Our ordinary lives: Pathways to a more human-oriented linguistics

When one considers the range of data types, methods and research
questions that characterise contemporary linguistics, it is clear that the field
is diverse and ever expanding in ways that were hardly conceivable 100,
or even 50, years ago. One shift underlying many of these developments
within linguistics has been the increased attention given to the speakers
and writers of language. This shift is manifest in a variety of ways: how
speakers interact in conversation, the cognitive processes accompanying
acts of speaking and writing, the language used by speakers and writers
in the form of language corpora, the role of the human body in shaping
language (i.e. the idea of ‘embodiment’), etc. It is clear that the idea
that linguistics is primarily concerned with a system untethered to the
speakers and writers of the language no longer holds sway in the way it
once did.