Language, culture, and discourse

For linguistics and sociology, language, culture, and discourse are non-exhaustive topics. There is a wide plurality of views on discourse, so many that we cannot properly account for them all. For instance, Fairclough (1995) investigates discourses in processes of social and cultural change, or “re-contextualization”, showing how discourse is a social practice that produces ideological work, which therefore can be manipulated and used to produce (or fight) inequalities. ‘Climate change’ is an example of how, over the decades, what were once ‘fringe’ views in society are now ‘mainstream’ as the ‘dominant’ discourse (what is said, who is saying it) has changed. As such, our intention in this chapter is not to provide a thorough account of different views but to collect together affinities in these views. These affinities may be glossed as approaches that take language as representative of culture (“correspondence” approaches) and approaches that treat language as constitutive of the activities it describes (“reflexive” approaches).