ABSTRACT
How can sociolinguistics be related to social theory? This is a complicated question for a range of reasons. Obviously what one understands to fall under the purview of sociolinguistics is one issue; precisely which social theory we are talking about is another. A further complication is whether we consider the relation between sociolinguistics and social theory to be additive or agonistic. For example, on the one hand, van Dijk’s (1997) volumes on discourse studies map out an additive approach where various topics — ideology, semantics, register, cognitive representation, and so on — are treated as complementary modules that can be articulated together to contribute to a larger picture. On the other hand, some strands of ethnomethodological conversation analysis provide instead a wholesale respecification of topics, methods and questions. In conversation analysis, for example, the attempt is often not to relate institutions, as prior existing and clearly identifiable phenomena, with the more ephemeral waxing and waning of talk; rather institutional realities are treated as constituted in talk in a variety of ways as participants construct and orient to institutional goals and identities (Drew and Sorjonen 1997; Heritage 1997).
