**3. The embodied approach**

If the grasping of meaning presupposes propositional analysis, then infants would not be able to communicate. Humans are not born as isolated individuals that need to develop intelligent faculties before they can communicate. Instead, newborns are engaged in preverbal proto-conversations with the mother [6]. This dyadic interaction evolves through gaze following to secondary intersubjectivity that involves a mother-baby-object triadic relation [7]. Meaning exchange must be grounded, therefore, in preconceptual bodily anchored mechanisms. This has indeed been demonstrated with the discovery of mirror neurons.

*"Mirror neurons are premotor neurons that fire both when an action is executed and when it is observed being performed by someone else." ([8], p. 521)*

For Merleau-Ponty, who first introduced the corporeal embedding in the world as the basis for meaning-making, the meaning of an object is not an ideal entity but the residuum of experiences from interacting with this object in situations; it is its *style*.

*"C'est donc cette compréhension originaire du monde qu'il faut éclaircir… Elle est comparable à celle d'un individu que je reconnais dans une évidence irrécusable avant d'avoir réussi à donner la formule de son caractère, parce qu'il conserve le même style dans tous ses propos et dans toute sa conduite, même s'il change de milieu ou d'idées." ([9], p. 395)*

*"So, it is this original understanding from the world that we need to clarify… It is comparable to that of an individual whom I recognize in irrefutable evidence before having succeeded in giving the formula of his character, because he retains the same style in all his words and in all his conduct, even if he changes his background or his ideas."*

This residuum of experiences is materialized as sedimentation of interactions in brain networks. A concept is a dynamically distributed system in the brain [10]. It is an assembly of neurons that contain a recording of schematic aspects (extracted by selective attention) of a brain state associated with a perception [11]. Meaning is created as a result of the whole organism interacting with the environment. For example, activations in brain structures and sensorimotor systems are intercoupled [12]. It is also not localizable in a specific brain area, because the binding of multimodal semantic features relies on long-range connections; it is binding by synchrony [13].

Moreover, as the evolution of intersubjectivity in infants demonstrates [14], reference to objects emerges from intersubjectivity and it is not the result of the meaning exchange between isolated individuals. Humans are born into intersubjectivity.

*"J'éprouve mon corps comme puissance de certaines conduites et d'un certain monde, je ne suis donné à moi-même que comme une certaine prise sur le monde; or, c'est justement mon corps qui perçoit le corps d'autrui et il y trouve comme un prolongement miraculeux de ses propres intentions, une manière familière de* 

*traiter le monde; désormais, comme les parties de mon corps forment ensemble un système, le corps d'autrui et le mien sont un seul tout, l'envers et l'endroit d'un seul phénomène et l'existence anonyme dont mon corps est à chaque moment la trace habite désormais ces deux corps à la fois." ([9], pp. 423–424)*

*"I experience my body as the power of certain behaviors and a certain world, I am only given to myself as a certain hold on the world; it is precisely my body which perceives the body of others and discovers a miraculous extension of its own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world; as the parts of my body together form a system, the body of others and mine are a single whole, two sides of a single phenomenon and the anonymous existence of which my body is at every moment the trace, inhabits both bodies at the same time."*

Meaning emerges from internalization [15] of social interactions and not—as in the dualistic scenario—social interaction emerges from the meaning exchange between individuals. The alter ego stands for another point of view of the ego. Embodied interactions from cognitive systems with similar capabilities with an environment with the same affordances result in comparable sedimentations. A universal Leib penetrates ego and alters ego.

*"La chair n'est pas matière, n'est pas esprit, n'est pas substance. Il faudrait, pour la désigner, le vieux terme d'"élément"… c'est-à-dire une chose générale à mi-chemin de l'individu spatio-temporel et de l'idée … La chair est en ce sens un élément de l'Être." ([16], p. 181)*

*"The flesh is not matter, is not spirit, is not substance. To designate it, we would need the old term "element"… that is to say, a general thing halfway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea… The flesh is in this sense an element of Being."*

The topology of a chair is not homogenous. Regions with high density, resulting from often interactions with joint attention, form intersubjective concepts that emerge as common orientation dimensions. Concepts are not eternal entities in an ideal third domain but emerge from intersubjective communication and are materializations of recurrent patterns. Such materializations stored in long-term memory create the categorial framework that enables social interaction. But it is also possible that intermediate forms, such as *ad hoc* categories [17], exist.

The sedimented experience from interacting with a certain sort of objects constitutes a simulator. When perceiving or imagining an object, a distributed pattern becomes activated across relevant brain areas, and it is this distributed neural network that simulates the relevant concept [18]. Understanding is based on simulation [19].

*"Simulation semantics is based on a simple observation of Feldman's: if you cannot imagine someone picking up a glass, you can't understand the meaning of "Someone picked up a glass." … meaning is mental simulation — that is, the activation of the neurons needed to imagine perceiving or performing an action. Thus, all mental simulation is embodied." ([20], p. 19)*

Neuroscience experiments demonstrated indeed a similarity between neural activations related to an experience and its recall. MRI-based analysis of neural activity during movie-viewing and spoken-recall identified pattern similarity in a large set of brain regions [21].

In contrast to the dualistic approach, paralinguistics signs form inseparable parts of meaning, since they are captured in combination with other multimodal elements that are sedimented in the concept simulators. Linguistic utterances can be seen as phonetic gestures that emerged in evolutionary steps from facial and manual gestures [22].

Construction linguistics views syntactic structures not as a result of *a priori* hardwired rules, as it is the case with generative grammar, but emerging from generalizations of similar usage patterns. There is also no hard division between syntax and semantics; surface structures are also carriers of meaning. Moreover, several regular patterns without correspondence to fixed syntactic categories can play a role in the construction of more complex syntactic structures [23]. The logical structure that can be extracted from linguistic expressions is not pre-existent; it emerges rather through the grouping of units that serve the same communicative function from recurrent usage in situations [24].
