Copyright 2000 Oxford University Press.

Thorne, S.L. (2000). Second language acquisition theory and the truth(s) about relativity. In James Lantolf (ed.), Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 219-243.

Second Language Acquisition Theory and the Truth(s) about Relativity

"In a language encrusted world, the situation at hand is hard to get at."

A.L. Becker, 1982.

Introduction

This chapter provides a framework which, to paraphrase Bourdieu, attempts to objectify the process of objectification itself[1]. I will argue that responsible theorizing in second language acquisition (SLA) embraces both relativism[2] and essentialism[3]. The trick, and there is always a trick, is to theorize strategically. Within a recursive framework, I attempt to illustrate the bounded and historically contingent nature of theoretical work as a rationale for the continued pluralism of SLA research foci and methods. The bulk of these comments highlight approaches to SLA which foreground the situated and historical qualities of human activity, specifically sociocultural theory and its reliance on an expanded formulation of linguistic relativism. Research by communication theorists, linguistic anthropologists, SLA researchers and psychologists will be drawn together in a multi-stranded discussion supporting a few issues which current SLA research is just beginning to take seriously. Among these are that human actions and social identity ecologically articulate with social-material, historical, and discursive contexts. An exploration of the social formation of mind, recognizing certain ontogenetic, neurobiological limits and linking key ideas to SLA, comprises a second theme. I conclude with a broadened notion of linguistic relativism as the key to understanding how, and why, socio-historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts do indeed co-construct, in symphony with yet to be explained biological material and inclinations, durable social practices of mind and activity. A corollary to this latter point is that cognitive processes, in many instances (conversation for example), are usefully viewed as distributed rather than individually bound activity.

The Relative Nature of Theoretical Work

A review of recent SLA journals shows heated debate between cognitive and social theories of SLA, and perhaps more importantly, a tension concerning what constitutes productive research within the field. In a special issue of the TESOL Quarterly focused on theory building, Long (1990) stated the need for theory culling within SLA. Block (1996) entered what had become an escalating intra-field debate and asked what "the ontological parameters of the [SLA] field are to be. In simple terms, what counts as SLA or SLA-related research and what does not?" (1996: 75) Implicit in Block’s question was a yet more important question–who gets to decide these things for the field? In opposition to Long (1990, 1993) and Beretta (1991) as proponents of a unified theory of SLA, Block argued for theoretical pluralism and challenged the "mainstream" SLA preoccupation with cognitive factors. Other skirmishes include Lantolf (1996), who provides a postmodern argument for a pluralist approach to the exploration of SLA, and a published response to Block’s (1996) article supporting the rationalist scientific substrate to much of SLA by Gregg, Long, Beretta and Jordan (1997). The current public forum engagement of these issues is a paper by Firth and Wagner (1997) accompanied by six supporting and contrary response articles. Firth and Wagner stress that the SLA literature is dominated by a focus on individual cognitive issues and a corresponding ellipsis of attention to context and socio-cultural-historical issues. They argue that an emphasis on individual cognition within SLA fails to account for a large number of sociolinguistic and communicative dimensions of language use, including the roles of context, discourse and interaction, and the representationally flat social identity of "learner" and "native speaker" as they are used as research proxy for human agents. Each of these turns-at-talk within the SLA literature offer polarized and highly charged meta-narratives illustrating the politics and truths of the state of SLA theory building. I will argue for a position that cross-linguistic research in first language socialization and linguistic anthropology effectively demonstrate–that relativism is an undeniable quality of the linguistic, social and conceptual world(s) of human beings[4]. This would include humans-as-theorists who, within historical and particular discursive contexts, most often produce field-commensurate metaphors to work by[5].

Developing and/or supporting a theoretical perspective requires stating clearly what the theory in question is a theory of (Bialystock 1990). If, as Williams has argued, "[a] definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world" (1977: 21), then the dominant core of current theories of SLA are for the most part defining a world of a-historical, decontextualized and disembodied brains. It is my belief that such a theory does not fit the evidence. My numerous years as a language learner (and user) have universally (and I use this term consciously) included rich and specific historical situatedness, webs of social interactivity, context contingent identity work, and as far as I am aware, my brain has invariably remained an organic component of my body. These qualities of historical, contextual, and social situatedness are the ‘universals’, in all their many forms, that need explicating in any account of the processes of second language acquisition.

The argument

Psychological and cognitively oriented approaches to SLA represent but one dimension of the complex of phenomena and their interrelationships which need to be grouped together under the label of SLA. I wish to problematize strict distinctions between individual cognition and socio-historical and sociocultural contexts. By hermetically compartmentalizing individual cognition, we may mask the very processes we seek to describe. For, indeed, aspects of what is often labeled cognition are in fact sociocultural practices. ‘Cognition’ is historically and contextually co-constituted in combination with, not merely derived from, neurobiological factors local to individual brains (see Frawley, 1997, for efforts to create a commensurate syncretism of Vygotskyan psychology and American cognitive science). Though the balance of this co-construction is not yet clear (Schumann 1990), there is evidence supporting the need for, and validity of, contextual approaches to learning, language and activity (Cole and Engestrom 1993; Salomon 1993; Hutchins 1995).

In this chapter, the theoretical perspectives I bring to bear on second language acquisition stress 1) sociocultural[6] views of psychology and learning (the historical and situated quality of ‘cognition’), and to a lesser extent, social practice theory (the dialectic interrelations between individual and cooperative practices and the construction of social context), 2) linguistic relativity (here understood as the influences of language on perception and activity), and 3) distributed cognition (evidence that units of analysis for the study and description of second language learning ought to extend beyond the confines of individual brains to include joint activity, within communities of practice, and mediation, through artifacts). In expressing these views I am argumentative on a few fronts, but I wish to underscore that my intention is to show the compelling potential of sociocultural approaches to SLA and not to discredit other paradigms. It is after all the 30-plus year history of largely experimental research that has established SLA as a respected discipline. All in the SLA community are indebted to this history as it formed a field which we now, not always harmoniously, seek to advance. It is my hope that the existence of distinct and multiple theoretical traditions may help to explicate the processes of SLA, and subsequently, to develop more accurate heuristics which model SLA processes and conditions.

SLA and applied linguistics as the social science that it is (or should be)

Regardless of whether one finds any theory of SLA compelling or not, I wish to underscore the necessarily relative nature of all theoretical work, and the essentialization, though often for needed and useful purposes, that accompanies the conflation of individual datum into categories of more general specification[7]. Vygotsky stated that "[f]acts are always examined in the light of some theory and therefore cannot be disentangled from philosophy" (1986: 11, cited in Lantolf and Appel 1994: 12). I would add that an instance of theoretical modeling is historically relative in terms of its relational and oppositional construction vis-a-vis earlier research, as well as being built from a foundation of referential categories, used to catalogue and group empirical data, which are themselves historically contingent. Theoretical work is necessarily ‘observer relevant’, and thus implicated in one or a few ideologies[8]. These can be either explicitly stated by the author (the strategic approach, e.g.. ‘I endorse the code model of human communication’), or implicitly assumed in one’s work and teaching practices (reliance on a lexicon and methodology that index’s such a belief structure).

Overview volumes (Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991; Ellis 1994) make it clear that, for the most part, SLA researchers have not included relevant intellectual work occurring (and having occurred) in related fields (though Ellis does endorse the metaphor of a prism, where SLA "is best seen as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon … [that affords] different perspectives on the same entity" (1994: 667)). This condition may be due in part to an incommensurability of discourses (Pennycook 1994b and Kramsch 1995a), a condition which has become more exaggerated over time as SLA seeks out its own identity as a free-standing discipline. As Kramsch puts it, "[b]ecause each discourse domain has its own metaphors, its own categorizations, its own way of relating the parts to the whole, the broadened intellectual agenda now available to language teachers and applied linguists has made it more difficult to communicate across historically and socially created discourses" (1995a: 4). It is ironic that greater access to a "broadened intellectual agenda" may result in decreased cross-disciplinary fertilization. Yet it is clear, to take an example close to heart, that a significant hurdle to understanding the backdrop against which sociocultural theories of SLA are drawn may be Marxist and critical theory’s rhetorical density and specific lexicon. Such challenges notwithstanding, these and other intellectual movements offer significant tactics for self-evaluation which further the hope of linking SLA to our cousin social science disciplines. Though it would be a mistake to over-dramatize the issue, the considerable promotion within the mainstream SLA and applied linguistics journals for a culling of exogenous theory may hinder more experimental and social theoretical trends in the SLA field and could engender a complicit hegemony of the Gramscian sort.[9]

To look through another lens, within Bourdieu’s (1991) market place metaphor, discursive fields–including academic specializations such as SLA for example–operate through proper forms of symbolic exchange, and reproduce themselves through a mechanism of selection bias that favors those holding the same or similar categories of perception. Although intended to strengthen the field and research productivity, if ‘normal science’ approaches to SLA were to become too dominant (e.g., Long 1990, 1993; Beretta 1991; Gregg 1993), the result could be to impoverish divergent theoretical positions of the symbolic (and potentially economic) capital necessary for what feminist theorists Bryson and de Castell (1993:355) term access to "means of discursive production." In short, SLA could be intellectually hobbled by an increased insistence on "accepted facts" (such as they are) and scientific positivist modeling.

A brief look at SLA approaches–from brain to society

SLA theory already comes in lots of flavors, so one might ask–why would we want more? Yet each highlights a certain set of phenomena, each defines ‘rigor’ by slightly different criteria, and each employs methodologies that aim to provide coherence to particular types of data, and through particular categories of reference. What I see as the core of current SLA theorizing are cognitive processing and information processing approaches, which consider the individual and his or her language related mental functions, including short and long term memory issues, language reception and production processes, and so on (e.g., McLaughlin 1987; Anderson 1983). These approaches focus on individual performance and abilities, intra-psychological activity, physical science methodologies, and scientific genre presentation of research results. Cognitively oriented research foregrounds the isolation of variables, favors repeatable experimental design, and may require specific decontextualized and controlled environments.

Though attention to social factors and acculturation are core to Schumann’s (1978) work, for example, he comments that a neurobiological component is integral to theories of second language acquisition. As Schumann (1990) points out, however, little conclusive neurobiological research exists. Further thwarting efforts to understand the cognitive dimensions of language acquisition is that SLA research is primarily based on secondary evidence–externalized language activity–followed by after-the-fact reconstructions of the types of processes and mechanisms that might have produced such visible activity (vocalization, graphical representations of language, responses to particular stimuli in controlled setting environments). Without wanting to take away from sophisticated research at how the brain stores and processes information (and expresses and comprehends/constructs meaning through language), to understand SLA as it occurs between (and not merely within) people, it is critical to remove ‘context’ and ‘interaction’ from the static and superficial ‘variable’ category, and, with more complexity, to reinterpret ‘cognitive issues’ as also historical, social, activity, and context contingent issues. There is a continuum, then, from information/cognitive processing attentions within SLA to those examining processes of second language interaction and negotiation. This now long standing interest in negotiation (e.g., Hatch 1978; Long 1983; Long and Porter 1985; Varonis and Gass 1985; Pica 1987; Erlich, Avery, and Yorio 1990) does acknowledge the importance of social and interactional factors for SLA. A diverse group of researchers and agendas are engaged in this area (which shall not be spelled out here), but for the most part, they retain the terminological inertia of the engineering-computational metaphors common to cognitive approaches.

There is a corrective to the limitations of standard cognitive theory (see Lave and Chaiklin 1993 for critiques of cognitive science, and Harre and Gillet 1994 for a look at the ‘discursive’ or ‘second’ cognitive revolution), with its isolation of human activity from the contexts of its production and reception, in social practice and sociocultural theories of language, learning, and sociality. In contrast to the engineering-computational metaphor varieties of SLA, which have defined themselves and the processes they look at through terminology such as input, output, uptake, etc. (and the use and learning of language understood as ‘information processing’), practice and sociocultural paradigms of learning, though distinct from one another and rooted in divergent intellectual traditions, seek relational, historical, and non-dualist ways of reconceptualizing ‘learning’ and ‘behavior’ as ‘change’ and ‘practice’. Firth and Wagner (1997), Rampton (1995), Peirce (1995), and Hall (1995b), for example, offer heterogeneous approaches to, and understandings of, second language phenomena which may be characterized as "firmly rooted in contingent, situated, and interactional experiences of the individual as a social being" (Firth and Wagner 1998: 92). Second language learning is a process involving the co-presence of intra- and inter-psychological activity, environments with histories, and an ongoing negotiation of social identity. Understood in this way, the activity of foreign and second language learning occurs within material and social conditions which must be taken into account in the production of ecologically robust research.

Social practice theory and sociocultural approaches to SLA

Social practice theory, only recently applied to the problems of SLA, most notably by Hall (1995b) and van Lier (1996), attempts to capture the interplay between macro social structures and moment-to-moment practices. At first blush, it would seem that environments–institutional settings for example, such as university classrooms–are the context within which activity would take place. But practice theory would take into account additional factors, such as the historical qualities of ‘universities’, the institutionally defined subject positions of ‘student’ and ‘instructor’, and how these subject positions are inhabited (and their resources and constraints) by real people in concrete situations, issues of epistemology, and normative interactional and cultural patterns. Static constructs are problematic and analysis instead begins by framing context dialectically as bidirectionally constructed through the relationships between agent and social-linguistic structures. The sedimented patterns and activities engaged in in everyday life are both a product of the constraints and resources that a particular social and institutional setting provides, as well as productive of these very settings, constraints and resources. In a synopsis of what such an approach might offer to SLA, Hall (1995b: 221) notes that "[a] primary interest of [practice theory] is the explication of the interactive processes by which individuals within groups, and groups within communities, (re)create and respond to both their sociohistorical and locally situated interactive conditions, and the consequences–linguistic, social, and cognitive–of their doing so." In short, practice theory seeks to unify under a common theoretical umbrella the ways human activity reproduce systems, and how systems may change as a result of human activity (e.g., Ortner 1984).

Sociocultural theory is a term applied to the efforts by Vygotsky and his colleages to formulate "a psychology grounded in Marxism" (Wertsch 1995: 7), with an emphasis on locating the individual within collective, material and historical conditions. The entailments of a sociocultural theory approach foreground sociality to individuality, language as socially constructed rather than internally intrinsic, language as both referential and constructive of social reality, and notions of distributed and assisted activity in contrast to individual accomplishment. There is a general tendency to derive the micro-processes of language learning and use from larger social, political and historical contexts, and to understand what occurs within these frames of reference as mutually (though not necessarily equally) influencing one another. In contrast to practice theory, sociocultural theory as it is applied in psychology, education and SLA focuses primarily human development and learning. Central to this approach is that human activity is mediated by material artifacts and by symbolic sign systems, the most important of which is language. Though the limitations of space preclude a discussion of it here, language as social-semiotic systems, expertly developed in the work of Halliday (e.g., Halliday 1978; Halliday and Hasan 1989), is formative to the view espoused in this chapter.

With its commitment to the importance of human agency and societal context in the L2 development process, sociocultural theory is participating in newer genres of SLA research. Representing a variety of research perspectives, one productive new focus looks specifically at the relations between language learning and social identity (Kramsch 1995b; Peirce, 1995; Siegal 1996; Norton 1997; McNamara 1997; Pavlenko and Lantolf this volume). An emphasis on the relations between social identity and SLA require a greater emphasis on context (dicussed from a sociocultural perspective by Donato 1994; Platt and Brooks 1994; and from a cultural studies perspective, Kramsch 1993) and a rendering of human agents as more complex than "students" or "non-native speakers" (e.g. Firth and Wagner 1997).

(Mis)appropriation and (in)commensurability

Sociocultural approaches to learning, based as they are on the central notions of mediation, historical and contextual situatedness, and human action (Wertsch 1995), have gained some currency in SLA theorists’ and researcher’s recent work, but often as an add-on to an otherwise epistemologically divergent approach to SLA (e.g., psycholinguistic, cognitive, etc). Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), for example, is a popularized and ostensibly accessible dimension of Vygotsky’s work that has been widely discussed since the mid-80s. The use value and broad dissemination of Vygotsky’s ZPD is not in question, or at least is not the issue I wish to address. The focus here is the degree to which the entailments of a social-Marxist philosophy of mind stop with the ZPD concept, and indeed, reinterpret it to conform to an ideologically commensurate standard (the core principle of which is that learning is primarily an individual activity). An example will best illustrate this point.

Vygotsky’s ZPD has of late been unconvincingly equated with Krashen’s metaphor of comprehensible input (i + 1). The differences between these two concepts have been discussed elsewhere (de Guerrero 1996; Dunn and Lantolf 1998), but briefly, Krashen developed the input hypothesis–the notion that language acquisition occurs when an individual is surrounded by target language input at i + 1, where i is the acquirer’s current level of competence and + 1 denotes the stage immediately following i in a natural order developmental sequence. The learner moves from stage i to stage i +1 by understanding input containing i + 1 (Krashen 1982). Vygotsky’s ZPD concept, by sharp contrast, involves what an individual can accomplish or perform in collaboration with a more competent other’s assistance (or the structural properties of the physical environment, or constructed mediational means and tools, which can carry some of the weight of what is traditionally understood as ‘mental’ activity). Hence i + 1 is a metaphor about language input quality and its effect on language acquisition, whereas Vygotsky’s ZPD is a theoretical approach to development based on the close analysis of activity made possible through collaboration. Krashen’s i + 1 and Vygotsky’s ZPD, then, are unrelated in their conceptualization (a passive body listening versus collaborative activity), philosophical underpinnings (learner as autonomous versus personal ability co-constructed through activity with other people and artifacts in the environment), focus processes (child-like learning versus the collaborative accomplishment of a specific task), and generally, their results (though it is certainly possible that a more capable peer could provide linguistically mediated social interaction to the end of assisting someone with language related tasks and learning).

There are ideological and philosophical entailments to including sociocultural theory in one’s teaching and theoretical frame. A mixing of theoretical and pedagogic principles based on divergent ideologies generates a ‘cohesion gap’ of sorts, and I believe these differences are, or have the potential to be, quite profound. The difficulty with quick appropriations and analog mappings of dissimilar theoretical and pedagogical stances are often due to incommensurable formulations of core concepts such as ‘learning’, ‘language’, ‘identity’, ‘activity’ and ‘interaction’, and how important each of these factors are understood to be, if they are addressed at all, in the processes of second language development. While certainly problematic, I see these cohesion gaps as potential arenas where discoveries and insights might be produced as a result of the thinking and research catalyzed by these incongruities.

The Relative Principles of Context

"The particular meaning categories configured in the language at any point depend critically upon the social world with which it articulates." (Hanks 1996: 181)[10] Whether it is explicitly stated or tacitly assumed, a theory of communication and a theory of the relevance of social context lays beneath whatever SLA research one carries out. Since the inception of modern SLA (Pit Corder’s observation of learner’s systematic errors–what he termed a learner’s "internal syllabus" (1967)) the preoccupation for the most part has been on interlanguage, learner variation, L1 to L2 transfer, and of course the development of cognitive models of what might be going on inside the head. As SLA researcher Hall points out: "That our use of language both indexes and creates the social contexts of its use is not a novel idea" (Hall 1995b: 206). Yet despite its long history as a research focus among anthropologists and communication theorists, context has remained little theorized in SLA studies.

Commenting from a sociocultural perspective, Donato offers the following critique of conventional psycholinguistics: "underlying the construct of L2 input and output in modified interaction (which is said to foster negotiation leading to reorganization of a learner’s interlanguage) is the [code] model of communication", which presumes that the goal of communicative language use is the "successful sending and receiving of linguistic tokens" (1994: 34). The theoretical assumptions of the code model of communication[11] are well formulated by Reddy’s (1979) ‘conduit metaphor’–IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, LANGUAGE IS A CONTAINER, COMMUNICATION IS SENDING. As linguists and SLA theorists have pointed out (Lakoff and Johnson 1981; Donato 1994; Lantolf 1996), this impoverished understanding of communicative processes too often infiltrate the metaphors through which communication is framed (at least in English language publications). Primary among the problems of the code model of communication is that it places emphasis on the formal characterizations of language involving the linguistic competence (in Chomsky’s sense) to produce grammatical utterances. There is no reckoning of interaction in the code model, and the treatment of message reception/comprehension is anemic due to its basis in the conduit metaphor.

