What makes linguistic agency impossible for language models?

The enactive approach to language (Di Paolo et al., from "Large Models of What?" 2024) identifies language not as a thing to be captured in data but as a practice to participate in. From this view, three properties are constitutively essential to linguistic agency — and all three are absent from LLMs:

Embodiment: Language depends on the mutual engagement of those involved in interaction. Languaging — casual chit-chats, gestures, body language, tones, pauses, hesitations — is not fully capturable in text. It is an often fleeting phenomenon without formalizable rules, arising in embodied participatory interaction. Text-based training data can never be complete because some of language doesn't leave text traces.

Participation: Language is an inherently collaborative, dynamic negotiation of meaning. It is always partial — an utterance only becomes complete when it is taken up and extended by other agents. Each utterance is both a response to prior acts and an anticipation of future uptake. The key insight: linguistic acts are made within a nested set of contexts (behaviour settings), already coordinated at a coarse grain while introducing new tensions that require linguistic management. This participation cannot be precomputed from corpus data.

Precariousness: Linguistic agency, in the enactive view, involves continuous management of intersubjective tensions. Something must be at stake. Agency is "seething with frictions, and the possibility of failure and the unravelling of the ongoing process." LLMs have no self-production processes that are at risk, no sense of satisfaction, guilt, responsibility, or accountability. Without precariousness, there is no genuine linguistic agency — only generation.

The enactive view makes a categorical claim, not a degree claim: these absences are "likely incompatible in principle with current architectures." This distinguishes it from the graded account in Can LLMs acquire social grounding through linguistic integration?.

A convergent argument arrives from a different philosophical tradition: Can disembodied language models ever qualify as conscious? (Shanahan's Wittgensteinian analysis). Where the enactive view identifies embodiment, participation, and precariousness as necessary for linguistic agency, Shanahan's argument identifies shared-world co-presence as necessary for consciousness candidacy. Both are categorical arguments; both name embodiment as the missing condition; they do so through different routes — enactive cognitive science vs. Wittgenstein's language games. The convergence strengthens the claim that embodiment is not just one feature among many that LLMs lack, but the enabling condition for the deeper properties both frameworks require.