Language and Social Interaction

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on language and social interaction. The social psychology of language could be defined as the study of the use of language and sequences of utterances in social situations. It is partly in social psychology and is studied more or less scientifically by experiments, using statistics, and trying to predict and explain. The social psychology of language also falls into the field of linguistics and language study that are Arts subjects; they look for grammatical and other rules, study how people have used language in the past, emphasize the originality of utterances and conversation, and do not try to predict or explain things. Instead of finding empirical generalizations, they offer interpretations of particular instances. This can be regarded as the early natural history stage of a scientific endeavor. There is more accurate syntax and more elaborate sentence construction in formal speech. One of the most obvious ways in which language, or rather speech, varies between situations is in the physical dimensions of sound.