Abstract
Lewis Thomas (1981, p. 49) has observed that “the greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.” Thomas’s wisdom is not out of place in the final chapter of a book concerned with the contingencies, vagaries, individual differences, and uncertainties that characterize a diverse set of phenomena called metalinguistic performance, and that complicate the relationship of metalinguistic performance to theories of interlinguistic competence. It is important to understand that we do not have all the answers. Smugness is unwarranted.
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© 1989 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Birdsong, D. (1989). The Known and the Unknown in L2 Metalinguistic Performance. In: Birdsong, D. (eds) Metalinguistic Performance and Interlinguistic Competence. Springer Series in Language and Communication, vol 25. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74124-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74124-1_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-74126-5
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