essay on the relationship between language and communication

Psychology Discussion

Essay on language and communication | human behaviour | psychology.

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In this essay we will discuss about language and communication.

Essay on Language:

Language is often described as the sine-qua-non or the most important and distinguishing characteristic of a culture or civilisation. There has been a the consistent relationship between the level of advancement of a society and the complexity and development of its language. In fact, one may say that civilisation or for that matter the very idea of knowledge is closely intertwined with language.

Scientists interested in the study of the evolution of behaviour of societies point out that there are four distinct features which have made the human organism distinctly superior to the highest evolved sub-human organisms like the chimpanzee. These are, attainment of an erect posture, the growth of the cerebral cortex and its complexity, the prolonged period of socialisation, and finally the acquisition of advanced and complex linguistic capacities and abilities.

While the first three are purely biological or related to biological factors this is not the case with language. Language skills of the human being have been growing and will continue to grow. In fact, while the brain structure, erect posture and socialisation have essentially remained the same throughout human history, the story is different in the case of language.

Languages have grown in complexity, quality, flexibility, finesse and versatility. While animals and to some extent even the earliest human beings mostly depended on gestures and movements, in contemporary society, verbal language is the most characteristic medium of interaction.

This verbal language has come to engulf our lives in every sphere and today one cannot think of advances or development in any sphere of life without the involvement of language. Thus, human society has evolved music as a language, the numerical system as a language, dance as a language, Morse code and today a variety of computer languages.

Nature of Language:

Language is essentially a set of signs and symbols which have certain fixed meanings, evolved in each society. It is this fixed denotation which makes languages so essential and crucial.

The signs or symbols may be sounds, words, light signals, gestures, facial expressions, geometrical signs, and body postures. These signs can be verbal or non-verbal, visual or auditory, animate or inanimate. Thus a traffic light is an inanimate visual sign.

The telephone bell is an inanimate and auditory symbol while the expression of a dancer is a visual and animate symbol. When you get up to interrupt your teacher while he is teaching, he makes a gesture and you sit down. This is visual and animate. Thus, we see that when we talk of a language, it is just not the mere verbal language that we mean though that represents the most complex and advanced from of language behaviour.

It is obvious that any language can develop only in a society or social context. So, the nature of the society and social interactions play a very crucial role in determining several aspects of language, particularly the linguistic form of language. This is true both at a collective level, the evolution of a language, and also at the level of an individual, the acquisition of language abilities.

Of course, there is a view that certain forms of language structure are universal and innate and that even some animals exhibit some sort of language behaviour. But, even if there are innate and universal language structures, it is undeniable that verbal language is very much a product of social life interaction and social evolution.

It is estimated that human beings have used some form or the other of a spoken language for more than a million years or even three million years. However, written language is estimated to be only about 7,000 years old. This latter perhaps is an underestimation, and even written language is probably older than this.

This clearly shows that language behaviour in a spoken or written form has been very closely associated with the whole evolution of human societies. Languages appears to have played a very crucial role in social evolution, the emergence of civilisation and unfolding of social life in all its aspects including social degeneration.

If an individual who lived in this world a million years ago and who was speaking some language of his period were to come alive again, he will be amazed at the complexity of modern languages. Perhaps, he will not be able to recognise them as languages. Thus, modern languages have become much more complex, complicated, rich in vocabulary and above all show variance from one language to another, some with a long vocabulary. Idioms and sentences are combinations and re-combinations of a limited number of basic sound units called phonemics corresponding to vowels and sentences though not exactly the same.

The number of basic phonemics used by different languages in the world are limited and range between 15 to 85, the English language using about 45 such phonemics. Combination of these phonemics in different ways and manners leads to the formation of morphemes which some linguists compare to words though morphemes are not exactly similar to words and certainly not identical.

It is sometimes estimated that a very highly educated individual learns to recognise about 1, 00,000 morphemes out of the basic 45 phonemics the average being around 10,000. A few studies by Templin and Irwin have shown that there are very wide individual variations depending on socio-economic status, educational background, intelligence, availability of learning opportunities, etc.

A number of other factors also seem to contribute to these variations. Thus, we may see how fantastic languages are in that, though their basic units are limited, their combinations in various ways have resulted in the generation of unlimited number of morphemes. We may thus say that language is an open system, even mild variations in the intonations of these phonemics can result in new morphemes.

