Carter&Sealey (00) StructureAgency

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# Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 4/1, 2000: 320
Language, structure and agency:
What can realist social theory oer to
sociolinguistics?
1
Bob Carter and Alison Sealey
University of Warwick, United Kingdom
The sociolinguistic enterprise raises fundamental questions about the nature
of the relationships between social phenomena (such as social class or gender)
and linguistic variation, while within social theory a persistent concern is the
nature of the relationship between structure and agency. Sociolinguistics can
draw on social theory for analysis of the relationship between speaker and
system, the role of language in the creation, maintenance and change of
social institutions, and the role of human agency in sociolinguistic phenom-
ena. This article summarises the key tenets of a sociological realism, based on
the recent work of Margaret Archer (in particular her exploration of analyt-
ical dualism) and of Derek Layder (specically his theory of `social domains').
It relates these ideas to sociolinguistics, arguing that language can be seen to
have a dierent signicance, depending on which domain is the focus of the
researcher's interest. The article considers the distinctiveness of this approach,
contrasting it with structuralist and social constructionist accounts and with
structuration. It concludes by identifying some methodological implications,
suggesting that sociological realism oers a productive theoretical framework
for sociolinguistics in dealing with questions of language, structure and
agency.
KEYWORDS: Realism, structure, agency, structuration, constructionism
We begin this paper by proposing that sociolinguistics, whether broadly or
narrowly conceived, has not yet developed an adequate theory of social action
which accounts for the phenomena with which it is concerned. We then set
out the principles of a specic version of sociological realism, which we suggest
has an explanatory potential applicable to these phenomena. We develop this
claim by contrasting our realist approach with other theories which have been
drawn on, implicitly or explicitly, in sociolinguistics, and we conclude with a
consideration of some methodological implications of the position we are
proposing.
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SOCIOLINGUISTICS: A DISCIPLINE IN SEARCH OF A THEORY?
In 1988, at the First Hong Kong Conference on Language and Society, a round
table debate addressed the question `To what extent has the ``sociolinguistic
enterprise'' made substantial progress in recent years in moving towards a
unied sociolinguistic theory of language?' (Bolton and Kwok 1992). If there
was a consensus in the responses, it was in acknowledging that there is not, as
yet, à unied sociolinguistic theory of language' (see also Fasold 1990).
Wardaugh also concludes that sociolinguistics is a long way from identifying
a unied theory which can explain `how language and society are related'
(1992: 375). More recently, Chambers' Sociolinguistic Theory (1995), sought to
address this lacuna, but he felt obliged to conne his contribution to a
discussion of the linguistic variable in urban dialectology, continuing a tradition
criticised by writers such as Williams (1992), Cameron (1997) and Hasan
(1992) for its unwillingness to engage with broader sociological concerns. A
recent synoptic article in this journal (Coupland 1998) makes it clear that there
continues to be disagreement among sociolinguists about what the scale and
role of sociolinguistic theory is or ought to be. In dening our own terms here,
we should state that we take the broad view of what sociolinguistics comprises,
endorsing Halliday's claim that `the linguistic system is a sociolinguistic system'
(Halliday 1978: 72). Like Stubbs, we would see the (socio)linguistic enterprise
as `part of the attempt to nd explanations for human behaviour and to
formulate a theory of social action' (1996: 58).
Clearly, we are by no means the rst to have been intrigued by this issue, by
questions such as: How and in what ways can individuals and groups modify
language? Does language itself have a role in conditioning (i.e. constraining and
enabling) the utterances (and writing) of individuals and groups? What is the
role of language in the maintenance and change of social relations and
institutions? In this brief paper, we aim to do no more than introduce a
particular version of sociological realism and consider how it might help in
the applied conceptualization of: language itself, social relations, and the
dynamics of the relationship between language, structure and agency.
SOCIOLOGICAL REALISM
The social theory on which we are drawing here does not appear to us to have
been utilised very extensively in sociolinguistics. There has been much discus-
sion in the social sciences in recent years about the extent to which the natural
world and the social world are susceptible to similar kinds of explanation, and
the work of the `critical realist' Roy Bhaskar, in particular, features in this
continuing debate. Corson, who also laments the lack of àny coherent or
consistent guiding philosophy' in applied linguistics (1997: 166), sees a role for
Bhaskarite realism, but we see greater potential in the work of Derek Layder and
CARTER AND SEALEY 4
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
Margaret Archer, whose realism emphasises the distinction between structure
and agency.
