CHAPTER 9

LINGUISTICS

Linguistics and the social sciences

PhD Students Research Poster (photo by mjzimmer)

Each human language is a complex of knowledge and abilities enabling speakers of the language
to communicate with each other, to express ideas, hypotheses, emotions, desires, and all the
other things that need expressing. Linguistics is the study of these knowledge systems in all their
aspects: how is such a knowledge system structured, how is it acquired, how is it used in the
production and comprehension of messages, how does it change over time? Linguists
consequently are concerned with a number of particular questions about the nature of language.
What properties do all human languages have in common? How do languages differ, and to what
extent are the differences systematic, i.e. can we find patterns in the differences? How do
children acquire such complete knowledge of a language in such a short time? What are the ways
in which languages can change over time, and are there limitations to how languages change?
What is the nature of the cognitive processes that come into play when we produce and
understand language?

The part of linguistics that is concerned with the structure of language is divided into a number
of subfields:

 Phonetics - the study of speech sounds in their physical aspects

 Phonology - the study of speech sounds in their cognitive aspects

 Morphology - the study of the formation of words

 Syntax - the study of the formation of sentences

 Semantics - the study of meaning

 Pragmatics - the study of language use

Aside from language structure, other perspectives on language are represented in specialized or
interdisciplinary branches:

 Historical Linguistics

 Sociolinguistics

 Psycholinguistics

 Ethnolinguistics (or Anthropological Linguistics)

 Dialectology

 Computational Linguistics

 Neurolinguistics

Because language is such a central feature of being a human, Linguistics has intellectual
connections and overlaps with many other disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and
the natural sciences. Some of the closest connections are with Philosophy, Literature, Language
Pedagogy, Psychology, Sociology, Physics (acoustics), Biology (anatomy, neuroscience),
Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Health Sciences (Aphasia, Speech Therapy).

The main purpose of the study of Linguistics in an academic environment is the advancement of
knowledge. However, because of the centrality of language in human interaction and behavior,
the knowledge gained through the study of linguistics has many practical consequences and uses.
Graduates of undergraduate and graduate programs in Linguistics apply their training in many
diverse areas, including language pedagogy, speech pathology, speech synthesis, natural
language interfaces, search engines, machine translation, forensics, naming, and of course all
forms of writing, editing, and publishing.

Table of contents

 Linguistics and the social sciences

 What linguists need from the social sciences

 What social scientists need from linguists

 Starting points and personal lists

 Bibliography

 Related links

Linguistics and the social sciences

How does the pronunciation of 'car' vary with class or region? When and why do students
learning English use their first language (Cantonese perhaps, or Spanish) in the classroom? How
have the voices broadcast on the BBC changed? Do men interrupt women more than women
interrupt men? Why do British people say 'You wouldn't happen to have the correct time, would
you?' when they mean 'What's the time?'

Many students of linguistics find themselves dealing with issues that have concerned social
sciences such as sociology, anthropology, geography, politics, and social psychology. And many
students in these subjects find themselves wanting a principled, consistent analysis of some form
of language: they have a collection of policy documents, new articles, interviews, or transcripts
from television, and they want to relate them to some issue about social change. This note is
intended for teachers of courses with titles like 'Language in Society' who want to lead their
students to further resources for linking linguistics to the social sciences. Rather than try to map
the complex relations between these fields, I will point to a few concepts that suggest the need to
look further.

What linguists need from the social sciences

The practical strength of most linguists is their ability to pursue sustained analysis, and often to
compare the applicability of two or more different systems of analysis. To do this, they often
take some key social aspects of language use for granted, particularly in undergraduate
coursework. Current work in the social sciences problematizes some of these concepts.

Identities

Social scientists have often warned sociolinguists against essentialising identities, taking them as
fixed attributes, categories to be ticked off in the survey. Class was the first of these categories to
be called into question; belonging to a class seems to be not so much a socio-economic fact as a
cultural process. Gender also becomes complicated, a performance of certain roles that may or
may not correspond to biological sex. National identities, so closely tied to languages and
especially standard languages, can be treated as 'imagined communities'. While an earlier
generation of sociolinguists looked for the authentic user of a language, often the oldest and most
isolated speaker in a community, current sociolinguistics celebrates hybridity, the mixing and
crossing of identities. Students sometimes imagine, from the skepticism of current social science
approaches to class, gender, and ethnicity, that the social inequalities described in these terms
have magically disappeared over the last generation. This is unfortunately not the case. See
Antaki and Widdecombe (1998); Bucholtz, Liang, and Sutton (1999).

Subjects

Sociolinguists have long criticised the ideal speaker-hearer proposed by Chomsky, starting
instead a person embedded in complex social relations and histories. Recently they have often
cited post-structuralist critiques of the very idea of a subject, the idea that there is a unified 'I' at
the source of speaking and action. In these critiques, the 'I' is the effect, not the source, or speech;
I am constructed as a unified, ongoing entity by language. But in linguistics, as in other
disciplines, most students are actually rather uneasy with such critiques; at some level they
believe there is a real self that precedes and underlies language. These questions arise when one
studies formulaic language, or conventional genres, or language use that mixes different voices.
Where is the subject in such speech? See Potter and Wetherell (1987); Shotter (1993).

