Language use and social interaction

Douglas W. Maynard

Jason Turowetz

pp. 251-279

in: Amanda Ward (ed), Handbook of social psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2013

Abstract

Language is a primary medium of social behavior and, as such, deserves center stage in the panoply of social psychological topics. This chapter explores the social psychology of language by reviewing scholarship that highlights how people use language to perform social actions. This approach goes against a tradition that sees spoken language primarily in terms of the conduit metaphor or only as a vehicle for communication. The authors review speech act theory (in philosophy) and pose the "mapping problem" (Levinson, Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983) or how actions are linked to particular utterances. They then review different perspectives including sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, Goffmanian sociology, discursive psychology, and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Discussion includes, for each of these perspectives, methodological procedures, including approaches to the relation between talk and social structure. Ever more realms of language use related to social psychology are coming under the microscope and set an agenda for further study.