We want to maintain that structured social relations provide the contextual
conditions for social action, and are a feature of social reality which extends
beyond individual consciousness and control. Examples of `structured social
relations' would include patterns of income distribution, legal and political
systems, belief systems such as religions, and so on. In a signicant sense, then,
structured social relations have an externality and objectivity which gives the
social world an independence from social actors. However, our argument does
not entail a reication of structures, since it is a view of the social world in
which it is only human beings who can have intentions, purposes and
reexivity: it is only human beings who can act in the world and are thus
the àgents' of social action.
These propositions mean that we need ways of describing this reality and
the interplay between it and those who people it. They require a dualistic,
stratied analysis, which can distinguish between structure and agency, on
the grounds that they are ontologically distinct from each other. In other
words, social structures are dierent kinds of things from human beings, and
interactions between co-present human beings are dierent things from either
of these.
Archer's analytical dualism
A realist approach, then, insists on an analytic separation of structure and
agency. (We should point out in this context that this dualism is distinct from
the linguistic dualisms of langue / parole or competence / performance.) Analytical
dualism in sociology permits the distinction between system integration and
social integration (Lockwood 1964). This distinction enables a recognition
that a well integrated structural arrangement (well integrated from the
structure point of view that is) may not be one that encourages the
commitment of the people who make it work, just as a social system which
most people regard as commodious may be, structurally speaking, a shambles.
Consider for example the introduction of tightly organised inspection arrange-
ments in schools and universities which not only produce comparable data
about `teaching quality', enabling dierential distribution of funds, but also
generate insecurity and demoralisation among those inspected. System inte-
gration in this example may be adequate or better for the achievement of the
intended goals, but social integration is weak if those involved are discon-
tented with the arrangements imposed on them. Analytical dualism also
encourages a view of structure and agency as operating within dierent
temporal modalities, that is operating according to distinct or dierent time
scales: systemic changes in education systems take place over a number of
years, but their impact on individuals (job restructuring, say, or redundancy)
is likely to be experienced as immediate.
LANGUAGE, STRUCTURE AND AGENCY 5
This distinction is rened in the recent work of both Layder and Archer.
Although there are some dierences between their respective approaches, both
insist on the importance of a further internal dierentiation of structure and of
agency. Layder (1997) suggests that it is useful to view social reality as
comprising four analytically separable social `domains': psychobiography and
situated activity (which, broadly speaking, refer to dierent aspects of agency),
and social settings and contextual resources (which refer to structures).
Layder's domain theory
Layder's model attempts to capture the social and temporal distancing of social
relations from lived experience, while recognising that, at the same time, every
lived experience is embedded within the other domains.
CARTER AND SEALEY 6
Figure 1: Analytical dualism
Figure 2: Social domains (adapted from Layder 1997: 78)
The rst of these social domains is that of `psychobiography'. All human
beings develop unique biographies in which `personal feelings, attitudes and
predispositions' contribute to a continuing selfhood, which is èmbedded in their
daily routines and experiences' (Layder 1997: 23). Thus `the notion of
``psychobiography'' points to the development of the self as a linked series of
evolutionary transitions, or transformations in identity and personality at
various signicant junctures in the lives of individuals' (Layder 1997: 47).
The second social domain, which also focuses on human agency, is that of
`situated activity'. Despite the unique quality of our psychobiographies, human
beings are pre-eminently social actors, much of whose lives involve the
negotiation of face-to-face interaction. `Situated activity' refers to these experi-
ences of social life.
The situated activity of face-to-face conduct, however, is itself embedded
within what Layder identies as the domain of `social settings'. Here the focus
shifts from agency that is, what actors do and experience to structures, the
social context within which these interactions are situated. These are the
physical and social contexts òf social activities and specic social practices'
(Layder 1997: 87), such as workplaces, schools or places of worship, and their
routinised ways of doing things.
This brings us to the domain which is most distant from actors' experiences.
