THE ROLE LANGUAGE PLAYS IN SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

ABSTRACT.The main objective of this paper is to explore and describe the development of social reasoning, the relation of language use and cognition, the role of language variations in attitude change, and language as a set of complex, organized systems that operate in concert. This study is grounded in the considerable body of scholarship examining the mechanisms that mediate the language activation effects, the relationship between language use and group membership, and the central role of representations in communication.Keywords: language, social, behavior, cognition, mechanism, use1. IntroductionIn this paper I am particularly interested in exploring the ways subtle aspects of word meaning can affect the mental representations of social events, the relation of grammar and cognition, and the importance of language for the maintenance of social identity. The findings of this study have implications for the social nature of the situations in which language is used, language understanding as social cognition, and the principles and mechanisms that underlie language use.2. The Principles and Mechanisms that Underlie Language UseThe design features of modem human languages reflect aspects of human cognition, which may or may not be distinctive to our species. Syntactic complexity reflects conceptual complexity. The semantic representation and semantics-syntax mapping bring about the characteristic syntactic structures of modem human languages. The relevant cognitive/conceptual structures must be in place for the formal linguistic structures to emerge. The evolution of linguistic complexity can be understood only in its social interactional context. Language as joint action determines most of the fundamental design features of language (it can only be properly understood in its social inter- actional context). Language is part of a joint action that extends beyond what linguists usually think of as language. Every word and construction is a regularity in behavior that solves a recurrent coordination problem (language involves conventions for communication for the achievement of joint actions). Central to joint action and to convention is common ground (i.e. shared knowledge, beliefs and attitudes of members of the community). Personal common ground is grounded in the shared experiences and communications between the persons. The actional basis presupposes the communal common ground of shared communicative conventions in the community. Shared practice may influence the way we categorize elements of our perceptual experience. (Croft, 2014)Language is an abstract set of principles that specify the relations between a sequence of sounds and a sequence of meanings. The elements of social life constitute an intrinsic part of the way language is used. Any communicative exchange is situated in a social context (Nica, 2013d) that constrains the linguistic forms participants use (communication involves exchanges of representations). A communicator's language can influence perceived credibility. The ways languages can be used are constrained by the way they are constructed. Acts of speaking can be regarded as actions intended to accomplish a specific purpose by verbal means. In human communication, the information processing devices are people and the code is language. The communicative use of language requires participants to go beyond the words in extracting the speaker's intended meaning. In highly interactive settings, communicators can draw on a variety of informational resources in fashioning messages. Feedback permits speakers to modify tentatively formulated assumptions about what listeners know as the interaction proceeds. Facial expressions are used in social situations to convey a variety of kinds of information. The coordination of gaze, facial expression and speech illustrates the integration of different communicative modalities. Speech contains a good deal of information that can be considered nonverbal. …