Evolution of Language:

One observation which has been engaging the attention of life scientists including psychologists is that many of the activities which we see at the human level are also seen in the behaviour of sub-human organisms. This interest is a direct result of the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Stated simply the question runs as follows:

Do sub-human organisms exhibit and employ a particular activity or activities seen at the human level, and if so how far down the levels of the evolution ladder this activity is seen?

Further, if these activities are found to be present at the lower levels do they serve the same purposes as they do at the human level? Do they show the same degree of complexity and individual variations? Are the differences between sub-human forms of such activities and human forms different only in degree or are they also qualitatively different?

This search for the presence of human level activities at the level of the lower organisms has been extended to languages also. Scholars have been trying to explore whether there exists some forms of social interaction among animals based on languages. Some of the earliest and classical studies of Wheeler and Fabre have shown evidence for the existence of some elementary forms of social organisation among animals and insects.

It has also been shown that some forms of social interaction and communication exist among birds. A number of studies have been undertaken on sub-human organisms at higher levels like apes and chimpanzees who are the immediate evolutionary ancestors of the human beings.

Such studies have shown that they live in clans and also possess embryonic forms of power hierarchy. This being so, it is only logical for forms of communication to exist among these animals, may be these forms of communication are not linguistic.

If we define language as essentially a system of signs used for expressing and communicating, then there certainly appears to be some form of language though not necessarily phonetic in form. A number of studies involving observation of animals in situations involving coping with certain crises situations have shown that at the levels of animals while one may not find linguistic and verbal communication, nevertheless a variety of body movements, sounds and even emission of certain odours exist and play a definite communicative role and perform functions including expression, influencing, signalling, etc.

Thus, certain sounds are made when an enemy is seen as an expression of a felt threat which in turn acts as a communication to other members of the group, thereby influencing their action and making them run away. Such sounds or actions constitute ‘display or exhibitionistic language’ to communicate with other members.

Among the geese, a set of vocal displays have been repeatedly observed to prepare to escape as a group. Vocalization or other forms of sounds have been found in birds during hatching seasons and these vocalizations set in motion a general reaction to make other birds react in a similar manner. Touch language is also prevalent as preliminary to mating between two members of the same species – one male and the other a female.

Animals at the higher levels of the animal world like apes and chimpanzees have the ability to acquire, store and retrieve information to a much simpler extent than in the case of the human. If this is the case then, at-least at the level of the chimpanzee, there should be some elementary form of language.

A strong case for the presence of such a basic language at the level of the apes has been made out by investigators like C.R. Carpenter. Carpenter and many others have identified anywhere between 9 to 20 sounds with different meanings used by apes. But the one observation has been that while such a sound language may initiate action in other members of the species, nevertheless there is no dialogue or conversation.

The language and communication seems to operate one way. Further, they are found to be used only in emotion led situations and are very situation specific as in attracting a mate or signalling the arrival of an enemy. Thus, situationised considerations of direction and guiding physiological action seem to be the main functions of such sounds. Of course, there is nothing purely verbal and in that sense nonverbal language, speech or communication among members of lower organisms seems to exist.

One may then conclude, if we look at language purely as a tool of expression and communication directed to influence the behaviour of others, there does seem to be adequate evidence to indicate the existence of some rudimentary forms of language among animals and this is in parts in the form of physical movements or sounds or directly involve display, situation specific and one way. Animals do not know how to use a word or a sentence or for that matter any form of verbiage.

Certain investigators however, have gone a little further and tried to find out whether even if there is evidence in the case of higher level animals like gorillas or chimpanzees about their having a language, do they have the structural capacity of the brain? This has been doubted by another group of investigators.

Similarly, one can raise the question, can we teach human language to the apes? A few interesting studies have been undertaken in this regard. In a very interesting study along these lines, Keith Hays and Cathy Hays adopted an infant chimpanzee Vicki and brought her up as a human child.

Despite intensive efforts they found that all attempts to teach Vicki to speak like a human child were futile, Vicki being able to utter hardly three barely recognisable words or sounds after three years of teaching. But at the same time, they found that although Vicki could not utter these words, she was able to comprehend many more words of the English language. Thus, in many other chimpanzees who were studied, it was found that though there is no ability on the part of the animals to utter or speak, they were able to understand and interpret.

