The viewpoint on language in this book has evolved over a good many years. It arose, initially, not out of any desire to contribute to discourse analysis as a method of inquiry, but rather, out of my own attempts to understand how language works in a fully integrated way as simultaneously a mental, social, cultural, institutional, and political phenomenon. I first became interested in these matters when I was teaching linguistics in the School of Language and Communication at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.