ABSTRACT
The study of ‘language use’ was blocked by de Saussure a century ago ([1917] 1967) when he created the dogma of linguistics as the study of language structure (linguistique de langue) at the expense of the study of language use (linguistique de parole). He called the latter enterprise ‘ridiculous’. However, an approach to the study of language based on ‘language use’ seems only natural, and in the eyes of laymen even obvious (cf. Gu 1999). Two broad traditions can be recognised. The first is a ‘language-as-product’ tradition that endeavours to broaden its scope by starting from sounds, words, and sentences – the products of linguistic analysis – (cf. Brown and Yule 1983; Schiffrin 1987 for criticism of this approach). The second tradi-
tion is known as the ‘language-as-action tradition’, which stresses language as a form of action (cf. Clark 1996). The latter tradition developed from work by philosophers (e.g. Austin 1962) and sociologists (e.g. Goffman 1974) and focuses on real-time interactions in actual situations. In this study, our orientation is on the second ‘language-as-action’ tradition. Before going into some more details as to the basic tenets of a theory of language use, we will list some of the more obvious drawbacks of a language-asproduct approach to discourse and communication.