In view of this, it was concluded that human language is unique to the human species because they are distinct from animals. But very soon the Pandora’s box was opened again. Reacting to the earlier findings that even man’s closest animal cousin, the chimpanzee could not learn the languages, critics started asking that while the chimpanzee may not be able to speak, speech is not the only component of language and that there should be other aspects of language like comprehension, interpretation, etc., and it is possible that as in the case of speech, if these processes were also investigated then the chimpanzee may be found to be more capable.

Human infants are not capable of producing many speech sounds. It has been found that this is because of their underdeveloped vocal tracts and memory and also because of their inability to make certain articulate movements needed for speech production. Lie Beevan and others found that many mature non-human primates faced the same problem as human infants.

Their vocal tracts are smaller like those of human infants. On the other hand, studies intending to find out whether primates perceive the speech sounds, in ways similar to the ways perceived by human beings, have produced mostly negative results or at any rate results which are not clear.

Overall, there appears to be a broad consensus, perhaps, tentative that primates including chimpanzees are not well endowed with the capacity to acquire the ability to communicate using speech. But, what about other aspects like comprehension?

Children who are not able to speak certainly appear to be quick in other aspects like responding, interpreting, comprehending, etc. as observed by Lenneberg and Maclean and Ruches. Beatrice and Garner undertook a pioneering investigation attempting to teach American sign language to Owashowe – a chimpanzee. Owashowe was brought up in the house trailer, interacting with a number of human beings who while in her presence never spoke verbal languages but used sign communication extensively.

Signs were used to communicate objects; questions were asked in sign form. In the beginning the progress was very slow. But by the end of about 22 weeks Owashowe could acquire a vocabulary of nearly 34 signs and use these under appropriate situations.

Though like human infants, Owashowe’s sign language initially was not very descriptive and clear, gradually situation appropriate and specific sign language was achieved. More remarkably, Owashowe after a number of minutes could combine such signs to produce sentences like “you drink”, “key open” etc.

According to many investigators like Brown, Owashowe’s language was very similar to what human children in the first stage of speech have. Other investigators like Premark based on their studies on chimpanzees arrived at more interesting conclusions.

The task involved here was slightly different. Here, the chimpanzee Sara had to learn to equate certain utterances with a set of distinctly coloured and shaped plastic pieces arranged in a pattern and stuck to a plastic board. The utterances were a pattern of sticking together a set of such pieces. Results were really surprising and the chimpanzees could learn this language to a very high degree of complexity.

Here, the attempt by the experimenter does not require the animal to translate the language into human language terms. She only had to learn a non-verbal way of uttering what was uttered by the investigator. Researches like this show that while chimpanzees may not go far in learning a human language and speak the same, their ability to code, encode and decode symbolic cognitive inputs like colour pieces, cannot be written off.

Research in this area has certainly pointed out that even at the higher level of evolution, the animals are not very capable of learning and speaking the human type language and produce speech sounds. But, because of this, one cannot say with the same degree of certainty that they do not comprehend language symbols, or forms of relations among them.

The adult human beings’ capacity for mastery of human speech is infinitely superior to that of an adult chimpanzee, but at the same time there is a lot of similarity between the vocabulary of a human infant and a chimpanzee. A chimpanzee can learn a language of different types.

Of course, it does not mean much, but one or two sounds become clear. The nature and structure of the brain and the vocal apparatus at the human level thus make a qualitative and quantitative difference in the language behaviour of sub-human organism and the human being.

Apart from this basic biological structure, there are greater number of language based interactions, and also more numerous opportunities for mastering a language, at the disposal of the human being which definitely make for a difference between human language and sub-human language.

Functions of Language:

If language is such an important part of human life, then it certainly must have served human beings very well and also useful purposes. What are the various functions of language? Essentially, as a common man sees, language has two obvious functions; first it serves a person to express oneself and then communicate.

Through an expression one is able to inform, request, persuade, threaten or influence others. This means one is able to relate one’s experiences, fears, wishes, to others and similar experiences of others. This is the beginning of social life. When people are able to express to each other, naturally they are able to interact with each other and understand what others are saying or doing. Based on such an interpretation there is the beginning of action.

This phenomenon goes on. Thus, we may see that language helps in expressing, understanding, interpreting and communicating events those inside a person and when there is a reciprocal action one can see how social interaction starts. The entire fabric of social life is thus based on an ability to express, interpret, understand and influence, first reciprocally, then in an extended manner.

Thus, one may see that language is at the very foundation of human civilisation. Perhaps, this is a very simple statement of what is happening. When I say I understand and interpret, there is a cognitive function; when I say, make others accept or act, there is a social function, one of relating myself to others.

