Sociology's Engagement with Linguistic Concepts

It may be wondered what business a sociologist has to be meddling nowadays with language and

linguistics. The fact is that sociology cannot free itself from all the more

or less subtle forms of domination which linguistics and its concepts still exert

over the social sciences, except by taking linguistics as the object of a sort

of genealogy, both internal and external. This would seek above all to bring

to light simultaneously the theoretical presuppositions of the object-constructing

operations by which linguistics was founded (f/~ Bour- dieu, 1977,

pp. 23-25) and the social conditions of the production and, espe-