ABSTRACT
The major consideration of language produced by a member of the Bakhtin circle is to be found in Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, published in 1929. This will form the main topic of this chapter, together with Bakhtin’s own accounts of language at various moments in his writing. What Voloshinov and Bakhtin have to say about language, and the study of language, is remarkable, not only because what they wrote in the late 1920s appears to anticipate some of the directions of contemporary thought, but more importantly because it suggests some exciting and fruitful ways of thinking about language and the manner in which we act and interact with each other through language.