When I talk and smile, this is an affective function. Language helps people to develop, shape perception, share interpretations, share expectations, and share expressions and also feelings and emotions. We may now briefly examine some of the basic functions of language. Some of these are obvious and others are not so obvious.

Let us for a moment imagine that a sub-human organism or a primitive human being faces for the first time a condition of hunger or fear, sees another strange animal or hears a sudden noise. Cutting across all these one would have faced a condition of disturbed equilibrium which might have resulted in the feeling of fear, surprise, joy, delight, hunger, or whatever it is.

However scientific our modern researches may be, common sense tells us that the earliest form of linguistic reaction must have originated under such a situation. A classical example is the birth cry of a new born child.

In all these instances, it may be seen that the origins of language lay in an articulation or expression of the state of the organism; but while being an act of expression, it also becomes an act of trying to understand and interpret the strange feelings or state of affairs.

Now, we may begin our attempts to understand various usages, and functions served by language or linguistic behaviour which includes the sound language of some animals and also the sign language used in various categories.

The functions of language can be classified under two or three broad categories – 1. Expressive and Communicative Functions 2. Interpretative Functions 3. Control function 4. The Functions of Remembering and Thinking 5. The Discovery of One’s Name 6. Social Functions of Language 7. Creative Functions.  

Specificities of Languages:

Various languages spoken by different groups of people differ in as many dimensions as there are to language behaviour. The simple language of a stone-age tribal community is far different from one of the developed and complex languages of today. Not only this, languages also change, grow and evolve.

For example, some languages like Latin or Sanskrit are referred to as dead languages in that they have not changed over a time because of not being actively used, particularly in speech, and also because they have not interacted with other languages. But, amidst all these variations across space, and over time, are there any universal characteristics and structures of language?

Here again there is a debate with one group of scholars who argue for the existence of universal characteristics, others deny the existence of any such universal characteristics. But the controversy notwithstanding, there are some universal characteristics of language.

Some of these are as follows:

a. Discreteness :

The message (words and sentences), in any language are brought out from a limited number of units. For example even if you utter a word like ‘brother’ in different ways the listener will understand the word in the same way. Thus in-spite of differences between American spelling and British spelling of the word ‘colour’, it means the same to all those who know English.

b. Arbitrariness:

Language terms are arbitrary. No one can explain why an elephant should be called an elephant and a man by the word man. There is no reason, or if there is any reason, we do not know. Of course, there are some words in every language where one can see a similarity between a word and the object, it denotes.

For example the word ‘kaka’ in Tamil means a crow. This word is based on the sound of the crow crowing. Such a connection is called onomatopoeic – similarity in sound. This means that tomorrow if we decide to call a cat as a cow and a cow as a cat, there is nothing to stop it.

c. Openness :

As pointed out, in every language new terms, words and messages are generated easily. Every language grows, and the number of words, sentences and idioms keep on growing depending on experience, increasing complexity of life and interaction with other people and other languages. This means no one can claim that he or she has completely learnt or mastered a certain language or the messages in a particular language.

These three characteristics-discreteness, arbitrariness and openness are universal features of all languages. The presence of such universal features has raised the question as to whether there is a certain universal language or linguistic structures present in all human beings cutting across languages and therefore, not language specific.

A leading advocate of such a view is Chomsky. According to Chomsky there are some universal structures or formal operations in languages, which underline the semantic or meaning aspect. These theorists have been trying to identify certain universalities, similarities and regularities in language behaviour across language and cultural variations.

It is hoped that such research can ultimately help in building up a universal grammar. Once such universal grammar is developed, then it is easier for one person to learn another language. But more than this, if this possibility becomes true it will help us to achieve a better understanding of the entire system of cognitive processes including speech, memory, learning, thinking and perception.

Such a view would help us to understand the innate biological processes and necessities which condition language behaviour. According to Chomsky, language behaviour is not purely learnt by accident or conditioning and much of it is biological and species-specific.

Bio-Neurological Bases of Language:

The human being is basically a biological organism, born as a biological creature becoming a social and psychological organism. Certainly, some views hold that the human being is inherently social.

Assuming that the adult human being is more social than merely physiological, it may be pointed out that, elementary forms of social behaviour are evident even in lower animals. While the human being may be much more social and complex, social nature of behaviour is not an exclusive privilege of the human organism.

