As the title of this volume indicates, Thomas traces the history of ideas behind the contemporary concepts of Universal Grammar (UG) and SLA as well as their coming together in contemporary approaches to linguistics and language acquisition.
As a student of SLA and linguistics in the 1980s and 1990s, I was particularly excited to be part of a new and upcoming field of study in which revolutionary concepts and methods about language and language learning were shaping the beginning of what was held to be scientific research in these areas. I was also under the impression that SLA was a new field of inquiry that emerged in the 1960s as a way to understand and properly respond to the growing need of people to effectively learn and teach second and foreign languages.
Thomas's volume is unique in its kind in that it reminds and educates researchers in these fields that there is a history to be told: a history that has been neglected in some contemporary surveys of SLA and generative linguistics, and a history that can help those in the field understand where we are coming from and where we are going to in our quest to explain the SLA process and its relation to language universals. Even if Chomsky and his linguistics revolution in the 1960s framed the issues in a way that presented the study of language and its acquisition as breaking new ground, Thomas shows that in fact many of the ideas recast by Chomsky were already entertained by his predecessors.
Chapter 1, the introduction, introduces basic definitions (UG, SLA) and offers a compelling rationale for why the field of SLA and UG needs to look at its past. If there is something that Thomas vehemently critiques about our field, it is what she calls the lack of interest in our past or “programmatic ahistoricity” (p. 9). In particular, she argues that (a) the field of SLA and UG defines itself as having arisen ex nihilo in the late twentieth century (after Chomsky), (b) attempts to justify the lack of a past are unconvincing, (c) ahistoricity might derive from the field's drive to separate itself from language learning pedagogy and its attachment to generative linguistics, and (d) the discipline might benefit from developing a sense of its past. This chapter also addresses what a discipline loses when it neglects its past. If there is something that could have been articulated more forcefully by Thomas, it is, perhaps, what the discipline gains by gaining a sense of its past and how this sense of history could help to move the field forward.
The rest of the volume proceeds with a quasi-chronological account of how the concepts of language and language learning developed in Ancient Greece and Rome (chapter 2), from late antiquity to the Carolingian Renaissance (chapter 3), in the Middle Ages (chapter 4), in the seventeenth century (chapter 5), in the nineteenth century (chapter 6), and into the twentieth century (chapter 7). A three-page afterword closes the volume.
What I found most revealing and interesting about this volume is that, as Thomas correctly conveys, what we regard as theoretical innovations today were ideas that germinated in the past. Even when all of the scientific and technological advances that surround us today were not around to help answer many of the same questions that scholars from other epochs entertained, there was already a good sense of the nature of language and the language learning process; that is, philosophers, grammarians, language teachers, and linguists came to the following conclusions: There are both similarities and differences between languages, and children learn their first languages easily, whereas adult second language learners struggle with countless hours of study to master much less. Whether we have achieved or will achieve answers closer to the truth than those reached by our predecessors is up to history to determine.
This volume is of interest to scholars and graduate students in linguistics and in SLA. Although, as Thomas herself anticipates, some chapters can cause the reader museum fatigue due to the amount of information presented and the occasional density of the prose, the volume is exceptionally well written and well informed overall; it is clear, comprehensive, argumentatively rigorous, and compelling. It is an excellent read for those who want to understand the SLA and UG fields from a broader perspective. Most important, this text also forces us to look at our field as part of the bigger picture.