`Contextual resources' refers to the anterior distributions of material and
cultural capital which social actors inherit as a consequence of being born in
a particular place at a particular time. While individuals have no choice about
this, the distributions of these resources are systematically reproduced. This
again entails a particular view of the relation between agency and structure,
one in which each is regarded as possessing distinct properties, while they are
also mutually inuential.
We are not, of course, claiming that we experience these domains in this
stratied way, as we live from moment to moment and day to day, but we
nevertheless do want to insist that our lives are constantly shaped by all of
them, and the relations between them, and that we are more aware of some of
them than others. Structural domains involve institutional constraints and
enablements that are themselves partly the product of the distribution and
allocation of economic, political and cultural resources, which means that they
may be more opaque to actors' knowledgeability. Actor knowledge is greater at
the level of interaction. For example, most social actors are more aware of the
way other people they meet respond to their class accent than they are of the
possible connections between social attitudes to accents or standard languages
and global economics.
Our adoption of the domain approach allows us to highlight some other
important features of the social world which are relevant to the study of
language and society. To begin with, it is clear from this model that some
people will be more inuential than others, that is, their actions and their
decisions will have more far-reaching consequences. We might consider these
as `macro actors' (Mouzelis 1991). However, it should also be clear that since
actors occupy dierent domains simultaneously their inuence may vary across
dierent domains. (Think, for example, of an employee who has relatively low
status in the social setting of work, which is reected in the situated activity of
his interactions with his employer. This same individual may, within his family,
wield enormous inuence as a tyrannical parent.) In this sense, power is a
relational feature of the dierent `domains' we inhabit.
We also want to draw attention to the role played by contextual resources in
the distribution of life chances. One feature of this domain is its remoteness from
actors: it is anterior, and individuals' placement within it is therefore involun-
taristic and objective. We are not consulted, that is, about whether we want to
be born to Jewish parents in an anti-semitic society, or to be born female in a
sexist one. In other words, the domain of contextual resources is concerned with
the collective placement of actors where there is a necessary and internal
relation between the location and the life chances associated with it (Archer
1995: 257). So, when we refer to `the working class' or `women', we are saying
something about the relations between the sorts of life chances available to
someone in that position and also about the nature of the position itself. In other
words, being working class of necessity only makes sense in the context of the
relationship between the working class and the class(es) that dene it as such in
terms of the distribution of resources. Thus:
. . . the major distributions of resources upon which `life chances' pivot are themselves
dependent upon relations between the propertied and the propertyless, the powerful
and the powerless, the discriminators and the subjects of discrimination: and these, of
course, are relationships between collectivities'. (Archer 1995: 257)
Emergence
Another way of expressing this is to say that life chances are an emergent property
of the relations between the powerful and the powerless. Èmergence' is crucial
to this realist account. It refers to the generation of properties and powers which
are not reducible to their constituent elements and must therefore be regarded as
distinct from them. For example, a linguistic artefact in the form of a written text
is emergent from the engagement of authorial consciousness with language, but
as a text it is irreducible to either of these elements and possesses properties and
powers which are partially autonomous of them and capable of exerting
inuence in their own right (the startling career of The Satanic Verses and its
dire consequences for its author provides a compelling example).
These are perhaps quite abstract concepts, but, as they form the philosophical
background to the domain theory perspective, they are crucial to what follows.
Limitations of space mean that we can do no more than provide this necessarily
condensed outline. We now go on to develop the applicability of this perspective
to sociolinguistics.
CARTER AND SEALEY 8
RELATING SOCIOLOGICAL REALISM TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS
What specically, then, does this analytical approach oer to sociolinguistics?
An important implication for the conceptualization of language is that it can be
seen to have a dierent signicance, depending on which domain is the focus of
the researcher's interest.
The psychobiographical domain
The capacity to acquire language is a universal attribute of human beings as
biological organisms, but this ability is only realized through their engagement
with each other and with the world. Thus there will be both commonalities and
dierences in the language experience and behaviour of individuals. No
individual has quite the same linguistic biography as any other, and each of
us has the capacity to produce utterances which have never been spoken before.
Also, because we think in language, employing language as the means by
which we stitch together a biography over time, explorations of the stories
people tell about themselves provide accounts of the psychobiographical
domain.
