Between Acquiring and Learning a Language: Subjectivity and Polyphony

Abstract

This paper aims at discussing and deconstructing dichotomies such as learning/acquisition, mother tongue/foreign language, drawing upon a corpus extracted from reports of ten foreign language speakers. In general, they learned (grasped) those languages in informal situations or, as they say, in autodidactic ones. The analysis was based on the discursive-deconstructive perspective, which includes thinkers such as Bakhtin, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, who share concepts of language, subject and culture. The analysis has allowed us to realize that when talking about how they learned the foreign language(s), the majority of the participants only consider strategies, (formal and informal) methodologies, the means used to have access to the other person's language-culture, forgetting that entering the other's language presupposes the desire that manifests itself in the love for the language(s) and for the other.