A Sociolinguistic Approach to Socialization.

This article presents a sociolinguistic approach to socialization. The author remarks that in terms of the particular of the relationship between class and the process of its cultural reproduction, what has to be shown is how class regulation of the distribution of power and of principles of control generates, distributes, reproduces, and legitimates dominant and dominated principles regulating the relationships within and between social groups and so forms of consciousness. The author analyses how the distribution of power and the principles of control are transformed, at the level of the subject, into different, but related, organizing principles, in such a way as both to position subjects and to create the possibility of change in such positioning. There has been a movement from the giving of definitions in terms of linguistic indices to definitions in terms of their underlying semantic. In both cases the underlying semantic was considered to be the regulator of specific linguistic realizations.