The domain of situated activity
At the level of situated activity, language is the principal available resource on
which we draw for communication, and to convey a sense of ourselves to others
as well as to position others in relation to that self. `Situations' are those
contexts where face to face interaction generates `denitions' of reality, and
where, correspondingly, actors have varying degrees of inuence over these
denitions. Thus language can be used as a source of power in interactions.
Although in crucial senses it derives this power from the domains of social
settings and contextual resources, as we explain below, nevertheless it is a
conduit for the negotiation of aspects of the relations between participants, such
as relative status, levels of intimacy and so on.
Research in the traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis,
pragmatics, symbolic interactionism, social constructionism and some versions
of discourse analysis contributes to sociolinguistics within this domain. Situated
activity is the area of social life which most people know most about, since it is
the domain most accessible to direct perception. Here reexivity is at a premium,
and interlocutors carry out rapid monitoring and repair work. However, despite
the fact that the analyst therefore appears to be dealing with knowledgeable
actors, nevertheless for domain theory the limits of the social world are not
determined by what the participants perceive them to be.
The domain of social settings
At the level of social settings, we are particularly concerned with collective
agency, and with ìnstitutional facts' as discussed by Searle (1995) and Stubbs
(1996). Social processes of legitimation, ideology and authorization can be
explored, in ways which are familiar from the contributions of (critical)
discourse analysis, for example Fairclough's exploration of the interrelationship
of discourse and orders of discourse with `social structures, social relations,
systems of knowledge and belief, ideologies . . .' (1996: 5). Stubbs likewise
denes discourse as language potential `. . . used in regular ways, in large
numbers of texts, whose patterns therefore embody particular social values and
views of the world' (1996: 158), and language in this domain can be thought of
as a cultural and political resource. The domain of social settings impacts more
signicantly on some interactions than others, and language use in settings
such as schools and universities, asylums, prisons, hospitals, workplaces and so
on can be a focus for research. Texts themselves may be produced not by
individuals, but by policy-making committees, for example, and even indi-
vidually produced texts have a dierent social status from private, inter-
personal communications. Sociolinguistic research might include the analysis
of texts generated within institutions such as universities, commercial com-
panies, government departments and so on. A particularly clear example of
institutionally generated text is provided by Bell's (1991) account of the
production of news copy. It is almost impossible to attribute individual author-
ship to news text which passes through many hands (journalist, copy editor,
sub-editor and so on). And ultimate arbitration on issues of representation rests
with `macro actors', the owners of news corporations. Analyses of language and
texts in this domain would always have to be located sociologically, mindful of
the question: which groups are doing what, for which purposes and to whom?
Sociolinguistically, the nature of the relationship between social process and
language needs to be specied. (See Stubbs 1997 for recommendations along
similar lines).
The domain of contextual resources
The domain of contextual resources is the one most remote from individual
experience. By our account, language in this domain is àlways already there',
as one half of Bakhtin's formulation has it (Clark and Holquist 1984: 217). (It is
within the domains of agency psychobiography and situated activity that
words are, simultaneously, `never ever before', (Clark and Holquist 1984))
Because its existence is anterior to individual speakers, language in this domain
is a resource which does not rely on actor knowledgeability. Hence the
demonstrable probabilistic patterns in language which are revealed by corpus
analysis. Hence also the equally involuntaristic associations between particular
vowel sounds, for example, and speakers' regional or class origins. These
CARTER AND SEALEY 10
patterns are not within the control of specic speakers. Neither is the unequal
distribution of `cultural capital' (in Bourdieu's sense) which also correlates with
dierential access to the standard language or received pronunciation. Lin-
guistic facts, at this level, exert a conditioning but not determining inuence
on social actors.
Why `conditioning but not determining'? Why both àlways already there'
and `never ever before'? Why is it that people have an intuitive sense that
human beings are both creative and constrained? In our view, only a stratied
theory of the social world provides an answer, one in which both structure and
agency are accounted for.
THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF REALIST SOCIAL THEORY FOR
SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH
In this section we shall state briey the main ways in which our position diers
from some other inuential theories in sociolinguistics, although it will be
obvious that there are many overlaps between our position and others, both in
areas of concern and in some aspects of the explanations oered.
