Linguistics, as a social science, should have something to teach us about humans as social beings. However, modern grammatical theories regard languages as autonomous systems, so these theories are little concerned with speakers and hearers, their interactions, and their relationship to the world around them. Further, these theories tend toward excessive concern with methodology and the properties of linguistic systems, neglecting, in fact, the languages themselves and those who use them in everyday life. Even the shift toward cognitive approaches, promising for their new insights into the bra |