Language and Social Life

Abstract

The number of books reviewed in this symposium is but a sampling of currently published social scientific tomes devoted to language. The range of theoretical and methodological concerns that languageoriented researchers display is vast, and the quality of investigations runs consistently high. To describe in a few brisk sentences the different contributions and complex arguments of laborious authorial efforts is a difficult task in its own right. Nevertheless, our essayists have welcomed the opportunity to call attention to the explosive energy and burgeoning research in many different investigative arenas where language occupies center court. To obtain a handle on this work, it is useful to distinguish between researchers who examine language on a large scale, much as Stanley Lieberson (1981) and others in sociology have been doing for some time, and those who are interested in language as a medium or site of social activity, which requires closer scrutiny. It seems that the larger view, which addresses questions of how whole languages develop, persist, change, and decline, is being outpaced. Although books of this type are reviewed here, the overwhelming number fit within two other genres. The first genre includes studies of language and social interaction, if we can use that phrase momentarily to cover aspects of anthropological linguistics, cognitive sociology, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, ethnography of speaking, interpretive sociolinguistics, and symbolic interaction. The second genre consists of the poststructuralist examination of texts, especially the serious statements of the human sciences themselves rather than everyday speech.'