This research is by its very nature ‘inter-disciplinary’. Instead of traditional ‘disciplines’ or institutional ‘subjects’, I use particular intellectual ‘lineages’ in grappling with each particular challenge. A lineage is the way a particular ‘line of inquiry’ in research can be traced as it spreads and develops through successive generations of scholars. Examples are the urban dialectology which originates with Labov, Chomsky’s generative tradition, Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics, Johnson and Lakoff’s cognitive linguistics; the pragmatics of Grice and Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, conversation analysis with its origins in ethnomethodology, and so on. The term “linguistics” covers a large number of such sub-disciplines and each sub-discipline bundles to-gether many lines of inquiry. Think of all the lineages that make up sub-disciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis and text or corpus linguistics. Each line also has the sub-lines followed by each particular researcher. In fact, each person probably understands and uses the concepts differently. And each seminal figure mentioned above is also embedded in a complex historical context. For example, Halliday’s line originates in the London School thinking of J.R. Firth and the influence of Malinowski; Chomsky’s line in Harris’ descriptive linguistics, in the mathematical theory of automata and in the birth of cognitive psychology; Gricean pragmatics within logic and ordinary language philosophy. Consider also the many lineages in related disciplines which deal with language outside ‘linguistics’, from philosophy, critical theory, psychology and anthropology to information and computing (for example, DRT or discourse representation theory.) In studying language, there is no one normative methodology. Instead, there is a vast, branching, evolving, emergent cultural complexity. It is also very clear that we are inescapably 'of our time and place' and it's necessary to be self-critically aware of this.