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The Biculture in BilingualAuthor(s): Michael AgarSource: Language in Society, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 167-181Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168228 .

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Language in Society 20, I67-I8I. Printed in the United States of America

The biculture in bilingualMICHAEL AGAR

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of Maryland, College ParkABSTRACT

Based on the bilingualism iterature, he author'srecentexperiences nAustrianGerman,and a discourseanalysisperspective,a way of look-ing at biculturalisms hammered ogetherto enablean understandingof how adult L2 acquisitionproceeds n more and less culturalways.(Bilingualism,biculturalism,discourse,ethnography,Whorf)"Research n second languageacquisitionhas too shorta historyto supplyconclusiveevidenceon any importantquestion."As someone new to boththe theory and the practice of bilingualism, I found Klein's (I986:167) con-clusionboth surprising nd understandable surprising,becausethere is amountainof literature hat should have produced omeresults;understand-able,because hroughpersonal xperience've earnedhat,as I movedcloserto life inside of a second language L2), the complextangleof whatever twas I'd acquiredhad outgrownmy efforts to describeor understand t.One kindof L2 acquisition, he kindthatconcernsme here, involves theway adults earnL2 in ordinary ontextsof use. WhenKleingot to thistypeof acquisition,he was if anything,evenmorepessimistic:

Untila few years ago, spontaneous anguageacquisitionremaineda sideissue n research; ven today the bulk of second anguagenvestigations readdressed o guided learning.Moreover,studentsof spontaneous earn-ing arechiefly preoccupiedwith childsecond languageacquisition;veryfew of themdeal withspontaneous earning n adults,or at an age whena first language is fully established. (I986:i8)From a practicalpoint of view, I can understand he neglect. "Guidedlearning" akes as its researchobject a bounded situation containingclearteacher/studentrelationsand a prescriptedext. Spontaneous earning,onthe otherhand,involvesthe ethnographic tudyof everyday ife in L2 envi-ronments.Such studiesaren't mpossible,but theyare much more difficult(see, e.g., Gal 1979, Hill&Hill I986, Woolard 989, thoughtheseare stud-ies of bilingualcommunitiesrather han adult L2 acquisition).Evenif we had the right data,Kleinargued, he models for theiranalysis

? I99I Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/91 $5.00 + .00167


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aren't well worked out. "Little is known as yet about this particular aspect[fitting of talk to circumstance] of language acquisition, partly because westill do not know enough about the interaction of contextualinformation andlinguistic information in ordinary language use" (Klein I986:113). By "con-text," Klein meant the usual underdifferentiated mix of everything fromphonological detail up to world knowledge, though he spent most of his timewith well-understood problems, such as deixis and anaphora.Klein isn't the only one who reportedconfusion and ambiguity in the fieldof bilingualism. In fact, he is more the typical case. In the second of fourrecent book-length reviews of the field that I consulted - all written by bilin-guals - Beardsmore began with:

It is not an easy task to start any discussion on bilingualism by positinga generallyaccepted definition of the phenomenon that will not meet withsome sort of criticism.... Definitions are numerous and are continuouslybeing proferredwithout any real sense of progressbeing felt as the list ex-tends. (I982: I)Definitions of bilingualism- Beardsmorereviewed several - typically includemore than linguistic competence as narrowly understood, but it is not clearjust how much more, or what that "much more" should include.

Some drew on the rich tradition of Hymes's "ethnography of speaking"(1972a) to better focus their discussion of L2 acquisition, especially his con-cept of "communicative competence" (1972a). The notion that languageinvolves the proper sense of what to say to whom under what sorts of cir-cumstancesis a premisefrom which Klein's and Beardsmore'scritiquescouldhave been derived. And communicative competence leads, as Hymes in-tended it to, in the direction of a "culture two" that travels with the secondlanguage.But Grosjean, in a third review of bilingualism, continued the pessimis-tic tone of Klein and Beardsmore when he discussed culture. "Although ithas been studied by relatively few researchers, especially when linked to bi-lingualism, many bilinguals are aware that in some sense or other they arealso bicultural and that biculturalism or its lack has affected their lives"(I982:157). He added that Haugen (1956) argued that bilingualism and bi-culturalism don't stand in any simple one-to-one relationship, either.This intriguingquotation introduces the directionI want to pursue, in partbecause of linguistic anthropological tradition, in part because of my ownrecent experience in Austrian German, and in part because several experi-ments in the bilingual literaturepoint toward biculturalism as a necessary as-pect of communicatively competent bilingualism.Not that the direction is an easy one to follow, as any veteran of the mul-tiply ambiguous uses of "culture" n anthropology knows. The grand sweepand problematic nature of the culture concept is difficult to reconcile with

