Theory and Practice: A Matter of Words. Language, Knowledge and Professional Community in Social Work

The relation between theory and practice in social work has always been controversial. Recently, many have underlined how language is crucial in order to capture how knowledge is used in practice. This article introduces a language perspective to the issue, rooted in the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of knowledge and in Wittgenstein’s late work. According to this perspective, the meaning of categories and concepts corresponds to the use that concrete actors make of them as a result of on-going negotiation processes in specific contexts. Meanings may vary dramatically across social groups moved by different interests and holding different cultures. Accordingly, we may reformulate the issue of theory and practice in terms of the connections between different language games and power relationship between segments of the professional community. In this view, the point is anyway to look at how theoretical language relates to practitioners’ broader frames, and how it is transformed while providing words for making sense of experience.

Spanish-English Codeswitching in Email Communication

While spoken codeswitching (CS) among Latinos has received significant scholarly attention, few studies have examined written CS, specifically naturally-occurring CS in email. This study contributes to an under-studied area of Latino linguistic practices by reporting the results of a study of CS in the emails of five Spanish-English bilingual Latinos. Methods are employed that are not often used in discourse analysis of email texts, namely multi-dimensional scaling and tree diagrams, to explore the contextual parameters of written Spanish-English CS systematically. Consistent with the findings of other studies of CS in CMC, English use was most associated with professional or formal contacts, and use of Spanish, the participants’ native language, was linked to intimacy, informality, and group identification. Switches to Spanish functioned to personalize otherwise transactional or work-related English-dominant emails. The article also discusses novel orthographic and linguistic forms specific to the CMC context.

Particle placement and the case for “allostructions”

As a reaction against derivational frameworks, Construction Grammar accords no place to regular alternations between two surface patterns. This paper argues for a more tolerant position towards alternations. With respect to the well-known placement variability of verbal particles (pick up the book / pick the book up), the author grants that there is little reason for analysing one ordering as underlying the other but goes on to show that it is equally problematic to claim that the two orderings code two different meanings (or serve two different functions) and therefore cannot be linked in the grammar as variants of a single category. The alternative offered here is to consider the two orderings as two “allostructions” of a more general transitive verb-particle construction underspecified for word order.