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This chapter summarizes the following using non-technical terms and diagrams: the tools with which this book has developed one version of the interactive stance; some of the main empirical phenomena that has enabled the text to tackle the topics of the book; and some of the disciplines/approaches whose concerns can thereby be linked, including Formal Grammar, Conversation Analysis, Psycholinguistics, Gricean pragmatics, Child Language Acquisition, and spoken dialogue systems.

This chapter stresses that the central problem of parametric theory is Plato’s problem (how do humans learn a language?), whereas what we may call Greenberg’s problem (what is the shape and degree of linguistic variability?) is derivative. The chapter reviews several macro- and microparameters and shows that they do not satisfy certain learnability conditions, whereby they are not plausible learning paths or plausible elements of UG. It explores a parametric approach, which conjoins a mechanism of data analysis parametrically defined (the Chunking Procedure), arguably used by the LAD to attain a morphological analysis of its PLD, and bootstrapping mechanisms that use the attained morphological analysis to specify more abstract syntactic properties of the target language, the clustering properties which standard parameters range over.

This chapter argues that variation is a constitutive property of language use; its study allows one to explain how grammars change over time. The present discussion is concerned with the latter issue, i.e. the restructuring of grammars underlying language use. Starting from the assumption that language acquisition is a likely source of change, it is argued that explanations of diachronic changes must not stand in conflict with what is known about the human Language Making Capacity in general and, more specifically, about the Language Acquisition Device and the principles constraining acquisition. But although the individual is hypothesized to be the locus of change, it is argued that adequate accounts of diachronic change cannot ignore the fact that speakers share their linguistic knowledge with other members of speech communities. The main question pursued in this book is how core properties of grammars change, i.e. those aspects of grammars which have been shown to be most resistant to change. In the theoretical framework adopted here, this concerns principles constrained by Universal Grammar (UG), most importantly syntactic parameters.

This article, written by Karin C. Ryding, argues that while Arabic has garnered increased attention by the American education system over the past decade, the sociolinguistics of Arabic are being neglected in such educational endeavours. This is despite academic research on this topic, including, notably, Yasir Suleiman’s Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives (1994). Ryding writes that the complexity of teaching and learning Arabic is related to the transcultural realities of living and working in the Arab world. As she demonstrates, Arabic is particularly challenging as the language must be modified to conform to different types of interaction. Ryding then analyses some of the shortfalls in the fi eld of Arabic language instruction, and argues that because Arabic teaching – due to its distinctive diglossic nature – lacks many traditional models to choose from, it must construct its own, which she refers to as ‘the repertoire model’. Ryding summarises by noting that sociolinguistic analyses, like those studied by Suleiman, must be taken into consideration and should force us to come to terms with the linguistic reality of multiple discourse levels and, accordingly, to develop new models for Arabic pedagogy.

This chapter explores how James Joyce’s Bildungsroman disrupts the recapitulatory plot by fusing the ostensibly primitive body to the ostensibly advanced linguistic faculties of its budding poet-protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. This fusion results in repeated reversionary digressions from the progressive movement toward artistic self-realization: the very words that Stephen seeks for his art bring him instead into the realm of the sexual and procreative body. These atavistic reversions allow Joyce’s to ironize and supply an alternative to his protagonist’s desire to separate the body from aesthetic experience and artistic maturity.

Viewed from the perspective of cultural techniques the anthropological of the philosophers is an effect of the problematic distinction between different species of talking animals (parlêtres). If, as Aristotle decreed, man is an animal endowed with the gift of speech, then throughout the histories of philosophy, pedagogy, and literature this particular animal will be trailed by a host of other speaking animals (such as woodpeckers and parrots) that it has to be distinguished from—despite or because of the fact that their excluded gift of speech is always already marked as part of humanity. The chapter first discusses the theory of parrots and other talking birds in Pliny the Elder, Dante, the medieval jurists Baldus and Bartholus, and Descartes, and focuses then on the theory of the origin of language in Herder. Herder (as a philosopher) places animal sounds at the starting point of humanity’s collective entry into language, but (as a pedagogue) seeks to banish them from the beginning of individual language acquisition. Flaubert finally revokes the difference between bird speech and human language by introducing the idea that nothing can be said or written that has not been said or written before, thereby exchanging his role as author with that of secretary or parrot.