Sociolinguistics and Social Theory

Nikolas Coupland, Srikant Sarangi, Christopher N. Candlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317881445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The empirical and descriptive strengths of sociolinguistics, developed over more than 40 years of research, have not been matched by an active engagement with theory. Yet, over this time, social theorising has taken important new turns, linked in many ways to linguistic and discursive concerns. Sociolinguistics and Social Theory is the first book to explore the interface between sociolinguistic analysis and modern social theory. The book sets out to reunite sociolinguistics with the concepts and perspectives of several of the most influential modern theorists of society and social action, including Bakhtin, Foucault, Habermas, Sacks, Goffman, Bourdieu and Giddens. In eleven newly commissioned chapters, leading sociolinguists reappraise the theoretical framing of their research, reaching out beyond conventional limits. The authors propose significant new orientations to key sociolinguistic themes, including-
- social motivations for language variation and change
- language, power and authority
- language and ageing
- language, race and class
- language planning
In substantial introductory and concluding chapters, the editors and invited discussants reassess the boundaries of sociolinguistic theory and the priorities of sociolinguistic methods. Sociolinguistics and Social Theory encourages students and researchers of sociolinguistics to be more reflexively aware and critical of the social bases of their analyses and invites a reasessment of the place sociolinguistics occupies in the social sciences generally.

Part

I

Language, theory and
the social

1

A comparative perspective on social theoretical accounts of the language–action interrelationship

Sarangi, Srikant

1 Introduction

In this chapter, my aim is to examine in a comparative mode some of the prevalent social theoretical accounts of language-as-action, and to do so against the backdrop of the social/discursive turn in linguistics. My focus is not so much on how social theorists deal with constructs such as power, knowledge, domination, deviance, etc., but rather on how they conceptualise the role of language vis-à-vis these social phenomena in their theorisation of society. I limit my discussion to three social theorists — Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieu — and their language-oriented writings. My choice of these three social theorists may appear arbitrary; it may even be controversial to label them as social theorists. Foucault is very much regarded as a historian: far from offering a new theory of social order, he focusses on deconstructing such theories. Bourdieu categorically denounces any specific intellectual labelling of himself: he calls himself a critical writer interested in social change, and offers a defence of his work against ‘theoricist’ readings (Calhoun et al. 1993). Habermas is more close to the tradition of critical theory as developed in the Frankfurt School, with his emphasis on language-based communicative interaction as foundational to the evolution of social life.

My motivation for this choice, apart from being constrained by the scope of this chapter, is that these three social theorists explicitly engage with linguistic paradigms of Saussure, Chomsky, Austin, etc., and in their work address central (socio)linguistic concepts such as communicative competence, ideal speech situation, symbolic and indexical dimensions of language. Also, they are frequendy invoked as explanatory resources in the sociolinguistic and discourse analytic literature. Foucault has been enshrined in the work of critical discourse analysis (see in particular Fairclough 1989, 1992) and so is Bourdieu, perhaps more in the field of sociolinguistics of education and identity politics (see Erickson, Heller, Watts this volume). Habermas has contributed significantly to the discussion of universalist pragmatics, with its focus on action as linguistic activity.

Although Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieu draw upon language in their theorisation of social structure and agency, they do not actually analyse language data to show the interrelationship between micro- and macro-contexts. For instance, they do not undertake to illustrate what might constitute a competent display of communicative action sequences in real-life situations. I therefore draw upon a data setting — the psychotherapeutic clinic — in order to assess the extent to which these social-theoretical models of language-as-action can illuminate our understanding of social life (in this case, talk-in-interaction in the clinic). It also remains to be seen whether any of the social-theoretical assumptions about the role of language in social interaction can be challenged on the basis of a detailed analysis of socio-linguistic data.

In what follows I begin with a brief overview of the social/discursive turn in linguistics. This provides a backdrop against which I compare the social-theoretical accounts of language-action interrelationship. Next, I offer a detailed discussion of the three individual social-theoretical frameworks, accompanied by data extracts from a psychotherapeutic clinic. I adopt a farther comparative stance in order to see which social-theoretical framework is more suited to our analysis of psychotherapeutic talk, and whether there are identifiable overlaps and contradictions when different analytic frameworks are brought to bear on a given data site.

2 The social/discursive turn in linguistics

In general terms, language stands at the intersection between social sciences (language as social activity — to include action and interaction) and natural science (language as a scientific system and therefore a separate entity out there). Historically speaking, the study of language has always been an interdisciplinary project, and not confined to linguistics. Scholars from a range of disciplines (e.g., Bakhtin, Benveniste, Derrida, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Nietzsche, Volosinov, Vygotsky, Wittgenstein) have foregrounded a view of language in the development of their distinct approaches to the study of human thought and action vis-à-vis social and cultural factors. For instance, both Lévi-Strauss (1963) and Lacan (1968) share the view that ‘the deep structures of human consciousness’ can only be grasped by paying attention to their linguistic realisations. Lévi-Strauss argues in favour of how invariant linguistic rules can contribute to our understanding of ‘structural relations’ in the anthropological sense (for example, kinship structure). In the psychoanalytic setting, Lacan insists that the language in which dreams are reported, not the dreams themselves, should become the prime object of analysis.

