Applied linguistics and social contexts
Critical discourse analysis
While applied linguistics contributes to the description of communicative practices partly through its work in discourse analysis, some of its theorists and researchers are committed to analyses which not only describe 'what is', but also enquire into 'how it has come to be, and what it might become, on the basis of which people may be able to make and remake their lives' (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999: 4). For example, a virtual research group concerned with 'language in the new capitalism' is interested in 'the language and meaning of contemporary capitalism, and the links between economic, social and linguistic change in the contemporary world', in the belief that 'a better understanding of how language figures in the new capitalism ... increases our capacity to question and critique it, and to change it' (LNC 2003). The 'critical linguists' and, later, 'critical discourse analysts' who have used the analysis of language practices to illuminate issues of power and inequality include, for example, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), Fairclough (1989, 1995, 2001), Fowler et al. (1979) and Kress (1985). Amongst their data are texts produced by institutions, such as universities, government departments or commercial corporations, the output of news media (both print and broadcast) as well as the discourse of political speeches, and there is, again, a particular affinity between the systemic functional description of language associated with Halliday and the enterprise of exploring large-scale political issues through the analysis of language (see particularly Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999).
The methods available to corpus linguists are also drawn on in studies of social and cultural values. According to Teubert (1999), corpus linguistics 'is based on the concept that language is a fundamentally social phenomenon, which can be observed and described first and foremost in the empirical data readily available, that is, in communication acts'. Corpus linguists have explored cultural preoccupations in their data, such as various examples of specific lexical items being repeatedly found with other words that have one kind of connotation rather than another, leading Stubbs (1996) to propose that the analytic methods made possible by these methods could enhance new versions of the kind of social commentary carried out by Raymond Williams in his Keywords (1976), and he provides examples here and in Stubbs 2001a.
We highlighted the link between discourse analysis with an applied linguistic provenance and the conversation analysis conducted by sociologists. The critical discourse analyst Billig (1999a, 1999b) has attacked traditional conversation analysis on the grounds that it 'conveys an essentially non-critical view of the social world', but there are many analysts who use the CA approach to explore the role of talk in the constitution and maintenance of a symmetrical social relationships, particularly in institutional discourse. For example, the collection edited by Drew and Heritage (1993) reports on the interactions between professionals and 'clients' in a wide variety of settings, including doctor-patient consultations, legal hearings, news interviews, visits by health visitors, psychiatric interviews, and calls to the emergency services. Contributors include sociologists and applied linguists, some of whom are well-known for developing the branch of the discipline which has drawn particularly on anthropological and ethnographic methodologies.
