TY - UNPB
T1 - Rhetorics of 'reinventing'
AU - Rampton, Ben
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - In applied and sociolinguistics at present, there are quite a number of calls to ‘reinvent’, ‘rethink’ or ‘redefine’ this or that tradition, paradigm or indeed the fields themselves. Sometimes this looks like a branding ploy, but at other times it can be very weighty, and with AI, geopolitical upheaval and environmental collapse, it’s not surprising if there’s an upsurge in talk of ‘re-xxx-ing’ applied, or educational, or socio-, or whatever linguistics. So how does one figure out what to treat seriously and what to take lightly? Indeed, if you yourself are convinced that basic procedures or ideas in a particular line of scholarship need to change, how do you formulate the case in a way that’s not easily dismissed? To try to characterise the kind of scholarly writing that can really make a difference, I focus on Deborah Cameron’s ground-breaking 1990 paper ‘Demythologising sociolinguistics: Why language does not reflect society’. I draw out eleven features, and then supplement them with two that are especially relevant to contemporary interdisciplinarities and one that reflects my own experience of being told I was talking overblown nonsense.
AB - In applied and sociolinguistics at present, there are quite a number of calls to ‘reinvent’, ‘rethink’ or ‘redefine’ this or that tradition, paradigm or indeed the fields themselves. Sometimes this looks like a branding ploy, but at other times it can be very weighty, and with AI, geopolitical upheaval and environmental collapse, it’s not surprising if there’s an upsurge in talk of ‘re-xxx-ing’ applied, or educational, or socio-, or whatever linguistics. So how does one figure out what to treat seriously and what to take lightly? Indeed, if you yourself are convinced that basic procedures or ideas in a particular line of scholarship need to change, how do you formulate the case in a way that’s not easily dismissed? To try to characterise the kind of scholarly writing that can really make a difference, I focus on Deborah Cameron’s ground-breaking 1990 paper ‘Demythologising sociolinguistics: Why language does not reflect society’. I draw out eleven features, and then supplement them with two that are especially relevant to contemporary interdisciplinarities and one that reflects my own experience of being told I was talking overblown nonsense.
M3 - Working paper
T3 - Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies
BT - Rhetorics of 'reinventing'
CY - KCL
ER -