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the narrow ocus andsystematicdemandsof theAnglo-Americanmpiricalresearch radition.The result s a situationthat Hakuta, the author of thefourth reviewof the field that I consulted,describedas follows:A fascinatingdea suchas Whorf's thatthe world s fullof diverseviewsthat go hand n handwithcultural ndlinguisticdiversity is cookeddownto nothingmorethan a few experimentson color perceptionand wordmeanings[seeFishmanI982]. In thinking hroughthe problemof bilin-gualismand thought,particularly s we thinkabout studiesshowingnoeffects of bilingualism,we shouldremainsuspicious hat we are becom-ing the victims of our own tunnel vision. (I986:105)Inthisarticle,I'd liketo trya different unnel, f not a viewfromthesum-mit. The attemptis worth the effort. It is now a cliche to observe that -whetherdue to politicaland economicmigration,participationn theglobaleconomy, ntrastatenationalism, r simplymediaand travel normalevery-day life is now carriedout in multiculturalworlds.The shiftingand shiftyrelationshipsbetweenco-occurrentanguagesand cultures at the level ofadultL2use as wellas the level of community contain hekeythatwillun-lock an interestingand useful ethnographic uture.

These aregrandclaimsthat legitimatean interestborn of personalexperi-ence. ThoughI'd triedon differentL2s before- Kannada,Spanish,and ataste of DemoticGreek- I989's adventuresas a linguistin Viennaled medeeper nto an L2worldthanI'deverbeenbefore.Thestorybegins n I962,at the ageof 17, whenI wentto a small ownin Austriaas anAmericanFieldServiceexchangestudent.I had neverstudiedGerman.My Is-year-oldAustrian"brother" nd Ihammered ut a pidginmade of Latin,whichwehadbothstudied;English,whichhe'dbegunto learn;andAustrianGerman,which I was pickingup.By the end of my4 1/2-months, I was fluentin the limitedrole of obnox-ious teenager.When I returned o the UnitedStates, my high school, andthenmyuniversity,didn'tknowwhatto do withme. I'dchatcomfortablymost of the graduate tudentscouldn'tdo that - but only in the adolescentmalevocabulary hat I'dbeenexposedto, witha grammarandlexiconthatweredisasters.Thestorygoes on andon throughseveralvisitswithmy exchange amilyovertheyears,but for nowI'llskipto theFallsemester f I986, when I livedin Viennaandstudiedat the Linguistics nstituteat the University, he firsttime since I962 that I'd spentsubstantial ime in Austria.It wasterrible.I couldn'thave an interesting onversation,discussthingswithcolleagues,pass the timeof dayat the cornerstore, understandTV ormoviesor thepaper,nevermindtheprofessionaliterature.Andthis, to add169


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insult to injury, in a language that "felt" comfortable. SprachgefuXh,hey callit. By the end of that semester I knew I was on the way to something butdidn't know exactly what it was. Exchange family, neighbors, colleagues, ac-quaintances, friends, and a lover had helped me toward an appreciation ofeverythingfrom high-levelpremisesabout the world and how it worked downto how to ask for a drink in Austrian and the various semanticspins all thoseprefixes gave to verbs.In I989, I returnedto Vienna and lived there the entire calendar year. Forthe SpringsemesterI was an official Gastprofessor, taught three classes, andworked with students in Austrian German. The rest of the year, I continuedworking with colleagues and students; wrote papers; gave lectures - some-times in English; dealt with the kinds of people I'd known before, only inmore interesting ways; talked elaborately (if clumsily) without being ex-hausted after a couple of hours; watched TV; went to the movies; read thepapers; made a few jokes that worked; and began to feel the web of associ-ations that echoed in certain things I said and heard.At the end of the year, I met someone I hardly knew in a coffee house,and we sat and conducted an elaborate conversation across severaltopics thatI'd never "rehearsed,"though a couple of times I couldn't get things out. Iwas invited to give a lecture at the Austrian linguistics meetings and wrotean original paper from scratch in German that went over well, though thebest discussion question at the end was beyond my capability to spontane-ously handle. I cracked a joke about Vienna's mayor that kept a taxi driverlaughing for a block, though he'd had trouble understanding my descriptionof the location of my apartment. I thought of myself as being in the bilin-gual basement.I left with regret. I dreamed that I tried to step away from Vienna butfastened to my back was the narrow end of a net that grew ever larger withdistance, a net whose ends eventually disappeared into the city. Another net,of course, holds me to the United States. Now that I'm back, many of thepieces of the two nets overlap nicely, some are close but of a different weave,and some are made of entirely different material. This article is a step in thedirection of trying to figure out what those differences are and why theyobtain.The bilingualism literature is loaded with issues that hint at the complicatedways such nets do and do not connect, issues that usually end in the indeter-minacy that the four authors cited at the beginning of this article expressed.One classic example is vocabulary. What happens when first language (LI)and L2 lexicons meet in the same mind?Lambert and Moore (I966) found that word associations among bilingualswere different, because associations around a word were a mix of associa-

