Colin B. Grant (ed.), Rethinking communicative
interaction: New interdisciplinary horizons. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. 325. Hb, $95.
Reading Rethinking communicative interaction (henceforth
RCI), I realized that the final word of the subtitle,
“horizons,” is an accurate allusion to the main difficulty and
contribution of the book: the quest for interdisciplinarity. RCI
advances the idea of communication as a fiction; the same applies to
interdisciplinarity, a commonplace in the social sciences to which
RCI at least contributes a “programme,” as Colin
Grant suggests in his Introduction, acknowledging the difficulties of
“pluri-disciplinariety.” A wealth of sources to advance such
an ambitious project is presented. RCI develops key methods to
fulfill the interdisciplinary endeavor: ways of bridging the macro and
micro gap by studying the connection of the self's participation in
the social construction of the communicative process and the interplay
between linguistic and biological facts in human evolution and language
acquisition, among others.