کتاب A Collection of English Papers on Language and Interdisciplinary Studies اثر Behrooz Azabdaftari نشر انتشارات دانشگاه تبریز

In the introduction to this book, I would like to address myself to two different themes. First, I intend to give a synoptic account of how this collection of papers gained an existence of its own; second, to avail myself of the occasion to express my view regarding a common trend of language studies that conjoin them in terms of a perspective adopted by language scholars at different periods of time and in different academic circles and under different captions since the inception of Prague School of Linguistics in 1920’s, namely the approaches that factor in a multitude of historical, sociocultural, and interactionistic variables (all that resides outside the human mind) to account for second language acquisition. To do justice to the second theme, here I would like to focus only on the Prague School of Linguistics and Russian functionalism, and remind the students in the graduate programs that the search for seemingly disparate views, forming a single trajectory of research activities in language and interdisciplinary studies beginning in the early decades of 1920s and through the impetus Russian Formalism and the Prague School of Linguistics, is very challenging and rewarding. The big river is the confluence of many small streams running into it. Without recognizing the contributions of the scholars of past generations in the area of language and literature studies, we would be trying to define the mythological elephant in the dark room.