The rst point to make here is that we want to retain a view of the social
world in which it is human beings who do things. Our commitment to a
conception of the social world as analytically stratied entails keeping in focus
the question `whose activities are responsible for what and when?' (Archer
1995: 141). Neglect of this question runs several risks. Too great an emphasis
on structures denies actors any power and fails to account for human beings
making a dierence. Too great an emphasis on agency overlooks the (we
would claim) very real constraints acting on us in time and space. And
reducing each to merely a manifestation of the other a conceptual running-
together of dierent domains (or `conationism' (Archer 1988, 1995) )
necessarily results in a theory which is unable to capture the complex
relations between them.
The risks we would identify within sociolinguistic research are of either
reducing language to the sum of individual utterances (thereby denying its
systemic, partially autonomous features) or endowing it with the ability to
construct social reality.
`Downwards conation'
Our conception of language as a potential, of discourses as cultural resources,
allows for them to be powerful when deployed by actors, but they cannot go
about doing things on their own. Various writers have taken up Popper's notion
that there is a `World 3', of objective public knowledge (as distinct from the
`World 1' of physical bodies and `World 2' of `subjective knowledge'), and that
language às a product, . . . is a World 3 artefact, self-existent in that world, but
manifested by an innitely complex and delicate World 1 World 2 interaction'
(Lass 1980: 129). (See also Stubbs 1996: 243.) In this sense, language may be
thought of as partially autonomous. As Halliday says, ìt is the system which
has a history' (1991: 34). It is at this level that language in use displays, when
examined over the large quantities of examples made possible by corpus
analysis, properties of which individual users may be unaware. Such properties
of language (patterns of collocations, for instance, and connotations attaching
to lexical items) which native-speaker introspection does not reveal, we would
classify as `relations between relations' (Archer 1995), where a system is more
than the sum of its parts, and macro is more than micro writ large. We shall
return to this claim below.
Language may be a kind of system, then, and have systemic features, but as a
human product it cannot have purposes and intentions of its own. A conception
of language which endows it with its own purposes and intentions makes it
dicult to acknowledge the role of speakers, and is in this sense an example of
what we would term, following Archer, `downwards conation'. In other words,
agency and structure are conated by making structure pre-eminent.
In the context of sociolinguistic studies of variation in matters of grammar
and pronunciation, language is often portrayed as having an àdaptive function'
(Chambers 1995: 207), a notion criticized by for example Hasan (1992), Lass
(1980) and Williams (1992). While living organisms can adapt in an evolu-
tionary, Darwinian sense, language as a symbolic system cannot. This kind
of societal functionalism has often been criticized in sociology for being
teleological: in order to adapt successfully the adapter must know in advance
what form of adaptation is going to work, whereas the realist approach
suggested here draws attention to the emergent nature of social reality, and
the unintended consequences of social action. Furthermore, as we have said, we
believe that it is human beings who actively deploy language in the generation
and reproduction of the social world. And they do this in ways which are
creative, for a whole range of social and political purposes, not all of which will
lead them to adapt language in the conformist ways which are implied by the
consensual idea of a language which has adaptive functions. Of course the
system integration needed to allow language to function as a tool of commun-
ication constrains the possibilities open to speakers adapting language to their
own ends, but, as we have said, system integration cannot compel social
integration. (This is something which language planners are often disappointed
to discover.)
In our account, probabilistic patterns of correlations between people's class
position, and their use of language as a way of living that class position, are
properties of language as a contextual resource, involuntaristic and often below
the level of individual consciousness. However, these patterns cannot in
themselves determine how particular people born into particular social loca-
tions will use language, though the patterns have some predictive utility. An
individual's sociolinguistic repertoire would in our terms be an emergent feature
of the interaction between the language (the domain of contextual resources)
and personal experience (the domain of psychobiography). Further, the ways
people will select from their repertoire in any specic instance are an emergent
feature of the interaction between social action in these domains and in those of
situated activity and social settings. In other words, the same person, born
(involuntaristically, of course) in a certain place at a certain time into a family of
particular economic circumstances, will develop a linguistic repertoire in a
predictable sequence, with broadly predictable features (including grammar and
accent). However, in specic interactions, the inuence of social settings will be
variable, and she will always have some choice about the language she uses.