The relevance of communication theory

At the core of each theory of SLA is an assumption about what the communication process involves, and subsequently, the types of exposure and practices that contribute to learning. As asserted above by Donato, many theories and approaches to SLA observe the code model of communication, and as such do not include the interactively constructed and historically conditioned nature of communicative activity and context (local and historical). Also problematic is the strict separation of language use from language acquisition. Arbitrary units for measuring acquisition (e.g., written and oral examinations) may in fact be poor indicators of on-going developmental processes that co-occur with uses of language. The relevance of communication theory to language acquisition theory, then, is profound, for it is through language use that development occurs, and in-use that these developmental processes may be most clearly illustrated. Below I attempt to show that an improved understanding of communicative practice has the potential to provide the means for productive research into second and foreign language use and development.

Communication theorists Sperber and Wilson (1986/95: 118) hypothesize a ‘context effect’ in which a "hearer retrieves or constructs and then processes a number of assumptions. They form a gradually changing backdrop against which new information is processed ... This involves the contextual effects of an assumption in a context determined, at least in part, by earlier acts of communication." Sperber and Wilson emphasize that context is emergent and cumulative based on shared knowledge with an interlocutor, and that communication involves the sending and receiving-constructing of ‘assumptions’ (rather than stand-alone ‘messages’). Through their development of Relevance Theory (rooted in Grice’s work), which attempts to account for the fact that semantically sparse utterances invoke determinate meanings within specific contexts, Sperber and Wilson make a case for a pragmatic or ‘relevancy’ based approach to communication. Relevancy to an individual, as well as to a community of practice (in the sense of Lave and Wenger 1991), is a primary strength of sociocultural approaches to SLA.

‘Temporarily shared social worlds’

To deepen this discussion of the role and characteristics of context, Rommetveit (1974: 3), in a number of works he characterizes as "exploring [the] subtle relationships between communication settings, tacit presuppositions and what is said", focuses on the notions of ellipsis and prolepsis as they come to constitute intersubjectivity (or ‘temporarily shared social world’). It is the dearth of the information carrying capacity of natural language that requires of any theory of human communication an explanation for our species’ communicative successes. Understood is that communicative breakdowns occur, and that such occurrences in fact underscore the need for a workable theory of context, intersubjectivity, or other extralinguistic process to work interdependently with linguistic and paralinguistic communicative practices. Rommetveit turns traditional assumptions about language around, and states–"we may thus reverse the traditional linguistic approach to ellipsis[12]: ellipsis, we may claim, appears to be the prototype of verbal communication under ideal conditions of complete complementarity in an intersubjectively established, temporarily shared social world." (1974: 29 (italics in the original)) Or to quote Hanks (1996: 148), "[t]he blank spots (ellipsis) point into the intersubjective context, linking verbal form to the extralinguistic horizon of social knowledge." Intersubjective states are created, not inherited or presumed, and draw agents together toward a common focus, activity, process or goal (Rommetveit 1974; Habermas 1984). The dialogic exchange of ellipses and indexicals, universal to both face-to-face and written exchanges, makes possible participation frameworks which build socially distributed perceptions that are, so described by Goodwin, "situated, context dependent, ... and intensely local" (1996: 398).

Rommetveit discusses particular social and pragmatic uses of ellipsis, other than those of economy or the reduction of redundancy, through the notion of prolepsis. Prolepsis involves ellipsis, but is different for the subtle establishment of social inclusion it brings with it. The hearer is "invited to step into an enlarged common space, and shared background knowledge is thereby created, rather than assumed." (van Lier 1996: 161).[13] The notion that certain presuppositions imposed through discourse, such as mentioning an unknown name or event or place to an interlocutor, may in fact make this person an insider "precisely because that expanded social reality is taken for granted rather than explicitly spelled out. ... What is said serves on such occasions to induce presuppositions and trigger anticipatory comprehension, and what is made known will necessarily transcend what is said" (Rommetveit 1974: 88).

Rommetveit argues then that the nesting of an utterance significantly alters its message structure. Hence he moves communication from a system of invariant semantics to one of contextual variability. For speakers to understand one another they utilize an ability to work out messages in relation to specific contexts rather than rely on universally distributed linguistic competence. Hanks notes that Rommetveit relies on Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, wherein participants share or develop an understanding, or set of rules, about how to ‘play’ when the game is successful communication. Contexts can be characterized as made up of "metalinguistic contracts, which govern how speakers concretize the indeterminate meanings of the words they use with one another" (Rommetveit 1974: 57, cited in Hanks, 1996: 150). This reference to the organization of talk-in-interaction will be expanded upon below.

The essentials of Rommetveit’s proposed theory of communication can be summarized as follows, 1) ellipsis is not the exception, but rather the prototype of communication, 2) intersubjectivity is the quality emergent of linguistically mediated communication when it is successfully practiced, 3) prolepsis provides a necessary corrective to flat and static understandings of communication-context relations and illustrates the pragmatic-semantic functions that ellipsis may invoke, and 4) communication is a co-constructed social process and not an act of simple transmission. Thus linguistic interaction is constructive of a ‘temporarily shared social reality’, and in reciprocity, intersubjectivity scaffolds the process of intention-attribution and communicative practice. In this sense, sociocultural approaches to SLA are closely related to social constructivism in interpreting foreign and second language interaction to involve the creation, and not mere reflection, of social realities.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, then, there is a strong research tradition within anthropology, sociology, and linguistics which illustrate the contextual relativity of semantic values (e.g., deixis and indexicality). Such a reappraisal of communicative practices could precipitate a radical shift within SLA, from an understanding of the language learned as context-independent lexical and grammatical meaning (present in formal theories of language and communication), to an acknowledgment of the relative and context contingent nature of language-in-use. Hence to take seriously sociocultural theory and commensurate insights from linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and communications theory as they pertain to second and foreign language learning, the following themes arise:

• the interdependences between language and conceptual development,
• language as the principal sign system carrying socio-historical-cultural presence into the moment,
• language as a primary resource through which people interactively construct social reality, and
• the reproduction of individual and community practices due in part to the inertia of language constructed social worlds.

