Language, Interaction and Society

Language has always been neglected in the social sciences. This has also happened in the humanities and philosophy, where (real) conversations and (concrete) communicative exchanges have often received little attention. Yet, it is too often forgotten that it is languages, conversations, that construct reality. Therefore the saying "facts, not words" is empirically unfounded.
Within this perspective, the course offers an overview of the different approaches to the study of the relationships between language, social interactions (micro) and society (macro). This interdisciplinary field intersects several disciplines:
· the sociology of language (also known as macro-sociolinguistics), introduced by Joshua Fishman, which studies society and its impact on language;
· sociolinguistics, born in the West in the 1960s, founded by linguists such as William Labov in the United States and Basil Bernstein in the United Kingdom. Sociolinguistics focuses on the effect of society on language, the latter being the main object of study. Therefore, it studies the effect of society on language and how language varies according to the sociological background of the user (such as gender, ethnicity and social class).
Sociolinguistics has many points in common with:
· pragmatics, ethnography of communication (Dell Hymes), ethnopragmatics (Alessandro Duranti)
· and is closely related to linguistic anthropology (John Gumperz, Charles Goodwin).
These approaches will explore the relationships between a) language and interactional context (micro), and language and social context (macro).
The second part of the course will be dedicated to the different approaches and methods for the analysis of speech (discourse and conversation analysis): the presentation of research and group works will be the core of this second part.
The third part will focus on racist discourse and discriminatory discourses (gender, sexual orientation). Group works will also be presented in this part.