ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book suggests that there are strong and pervasive connections between linguistic structure and social structure. It demonstrates that social groupings and relationships influence the linguistic behaviour of speakers and writers, and moreover, that these socially determined patterns of language influence non-linguistic behaviour including, crucially, cognitive activity. Conventional linguistics and sociolinguistics texts are not appropriated as sources of data, but are treated as independent subjects for critical interpretation. The book seeks to offer, by exemplification and discussion, an analytic method that can be applied to texts and discourse. Speakers make systematic selections to construct new discourse, on the basis of systems of ideas–ideologies–and complex purposes of all kinds. In speech-acts the major meanings are concerned with establishing linguistic role-relations between speaker and hearer and the consequent control of the addressee's behaviour.
