This book is one of the first applications of a functional approach to language across time. It first summarizes and evaluates previous studies of the development of scientific language, including Halliday's exploration of this fascinating topic.

First published in Great Britain in 1973, Main Trends in the Science of Language was part of a series of books that resulted from a study carried out by UNESCO in collaboration with national and international research centres in the social sciences, as well as with groups of individual scholars. The book examines the position of linguistics in the years surrounding the publication of the book before considering the subject’s potential, future development. It looks at linguistic vistas, the place of linguistics among the sciences of man and linguistics and natural sciences. This book will be of interest to the educated reader, research workers, and professional associations as well as to national and international institutions that organize, plan and finance scientific research.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.