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tions from two different languages. For instance, child, sickness, and doc-tor elicited mother, health, and nurse for monolingual English-Canadians,but the same words in French elicited baby, hospital, and sickness formonolingual French speakers. Bilinguals, on the other hand, produced theassociations mother, bed, and sick when they responded in English, andbaby, bed, and sickness when they associated in French.These patterns of "connotative interference"suggest a semantic mix in theworld of bilinguals that is neither clearly distinct nor clearly a blend, a re-sult that by and large summarizes the results of numerous other studies. Forexample, Grosjean (I982:244) reviewed the question, Does the bilingual op-erate with one or two lexicons? He discussed the many experimentsthat sup-port both answers and concluded with his own support for Paradis'sneurobiologically based model.The bilingual, argued Paradis (I980), has a single conceptual store and twolanguage stores that map onto it. Sometimes the language stores map ontothe same conceptual area; in those cases, translation is easy and the single-lexicon hypothesis is supported. But in other cases, one language store/con-ceptual store mapping simply has no equivalent in the other. In those cases,translation is difficult and the two-lexicon hypothesis looks correct. Onceagain, the languages are separate and merged at the same time.

Hakuta reviewed the results of observations of recovery of languagesamong aphasic multilingualsand found the same ambiguous results. He alsolooked at the granddaddy issue of them all - Weinreich's 1953) proposal thatbilingualismmay be compound or coordinate. (Actually, Weinreichproposeda third type, subordinate, but later researchcollapsed that category into thecompound type.)The compound/coordinate debate - and its derivatives such as the two-lexicon question - has been underway for 35 years. But Hakuta noted thatin Weinreich'soriginal proposal the distinction aimed at two different waysthat language could be organized within a bilingual. With Ervin and Os-good's (1954) interpretationand the experimentaltradition that they initiated,the question shifted to types of bilinguals. Hakuta concluded: "To repeat,I believe that the question of whether the two languages of the bilingual areindependent or interdependentmisses the mark. The real question is the iden-tification of the conditions under which the two languages maintain separa-tion and those under which they are apparently merged" (I986:94).From the literature, I take away the lesson that "either/or" questions havebeen posed, that the results have been by and large equivocal, and that thesuspicions of researchers like Hakuta are that the "either/or" is actually a"both/and," that is, that bilingualsorganize their meanings in different waysthat range from perfect overlap to completely distinct.The gaps between Li and L2, the areas that are kept distinct, are the mostinteresting because - as I hope to show - they suggest the widely divergent

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parts of the two nets I described earlier. There is something of "culture" inthat awkward metaphor, and the bilingual literature testifies to its impor-tance. Once again, though, the results are an inconclusive mix of how cul-tures, like lexical meanings, overlap and keep their distance at the same time.In Grosjean's admittedly casual survey, many bilinguals said that when theychange languages they feel like they are changing attitudes and behaviors. Hequoted Adler (1977:38): "Often bilinguals have split minds . . . all the par-ticularities which language conveys, historical, geographical, cultural, are re-embodied in the bilingual twice; he is neither here nor there; he is a marginalman."Ervin-Tripp conducted several studies that pointed at culture - French/English bilinguals tell different stories for the same TAT card (Ervin 1964),Japanese/American bilinguals fill sentence completion tests differently intheir two languages (Ervin-Tripp I968), and a Japanese/English bilingualtitled the same picture in different ways, depending on which language wasused (Ervin-Tripp 1973).Beardsmore (I982) discussed the problem of anomie among bilinguals, thepossibility that in their "between world"(Zwischenwelt is what I want to say)they experienceanxiety becausethey are attached to neither. He cited a studyby Lambert in which advanced English-speakingstudents in a Frenchimmer-sion course showed anomie when they started to think and even dream inFrench. They began to "feel like Frenchmen," started to break course rulesby speaking English, and sought English-language materials (Lambert,Havelka, & Gardner I958). A sense of balance, of equilibrium,will solve theproblem, Beardsmore wrote, though he didn't spell out what such equilib-rium entails.Grosjean cited some of his interviewees. A German/English bilingual:

