ABSTRACT
In his plenary address to the 9th AILA Congress (1990), Halliday challenged applied linguists to use their expertise to shed light on the social and ecological problems of our time. Pointing out that it is language which constructs the ideologies that sustain the social institutions and practices causing these problems, he urged them to show, for example, “how the grammar produces the ideology of growth and growthism”; to replace “war discourse with peace discourse…”. Other linguists, who share Halliday’s view on the social utility of linguistic research, further argue that language is a factor, like political, economic, and cultural factors, which needs to be investigated in the search for insight into critical social problems (e.g. Urban, 1988; Wertsch, 1987; Connor-Linton et al., 1987; Mehan and Wills, 1988). These same concerns underlie the work of the applied (critical) linguists who have contributed to Language and Peace. Their research illustrates the role played by language in social life, especially those aspects of social practice that inhibit the achievement of a comprehensive peace, i.e. a peace marked by an absence of social discrimination be it based on ethnicity, race, gender, or class, and the absence of physical and psychological violence as the means of dealing with human conflict.1 The research shows how language works through discourse to communicate and reproduce ideologies that support the use of war as a legitimate option for resolving national conflicts as well as inegalitarian and discriminatory social institutions and practices.