While an analyst may be able to describe phonological variations in this
speaker's talk in dierent social settings, these are not solely dependent on
her conscious manipulation of them, although she has some choice about
shifting her style of talk in relation to such variables as degrees of formality or
intimacy. The power relations obtaining at a job interview, for example, may
inuence her to adopt fewer non-standard features in her talk than she does at
home with family, although a strong personal commitment to not rejecting her
local `roots' may pull in the opposite direction. Although they do not develop a
model quite like the domain theory we are proposing here, Milroy and Milroy
(1992) suggest that the respective inuences of class and network may be
analytically separable in this way.
Variation studies, then, reveal patterns of language use (particularly accent-
ual and dialectal variation) correlating with social variables such as class, sex,
age and so on. Critics point out that such correlations provide little more than
empirical descriptions, which leave unanswered the question of why they are
there to be found. Our claim is that they need to be understood as phenomena in
the domain of contextual resources, and that only analysis of the relations
between these phenomena and the other domains of social life will provide an
explanation of both the dominant trends and the counter-examples. Concep-
tualising language as a fully autonomous system with determining as opposed
to conditioning power is inaccurate.
Ùpwards conation'
Conation can also occur at the opposite end of the continuum. Studies which
focus on face-to-face interaction sometimes claim that it is in this domain that
the social world is constructed, and thus that this domain actually constitutes
the social world. The body of work concerned is extensive, and there is
obviously not space here for a thorough review. It has its roots in the growing
recognition that (in our terms) the domain of individual psychobiography
cannot account for social interaction. Instead, there is a claim that the social
world is discursively constructed, an idea which also draws on the speech act
theory of philosophers such as Austin and Searle. This strand of the argument
reasons that since the institutions which human beings have devised and
which constitute the social world (economic systems, marriage, legal systems,
governments and so on) are products of the human ability to symbolise
through language, it is language which constitutes the social world.
The strongest version of the metaphor would have the world literally springing into
existence as it is talked or written about. Ridiculous, surely! Perhaps, but I want to opt
for something nearly as strong. Reality enters into human practices by way of the
categories and descriptions that are part of those practices. The world is not ready
categorized by God or nature in ways that we are all forced to accept. It is constituted in
one way or another as people talk it, write it and argue it. (Potter 1996: 98, original
emphasis)
While we recognise some partial truths in the social constructionist position, it
is incompatible with the theory we propose in some important ways. As will
already have become apparent, we do see a crucial role for language in all the
domains of social life, which would be inconceivable without it. We also accept
that categories and descriptions are to some extent linguistic conventions, and
that this aects objects in the social world in ways which do not apply to the
natural world. As Hacking (1997) suggests, while phenomena in the natural
world are ìndierent' to how they are labelled, human and social phenomena
may be aected by the discussions of what they do, how they are labelled they
are thus of ìnteractive' kind, and there is a `looping' back into the object itself of
how those involved understand it. Thus the naming of a practice (`sexism',
`globalisation') can give it social currency. However, the historical perspective
which sociological realism involves necessarily entails a rejection of the claim
that we talk the world into existence afresh in every conversation. As Searle
puts it `. . . we do not make ``worlds''; we make descriptions that the actual
world may t or fail to t. But all this implies that there is a reality that exists
independently of our system of concepts. Without such a reality there is nothing
to apply the concepts to' (1995: 166).
Furthermore, the stratication which realism involves requires us to dier-
entiate between dierent individuals and collectivities when considering how
certain ways of understanding and naming things become accepted while
others do not. There is a need to recognise political conict and dierential
power relations in any account of how the social world is collectively
constructed, so that while social institutions may in some senses be ònly
facts by human agreement' (Searle 1995: 1), human beings do not have equal
opportunities to agree or disagree about what those facts are to be. (See Magill
1997 for a critique of Searle on similar grounds.)
In the domain of situated activity, the `conversational realities' (Shotter
1993) people bring into being may indeed be very largely within the control
of co-present participants, but, as we have repeatedly claimed, that is not the
only domain which constitutes the social world, and analyses at this level
cannot aord to neglect the constraints and enablements of the other domains.
`Central conation'
Finally, we want to address those theories which seem to oer a way out of the
sructure-agency dualism by simply abolishing it, a move which Archer
characterises as `central conationism'.
