Social categories and theoretical descriptions
Culture, structure and agency
Structured social relations, then, make certain outcomes more likely than others for the occupants of different class positions. These probabilities, however, are always conditioning rather than determining, and each individual has some degree of choice about how to respond to the contexts in which she finds herself (Layder 1997; Carter and Sealey 2000). One of the areas in which a degree of choice is exercised is in relation to the cultural resources that are a feature of the context of social existence. Language is pre-eminent amongst these cultural resources, being not only the means of accessing these resources, but also a resource in its own right. As a cultural resource and a 'World 3' entity, one of the properties which language possesses, we have argued, is an objective existence. What makes a theory, a book, an idea- or indeed, a language variety - objective knowledge is its 'possibility or potentiality of being under stood, its dispositional character of being understood or interpreted, or misunderstood or misinterpreted' (Popper 1972: 116).
World 3 knowledge therefore has an independence from individual users; it does not have a color or a gender; it does not belong to one social class or another. Its elements can be used by any individual or group possessing the appropriate symbolic code. This is a significant constraint. People's structural location may mean that they do not have access to the symbolic code necessary to access parts of World 3, and their geographical location will influence their access to different language varieties.
There are other constraints on people's access to linguistic resources. An individual who seeks to become a fluent speaker of a language not widely used in the locality faces obvious practical difficulties, while adopting the speech style of those who are widely seen as members of a different social category is likely to be viewed as a form of 'crossing' (Rampton 1995b), which may attract social censure. Nevertheless, such deviations from the supposed norms are possible, because language has properties which make it potentially available to any human speaker.
Furthermore, language as a system constrains its speakers in various ways, pointing to its partial autonomy from its speakers. Beaugrande (1999: 131) describes the interplay between language and agency thus:
The standing constraints persisting on the plane of the system (e.g. the English article going before the noun) interact with emergent constraints being only decided on the plane of the discourse (e.g. the lexical choices appropriate for a job interview).
Reducing language to simply what speakers say (as in various forms of constructionism) eliminates its World 3 structural features, namely its relations of coherence and logicality, its grammatical, syntactical and lexical patterns and relations. Reducing language to its systemic, logical features (as in various forms of structuralism) eliminates its World 3 emergent features, namely that language change is brought about by the engagement of human purpose with an independent and antecedent body of linguistic resources.
In both cases the conflationary impulse results in the neglect of the interplay between linguistic and other cultural resources, and the processes by means of which human beings, in seeking to modify or maintain aspects of their social worlds, modify or maintain those resources. When this interplay is overlooked (or squeezed out) the outcome is often too close an association, in the researcher's account, between language and its most typical speaker. Cultural coherence is then assumed by the researcher on the basis of typical speech use and typical speech use is adduced as the basis for a claim for cultural coherence (Archer 1996).