What I argue through the rest of this chapter is sociocultural theory’s reliance, if you will, on a broadened formulation of linguistic relativism, and how the dynamics of linguistic relativism make evident the significance of a sociocultural approach. Linguistic relativism, in its base form, is the notion that culture, mediated largely by language and communicative practices, affects the way humans think about and organize their world(s).[14] This notion is especially pertinent to neo-Vygotskyan approaches for the emphasis within this method on private and inner speech–the practice of using the semiotic system of language as a tool for self-regulation and cognitive orientation to a task or situation. Linguistic relativism is here expanded to encompass this notion: that language is the medium through which historical, discursive and cultural resonances lend to particular contexts their texture and working principles, for want of a better phrase. These ‘textures’ can be multiple, a priori shared between interlocutors, or co-constructed in the moment as per Rommetveit’s notion of intersubjectivity. I believe a theory of SLA can and should involve these various components, and that the practices of second and foreign language teaching and learning would benefit as a result.

Linguistic Relativity and Social Cognition

Vygotsky’s work makes the case that mind is socially constituted "through mediation via semiotic systems, notably language, that are themselves expressions of socio-historical processes" (Cazden 1993). Sociocultural approaches reverse Piaget’s epigenetic constructivist theory of development wherein cognition precedes language acquisition (see Karmiloff-Smith (1992) for a corrective to the standard Piagetian view). Vygotsky in fact reverses Piaget, arguing that speech is initially social, is then internalized, and subsequently leads to inner and private (or egocentric) speech. For Vygotsky, biological, ontogenetically prior developmental dispositions exist, but later higher order mental functions, of which language use and symbolic and concrete activity are a part, are socioculturally determined (Lantolf and Appel 1994) .[15]

Against the sorts of ‘child as autonomous being’ construct characterized by Piaget, the ‘interactionist’ camp (so termed by Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1993) posits that children grow up suspended in cultural-linguistic environments which in part influence the direction of their cognitive development. There are a variety of perspectives on the depth and commensurability of human language variation. My argument here is that considerable differences between languages do exist, and hence differences in language specific world-framing as well. Gopnik and Meltzoff (1993: 220) make the statement clearly: "Different languages carve up the world in different ways, making certain semantic distinctions obligatory and others optional, or marking certain distinctions by clear morphological variations, while others can only be expressed by complex and indirect means." Bowerman (1989: 143) comments that "even though recent research has shown that languages are semantically less varied than had been supposed, they are by no means uniform." Lakoff (1987), Slobin (1996) and others address the depth of linguistic variation issue through ‘grammaticized concepts’, that is, concepts that are part and parcel of the grammatical system of language, and thus not generally available to conscious reflection. Fundamental domains (in which ‘concepts’ can be located), such as time, causality, an emphasis on aspect versus tense, and spatial relations, tend to be grammaticized.

Two first language acquisition studies, the first by Gopnik and Choi (1991) and a second by Gopnik and Meltzoff (1993), provide concrete illustrations useful to this analysis. These first language studies are included not to equate first and second language acquisition, but to demonstrate a specific correspondence between language-culture environment and conceptual development, which serves the greater goal of illustrating the interdependencies of culture, language, context, and social interaction, which I later bring to bear on the problems of SLA research.

Nouns and categorizing; verbs and means-end awareness

The two above mentioned studies demonstrate that within their subject pool (Korean, Japanese and English language children), the culture-language environment had demonstrable effects on participating children’s conceptual development, showing specific correlations between grammatical characteristics of the languages[16] in question and domain specific developmental progress. The Korean and Japanese children (in verb salient linguistic environments) produced verb morphology earlier than English speaking children (in noun salient linguistic environments), but in these studies they were significantly delayed in performance concerning categorization tasks (and relatedly, at which age they went through the ‘naming spurt’[17]). Perhaps linked to their earlier use of verb morphology, the Korean children were in advance of the English children in means-end abilities[18] (Gopnik and Choi 1991; Gopnik and Meltzoff 1993). Thus there are two specific correspondences that emerge: one between noun-salience, naming and categorization, the other linking verb salience and means-end skills (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1993). To account for this data, Gopnik and Meltzoff (1993: 221) developed the ‘specificity hypothesis’ which states, in accordance with an interactionist perspective, that there is a "complex bi-directional interaction between conceptual and semantic development." In their conclusions, Gopnik and Meltzoff (1993: 243) claim that "[c]onceptual developments are not just prerequisites for semantic developments. Instead, linguistic variations may actually influence cognitive developments." These crosslinguistic studies thus demonstrate that the linguistic environment influences and to some degree shapes perception and cognitive development. Levinson uses the form of the syllogism to summarize a version of linguistic relativity that these studies bear out. It goes like this:

1) languages vary in semantic structure;

2) semantic categories determine aspects of individual thinking;

therefore

3) aspects of individuals’ thinking differ across linguistic communities according to the language they speak. (Levinson 1996: 133)

‘Thinking for speaking’

Traditional linguistic relativism is made up of two seemingly static entities, language and thought (or habitual thought). Based on recent research, Slobin and his associates (e.g, Berman and Slobin 1994) offer a formulation of the relations between language and thinking which avoids the methodological dilemma of providing rigorous evidence in illustration of a ‘world view’. Through his extensive empirical work in crosslinguistic studies of narrative, Slobin has moved from ‘thought and language’ to the dynamic, in-progress notions of ‘thinking for speaking’, the specificity of thinking that occurs in the process of verbalizing (or writing) an utterance. "The expression of experience in linguistic terms constitutes thinking for speaking–a special form of thought that is mobilized for communication ... the activity of thinking takes on a particular quality when it is employed in the activity of speaking." (Slobin 1996: 76) ‘Thinking for speaking’ represents a concise and temporally specific formulation of linguistic relativism, empirically based on speakers of different languages who generated narratives from the same protocol (a picture storybook). In terms of tense/aspect distinctions and spatial organization, Slobin reports that the children and adults within his study observed the ‘selective attention’ to event construal grammaticized in their native languages, and that speakers rarely generated narratives outside of those that are normative for their speech community. Slobin (1996: 88) carefully summarizes his study thus: "I am convinced ... that the events of this little picture book are experienced differently by speakers of different languages–in the process of making a verbalized story out of them." (emphasis in the original).

Slobin avoids questions of difference beyond those that his participants made evident in their representations of events in language. It is here that social practice theory can help make the connection between these first language acquisition studies and the social foundation for the constitution of mind. With its emphasis on the relationships between daily activity (such as talk-in-interaction) and the social-material conditions which constrain and enable these same activities, social practice theory unveils the dialectic relationship between what people do each day and the social norms and values (‘culture’, more or less) from which they spring. This is why ideology, or as Bourdieu (1994) would term it, doxa–largely unconscious and spontaneous sets of naturalized assumptions about how the world works–is an integral component, wanted or not, in the research and teaching practices of applied linguists.

