ABSTRACT
The introduction of yet another term to describe what students of language do may appear to be merely one more example of the excesses to which social scientists lend themselves in the delusion that progress in science is produced by the invention of new terms. I submit, however, that the introduction of the new term ecolinguistics will aid us in understanding what the proper approach to language should be. Even more important, it serves to include the terms, psycho-, neuro-, and sociolinguistics. Webster’s Third New International unabridged dictionary defines the prefix “eco” as “habitat or environment especially as a factor significantly influencing the mode of life or the course of development. “In this chapter, I will emphasize the importance of the environment in the study of language, beginning with the assumption that language always occurs in a context and can be understood only in a context. To study language outside of its context or to study it by simulating it—as is done not only with computers but whenever psycholinguists construct some particularly tortuous sentence to test still another wrinkle in transformation theory—is to study a very small, special subset of behavior that is surely unrepresentative of language as it is found among human interlocutors.