I can't deny that I am American, yet because of my German upbringingI have different beliefs and ways of living and doing things.... I havebeen told that this mixture makes me complex and makes my reactions dif-ficult to predict . . . I am essentiallyin limbo and I sometimes become verydistraughtbecause I cannot seem to reconcile these culturalforces and dif-ferences within myself. (I982:I6I)

And, as a second example, consider this Arab/English bilingual:At home in the Middle East I am seen as the Americanized Arab . . . andin America, I am seen as an Americanized Arab by people that have cometo realize that they are Americanized Arabs also. Therefore, almost any-where I go I make sure my world is full of AmericanizedArabs. (I982:I62)The bilingualismliterature sn't the only place wherebiculturalismappears.In an overview of translation theory, Bassnet-McGuire (I980) introduced

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"culture" ightat the beginning.In fact, the title of the first section of herfirst chapter s "Languageand Culture."Nida and Taber's I969) classicmodel waspresented arlyon: the Li text mustbe analyzed, hentransferredand restructuredallin termsof culture)before it can be reworked nto L2.Bassnet-McGuireoncluded hat"sameness"s an unrealistic oal:one musttalk of loss and gain in the translationprocess.Shealso discusseduntranslatability, eginningwith Catford's I965) no-tions of linguisticand culturaluntranslatability, nd moving on into Po-povic's 1976) two kinds of untranslatabilityhat mixlanguageandculture,the first where"lackof denotationor connotation"blockstranslation, hesecondwhere he "relationbetween he creative ubjectand its linguisticex-pression" sn't adequate.Thesesources supporta stronglink between anguageand culture n L2acquisition.Unfortunately, he sameequivocalview that we met in the dis-cussionof Li/L2 lexiconsreturnshereas well. The literature,and my ex-perience,show that acquisitionof anotherculture sn't a necessary part oflearninganother anguage,a pointthatHaugen(1956)was citedas support-ing earlier.Beardsmoredescribed he possibility ike this:

It is perfectlyfeasibleto learna foreign languagewithout acquiringanyof the culturalattributesmplicit n that language hough the learner's e-sultantbehaviourmay appear omewhat trange o a nativespeaker f thatlanguage.Muchof the frictionacrossdifferent inguistic ommunities anariseout of situationswherespeakersof two languageshave acquired wosets of linguisticpatternsbut then proceed o use the second set with thecultural values of the first. . . . [TJhe further one progresses in bilingualabilitythe more important he biculturalelementbecomes, since higherproficiency ncreases heexpectancy ate of sensitivityowards he culturalimplicationsof languageuse. (I982:20)

This quotation remindsme of another time and another language when,yearsago, MaxMartinez,a colleagueat the Universityof Houston, told meto practiceSpanishwithtranslatedAmericanbestsellers."Not only do theidiomswashout,"he said, "butso does the culture."He was right.Theyweremucheasier for an American o read, because the story rested on the hid-den base of Americanbackgroundknowledge.More to the point here,I wasstruckseveral imes by the way that Amer-icanscombineddistance romAustriaand proficiency n German o producepeculiarutterances,not onlyin my judgment,butevident n the reactionsofAustrians as well. At one party of about 15 people, 4 Americans werepresent,all speakingGerman.Two, the hostessandmyself, wereresident nViennaandactivelyengaged n trying o figureout Austria.One of the oth-erswas the grandchild f Austrianson a visit. The fourth was a residentof173


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Munich working for a researchfirm. The Austrian descendentspoke fluentlyin the sense of grammarand lexical variety, but he and the woman from Mu-nich spoke American culture. The hostess, who was researchingan Austrianwriter, was proficient in the linguistic surface, and she also spoke Austrianculture. The differenceswere striking,apparenton many levels, and the Aus-trians' reactions were obvious.Klein's (I986) discussion of bilingualism offered several reasons why thismight occur. In everydaycommunication, he pointed out, the L2 learnerhasboth a communication task and a learning task, and propensity to learn in-volves, among other things, communicative needs, social integration, andattitude. If a speaker in L2 feels that he/she is communicating effectivelyenough to fulfill some bounded task demand, in however linguistically andculturallyawkwarda way, then the speakermay simply declareL2 abilityad-equate for communication and turn off the learning.So, with culture we come to the same result as we did in the review of lex-ical issues. Two languages may be organizedinto overlapping or separate cul-tural frames - just as bilinguals have both one and two lexicons, recover theirtwo languages after aphasia together and separately, free associate in waysthat both do and do not show the influence of their other language, experi-ence anomie but compensate with balance, feel that their identity in differ-ent languages in some ways is different and in some ways stays the same.The lessons I take away are, first of all, that for some parts of L2, therewill be no simple mapping onto Li if L2 native communicative competenceis the goal. Second, the gaps between L2 and Li will pull an individual bi-lingual into a Zwischenwelt, whose negative (i.e., anomie) and positive (i.e.,creativity)effects are only hinted at in the literature. If communicative com-petence is not the goal, then, theoretically at least, L2 linguistic competenceis possible without leaving Li cultural frames.To the extent that bilinguals strive for communicative competence andmove into this Zwischenwelt, and to the extent that this occurs more fre-quently, a new, peculiar, nonlocalized community may be in the process offormation. "Many feel quite at home in both cultures, and many others feelat ease with people who, like them combiningthe traits of two cultures,makeup a new cultural group" (Grosjean I982:I62).In an articlein the magazine AmericanFilm some yearsago, Salman Rush-die wrote of a new "immigrantsensibility," a view of the world where mul-tiple cultural systems combine as a matter of course, however awkwardly orsmoothly, in the same situation. He was writing of the growing number offilms that combine story, setting, actors, and crew from multiple cultural tra-ditions. But the biculturalism that the literature points toward, the sensibil-ity that Rushdie wrote about, hints at a mentality, one that may increase aswe enter the next century, one that transcends what we ordinarily think ofas "culture."