Secondly, all social actions of the human organism take place only through the available bio-physiological mechanisms and if human social behaviour is much more advanced than that of the lower organisms, this is very much because of the highly advanced and developed body system he or she is endowed with, particularly the human brain.

All human actions therefore, have their basis in physiological and neurological possibilities. This is true of language behaviour including speech behaviour. The question is, how far is language behaviour including speech is determined by biological endowments. Here theories of language behaviour differ, in the degree of importance they attain biological mechanism.

Though no theory questions the essential minimal requirements of the biological equipment and mechanisms for achieving normal and effective language behaviour, some scientists like Chomsky argue that there are innately endowed biological language structures which are universal. Lenneberg believes that the unique human pattern of communication is possible only because of certain biological propensities and possibilities for complex language behaviour, particularly speech.

According to Lenneberg, there must be clear specialisation in the brain in relation to its anatomical structure and other speech related mechanisms. Further, the fact that children across the culture and sub-culture show a lot of similarities in language and speech behaviour indicates that there should be a regular and uniform pattern of development in children regardless of socio-cultural variations. Lenneberg further states that there ought to be innate and biological processes of the system which makes language development possible in spite of many handicaps and disabilities.

The failure of sub-human organisms to acquire comparable language and speech abilities, according to Lenneberg is a further proof of the unique and distinct structure and specialised characteristics of the human body particularly the cerebral cortex. Finally, Lenneberg cites the existence of language universality in phonology, syntax, grammar, etc. as evidence for the existence of universal and strong biological bases.

Essay on Communication:

One of the basic functions of language is communication. Communication plays a very important role in our lives. We communicate with members of our family who are living with us, with our friends, with our colleagues, with our bosses and everyone including a pet-dog. Let us not forget that we communicate with ourselves.

Of course, this is not the same as talking to oneself. We communicate with people who are present with us. Thus, when your mother, or the father or the teacher says something to you, this is called direct communication.

Similarly, when you talk to your friend on the telephone, this is also called direct communication. But if you are leaving on some urgent work and ask your brother to pass on a message to your parents or some other friends, this is indirect communication.

Here you are passing on a message to one person through some other person. This communication is not direct, but indirect. Similarly, a teacher teaching to a class of pupils is engaged in direct communication. This is communication between an individual on one side and a group of people on the other.

So is the case where a chief executive officer of a company calls for a meeting of his senior colleagues and addresses them; this is again direct communication with a group. On the other hand when the same chief, instructs these senior executives to pass on a message to other officers of various branches, this is an individual communicating with a group, but indirect.

Thus, in direct communication we communicate with those for whom a message is meant and in indirect communication we communicate with those to whom there is a message through somebody else and the concerned people do not receive the message themselves from us.

Now what is communication? Essentially communication is a form of social interaction where two or more people are involved. There is a transmission and exchange of information, knowledge or message. When you go to a railway booking office and find out whether accommodation is available by a certain train, you get the answer as to whether it is there or not.

Here you are seeking some information and you get the same. But in a classroom, the teacher passes on not only information but also knowledge. Newspapers provide information. But, if you are reading a book on a particular subject, you get knowledge. On the other hand if you are writing a letter to a friend or talking to him on the telephone informing him that you will be reaching him the next day at a particular place and time, this is a message.

Generally, the term communication is used to describe the kind of interaction between two or more individuals where one person or a set of people interacts with others with the intention of influencing the opinions or actions, of the latter. Thus, an advertisement is a piece of communication where the advertiser wants to influence people to buy a particular product. Clearly there is an intention behind a communication.

Along with the intention, there is also an expectation as to whether the other person or persons would do what you want them to do. Thus, when you leave a message for your friend that you would be meeting him at a particular place and time, you have the intention of asking him to wait for you and also expect him to wait for you or call you back to tell you whether it is possible or not. The degree of expectation varies.

The advertiser, for example, cannot be certain that everybody who reads his advertisement will buy his product. But when a boss sends a message to a subordinate asking him to wait for him, his expectation is more. Thus the degree of certainty is decided by intention and expectation. And even if the intentions are strong, and the expectation is low, the communication may not take place. On the other hand, if both are strong, communication will take place.

Thus, whether communication occurs or not is decided by the strength of intention and the certainty of expectation. We may say that communication arises whenever there is an intention or need. Of course, factors like availability of means also decide whether communication will take place or not.

