Abstract
Abstract Many important changes have taken place in the study of language in social context since the first sociolinguistic studies were carried out in the USA and Great Britain in the early 1960s. In this chapter, I shall concentrate on the consequences of two particular developments: first, the shift of emphasis from the sentence or utterance to ‘text in context’, in other words to the study of discourse, which in tum led to the linking of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis; secondly, the more systematic approach to the study of context, which entailed both a more interdisciplinary perspective and a greater emphasis on qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) research. The results of these developments are that sociological, psychological, social-psychological, and historical perspectives have been incorporated into sociolinguistic study, and that the analysis of context has become an important object of study in its own right. In particular, a whole area of research has developed focusing on the study of language use in institutional settings.
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