions (utterances) that enable selves to achieve (or try to achieve) a functional fit between self and the selected aspect of the environment that the self focuses on by means of the utterance. The idea of the meshwork (DeLanda, 1997; Ingold, 2011; Lefèbvre 2004/1992; Steffensen et al, 2010) is important here. It shows how heterogeneous elements are meshed together or combined by exploiting their functional complementarities. The resulting meshworks are non-hierarchical forms of organisation—biological, social, etc.—composed of assemblages of diverse elements. The diverse elements that are combined retain their relative autonomy and have the capacity to be detached from one assemblage and attached to some other. In the human ecology, languaging co-articulates connections between heterogeneous elements to form what I have elsewhere called social-affective-cognitive assemblages (Thibault 2011b, 2011c).

In the tradition of ecological psychology founded by Gibson (1977, 1983/1966, 1986/1979), Verbrugge (1977, 1980, 1985) argued that utterances are catalysts that have the functional capacity either to activate or to inhibit flows of affect, awareness, cognition, action, and so on, in both self and others. Lexicogrammar is then essential to what Heider (1958: 5) calls a “naive psychology” that explains, motivates, and makes predictable the goings on of human social life. Lexicogrammar in this sense is a folk-psychological resource that scales up to cultural time-scales of an entire population of languaging agents. It entails more and more layers of culturally standardized and institutionalized constraints on the largely iconic and indexical semiotic dynamics that are deeply implicit in the pre-linguistic infrastructure of the self's languaging activity. This is important for understanding the management of the self. Languaging enables selves to achieve co-articulated functional fits between self and some aspect of the self's world. A multiscalar view of languaging shows how the dynamics of the subpersonal, interpersonal, and project scales are integrated in occasions of languaging.

The chapter features four extended multimodal analyses of: (1) Dependency relations and the dia-logical metafunction: finding one's way together in the green grocer's shop; (2) The enacting of synergies of bodily co-ordinations that integrate past experience in a jointly created narrative trajectory and its perspectives involving a playful encounter between a five-year-old girl and the author; (3) The integration of pico scale bodily dynamics to patterns of wordings in a fragment from former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd's, self-narrative at a press conference in Brisbane in March 2013; and (4) The idea of affectively charged drama (Vygotsky) and the dialogic re-organisation of the self in a re-analysis of an episode from James Martin’s work on Youth Justice Conferencing.