Communication involves symbols and signs. Thus, every communication involves words, gestures, movements, etc. At the human level, communication is to a large extent verbal or involves words, numbers, symbols, etc.

This type of communication involving language or related symbols is known as verbal communication. But a large part of our communication also uses non-verbal symbols like gestures, movements, lights, sounds, etc.

The traffic signal is a clear example of non-verbal communication using light symbols. The horn of an automobile behind you is an example of a non-verbal communication with a sound symbol where the driver behind intends to overtake and expects you to give him the side clearance.

Gestures are also commonly employed as in the case of the traffic constable who gestures with his hand to the vehicles coming from a particular direction to stop or move. Similarly, you are sitting in a class and your friend standing outside is asking you to come out with a gesture and you ask the friend to wait for sometime with a gesture. The umpire on the cricket field raises his finger to communicate to the batsman i.e. out, and expects him to leave. Touch is also a means of communication.

If you are sleeping in the classroom and the teacher is about to notice the same, your friend touches you and you get up. You touch or fondle a little child or a pet to show your affection. In lower organisms, even smell is used as a communication. Thus we see that the communication can make use of any sensory modality, visual, auditory, touch and smell and can involve words, sounds, figures, lights, signals, gestures, etc.

Non-Verbal Communication and Body Language:

Though verbal language is our major medium of communication, there are other forms of communication and also that, any speech is not a piece of communication. Further, in many situations we speak not only with our mouths, or words but also through our body movements, expressions of the eye, posture, etc. A speaker uses a lot of gestures, modulations of voice, movements like bending, pacing up and down and does many other things to make the communication more effective.

In recent years, there have been a lot of research studies trying to understand the role of non-verbal communication including body movement, expressions, etc. on the effectiveness of communication. Such movements, expressions, gestures, etc. have all come to be known together as ‘body language’.

The study of the role of gestures, and body movements in the process of communication has resulted in the emergence of a specialised field of study called ‘kinesis’. Attempts have been made to prepare a dictionary giving a list of body movements and the meaning they generally convey.

An American anthropologist, B.T. Hall based on a very careful study of postures, degree of bending, angle of vision, etc. employed by people of different cultures, has argued for a discipline of study called proxemics which is interested in the study of how people use timing, body posture, and distance to make the communication effective.

Body language is widely employed by lower organisms and it is also used more extensively in simple human societies where verbal language has not developed to a very high degree. People employ body language very often not as a part of conscious effort. This just flows as a supplement to reinforce and strengthen the verbal communication. However, today body communication experts are attempting to train people to use body language selectively and more effectively. In fact, dance is a learnt and organised form of body language.

Non-verbal or body language communication has been evident in arts like dance, sculpture, music, etc. from ancient times. But the disciplines which study its status as a means of communication today are linguistics, anthropology, history, clinical psychology, etc.

Some of the scientists of these disciplines brought together a long list of expressive movements in the form of a dictionary, thus, trying to associate specific meanings, motives, etc., which underline them. Some of these movements are blinking, fingering the nose, crossing the finger, finger or knuckle cracking, loosening the collar, shrugging the shoulders, shaking a leg or legs, etc. However, this type of research has a long way to go.

Psychoanalytic literature, beginning with the writings of Freud, contains many explanations of the relationship between expressive movement or gesture and an unconscious motive. For instance, according to them, blinking the eyelids may indicate a desire to conceal something or the desire to hide from others. Dittmann studied pattern of movements composed of interaction between head, hands and legs for five different moods.

The frequency of movement within each of the body segments was arrived at from motion pictures of a patient during psychotherapy. The moods were judged in accordance with what the patient was expressing verbally. It was found that anger correlated with increased movements of the head and legs, with the hands remaining inactive while a depressed mood correlated with increased leg motion, both head and hands being inactive.

Wilhelm Reich, a leading psychoanalyst, after years of working as a therapist, began to notice that people’s facial expressions, gestures, posture- their body language -often told him more about their feelings than their words. Shaking a leg while talking about one’s wife’s temper tantrums, a drooping mouth when talking about a dead child, blinking frequently and closing eyes for a longer duration, holding the lips tight when talking about sex, etc. – all these movements were extremely revealing.

Pursuing this observation, Reich began to see muscle tension as the bodily equivalent of psychological blocks and defences. Tension protects a person from threats and the dangers he does not think about consciously. People hold their breath, stiffen their arms, tense their necks and shoulder muscles when they are on the defensive.

