Language and Social Interaction

At least since Aristotle, language has been seen as distinctively human in its complexity. Ethologists have increased our appreciation of how other mammals—dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas, and so on—employ sounds to signal one another in sophisticated ways, but humans, in conducting their everyday affairs, rely on spoken and gestural forms of intercourse to an unparalleled degree (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Despite the centrality of language use in human society, social psychology textbooks often ignore the topic (Clark, 1985, p. 179), and when they do pay attention it is to regard language as a mode of communication or a vehicle whereby humans transmit information, including ideas, thoughts, and feelings, from one to another. A variety of philosophers and social scientists regard the view of language as primarily communicative in function as the " conduit metaphor " (Reddy, 1979). This metaphor is rooted in the commonsensical notion that, through speech, one person conveys information by inserting it into words and sending them along a communicative channel. People receive the words at the other end and extract the encoded thoughts and feelings from them. The conduit metaphor reinforces an idea that problems of meaning in human society are essentially refer-ential or concerned with how concepts correspond to or represent reality, and that language operates to make propositions about the world (Pitkin, 1972, p. 3). Instead of using the conduit metaphor and referential approach to meaning, scholars recently have approached language as a medium of organized social activity, in which words are " performatives " (Austin, 1962) or " deeds " (Wittgenstein, 1958, para. 546). It is partly through language that humans " do " the social world, even as the world is confronted as the unquestioned background or condition for activity. The conduit metaphor and " picture book " view of language, rather than the