ABSTRACT
T he stunningly productive new wave of research on language, cognition, and linguistic relativ-ity guided by works such as Berman and Slobin (1994) and Gumperz and Levinson (1996) is emerging in a time when a deeper understanding of “the cognitive and communicative consequences of linguistic diversity” (Slobin, 2002, pp. 7-23) has a pivotal role to play both for research strategies in the scientic community and for the everyday life of citizens in a world of many languages and crosscultural communication. Thus, thinking for speaking (Slobin, 1996) is an important corrective to the view that we would be better off on this planet if we were all speaking but one language. To amplify this point, consider Cassin (2004, personal communication), who presents an analysis of the vocabulary of European philosophies with a special focus on “untranslatable” terms, such as, for example, “philosophy of mind” “philosophie de l’ésprit”—“Geisteswissenschaft.” Cassin argues that the diversity of languages represents a plurality of viewpoints. Applied to differences in terminological traditions between academic disciplines, this plurality presents a problem for translation, but it also presents a resource of perspectives for conceptualizing a problem or phenomenon. In the domain of neuroscience there is a growing interest in the cognitive control of neural activity (e.g., Badre, Poldrack, Paré-Blagoev, Insler, & Wagner, 2005; Miller, D’Esposito, & Wills, 2005) and language plays a powerful role in cognitive control and regulation of brain activity. Here, the notion of thinking for speaking can help promote cooperation between scholars in the linguistic and cognitive sciences on the one hand and brain scientists on the other. Another research challenge concerns a partly new and extended model of the linguistic production process. According to the standard view (e.g., Hayes & Flower, 1980; Levelt, 1989), building a linguistic utterance or a text fragment is much like a logistic process where pre-specied conceptual good gets packaged, transported, and repackaged. The notion of thinking for speaking is suggestive of a more dynamic interplay between
language and thought, such that the conceptual content to be dressed up in words may be inuenced by grammatical demands and rhetorical habits.
