ABSTRACT
Social categories – for example, female, student, and American – play an important role in applied linguistics research (Sealey & Carter, 2004). They are used to
categorize, and therefore investigate, members of society, and thus provide a
descriptive framework for understanding how people make sense of each other and
their surroundings. Social categories are also used to understand how interactants
co-construct identities (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998), examine whether membership
to a cultural group is associated with specific grammatical features (Whitehead &
Lerner, 2009), and make critical observations pertaining to relations of power
(Morgan, 2010). Researchers use one of two approaches in the study of social categories: deductive
and inductive. The deductive approach involves categorizing interactants before (and
sometimes without) examining whether the social category has relevance to the
interactions under investigation (e.g. whether research participants tropicalize the
identities ascribed to them by the researcher). The deductive approach is highly
positivistic, as evidenced by the many sociolinguistics studies that use social
categories as independent variables: social categories are used to measure whether
pre-defined group(s) of people exhibit particular linguistic and/or interactional
behaviors.