Rigidity not only protects the person from external threats but also prevents the free flow of emotions. Reich began looking for a way to relieve these tensions. Ida Rolf, who was trained as a bio-chemist, arrived at much the same conclusion through her work in physiology.

When a person is injured, the muscles in the area tighten to compensate for the injury. Often compensation becomes habitual and persists long after the injury has healed, i.e. the tightened muscles lose flexibility. Perhaps the body reacts to emotional traumas in the same way it reacts to physical traumas. Ida Rolf began to look for a way of restoring ‘structural integration’.

Both Reich and Rolf found, to their surprise, that when they treated knotted muscles with massage, clients invariably became intensely emotional. Fears, traumas, old anger and old pain stays ‘locked in their muscles’. For many people, physical therapy seemed to promote much deeper emotional release than verbal expression which is the essence of psychoanalytic therapy.

Interest in this approach seems to be growing day by day, but it needs to go a very long way before it can shake, let alone topple, the concept of ‘verbal expression’ as an ‘exclusive emotional releaser’.

Effectiveness of Communication:

Communication is normally initiated by some individual or a group with the aim or intention of influencing the behaviour of somebody else by sending a message through a channel or a medium. It was further noted that communication plays a very crucial role in our lives.

Of course, there are instances where people get influenced by communication not specifically directed towards them, but overheard by them. Similarly, there are also instances where a communication intended to influence some particular person or persons, influences people who are not intended to be influenced. By and large every communication has an intention of influencing the ideas and behaviour of some specific set of people.

This intention can be achieved only if the process of communication takes care of certain requirements. A communication which is able to influence people in the intended manner is said to be effective. Of course, communications vary in degree of effectiveness. Some communications are more effective than others that too for sometime and not always.

The effectiveness of a communication varies depending on a number of factors. These factors have been studied extensively and certain findings have emerged which have enabled people, particularly in organisations to make communication more effective.

In every communication there is a source, a person or persons who initiate the communication, a channel like a letter or a telephonic message or signal, etc., a message which is the essence which conveys to the other person what is to be done and a receiver or audience, a person or group of persons to whom the message is directed and who are intended to be influenced. Source, channel, message and the receiver are the four important components of a communication process and all of them are important in deciding how far a particular communication is effective.

We may briefly examine how these four components can be carefully planned and built into a communication process so that the communication can achieve what it intends, to a large degree. A company may become more effective in making the people buy its products, and a political leader may influence people to vote for his party; all these can be achieved better by designing the process of communication in an effective manner.

1. Source Characteristics:

It has been found that a number of characteristics of the source contribute to the effectiveness of the communication. One such factor is credibility. Credibility refers to the perceived importance of the person. Thus, when the Prime Minister or any other highly placed person makes an appeal, people respond.

This is because the person is accepted as genuine and sincere and also capable of carrying out what he says he can do. Thus, when an expert on a subject gives some new information we accept it. When a highly qualified doctor prescribes a treatment, the patient accepts it.

We accept the authority, legitimacy, sincerity and competence of the person. In an experiment students were shown a passage of poetry and asked them to rate the same. Two groups were involved. One group was told that the poem was written by some unknown person and the other group was told that it was written by a great poet.

The second group rated the poem as of a much higher quality. But a question has been raised as to whether this credibility is very specific or general. For example, if we attribute an article on economics to a leading poet, will this have an effect on the rating of the article? On this question, research studies have brought out contradictory findings.

Some studies show that the credibility factor is specific and that an article on economics will not be rated higher if it is attributed to a poet or a film star whose credibility may be high in influencing us to buy a hair cream.

However, there are studies, which argue that there is a general effect of credibility and people will accept a film star’s advice, even on whether India should manufacture nuclear weapons, or whether the constitution should be amended to declare film stars as super citizens.

Closely related to credibility is trustworthiness. A person may be an expert. But if earlier communications from the person were found to be unrealistic and misleading, then there may be a lack of trustworthiness and this may counteract against the factor of credibility.

Thus, if a person who is perceived as corrupt tries to influence the moral behaviour of people or asks them to contribute to a welfare programme, the effect may not be much, even though he may be perceived as competent or having a position. Other things being equal, if a source is perceived as a person who can reward or punish, this may have an effect on the effectiveness of the communication.

Yet, another factor appears to be the factor of similarity between the person who sends the communication, the source, and the receiver. Thus young people are generally more influenced by sources which are similar in educational background, age, background and status. Thus, it has been shown that characteristics relating to the sources do have a crucial influence on the effectiveness of the communication.

