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Recent social theory includes important insights into language which constitute a so far underdeveloped resource for sociolinguistics. But much of this theory stops short - theoretical frameworks and categories which socially locate language are not pushed in the direction of a theorisation of language itself, which limits their operational value in research. Sociolinguistics can draw upon social theory to produce more sophisticated theorisations of language which at the same time constitute contributions to social theory. My aim in this paper is to explore what it means to work in a 'transdisciplinary' way. I argue in particular for a transdisciplinary engagement with social theory in which the logic of one theory is put to work in the elaboration of another without the latter being simply reduced to the former. My focus is upon critical discourse analysis (CDA) which I here take to be a part of a broadly conceived sociolinguistics. I shall link this theoretical exploration to a concrete research focus by referring to a discourse analytical study of the current British ('New') Labour Government. with particular reference to its 'reform' of social welfare. I shall be drawing upon the theoretical framework developed in Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999). I have referred to some of the social theory which I find it particularly fruitful to work with, but the paper is intended to suggest a way of working and is in no sense a closed list of theorists - on the contrary, I believe that we should be open to a wide range of theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the evolution of language policy and planning (LPP) as an area of research from the end of World War II to the present day. Based on analysis of the LPP literature, three types of factors are identified as having been instrumental in shaping the field. These factors - macro sociopolitical, epistemological, and strategic - individually and interactively have influenced the kinds of questions asked, methodologies adopted, and goals aspired to in LPP research. Research in LPP is divided into three historical phases: (1) decolonization, structuralism, and pragmatism; (2) the failure of modernization, critical sociolinguistics, and access: and (3) the new world order, postmodernism, and linguistic human rights. The article concludes with a discussion of current research trends and areas requiring further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a response to a paper by Bob Carter and Alison Sealey about the Layder theory of social domains. It is assumed that in engaging in situated activity, people articulate together diverse elements of the social, physical activities, broadly sociological elements such as social procedures and forms of organization, broadly psychological elements including beliefs, knowledges, feelings and values and semiosis. Articulating them together means bringing them into a more or less stabilized combination. These articulations are partly pre-given, the more-or-less stable and durable cumulative effects of past activity. Semiosis figures in two interconnected ways as a moment of a social practice, as a mode of producing social life and in the representation of the world, including the reflexive self-representations which are an inherent part of a social practice. Representations are always positioned and there are no representations which transcend social positionality. Representations are constantly being evaluated against each other in terms of epistemic gain. If the goal is to work theoretically across disciplines and theories, a theoretically coherent view of what it means to put the logic of one theory to work within another is needed.

This article comments on the paper by Bob Carter and Alison Sealey about realist sociolinguistics. The attempt to develop a realist sociolinguistics risks major theoretical and analytic confusions. In particular, it raises reflexive concerns about the production of its particular social ontology, it raises questions about how participants' constructions will be dealt with when they are different from those of the researcher and it can lead to a confused and impoverished view of language. Carter and Sealey's argument draws on tropes and rhetorical maneuvers characteristic of social science constructions of realism. Probably the most disarming of these is the production of a set of objects and processes that will make up the ontology of this particular realism and then treating this as natural and separate from the authors. The danger from the proposed enterprise of realist sociolinguistics is that it forces the analyst away from taking participants' activities and orientations seriously. The constructive and active business of talk and texts is constrained by the requirement that they fit into the analyst's prior ontology. Carter and Sealey have provided an engaging realist promissory note, yet its creditworthiness is far from established.