Abstract
<p>What linguistic theory must explain is not sameness, but diversity. This paper argues that semantic diversity does not arise from paradigmatic variation of innate linguistic inventories insulated from lived experience nor from a set of conceptual primitives or from abstract symbolic computation, but from the way culturally structured practices become stabilized in neural dynamics. Exemplifying these principles by culture-specific bodily practices, I propose that repeated motor habits reorganize oscillatory hierarchies in sensorimotor systems and, when these dynamics achieve low-variance compatibility with slow Default Mode Network integration, are compressed into durable predictive priors. Concepts are therefore not stored representations and meaning is not localized in semantic “hubs”; meaning is stabilized as a result of recurring culture-specific practices. This account replaces the question “Where is the semantic system?” with the more fundamental question “How does semantic structure become stable?” Cross-linguistic regularities are reinterpreted as recurrent attractors in humans’ shared neural oscillatory dynamics, while typological diversity reflects culturally specific regimes of oscillatory stabilization. Evidence comes from porterage ecologies in Khoe-San and non-Khoe-San sub-Saharan societies, whose distinct carrying practices correlate with different lexicalization patterns. The resulting model overturns blueprint linguistics, reinterprets semantic universals as emergent rather than innate, and recasts language as the outcome of continuous interaction among culture, body, and brain.</p>