Presents an examination and analysis of the relationship between language and society. Beginning with Professor Halliday's work on the users and uses of language, this tenth volume provides a framework for understanding the social meaning of language, and the relation of language to other social phenomena.

Preface; Acknowledgments; Part 1: Users and Uses; Editor's Introduction; 1. The Users and Uses of Language; Part 2: Sociolinguistic Theory; Editor's Introduction; 2. Language in a Social Perspective; 3. Language and Social Man; 4. Sociological Aspects of Semantic Change; 5. Language as Social Semiotic: Towards a General Sociolinguistic Theory; 6. Some Aspects of Sociolinguistics; Part 3: Language and Social Class; Editor's Introduction; 7. 'Foreword' to Basil Bernstein's Class, Codes and Control Vol. II: Applied Studies towards a Sociology of Language; 8. Language and the Theory of Codes; Part 4: Language and Social Structure; Editor's Introduction; 9. An Interpretation of the Functional Relationship between Language and Social Structure; 10. Anti-languages; Bibliography.

"Everyone will come away from this reading and re-reading of Michael Halliday's writings on language and society with a different insight: for me it is two matters; every person's capacity for creativity in exploiting meaning potential, and the central importance of establishing a unifying system able not only to capture form but to relate it consequentially and functionally to our understandings of social life." Chris Candlin, Senior Research Professor, Macquarie University, Australia '...a major enterprise comparable to a grand retrospective of the painting of some prominent artist of a distinctive school.' Roy Harris, Times Literary Supplement"

The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday is a series that brings together Halliday's publications in many branches of linguistics, both theoretical and applied (a distinction which he himself rejects), including grammar and semantics, discourse analysis and stylistics, phonology, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, language education, and child language development.