The Place of Words in Discourse and in Education

Abstract

By examining the place of words in the discourses of English, this book follows the ‘discursive turn’ in the social sciences. Linguists, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists have long discovered important differences in the discursive practices of culturally, socially, and historically remote peoples, differences that no doubt have deep implications for differences in social cognition and human interests. Language offers the best evidence for seeing differences in social cognition more clearly, and for appreciating the range of human interests that can occupy even a single social space. In particular, by studying the lexico-semantic range of people who are positioned differently by their sociocultural experiences and discursive practices, we can establish with a little more certainty the different ways that different peoples use different meaning systems to interpret their world.