Thanks for the thoughtful overview of your field, Ellen; there's much here of interest/instruction for me. Three moments stay with me:

• your focus on (and detailed explanation of the reasons for) the DESCRIPTIVE quality of linguistics--the aversion to making the sorts of judgments you see in literary courses. This is an interesting read on my readings of your earlier papers, where I kept asking you for judgments and meanings; now I can clearly see that, while you were writing in the genre of a linguistics papers, I was reading for the genre of a literary analysis (intriguing mistaken "uptake")
• your counterclaim that academc writing is not a "natural use of the language, because the rules and regulations that accompany it are so prescribed"--I'd like to go on thinking about whether this constitutes a judgment, is something we should work on as academic writers
• your final (somewhat hesitant?) claim that linguistics courses might take the risk of being more political, more willing to look @ how languages can be used as tools of power. Here you're not only putting the four sub-groups of linguistic study into more active interaction with one another, but also inviting them to play with what you call the more "judgmental" work of literary analysis--taking the risk of thinking about the implications of the rules and regulations being studied. I like it!