Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (1990) 11, 77-83. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 1991 Cambridge University Press 0267-1905/91 $5.00 + .00 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION Charles Bazerman Complex social activities—such as maintaining a legal system, fostering a literary system, or developing communally validated knowledge—rely on language as the medium through which these activities are accomplished. Law, literature, science, religion, politics, and even economics are socially constructed through discourse. Special language tools and uses have developed in conjunction with the rise of these activities. Thus, we may well say that the construction of legal language is part and parcel of the construction of the legal institutions that order our social lives, and that the language acts using legal language were developed in coordination with the elaboration of roles, responsibilities, and relationships of legal actors. Similarly, the construction of scientific language is part and parcel of the human construction of social modes of investigation and knowledge production. Those languages, which we have constructed to carry out those aspects of our social lives, embed the assumptions of the activities around which they are framed and dialectically provide the framework for the future development of socially cooperative endeavors. The general intellectual movement known as social constructivism provides an entryway to considering how special languages have been developed as part of social activities, how the use of these languages reproduce and maintain social activities and relations, how the languages are sustained by social institutions, and how language enters into the continuing process of social negotiation that produces novel arrange- ments for our social future. This review will first give a thumbnail sketch of social constructivism as a general movement and how it has been applied in particular to scientific knowledge, and then focus on investigations into the role language and linguistic activity plays in the social construction of knowledge. Social constructivism is a sociological movement, looking into the social formation of everyday knowledge and assumptions upon which our understanding and actions rest. The landmark text is Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966), which draws heavily on Schutz's theory of a social typification (Schutz and Luckmann 1973:229-233). Berger and Luckmann argue that our everyday sense of 77