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Whatever hat is. Years ago two of the founding anthropological athersgathered collectionof definitions nto a book(Kroeber& Kluckhohn 966),andthat wasbeforeDerrida.Cultures - alwayswas- a highlyproblematicterm, to put it mildly.Terms rompragmatics,ike"background nowledge,"or from sociology, ike "members'esources,"ustdress heproblemsn dif-ferentclothes.Yetsomesortof notion s essential,not only because he bilin-gual literature ointsat it, butbecausecultureor backgroundknowledgeormember's esources re whatmakethe differencebetween he speechlessmas-ter of L2 syntax and the L2 speakerwho is communicatively ompetent na nonnativeworld.Let'sreturn o the situateduseof L2 and rebuildculture rom the groundup. By "useof L2" I meansomethingrather pecific. Among the many fea-tures used to distinguishdifferent kinds of bilingualism, wo are relevanthere. The first differentiates etweenchild L2 acquisitionbefore the criticalperiodthat ends at ? i i yearsand adultacquisition.The second featuredif-ferentiatesL2 acquisition n an Li /L2 bilingualcommunityand L2 acqui-sition n a worldwhere helearner'sLi is not ordinarily artof everydayife.Here, I'mdealing with adultacquisitionof L2 in a non-Li world.Next, a view of language s necessary hat unites language and culturerather han treatsthem as separateentities. Friedrich I989) suggested"lin-

guaculture,"which is appealingon severalgrounds,but the term createsproblematic associations with "agriculture"and so on among Englishspeakers.Recent notionsof "discourse"maydo the job, becausesome, atleast, use the termto mean socialpractices nvolving anguage, anguage o-gether with the resources that go into its productionand interpretation(Brown& Yule I983; Fairclough 989).Someprincipleshatunderlie hisnotion of discoursehave becomefairlywell established(see overviews of the field such as Brown& Yule I983;Bulow-Moller I989; de Beaugrande & Dressler I98I; Stubbs I983).1. The sentencehas lost its privileged tatus as the primary ocus. Dis-courseis the data;the sentenceor utterance s only a specialcase.2. Whenyou lift up a pieceof discourse be it lexical tem, utterance,orextendedext- interpretivetrands f association nd use stickto it likeputty.3. Theputtyis reshapedbythe analyst nto interpretive rames,and with"frames" mean to call up the elaborate iteraturen artificial ntelli-gencethat deals withknowledge tructures, ust as thecitedoverviewsof discoursedo (see also Agar& Hobbs I985; van Dijk 1979).4. The frames, therefore,arebuilt fromsourcesother than the languageat hand- from the analyst'sbest currentknowledgeabout contextsofculture, ituation,andspeech;andfrom suchstrange ources hatmakethe difference betweengood and mediocreanalysisas intuitionandinsight.175