Within linguistics, language has been objectified as a system (Saussure, Jakobson, Chomsky, etc.). Saussure (1966 [1916]) proposed a set of binary oppositions or dualities in the study of language (for instance, duality of individual and society; duality of langue and parole; duality of concrete and abstract; duality of identity and opposition). Contrary to what many scholars believe, Merleau-Ponty (1974) argues that Saussure was primarily concerned with the speaking subject and the inseparability of synchrony and diachrony. Craib (1998: 39) summarises Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure as follows:

[Saussure’s] system of differentiation is the means of generating meaning within the ‘life-world’ of a society and to learn a language is to learn the rules of differentiation around which structure is built. In this sense language pre-exists what can be said with it; but at this level the structure of a language only makes meaning possible — it is actualised in use, and here we are referred back to the speaking subject.

It is worth noting Saussure’s views about how meaning is realisable through, and also constrained by, language structure. This relationship between preexistent language structure and situated meaning can easily be mapped on to the relationship between social structure and social action (see section 3 below). At the interactional level, as we will see later in our illustrative data taken from a psychotherapeutic setting, everyday formulation of unfamiliar experience does impinge upon the relationship between language structure, human experience and agency. There are several overtones here which suggest why Foucault drew upon Saussure’s view of the sign in his project on de-centring the human subject in favour of discourse formations (see section 4.2 below).

Much of mainstream linguistic theory has, however, flourished without a view of language as action, that is, without taking on board the mediating role of language in the shaping of individual–society relations. The development of linguistics as a descriptive science in the Chomskyan tradition is the farthest one can get in keeping language and social action apart. It also marks a disjuncture in the sense that Chomsky does not adequately acknowledge what other disciplinary studies have contributed to the study of language in its social, cultural context.¹ Although Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) theorisation of language is devoid of any social praxis, we notice a paradox when he swaps his scholarly ‘linguistic’ hat in favour of political activism in order to analyse the ideological underpinnings of contemporary political discourse. If we were to undertake a comparative analysis of Chomsky’s political writings and linguistic writings, we would probably notice striking differences at the textual level. This would support the Foucauldian thesis that language (in the sense of discourse) shapes our positions as speaking subjects. At another level, it is arguable that Chomsky’s radical views in the political domain receive the currency they do because of his status as a pioneering linguist. In Bourdieu’s terms, Chomsky is able to transform one form of capital into another even when the two stances and their discoursal realisations do not share a common basis. Perhaps Habermas would see such an explicit or implicit invoking of the linguist identity as undermining Chomsky’s participation in the public sphere. But, as we will see, it is Chomsky’s views about language structure and linguistic competence, rather than his radical political views, which attract the attention of social theorists such as Habermas and Bourdieu.

As an antithesis to Chomsky’s sole focus on ‘language structure’, Halliday (1973, 1985) makes ‘language use’ his topic of study and this leads him to analyse linguistic action at the ideational, textual and interpersonal levels. While Chomsky the linguist has nothing to do with language-as-social action, Halliday insists that language cannot be studied in the social void. Against this bipolarity, we can see the pragmatic linguistic tradition, with its origin in philosophy, building a bridge across the formalist and functionalist views of language, but with little reference to social structure. Although linguistic philosophers such as Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) view language as action, the social context which mediates meaning-making is taken as unproblematic. This is in addition to the difficulty associated with taxonomising all potential speech acts in a given language (Turner 1974). As Bourdieu (1991) rightly points out, the meaning of what is said depends crucially upon the status and role the speaker of the utterance occupies in a given social milieu. It is this social milieu which remains undertheorised in the speech act model of performative action.

In the 1970s, the dominant paradigms of sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov 1972a, 1972b; Gumperz and Hymes 1972) addressed the ‘social’ dimension in different ways (variational distribution of linguistic parameters, competence- and rule-based ethnography of speaking, contextualisation cues and indexicality, etc. — see Coupland’s introduction to this volume). In their early works, both Labov and Hymes focused on the variable relationship between society and language use, but the model of society itself does not receive critical scrutiny. In critiquing Bernstein’s (1971) stratified model of elaborate codes and restricted codes, Labov (1972b), for instance, goes on to illustrate in empirical terms the logical and variable structure of Black Vernacular English. What we have here is a detailed linguistic desc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Sociolinguistic theory and social theory
• Part I. Language, theory and the social
• Part II: Language and discourse as social practice
• Part III: Language, ideology and social categorisation
• Part IV: Retrospective commentaries
• ‘Motivational relevancies’: Some methodological reflections on social theoretical and sociolinguistic practice
• Index