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Abstract
Linguistics is the study of language, and for most non-linguists (including linguistics students), language is about communication. This paper examines the use of the terms communication, communicating and communicative in introductory linguistics texts to uncover the underlying assumptions about communication which they encapsulate. There are, in fact, relatively few mentions of communication in these introductory texts, and possible reasons for this are also examined.
*I would like to thank Helen Fraser and others who initially started me thinking about this issue, in the context of the 2005 ‘Conceptualising Communication’ workshop. I would also like to thank the editors of this special issue of AJL and the reviewers for their helpful comments on my article. I do, of course, take full responsibility for any aspersions cast upon my own profession in the course of this work.
*I would like to thank Helen Fraser and others who initially started me thinking about this issue, in the context of the 2005 ‘Conceptualising Communication’ workshop. I would also like to thank the editors of this special issue of AJL and the reviewers for their helpful comments on my article. I do, of course, take full responsibility for any aspersions cast upon my own profession in the course of this work.
Notes
*I would like to thank Helen Fraser and others who initially started me thinking about this issue, in the context of the 2005 ‘Conceptualising Communication’ workshop. I would also like to thank the editors of this special issue of AJL and the reviewers for their helpful comments on my article. I do, of course, take full responsibility for any aspersions cast upon my own profession in the course of this work.
1‘Linguistics is only a part of this general science [semiotics]; the laws which semiotics will discover will be applicable to linguistics, and so linguistics will have a well-defined place in the field of human sciences’ (my translation).
2This is not to deny that, especially in recent times, many linguists have started working with the ways in which language structure interacts with language use; two of the best-known examples of this work are Ochs et al. (Citation1996) and Couper-Kuhlen and Ford (Citation2004). However the discipline as a whole has tended to shy away from the area of language use in the past, and this kind of work certainly hasn't percolated down to introductory linguistics texts.