Page 178 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Introduction to Language Studies at the
Centre
Chris Weedon, Andrew Tolson, Frank Mort

This section deals with Language Studies at the Centre. It is organized in four
chapters. This introduction traces the development of interest in theories of
language and signifying practices and attempts to summarize the key questions
which have been the focus of attention in the Centre’s work over recent years. In
Chapter 15 we are reprinting an extract from past work on language theory.
Chapter 16 deals with aspects of more recent work on theories of language, and
Chapter 17 is an extract from a recent piece on a specific signifying practice:
advertising in women’s magazines. Within the constraints of time and space, we
have not dealt with recent Anglo-American discourse analysis.
It has often been argued that questions of language are central to Cultural
Studies, that all cultural phenomena include some linguistic component and that
processes of linguistic perception are involved in cultural analysis. Yet the study
of language as such has frequently been marginalized, both in empirical research
and in the Centre’s theoretical concerns. This is a confusing situation, not least
because of the several distinct theoretical approaches to language currently
defining the field. It was with the double aim of establishing the theoretical
importance of language and clarifying the different traditions of linguistic theory
and research that a ‘Language and Ideology’ study group was established in
October 1975.
At first sight, the marginalization of linguistic concerns in the Centre’s early
work seems strange, After all, it might have been expected that the Centre’s early
development out of English Studies would have been conducive to the study of
language. In Richard Hoggart’s own work there is a recognition of the
significance of spoken discourse. In Chapter 2 of The Uses of Literacy Hoggart
examines distinctive patterns of working-class speech, such as popular phrases,
proverbs and aphorisms. He insists on the importance of ‘the degree to which
working-people still draw, in speech and in the assumptions to which speech is a
guide, on oral and local tradition’. Moreover, there was a theoretical attempt to
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come to terms with the significance of language within the ‘culture and society’
debate. The early work of Raymond Williams, for example, which had provided
the Centre’s first theoretical grounding, included specific interest in language and
communication: