Textual moments in biotechnology discourse

In an article published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (2000: 164), Fairclough stresses the importance of working ‘in a transdisciplinary way’ by combining language and social theory. He also makes the claim that social theorists fail to show how language operates in social life within social research – possibly because social theorists tend to pay too little attention to the role played by language. To overcome this problem the suggestion is made that social theory can benefit from linguistics provided such transdisciplinarity is open to a number of different theories and does not rely on a single integrated sociolinguistic theory, which according to Fairclough would be both ‘implausible and undesirable’. What the social theorist needs, he suggests, is a ‘theoretical specification of the social power of language’ while the linguist would benefit from investigations into how language, discourse and text perform as elements of social practice. In other words the dialectic relationship between social theory and language theory should be addressed in a more balanced way without reducing the number of possible theories to a single approach within sociolinguistics. With the article referred to, Fairclough counters criticism raised by some linguists for focusing too much on description, while failing to pay sufficient attention to discourse and social practice (see e.g. Widdowson 2000: 9) and for failing to give clear recommendations as to how the dialectic relationship between discourse practice and social practice should be approached (Jørgensen and Phillips (1999: 101)). The point I wish to make here is that if such clear recommendations were given, the CDA framework might become a strait-jacket on interpretation, thereby narrowing the scope of meanings that the analyst might be able to uncover.