Abstract
Linguistics is currently placed in an uncomfortable position between its colleagues in the social sciences who continue to think of linguistics as a model discipline and those who, in the process of separation, return linguistics to the criticism of its own ideology.
The use of linguistic models and concepts in sociology poses problems on several levels : that of the origin of the Linguistic School of terms used, that of the degree of acceptability of a term taken as analogy, that of the pertinence of the concept for the sociologist. Two illustrations from recent sociological works show the difficulty for the linguist to recognize the use of linguistic concepts by the sociologist and make him some times doubt their proper application. But criticism of the separatist sociologists and semioticians sometimes shows a mistrust, both of the whole of the linguistic drift, and the conditions in which these concepts have been elucidated in this discipline.
Suggestions are made for introducing new concepts when it is a question of analysing speech, a task for which linguists as well as sociologists are invited to participate.