Slobin (1996: 91) extends his findings in an exploratory way to SLA. He remarks that certain grammaticized categories, such as plural and instrumental markers, involve linguistically encoded points of view that are supported by sensory experience in the world. Such linguistic categories would not present great conceptual difficulty to second language learners regardless of whether one’s native language expresses them or not. Slobin gives as an example that "if your language lacked a plural marker, you would not have insurmountable difficulty in learning to mark the category of plurality in [a] second language, since this concept is evident to the non-linguistic mind and eye" (1996: 91).[19] By contrast, Slobin argues that distinctions such as aspect, definiteness, and voice, which in childhood we are enculturated to represent through the grammaticized categories of a particular language (itself a historical lexico-grammatical set of arbitraries), would be resistant to restructuring (particularly through transmission approaches to teaching and learning[20]). Second language acquisition difficulties are compounded in such areas since "she went to work" or "she has gone to work", or "a car" versus "the car", "are distinctions that can only be learned through language, and have no other use except to be expressed in language. … It seems that once our minds have been trained in taking particular points of view for the purposes of speaking, it is exceptionally difficult for us to be retrained" (1996: 91). The insight that language is not a transparent medium unproblematically transmitting information raises both issues of pedagogy as well as problems with SLA theories dependent on ‘code model’ assumptions about communication. This is another point at which strategic reevaluation of base level principles can prove useful to researchers and practitioners a like.

Slobin’s ‘thinking for speaking’ does not occur in a social vacuum, but rather in contexts which themselves are formed by discursive and historical processes. Extending Slobin’s ‘thinking for speaking’ in this way implicates interactional features of communication as a larger framework within which to develop a grammar of the communicative process. Slobin’s formulation of linguistic relativism is an elegant and demonstrable characterization of the interactional co-construction that will be specific not only to speakers of a language, but also to members of particular speech communities who share discourse strategies, allocation of turns at talk (latching versus interruptions for example), and the like. This expanding out of ‘thinking for speaking’ to encompass the organization of talk-in-interaction will be continued below.

In summary, the key points of this section are that semantic domains are partitioned differently across languages, and that this is accomplished at a level beneath that of our everyday perception. These domains are grammaticized in the semantics of morpho-syntactic structures themselves.[21] The first language studies discussed above indicate that language is in a bi-directional relationship with conceptual development and category formation. A temporally specific form of linguistic relativity, such as I have described here based on Slobin’s work, is the mechanism by which human communication and cognition can be linked to specific historical and contextually contingent forms of communicative practice. As language-culture environments influence the encoding and construction of experience, the materiality of language encrusts, or symbolically concretizes, the world (to borrow from Becker’s formulation which began this paper). In essence, social agents constitute themselves in part through the language practices they engage in.

Relativity and talk-in-interaction

We turn now to an extension of grammar which includes the grammar of talk-in-interaction, and by doing so expand linguistic relativity to include interactional dynamics. The confluence of Rommetveit’s notion of intersubjectivity and the robust, dialectical understanding of context from communication and social practice theory hinge on this broadened notion of linguistic relativity. The arguments and research I have brought forward for the historical, relative, and sociocultural nature of communicative practice indicate that language structure, and to be further developed here, practices of use in communicative activity, have effects on the thinking and speaking that is done there. The genesis of human forms of communication is conversational interaction–the primordial environment for the ontogenetic and phylogenetic use and development of natural language (Schegloff 1996). Schegloff (1996: 55) also mentions that the local and interactional nature of talk-in-interaction means that grammatical structures should be understood in part as adaptations to such communicative contexts and partially "shaped by interactional considerations."

A system of grammar (or the durable patterns of language that are, for example, abstracted from use in descriptive linguistics) as well as its local instantiation in discourse, stands in a reflexive relationship to the organization of a ‘spate of talk’. Situational contingencies shape grammar as it plays out in use, and the grammatical qualities of a particular language, selectively highlighting certain conceptual principles, contributes to the organization of turns-at-talk, and more generally, to the way talk-in-interaction is organized (Schegloff 1996: 56). As mentioned, this extended concept of grammar, to include language based interaction, is also part of what I would like to subsume under the rubric of linguistic relativism. Though it is not linked with interaction per se, Volosinov (1973) and Bakhtin (1986) both commented that grammar can express a good deal, but that style and intonation can do more (see Shultz 1990). Style, intonation, prosody, and talk-in-interaction and its organizational structure (Goodwin 1996; Schegloff 1996), are all implicated in this larger understanding of the organization of communicative practices, their historical and situated qualities, and the dialectical process whereby talk-in-interaction and grammaticized features of a language are the sociocultural qualities which co-constitute the context within which communicative practices occur, and reciprocally, that the cultural-historical-discursive qualities of social context tend to (re)inculcate communicative practices in their social, ideological, and culturally specific forms.

A sociocultural syllogism in parallel with (and adjunct to) Levinson’s for linguistic relativism might go like this:

Therefore, when SLA researchers attempt to ‘get at what’s really going on’ in processes of second and foreign language learning, the unit of analysis and the context within which such research takes place become crucial for the validity of the results. The longish set of concluding remarks below lay out critical issues for thinking about the practice of theorizing in general and SLA theorizing specifically, and why units of analysis ought to include more than individual heads.

Distributed cognition and units of analysis

Commenting on Bourdieu, Calhoun, LiPuma and Postone (1993: 3) argue that "social life ... must be understood in terms that do justice both to objective material, social, and cultural structures and to the constituting practices and experiences of individuals and groups." In contrast to a methodology stressing strict isolation of variables and phenomena, the foundation of sociocultural theory approaches is that context, language (learning and use) and subjectivity are analytically separable, but must be understood holistically and interdependently to make sense of "situated activity" (Lave and Wenger 1991; Hanks 1996). In a related vein, distributed cognition approaches posit that ‘context’ is not another variable, but rather is in part productive of, and in part produced by, collective and individual human activity. Hence decontextualized research may isolate a focus phenomenon, but this isolation from typical contexts of occurrence in turn may mutate the phenomenon under surveillance. Akin to Labov’s ‘observer’s paradox’, this raises serious methodological issues for SLA researchers as processes such as memory, speech production, sense of social situatedness and social identity and entitlement, and the presence or absence of paralinguistic information such as head nodding, facial expressions, and gesticulation, impact and even constitute levels of engagement and performance (Lantolf in press). Nardi observes that it is not possible to fully understand how people learn and work if the unit of analysis is the uncharacteristic "unaided individual with no access to other people or to artifacts for the accomplishing of the task at hand" (Nardi 1996: 69). This observation would seem particularly applicable to second and foreign language acquisition research, given the inherent social-interactive nature of communicative practice.

