On the background of a Marxist political philosophy and philosophy of science, the authors make a critical analysis of some dominant linguistic and sociolinguistic theories. They discuss J.Lyons' (1968: 'Introduction to theoretical linguistics'), J.Habermas' 'universal pragmatics', the sociolinguistic theories of Basil Bernstein, and the investigation undertaken by K.Ehlich, J.Rehbein (1972: 'Zur Konstitution pragmatischer Einheiten in einer Institution'). Finally the authors develop an alternative conception of research as well as a different concept of language. They propose to study communicative competence in conflict-situations as a way of doing pragmatics.