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5. From this point of view, then, the key problem for the study of lan-guage is the methodology and theoretical basis for the construction andvalidation of interpretive frames.With the term "frame," I mean to move the discussion of "nets" and"putty" into a world of self-conscious systematic analysis. "Frame"and itskin - like "script" and "schema" - have already proved themselves useful ina variety of fields (see Casson I983, for examples of their use in anthropol-ogy). Frames are structures of interrelatedexpectations into which a partic-ular expressionfits. Framesprovidea context in terms of which an expressionmakes sense, knowledge in terms of which the expression can be discussed,and links in terms of which the poetic echoes (Friedrich I986) can be madeexplicit. Frames vary in scope, link to other frames, and in general offer auseful systematic fiction in terms of which the analyst can make explicit away to understand, a way to interpret, a problematic piece of language.Now I would like to use discourse as a departurepoint and develop an ap-proach to L2 acquisition as the study of interpretive frames. The story be-gins with an epistemology, one that I developed for ethnographic researcha few years ago in Speaking of Ethnography (Agar I985). The heart of thatepistemology, based on Gadamer'shermeneuticphilosophy, holds that whentwo languages are brought into contact, some connections are fairly simpleto forge. Others, in contrast, are striking by their difficulty.The problem is Whorfian, with a simple twist. Unlike Whorf's, the argu-ment about language differences is not a global one, that two languages, ingeneral, constitute an insurmountable or difficult barrier, depending onwhich version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis you hold to. Instead, the ar-gument is that points of contact vary - some, perhaps most, are easy jumps;some are traversed only with difficulty; and a few are almost impossible toconnect. Rather than a Whorfian wall, a Whorfian Alps would be a betterimage, a mountain range with plenty of valleys and trails and a few verticalcliffs.When two languages are brought into contact, the most interesting prob-lems for an L2 learner with the goal of communicativecompetence, the prob-lems that tend to attract the learner's attention, are the vertical cliffs. Thecliffs are difficult because - on one side of the language barrier or another,or perhaps on both sides - the problematic bit of language is puttied thicklyinto far-reachingnetworks of association and many situations of use. Whenone grabs such a piece of language, the putty is so thick and so spread outthat it's almost impossible to lift the piece of language out.I need a name for this language location, this Whorfian cliff, this partic-ular place in one language that makes it so difficult to connect with another.I will call it "rich,"with the connotations of tasty, thick, and wealthy all in-tended. The rich points in one language are relative to the other language thatis brought into contact with it. The juxtaposition of American English and

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AustrianGermanmay highlightrich pointsin both that a juxtapositionofEnglish and Hopi wouldn't, and conversely.But, in principle,as a prediction n the traditionof comparative inguis-tics, let'ssaythata languagehasrichpointsthatemergeacrosscomparisonswith severalother languages.We then suspectthat those rich points are sointricatelyand uniquely ied into a language-specific utty that they are notjust rich points relative o Lx, Ly, and so on, but that they are rich pointsin the language,period.A secondprediction,basedon my experiencesworkingn I989in Austria,is that rich points are also areas hat nativespeakers ecognize nstantlyandthen disagreeover when they discuss them. Becausethe putty is thick andbroad,differentnativespeakers an take different nterpretiverails hroughit. The comparativeest that I mentioned arlier ignalsrichpoints from out-side; mmediatenativespeaker ecognition ollowedby disagreement ignalsrichpoints fromthe inside.Rich points, then, are surface ormsthat tap deeply ntothe world hat ac-companies anguage,where hatworldcan be represented y systemsof in-terpretiverames.To the extent hat thoseframesenablecommunicationwithnativeL2 speakerswho sharea particular ocial identity,we can speakof acultureof thatidentity, rom theLi speaker's ointof view,and characterizeit in terms of just those framesthat enable an Li speaker o become com-municatively ompetent.This is a peculiarnotion of culture.Firstof all, following he ethnographicepistemologyoutlinedearlier, t is a model of newinterpretiveesources heLi speakerrequires o understand nd produce he L2 rich point in a com-municativelycompetent way. Second, the couplingof frameswith socialidentityallowsfor a varietyof "partial"ultures traditional ultural abels(the Apache),ethnicity Chicano),class (the elites), occupation mechanics),gender women's anguage), ifestyles yuppies),regions Southerners),tates(Austrians), nd so on. This suggestsvariable ultureswithinanyhumanag-gregate, and within any human speakerwithin that aggregate.The compli-catedimagethat this notionof cultureevokesis, I think,the rightbasis foran understanding f the "immigrantensibility"hat Rushdiedescribed.Duringmyrecentyearin Austria,students n my "Pragmatics nd Culture"class did an ethnographicnvestigation f onerichpointin AustrianGermanlabeledSchmah.An articlereportinghat research ppears lsewhere Agar,in press).Schmah s difficult o translate,andnativespeakersdisagreed verwhat it meant. It acts like a rich point. We investigatedit using threemethods:1. A systematic interviewin the tradition of ethnographic semanticsaroundthe conceptof Schmah.Such interviews ake an abstract,pre-structured rame, placethe conceptin the centerof it, and then pose

