Acknowledgments: We have benefitted from discussions with Kay Deaux, Susan
Fussell, Julian Hochberg, Ying-yi Hong, and Lois Putnam. Yihsiu Chen, E. Tory
Higgins, Robert Remez, Gün Semin, and the Handbook‘s editors read and commented
on an earlier version of this chapter. The advice, comments and suggestions we have
received are gratefully acknowledged, but the authors retain responsibility for such
errors, misapprehensions and misinterpretations as remain. We also acknowledge
support during the period this chapter was written from National Science Foundation
grant SBR-93-10586, and from the University Research Council of the University of
Hong Kong (Grant #HKU 162/95H).
Language and Social Behavior
Language pervades social life. It is the principal vehicle for the transmission of
cultural knowledge, and the primary means by which we gain access to the contents of
others‘ minds. Language is implicated in most of the phenomena that lie at the core of
social psychology: attitude change, social perception, personal identity, social
interaction, intergroup bias and stereotyping, attribution, and so on. Moreover, for
social psychologists, language typically is the medium by which subjects‘ responses are
elicited, and in which they respond: in social psychological research, more often than
not, language plays a role in both stimulus and response.
Just as language use pervades social life, the elements of social life constitute an
intrinsic part of the way language is used. Linguists regard language as an abstract
structure that exists independently of specific instances of usage (much as the calculus is
a logico-mathematical structure that is independent of its application to concrete
problems), but any communicative exchange is situated in a social context that
constrains the linguistic forms participants use. How these participants define the social
situation, their perceptions of what others know, think and believe, and the claims they
make about their own and others‘ identities will affect the form and content of their acts
of speaking.
Although this chapter focuses on language use, rather than language structure,
the ways languages can be used are constrained by the way they are constructed,
particularly the linguistic rules that govern the permissible (i.e., grammatical) usage
forms. Language has been defined as an abstract set of principles that specify the
relations between a sequence of sounds and a sequence of meanings. As often is the
case with pithy definitions of complex terms, this one is more epigrammatic than
informative. It omits much of what is required to understand the concept, and even
considered on its own limited terms, it is technically deficient. For example, the word
sound in the definition is used in a narrow technical sense, restricted to those sounds we
identify as speech. The sound of a door slamming may express the slammer‘s
exasperation eloquently, but language conveys meaning in an importantly different
fashion. Moreover, the definition of sound must be expanded to allow consideration of
languages that are not spoken, such as sign languages used by the hearing-impaired,
and written language. Finally, of course, meaning is hardly a self-defining term.
For present purposes, it may be more helpful to think about language as a set of
complex, organized systems that operate in concert. A particular act of speaking can be
examined with respect to any of these systems (G. Miller, 1975), and each level of
analysis can have significance for social behavior. For example, languages are made up
of four systems—the phonological, the morphological, the syntactic, and the
semantic—which, taken together, constitute its grammar. The phonological system is
concerned with the analysis of an acoustic signal into a sequence of speech sounds
(consonants, vowels, syllables) that are distinctive for a particular language or dialect.
Out of the bewildering variety of sounds the human vocal tract is capable of producing,
each language selects a small subset (the range is from about 11 to 80) that constitute
that language‘s phonemes, or elementary units of sound. The morphological system is
concerned with the way words and meaningful subwords are constructed out of these
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