Agency

One reason linguists are so uneasy with post-structuralist critiques is that they seem to remove
any sense that a person can do anything to change things. The recognition in the 1960s and 1970s
that when you say something you do something opened up whole fields of study in speech act
theory, the ethnography of speaking, politeness theory, and stylistics. But if there is no unified
subject behind these actions, then the models begin to look rather simplistic. So, for instance, the
hope of finding a taxonomy of speech events, neatly categorized by several parameters such as
participants, setting, and acts, crumbles as one tries to figure out the ends of such an event. See
Moerman (1988).

Structure

Linguists have traditionally turned to sociology and political science for an account of social
structure: stratification, institutions, laws, roles, exchange. But in the stripped-down version of
sociology used by linguists, it is hard to tell how these structures ever change: working class
people talk working class, some people have authority, and institutions specify the
appropriateness of kinds of language to be used within them. Current research emphasizes
different kinds of mediation between language and social change, the importance of different
discourse practices, so that change or resistance to change are not just read off the kind of
language used. See Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), Cameron (2000).

Public and private

One line of social and political thought over the last thirty years has dealt with the ideal of a
public sphere, a realm in which discussion can take place and civil society can be constituted.
This might seem to be far removed from linguistics and the study of actual interactions. But
Jurgen Habermas, in developing the idea of a public sphere, drew on speech act theory, and
linguists have been increasingly concerned with the uses of language in public discussion. The
other side of such a division is the new interest in the use of language in intimate, domestic,
private circumstances, and in the silences and omissions of the public sphere. See Behabib
(1996); Livingstone and Lunt (1994).

Play

So far, this review is making society sound rather grim and earnest. But we find repeated
reminders in sociology and anthropology of the ubiquity and importance of mocking,
hypothetical, and unserious uses of language, and delight in the sounds and patterns for their own
sake. See Bateson (1972) and Goffman (1974); for readable overviews by linguists, see Crystal
(1998) and Cook (2000).

What social scientists need from linguists

Grammar
Structuralism transformed the human sciences in the 1960s and 1970s with the prospect that all
aspects of culture could have the kind of organisation found in language. Linguistic concepts
were applied to films, architecture, and food. These projects have proved impossible, or perhaps
just deeply unfashionable. Now the question might be why the 'grammars' of all these other
symbol systems are so unlike those of languages.

Text

Social scientists pile up huge amounts of text, usually without looking at it as text. Various
researchers have demanded that they pay attention to the structure, rhetoric, and materiality of
media texts, documents, interviews, surveys. Linguists can provide a start on the detailed
analysis, though of course sociologists, psychologists, or geographers may be looking for
something different from what linguists look for.

Interaction

When we closely at social science research data, we begin to reconstruct the interactions that
have been reified in survey results, media effects, interview or focus group quotations.

Genre

Researchers in a range of fields, from film studies to computational linguistics, need ways of
categorising types of texts. Studies of genre link these sterotypical forms to the kinds of
interaction going on. Linguists have a body of work on analysing written and spoken (and more
recently, visual) texts.

Corpus

Linguists and computational researchers have developed large collections of language data. The
collections themselves may not be of interest to most social scientists, who would have their own
preferred designs for such a corpus. But the tools for searching and comparing corpora could be
useful to social scientists who want to extend their analyses beyond the few texts they can
analyse in detail by hand.

Starting points and personal lists

A dozen books in the social sciences that might interest linguists

Adam, Barbara (1995). Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time. Cambridge: Polity.

Agar, Michael (1996). The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to

Bauman, Zygmunt (1990).  Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bazerman, Charles (1999). The Languages of Edison's Light. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Becker, Howard (1998). Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You're
Doing It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Billig, Michael (1996).  Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social

Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky (1983). Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of
Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hermes, Joke (1995). Reading Women's Magazines (Cambridge: Polity).

Meyrowitz, Joshua (1985). No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social
Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scannell, Paddy (1996).  Radio, Television and Modern Life : A Phenomenological Approach.
Oxford: Blackwell.

Silverman, David (1998).  Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. Cambridge:
Polity.

Suchman, Lucy (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine

A dozen books by linguists that might be useful to social scientists

Blum Kulka, Shoshana (1997). Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization
in Family Discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Briggs, Charles L. (1986). Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the
Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cameron, Deborah (2001). Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage.

Eckert, Penny (1999). Language Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fairclough, Norman (1992). Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity. [His new book
on text analysis for social scientists is forthcoming]

Goodwin, Marjorie (1990). He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black

Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen (2001).  Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media
of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.

Rampton, Ben (1995).  Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London:
Longman.

Stubbs, Michael (2001). Words and Phrases : Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford:
Blackwell.

Swales, John (1999). Other Floors, Other Voices: A Textography of a Small University Building.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Thornborrow, Joanna (2002).  Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse.
Harlow: Longman.

Wodak, Ruth, Rudolph de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karen Liebhart (1999).  The Discursive
Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.