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systematic questions that represent frame relationships and place theanswers to those questions in the appropriate frame slots.2. A collection of anecdotes of Schmah use encountered in everyday life.The notes that resultare like the fieldnotes traditionallycollected in par-ticipant observation. These data yield information about the context ofpractical action within which the concept occurs, or which the conceptlabels.3. An informal ethnographicinterview about Schmah. Such interviewsal-low the native speaker to discuss the concept in whatever way he/shechooses. Methods of discourse analysis can be applied to such data tomake explicit the underlying folk theory that contains the concept.To sum up the results, Schmah is a view of the world, a 'life-feeling' (Le-bensgefuXhl),hat rests on the basic ironic premise that things aren't what theyseem, what they are is much worse, and all you can do is laugh it off. Suchan attitude is hardly unique to Vienna. What is unique to Vienna, perhaps,is that the world view, with all its complicated strands, is puttied into a sin-gle piece of language, and that the rich piece of language is, in turn, used asa badge of self-identification.The Schmah world view finds expression in at least two different speechevents that are also labeled Schmah: one, a humorous exchange that grows

out of the moment that is based on a negative portrayal of the other's mo-tives or situation;two, a deception designedto attain some instrumental end.Both specific examples fit the general philosophy - things are not what theyseem, what they are is bad, but the fact that the difference exists is not tobe taken seriously.The description of Schmah in the article is tentative, and the interpretiveframes were presented in informal prose, but the outlines of some very thickputty did take shape. And, in retrospect, the reason this piece of languageappeared so rich - in other words, appeared so problematic when broughtinto connection with American English - becomes clear. Over the course ofthe semester, the students and I played a game repeatedly, trying to link aspecific example of Schmah with an American English equivalent or withother German-language varieties such as the Berliner Schnauze or the Kol-ner Schmoos.Such links are, of course, possible, on an utterance-by-utterancebasis. As-sume I equated one Schmah example with my old high school verbal game,"cut lows," glossed another as a 'con', and then linked the world view withNew Yorkers. Would I have understood the concept? No, I would have de-stroyed it.I would have destroyed it because I would have taken a rich piece of lan-guage, cut the putty at different levels in different ways, and reputtied thedifferent pieces I'd cut into another language in a way that was not onlypiecemeal, but that didn't quite match or didn't match very well at all.178


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Schmah isn't really like the cut-low game; Schmah as 'con' isn't the right fiteither; and though New Yorkers may be Schmah-like in their world view attimes, they don't encode it in a lexical item and celebrate it as a badge ofidentity. The glosses might work to get by a single example, but in generalthey'd add up to confusion and distortion.And that would only be the beginning of the damage. The point is thatwhen we lift Schmah out of Austrian German, the putty that comes with itdrags along the raw material for a complicated but coherent set of interpre-tive frames, with potentiallywider links to history and political economy thatare only hinted at in the article. The ease with which it is used in Vienna tocharacterize situations and persons and verbal and written expressions is atestament to its centrality and power, as are the disagreements when peoplediscuss what it means. Schmah is a laughing surface laid over an ugly world,a way of seeing and at least two specific ways of talking within it.The analysis of Schmah tapped deeply into the world of Viennese dis-course. At its highest level, Schmah as "life-feeling" feeds back down intomany other details, ways of speaking and hearing, or writing and reading,of viewing film and reading the news, of understanding politics and history.Schmah began to pull me into a different way of being, one that made it eas-ier to be in Vienna and use Austrian Germanand more difficult to returnanduse American English.Schmah is a rich point whose analysis reveals not only the interpretivewherewithal to properly use the lexical item or to properly engage in speechevents that instantiate it. It also reveals a core view of things that ramify intomost of the details of everyday life. Schmah is the surface signal in L2 ofwhat I began to learn as the Viennese culture of native speakers. Such learn-ing put me into what I earlier referred to as the bilingual basement. Next timearound, I hope to move up a couple of floors and get a better view.The review of word association and projective tests, the experimental stud-ies of the compound/coordinate and two-lexicon question showed that bilin-guals - to some extent, in some areas - keep the conceptual systems of theirtwo languages distinct. The discussions of anomie, the self-reports of bilin-guals, and the review of translation theory showed, at a more global level,that the differences extend into identity, attitudes, behavior, and feelings ofaltered connections to the original Li world. From these results, a theoreti-cal prediction can be derived.

