Sociocultural development in the spectrum of concrete and abstract ideation

ABSTRACT

The view of abstract ideation as the telos of sociocultural intellectual development is revisited following Wertsch’s (1996) call to consider development within the spectrum of concrete and abstract ideation. This article provides a transdisciplinary framework adopting Vygotsky’s concept of semiotic mediation and the systemic functional linguistic concept of grammatical metaphor (GM). The focus is on novel qualitative and quantitative methods for investigating the accrual and dispersal of meanings through GM across genetic scales. The framework is illustrated with a case study of second-language university writing that presents developmentally-relevant patterns of oscillation along the concrete-abstract spectrum. Educational implications are briefly considered.

Acknowledgments

This study was made possible, in part, by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am also grateful to Geoff Williams, Patricia Duff, Sandra Zappa-Hollman, and Jennifer Vadeboncoeur for their support and encouragement. Thanks are due as well to the three anonymous reviewers for the thoughtful feedback that led to numerous refinements. The interpretations offered are, nonetheless, my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The twin concepts of system and instance of language are analogous to de Saussure’s (1986) notions of langue (systematic conventions of language) and parole (instantiations of language), although the relation between system and instance is theorized differently.

2. An active area of interdisciplinary research on lexical metaphor focuses on conceptual integration or blends, whose inputs can be a range of cultural resources, including functional grammatical units as well as lexemes (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). The links between grammatical metaphor and conceptual blends remain largely unexplored.

3. I leave aside the enticing potential of complex dynamic systems theory, frequently referenced in SFL and social semiotics (e.g., Lemke, 2000), for a complementary explanation of the development of higher order capacities suggested by the achievement in this example of a new “steady state” in one function of IGMs.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [752-2010-2415].