Coulmas Handbook of Sociolinguistics / Part 3 - Linguistics dimensions of Society / part 3 - 22. Language and the Mediation of Experience Linguistic Representation and Cognitive Orientation

22. Language and the Mediation of Experience: Linguistic Representation and Cog... Page 11 of 11

As well as purely conceptual analysis, it is important to do empirical studies, which might concentrate on: (1) Socially important cases where language may influence assumptions, perceptions and stereotypes. (2) Corpus-based analyses of the frequency and distribution of fixed phrases and collocations. (3) Forms of language engineering which encourage speakers to change their language use. This has happened with success in scientific registers and in nonsexist language. (4) Forms of language education which teach students how to identify implicit points of view in texts, and how to express things in different ways.

Experience shows that educational approaches cannot make people avoid prejudiced and stereotyped thinking. But they can perhaps contribute “just that extra critical edge of consciousness” (R. Williams, 1976: 21).

1 I am grateful to Gwyneth Fox, Director of Cobuild, Birmingham, UK, for permission to use the Bank of English corpus; to the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities for permission to use the LOB corpus; and to Gabi Keck for detailed comments on an earlier draft.

Cite this article

STUBBS, MICHAEL. "Language and the Mediation of Experience: Linguistic Representation and Cognitive Orientation." The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Coulmas, Florian (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 1998. Blackwell Reference Online. 28 December 2007 <http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode? id=g9780631211938_chunk_g978063121193824>

Bibliographic Details

The Handbook of Sociolinguistics

Edited by: Florian Coulmas eISBN: 9780631211938

Print publication date: 1998

http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/uid=532/tocnode?id=g9780631211938... 28.12.2007