For L2 learners who want to be communicatively competent in L2, richpoints are areas that must be organized separatelyand will move the bilin-gual into a metacultural Zwischenwelt.The effort to bring bilingualism/biculturalism together and focus the is-sue of culture involved a notion of discourse as language plus interpretation

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and an ethnographicview of breakdown resolution. A second theoreticalpre-diction follows:The acquisition of L2 rich points is the acquisition of culture, in this sense:the higher the level the interpretive frames requiredto repair the gap be-tween Li and L2, and the more those frames can be shown to enable com-municatively competent discourse among L2 speakersof social identity X,the more we can characterizethose frames as the culture of X from the Lispeaker's point of view.Culture continuous rather than discrete, partial rather than complete, rel-

ative to the situation of contact rather than independent - it looks strangegiven traditional definitions. But it sets out a way of seeing bilingualism thatcovers the experimentsand anecdotes in the literature, accounts for my ownrecent L2 experience, and responds to popular ideas like Rushdie's immigrantsensibilityas well as to fascinating speculations about postmodern conscious-ness and metacultural states. At this point, as the saying goes, a little moreresearch wouldn't hurt.

REFERENCESAdler, M. (I977). Collective and individual bilingualism. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.Agar, M. (I985). Speaking of ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.(in press). The unsaid corpus and Malinowski's ghost. In M. Kontra (ed.), Proceedingsof the Conferenceon Spoken Languages. HungarianNational Academy of Sciences, Budapest.Agar, M., & Hobbs, J. (I985). How to grow schemas out of interviews. In J. Dougherty (ed.),Directions in cognitive anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 413-432.Bassnet-McGuire, S. (I980). Translation studies. London: Methuen.Beardsmore, H. B. (I982). Bilingualism: Basic principles. Avon: Tieto.Brown, G., & Yule, G. (I983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Bulow-Moller, A. M. (I989). The textlinguistic omnibus: A survey of methods for analysis. Co-penhagen: Handelshojkolen Forlag.Casson, R. W. (I983). Schemata in cognitive anthropology. Annual Reviews in Anthropology

12:429-62.Catford, J. C. (I965). A linguistic theory of translation. London: Oxford University Press.de Beaugrande, R., & Dressler, W. U. (I98I). Einfuehrung in die Textlinguistik. Tubingen: Nie-meyer. [Available as Introduction to textlinguistics. London: Longman.]Ervin, S. (I964). Language and TAT content in bilinguals. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psy-chology 68:500-07.Ervin, S., & Osgood, C. (I954). Second language learning and bilingualism. Journal of Abnor-mal and Social Psychology 49 [Supplement]: 139-46.Ervin-Tripp,S. (I968). An analysis of the interactionof language, topic, and listener. In J. Fish-man (ed.), Readings in the sociology of language. The Hague: Mouton. I92-21 I.(I973). Identification and bilingualism. In A. Dil (ed.), Language acquisition and com-municative choice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Fairclough, N. (I989). Language and power. London: Longman.Fishman, J. A. (I982). Whorfianism of the third kind: Ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide

societal asset. Language in Society II: -14.Friedrich, P. (I986). The language parallax. Austin: University of Texas Press.(I989). Language, ideology, and political economy. American Anthropologist 9i:295-312.

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Gal, S. (I979). Language shift: Social determinants of linguistic change in bilingual Austria.New York: Academic.Grosjean, F. (I982). Life with two languages:An introduction to bilingualism. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.Gumperz, J. J. (I982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hakuta, K. (I986). Mirror of language: The debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic.Haugen, E. (I956). Bilingualism in the Americas: A bibliography and research guide. Univer-sity: University of Alabama Press.Hill, J. H., & Hill, K. C. (I986). Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of syncretic language in Cen-tral Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Hymes, D. (I972a). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. J. Gumperz &D. Hymes (eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 35-7I.(0972b). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (eds.), Sociolin-

guistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 269-93.Klein, W. (I986). Second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. ([I1952] I966). Culture:A critical review of concepts and def-initions. New York: Vintage.Lambert, W., Havelka, J., & Gardner, R. (1958). The influence of language acquisition con-texts on bilingualism. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 56:239-44.Lambert, W. E., & Moore, N. (I966). Word-association responses: Comparison of Americanand French monolinguals with Canadian monolinguals and bilinguals. Journal of Personal-ity and Social Psychology 3(3):313-20.Nida, E., & Taber, C. (I969). The theory and practice of translation. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Paradis, M. (I980). Language and thought in bilinguals. In The sixth LACUS forum. Colum-bia, SC: Hornbeam.Popovic, A. (I976). Dictionary for the analysis of literary translation. Alberta: University ofAlberta.Stubbs, M. (I983). Discourse analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.van Dijk, T. A. (1979). Macrostructures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in contact: Findings and problems. New York: Humanities.Woolard, K. A. (I989). Double talk: Bilingualism and the politics of ethnicity in Catalonia. Stan-ford: Stanford University Press.

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