The Strategic Use of Essentialism

As discussed earlier in this paper, theory construction–SLA related or otherwise–is both relative and essentializing. Addressing this issue, critical theorist Gayatri Spivak calls for the "strategic use of essentialism." By this she is responding to deconstructionist modes of inquiry, which she says fail in their efforts to decenter both the subject position of the researcher and the object of scrutiny itself. The salient issue to Spivak’s proposed use of essentialism for my comments here is that "since it is not possible not to be an essentialist, one can self-consciously use this irreducible moment of essentialism as part of one’s strategy" (Spivak in interview with Harasym (Harasym 1988: 66)). Spivak continues to say that "no representation can take place, no Vertretung, representation, can take place without essentialism" (ibid). Of note is that Spivak has commented extensively on subaltern historiography[23] and the efforts within this movement to pluralize and rerepresent historical perspectives to the end of gaining a more complete understanding of typically subaltern, or marginalized and silenced, groups of people. Responsible theorizing, or paraphrasing Spivak, strategic essentializing, can involve denaturalizing representations of data and category formation, affirming that ‘subjects’ are people with personal and collective histories, and remaining aware that methodological approaches and data gathering contexts are historically and discursively specific, with repercussions on human (inter)activity and performance. As SLA is still a developing field in many ways, both a tolerance for a diversity of hypotheses and claims and a self-conscious, political awareness of how theory builders are socially, ideologically, intellectually and institutionally located, seems a fruitful and necessary approach to understanding SLA in all its contingent and contextually diverse conditions.

A Relative Conclusion

Language patterns of some durability are the sedimented product of historical and sociocultural activity, which in part structure current contexts, and reciprocally, that such contexts in turn co-structure interactional and communicative practices. Through the here expanded principles of linguistic relativism, context is bound not just to communicative practice, but to thinking and cognitive activity as well. In terms of theory building within SLA, a ‘strategic use of essentialism’ would spell out as clearly as possible the foundational attributes upon which higher level analyses are built. A broad intellectual framework would be critical for interconnections with findings in other fields. I have also tried to point out that a strategic and responsible unit of analysis should account for social situatedness (role/identity/subjectivity issues), cognitive activity, discursive and local context, and attempt to address how these phemomena mutually influence one another.

What would SLA efforts gain from a relativist approach to theorizing? How deep can the antagonisms and incommensurabilities go while still remaining a productive, intellectual community? These are difficult questions, but historically, the outlayers within intellectual communities have both hurtled off in retrospectively wrong directions while also producing, in other instances, discoveries that led to paradigm shifts (Kuhn 1970) and improved understanding of the social and material worlds we share. As Geertz (1973: 88) stated in reference to the field of anthropology in the 1970s, there is always a danger of stagnation due, in part, to the "dead hand of competence." Thus I propose a practice of SLA theorizing which embraces pluralism, makes known its relativism, and which underscores SLA research as a "process of exploration" (Schumann 1993). This includes the consideration of the historical, discursive and contextual situatedness of people within talk-in-interaction, the distributed nature of medational resources (most notably language), and the sociohistorical constitution of sedemented practices of mental activity (in other words a rethinking of cognition). SLA is complex, and perhaps made more so given Bakhtin’s (1986) view that there can be no single (universal) truth due to our differential positioning. At the same time, and endorsed here, is that truth(s) bringing together neurobiology and historical-contextual contingency may be in fact obtainable, but will require a plurality of efforts to be realized.