Some writers claim that the dualism between agency and structure can be
overcome by regarding them as mutually constitutive. Put simply, in relation to
language, we could consider each instance of the production of a particular way
of saying things as the `micro' level, produced by individuals. The repetition of
these forms over many micro instances would then generate the `macro' level of
system, or structure. For example, Halliday (1991) considers the relationship
between the system and the instance to be merely one of observer viewpoint, the
same phenomenon looked at from dierent perspectives: in his own analogy, a
climate is simply many instances of the weather.
Stubbs (1996: 58) writes approvingly of this formulation, and explicitly
identies it with the work of Giddens and his notion of structuration:
Human agency constitutes social structure. Social structure is the medium for human
agency. . . . A key concept is the recursive nature of social life: drawing on convention
reconstitutes it. When I produce a grammatical sentence, I intend to communicate
something to someone. I do not intend to reproduce the English language: but this is
the unintended outcome of all those people out there producing grammatical
sentences. . . . This is what Giddens calls duality of structure: social structure is
both the medium and the outcome of the behaviour it organizes.
While our own reading of Giddens diers in several respects from this account,
the main claim with which we wish to take issue here is that agency and
structure are mutually constitutive. Both Archer and Layder have drawn
attention to the fact that if agency and structure are seen as `two sides of the
same coin', it becomes impossible to examine the interplay between them.
Indeed, Stubbs himself writes of the `changing relations between occurrences in a
text and the underlying language system' (1996: 92, our emphasis), which
strongly implies that there are two distinct strata involved, and that the issue is
therefore not merely one of dierent perspectives on the same thing.
We noted earlier the realist claim that social structures have distinctive
properties which are not reducible to the actions of individuals. This insight is
lost when structure is regarded as no more than the repeated, cumulative
actions of individuals, and makes problematic Stubbs' contention that Ìt is the
continuous reinforcement, through massive repetition and consistency in
discourse, which is required to construct and maintain social reality' (Stubbs
1996: 92). Properties of language as structure include those patterns which are
to be found only in corpora comprising many instances. Likewise, only at the
level of system can language have a history (as Halliday notes see above).
Again, the dierent temporalities implied by analytical dualism, to which we
referred earlier, make it possible to see that the anteriority of language to any
individual speaker, and the maintenance and change of language across long
periods of time, are systemic properties not reducible to specic individuals or
specic individual instances of language in use.
These claims are perhaps easier to demonstrate at the level of sentence in
relation to text than at the level of instance in relation to system. The cohesion
discernible in texts is a property of texts which is not reducible to the individual
sentences which comprise them. Texts stand in relation to each other in ways
which are not reducible to the relations existing between either the words of the
language or the sentences of individual texts, and which are independent of
individual speakers/writers and audiences. For example, whether or not some-
one happens to know the connection between say Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and
Bronte's Jane Eyre, or Bernstein's West Side Story and Shakespeare's Romeo and
Juliet, and irrespective of the times they were written and their respective
authors' original intentions (especially Bronte's or Shakespeare's), the two pairs
of texts now have an intertextual relationship which is not explicable in terms of
simple repetition.
SOME METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
Our claims, then, are as follows. The social world is stratied, each domain
within it has distinct properties, and the dierent domains are not reducible to
each other. People act within this stratied social world, whose complex
mediation of what they do results in social action having all kinds of unintended
consequences and generating further emergent features and properties
which in turn help to shape the social environment for subsequent actors.
Language is indispensible to social life, and plays a crucial role in each of the
domains. How might these ideas be used in practical sociolinguistic research?
The rst point to note is that there is nothing methodologically prescriptive
about our position. As with any research, methods should match research
questions, and several authors suggest how the theory may be applied in
sociology using appropriate methodological tools (see for example Layder 1993;
Pawson 1989; Sayer 1992). The determination of what appropriate methods
would be, however, does entail clarity about:
a. which domains are salient to the particular research questions;
b. how the other domains exert conditioning inuences on them;
c. how, in pursuit of their interests, social actors encounter and negotiate these
conditioning inuences, enablements and constraints; and
d. how these encounters and negotiations generate emergent phenomena
which inuence the social environment encountered by subsequent actors
and agents.
