Language, Law, and Social Meanings: Linguistic/Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Law

Abstract

I would like to thank Joseph Sanders for his careful editorial assistance and Bette Sikes for her expert editorial work. 1 As Merry (p. 110) and Conley and O'Barr (p. 2) note, the term has been used in different ways by different disciplinary traditions. Social theorists, anthropologists, and linguists use the term to refer to both spoken and written language and speak of types of discourse that vary in their structure. Thus discourses are stretches of language that can be viewed as structured or coherent; often analysts also examine the ways in which some stretches of language differ in principled ways from other kinds of language. Some discourse analysts from these traditions also pay particular attention to speech context. As Merry (p. 9) notes, a growing number of scholars, from Michel Foucault to Martha Fineman, have been concerned with understanding the social constitution and contexts of discourses. This kind of approach views discourses as always ideologically laden, as embedded in power relations in nonrandom ways. From this vantage, then, kinds of are kinds of discourse. However, to the extent that we embrace Merry's somewhat Foucauldian vision of discourses, discourse analysis would involve in-depth study of the social context of speech. It would be possible to analyze kinds of talk in terms of linguistic differences without much attention to the relevant communities and social history, but this would not be analysis in Merry's sense. (It would, however, meet the definition of analysis used by Conley and O'Barr-and by most linguists.) While at several points in this essay I use the distinction between and to signal this kind of difference in approach, it is not my intent to assert any canonical usage of the terms. (Indeed, my own practice in general is to use the term broadly.) Here the distinction is meant to signal a difference between Conley and O'Barr's more in-depth treatment of the language itself, as opposed to Merry's more in-depth analysis of the social/economic/political contexts of the language she studied.