NOTES

1. Bourdieu notes that the process of constituting an academic study "as a representation capable of being the object of a story, description or account, and secondarily [as] an interpretation, produces an essential distortion which has to be theorized if one is to record in the theory the effects both of the act of recording and of the theory" (Bourdieu 1990:101). Bourdieu underscores the confounding of the actions of agents in the world with "philological relations", or the work of researchers, and suggests an academic method which takes "as its object the very operation of objectification" (Bourdieu 1990: 101).
2. Relativism is here understood, paradoxically, as a human absolute, due to the limitations, if you take the stand point theorist side, or the specificity, if you take the sociocultural other, of the human conceptual and perceptual apperati. Bourdieu also discusses in great detail the constructed and relative nature of categories of perception, which he argues arise from socially (experientially) constituted generative dispositions (habitus). "Constructing the notion of habitus as a system of acquired dispositions, functioning on the practical level as categories of perception and assessment or as classificatory principles as well as being the organizing principles of action, meant constituting the social agent in his true role as the practical operator of the construction of objects." (1990: 13) Here Bourdieu presents a formulation for the constructed nature of social reality. Historically, Bourdieu is responding to Kant’s arguments for apriori categories of perception (which he discusses in considerable detail in Distinction (1979)).
3. Essentialism is an unavoidable feature of theory building, as individual datum are ‘typed’, represented by numbers or language, and organized in categories of broader description. This holds from ‘thick description’ ethnography to hard science research. Problems arise when category users and developers (theorists and researchers) naturalize their representations, models and categories.
4. For extensive anthropological inquiry into language socialization and cultural difference, see the work of Schieffelin (1990), Ochs (1988), and Schieffelin and Ochs (1986).
5. In an illustration of cross-perspective harmony, McLaughlin (1987, 1990) renders a clear assessment of issues in theory building that are much in-line with those I present here.
6. There has been considerable discussion about the term ‘sociocultural’–what it means, who it belongs to, and the intellectual lineage it is emergent of. For a historical assessment, see Wertsch et al. (1995), who discusses at length the intellectual antecedents to ‘sociocultural’ approaches to understanding human activity. He describes (with an excluded caveat) the neo-Vygotsky project this way: ‘the goal of sociocultural research is to understand the relationship between human mental functioning, on the one hand, and cultural, historical, and institutional setting, on the other.’ (1995:56) Later, Wertsch adds that neo-Vygotskyan scholars (Rogoff is named) disagree with the "‘evolutionist assumptions indexed by the terms ‘sociohistorical’ and ‘cultural-historical’", thus for Wertsch at least, the term ‘sociocultural’ refers to the Vygotskyan tradition while also to a contemporary and altered version of it (according to Wertsch, Vygotsky himself did not use the Russian equivalent of ‘sociocultural’). Lastly, in reference to not invoking Vygotsky’s name as the progenitor of sociocultural theory, Wertsch states that all sociocultural (for example Wertsch 1985), and socio-cultural-historical (Cole 1996) research involve two principal themes, those of ‘human action and mediation’, and that these are the ‘defining moments of sociocultural research’ (and which are, in fact, directly linked to Vygotsky’s work (e.g., 1978)). This project is broadly in line with Wertsch’s emphasis on "human action" and "mediation", here more specifically characterized as language-based social interaction and the mediational qualities of human language.
7. Fowler, discussing linguistic relativism (with which I believe theoretical category formation is tightly related), provides an elegant formulation of this process, that a ‘code simplifies knowledge and behavior by allowing particulars to be recognized as instances of a category.’ (1986: 31)
8. Searle's distinction of ‘intrinsic’ vs. ‘observer relative’ phenomena offers a useful way to frame both categories of reference and theory building itself. Though certain phenomena do appear to be ‘intrinsic’ (Searle mentions photosynthesis as an example), our systems of explanation and classification of such phenomena are observer relative (1992).
9. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony moves beyond the term’s usual meaning of domination to include consensual acquiescence. Gramsci describes this idea as, in part, "the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production." (1971: 12, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.)
10. A decade ago, I studied for a year at Benaras Hindu University. I focused on language study: Hindi, Urdu, a local vernacular called Kashike Bhojpuri, and worked on a linguistics project that a year later became my first conference presentation (on sexual puns in Kashike Bhojpuri). The insights I gained drinking endless cups of tea in male-clientele chai shops had mostly to do with the wit and complexity of the double-entendre language games my friends would play on each other, and often on me as the ‘least capable peer’. But as my language awareness developed, I began to catch the simpler of the interactively constructed moments during which either a pun would work or not. Those verbal performances that flopped failed to take sufficient account of the reception necessary by non-addressed insiders, for this pun-game had more to do with speaking indirectly to Goffman’s ‘legitimate bystanders’ (1967), those in-the-know sitting around waiting for a laugh, than to the hoped-for brunt of the joke. As a second language learner in this situation, the interactional dynamics constituting these complex plays on words, and my involvement there, was formative to my current interest in social context and its importance to SLA.
11. Sperber and Wilson (1986/95:2) claim that from "Aristotle through to modern semiotics, all theories of communication were based on a single model, ... the code model." "Yet the code model of verbal communication is only a hypothesis, with well-known merits and rather less well-known defects. Its main merit is that it is explanatory: utterances do succeed in communicating thoughts, and the hypothesis that they encode thoughts might explain how this is done. Its main defect ... is that it is descriptively inadequate: comprehension involves more than the decoding of a linguistic signal" (1986:6). They developed ‘relevance theory’ to try to account for the cognitive, contextual, social and interactional features of human communication, emphasizing that "human cognition tends to be geared toward to the maximization of relevance" (1986/95:261).
12. The conventional linguistic perspective is that ellipsis refers to an utterance where, for reasons of economy, emphasis or style, part of its structure, expressed previously, has been omitted.
13. Rommetveit discusses this point via the disclosure of a personal letter he received from his friend Willem Hofstee (who originally proposed the term and notion prolepsis): "... Today I walked with one of the psychologists here past the Mayflower cinema in Eugene, where Bergman’s latest film movie is being shown. He asked me whether I had seen it. I said no, and asked if he had. He said yes, he had. I asked him how he liked it, and he said ‘I liked it very much, but Mary Ann did not’; without ever explicitly having ‘made known’ to me that he is married and that his wife’s name is Mary Ann, that they went to see the film together, and a lot of other things–and (if I am correct) without assuming that I knew all this. His utterance was proleptic in that it triggered a search on my part for a shared social reality which in turn would provide a basis for understanding the sentence. Incidentally, it would have been barbaric and pedantic to say, ‘Oh, Mary Ann is your wife’. To be precise, prolepsis here served to establish a relationship between his wife and me as persons who should at some time get together. My comment would have been a crude rejection of that implication." (in Rommetveit 1974:87-88).
14. Linguistic relativism is the focus of a long debate, which Gumperz and Levinson (1996) date back to St. Augustine, and in modern times to Humboldt’s Weltanschauung (‘world view’). Linguistic determinism, such as is generally attributed to Whorf, has been shown to be untenable (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996).
15. Linguistic anthropologists Ochs & Schieffelin put it this way: "Sociocultural systems are to be considered as one force influencing language acquisition. Biological predispositions, of course, have a hand in this as well" (1984: 309).
16. Background knowledge on the languages in question, English, Korean, and Japanese, is necessary for understanding these studies as they relate language structure with perceptual and semantic development. English, as a subject-verb-object language, is noun-salient (‘salient’ in the linguistic sense of ‘+stress’). Utterance final position, usually the object of the clause in English, therefore stands out to the young learner. As Slobin illustrated through his extensive cross-linguistic first language acquisition research, post-posed markers and clause final position have proven +salient to young learners. Imagine a parent pointing to a picture of a dog in a picture book and saying ‘look at the DOGGY’ (upper case = +stress). By contrast, Korean and Japanese are verb-salient languages, are verb final (subject-object-verb word order), rely on complex verb morphology in the generation of semantic values, and observe frequent noun ellipsis (when compared to English).
17. The ‘things have names’ stage, also referred to as the ‘naming spurt’, typically occurs between 9 and 13 months. By 13 months, the child has ‘objectified’ the referent - vehicle (sign) relationship, and realizes s/he can substitute a sign for a thing in communication, while at the same time realizes the referent and sign are not the same.
18. Examples of means-end tasks Gopnik and Meltzoff employed are "using a string vertically to obtain an object attached to it"; "using a stick to obtain an out-of-reach object"; and "stacking a set of rings on a post, avoiding one solid ring". The authors note that "these tasks may be solved using either a trial-and-error groping or immediately, in an insightful manner," and that for their study, "only immediate, insightful solutions were counted" (1993: 226).
19. Slobin is emphasizing the learning of L2 conceptual categories in adult populations. He cautiously proposes that plural and instrumental markers would not be particularly difficult on a conceptual level since they "may be obvious on non-linguistic grounds". This does not imply that adult second language learners will necessarily remember to mark obligatory categories in their L2, a separate issue Slobin addressses as the matter of "automizing attention." (1996: 94)
20. In a related vein, Kramsch discusses the problem that too often, language "teachers teach language and culture, or culture in language, but not language as culture." (1995b:83)
21. Berlin and Kay (1969) point out evidence for parameters constraining the semantics of color terms. But as Hanks (1996) notes, the Berlin and Kay study, important as it is, disproves linguistic determinism rather than substantively addresses the concept of relativity. In other words, semantic universals and language differences influencing habitualized perceptions of the world are not exclusive of one another.
22. I use ‘mind’ following Wertsch (1991: 14), who describes it thus: "mind is viewed here as something that ‘extends beyond the skin’ in at least two senses: it is often socially distributed and it is connected to the notion of mediation. ... mental functioning is viewed as being shaped or even defined by the mediational means it employs to carry out a task."
23. Subaltern historiography is an intellectual project aimed at articulating the hidden players in history, usually women, the lower classes, and generally less represented communities. Edward Said describes it thus: "Subaltern studies represents a crossing of boundaries, a smuggling of ideas across lines, a stirring up of intellectual and, as always, political complacence" (1988: x). It is in the spirit of crossing boundaries and forging novel aliances that I reference subaltern studies/historiography.

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