Let us briey sketch out some examples.
At the risk of entering territory with which we are not over familiar (neither
of us has experience of studying the sociolinguistic variable in the quantitative
tradition), we might start with variation studies, which have produced both
sensitive methodological procedures and important ndings. Locating such
research within the framework proposed here would leave much of this
enterprise unaected, but would, as we have suggested above, entail some
conceptual changes. It would mean abandoning the concept of language as
adaptive and the tendency `to speak of linguistic change as if languages have
the capacity to change sui generis, apparently independently of speaker
behaviour' (Milroy 1992: 357). It would involve separating analytically the
domains of speakers' psychobiographies (experienced in phenomenological
time) and the contextual (in this case linguistic) resources available to them
(pre-existing them in time and distributed unequally). It would recognize the
inuences of speakers' individual and collective social locations, and the
potentially conicting inuences of social integration and system integration,
which aect the commitment of speakers of non-standard dialects to acquisition
of the standard variety, for example. It would relate the elicitations of speakers'
dierent speech styles to the inuence of the domain of social settings. Thus, the
application of the theory we are proposing would, we suggest, oer plausible
explanations of the probabilistic patterns of speaker behaviour found in many
sociolinguistic studies. These typically reveal correlations between the groups to
which speakers belong (and thus the contextual resources to which they have
access) and the way they talk, correlations which are dierentiated in relation
to the social settings in which dierent kinds of interactions are researched
(such as informal discussions, formal interviews and reading tasks). This kind of
research also typically identies counter-examples, and the signicance we
attach to human agency would allow for the particular experiences and beliefs
of specic speakers (their psychobiographical distinctiveness) to defy any
categorical predictions.
An area which is more directly familiar to us (Sealey 1999a; Sealey forth-
coming) is research into children's language. Child speakers can be conceptua-
lised as members of an age category and various kinds of patterns in aggregates
of child-produced talk can be identied. These might include phonological
variables which contrast in the speech of members of dierent generations
(Romaine 1984), or norms and conventions for the encoding of requests,
varying in relation to age status (Ervin-Tripp, Guo and Lampert 1990;
Gordon and Ervin-Tripp 1984; Levin and Rubin 1983; Mitchell-Kernan and
Kernan 1977). Children in this kind of research could be seen as occupying,
involuntaristically, a relational role: relative to adults they are unfavourably
positioned in respect of contextual resources, and they are obliged to learn and
observe the conventions of the social settings in which their interactions are
embedded sanctions follow if they are not `socialised' in this way. There are
also less directly observable structures which exert their eects on children's
lives and ways of talking: unequally distributed cultural capital, the political
project of curriculum planners to shore up the standard language and so on
(Sealey 1999b). These observations are relevant to the structural domains in
sociolinguistic research which focuses on children, and we would advocate that
their inuence be borne in mind even in detailed analyses of dialogue involving
children.
From a dierent perspective, in situated activity, child speakers, as competent
social actors, reveal creative, inventive uses of language in the pursuit of their
own interests. (A large-scale, quantitative variation or acquisition study would
almost certainly fail to identify this kind of evidence.) However, it would be
inconsistent with our position to imagine that these children are `socially
constructing' their world through their talk, since it is only at the level of
situated activity that their linguistic environment will be relatively malleable. It
is not inappropriate, though, to recognise children's unique psychobiographies,
which, again, might help to explain individual deviations from probabilistic
linguistic patterns. Equally, children, like other speakers, generate interactions
which are not solely predictable from the tendency of adults to speak from a
position of higher status.
What we have presented here has necessarily been a very introductory
account of what sociological realism might have to oer to sociolinguistic
research, and we hope it will prove a useful contribution to debate.
NOTE
1. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at Sociolinguistics
Symposium 12 at the Institute of Education, University of London in March 1998.
We would like to thank participants at the symposium and also the following
individuals for their constructive comments: Sheena Gardner, Marci Green, Alan
How, Gunther Kress, Derek Layder, Kevin Magill, Caroline New. We are also grateful
to Allan Bell and Nikolas Coupland for their encouragement and advice.
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Address correspondence to:
Bob Carter
Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations
University of Warwick
Coventry, CV4 7AL
United Kingdom
bob.carter@warwick.ac.uk

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