2. Channel Characteristics :

Channel is the medium by which the message is passed and presented. The channel may be direct and personal or through media like telephone, radio, newspaper, etc. The choice of the channel or medium depends on a number of factors like the nature of message, its coverage, importance, whether it is private, the size of the audience, their characteristics, etc.

Research studies have shown that direct communication is more effective especially as it permits use of body language like the expressions of the eyes, posture, etc. In terms of distance, a distance of about four meters between the source and the receiver has been found to be effective. Here again a number of factors have to be taken into account. For example, in a classroom a teacher cannot maintain a distance of four meters from all students. Nor is it possible in any direct audience situation.

One issue which has been investigated in more detail and depth relates to the question whether films or audio-visual aids are always more effective. Some studies have shown that films are more effective in communicating factual information and sometimes also in bringing about attitudinal changes, but there have been other studies which have shown that if the receiver is more educated and mature, printed communication is more effective.

The fact appears to be that effectiveness of a channel or medium seems to depend upon a number of factors like the nature and size of the audience, the nature of the message, the time available, the urgency of the message, etc.

3. Message:

The message is the core component of any communication. If there is no message, there is no communication, even though people may be talking. Some studies have attempted to study some of the necessary characteristics that may contribute to more effective communication. One important characteristic is known as loading which refers to the amount of information in that communication.

For example, if a boss wants to ask one of his own subordinates to go and meet and discuss a particular issue with somebody, he may simply say “regarding the matter, please meet Mr. A. at 3.30 p.m. today and talk to him”.

This is simple, brief and direct but adequate. If he says “I was with Mr. A yesterday and we had dinner. While talking to him I found that he has lot of experience in matters related to the issue which we discussed two days ago. You try to meet him and see if he can help us.”

Here we can see that the amount of unnecessary information is much more than what is necessary for the young person to act and it is possible that the message is too elaborate and confusing and the receiver misses the essential part. Such a lengthy communication with too much of unnecessary details is said to be overloaded.

On the other hand the boss may tell the young person, “meet Mr. A, and I want to have a discussion with him”. This is certainly brief but not very clear to the person who is expected to discuss with Mr. A. He is not sure about what to discuss with A, where and when. Such communications will create a need for a series of further communications on various aspects.

This is an example of what is called communication under-loading. The message should be optimally loaded while clearly communicating whatever information the receiver needs to carry out the instruction contained in the message. Thus, ‘loading’ is found to be a very important characteristic.

Messages may be of different types. Some of them may be a ‘one-way matter’. The source may expect the receiver to do something only once, but there could also be a message where a choice of action or response becomes necessary among different alternatives. This is very true of communication relating to work organizations.

It is very common that a particular person is involved in a number of transactions which are interrelated. The boss may find it necessary to send a message to him to take a particular action on a particular issue or matter. It is also possible that sometimes there are conditional messages.

For example, the boss may instruct the receiver as follows “meet Mr. A and find out what is happening. If there is some problem, ask him to talk to me and if he is not there meet Mr. R”. In such instances, it becomes difficult or even impossible for the respondent to get the message clearly unless the message is con-texted properly by clearly giving the necessary background and details.

Very often an organisation may be involved in a number of transactions involving the same client or party. So unless the background relating to a particular transaction on which action is to be taken is made clear, there may be a delay or even a wrong action at the end of the receiver.

This involves not only clarity of what to do, but also on what matter the action is to be taken. The message must provide the necessary details for the receiver to clearly identify the concerned issue. We may call this factor as “contesting or embedding”. Yet another characteristic refers to explicitness or implicitness or we may even call them degrees of explicitness.

Suppose a client is filing a legal case and his lawyer after studying all the details, comes to the conclusion that there is very little chance for the client to win the case. He may convey this directly to him and straightaway advise him to withdraw his case and arrive at a compromise. This will be an example of explicit communication.

On the other hand, the lawyer may explain to him all the details and also instances of similar cases he has handled in the past and leave the client to arrive at his own decision. This is an instance of implicit communication. Here again in-spite of a number of studies, no definite conclusion appears to be available.

Some studies by Hovland and Mandel on influencing American public opinion on the need for devaluing the dollar found that presenting an explicit conclusion was found to be more effective, but equally strong is the evidence in support of the strategy, where the message is presented without an explicit conclusion leaving it to the receiver to arrive at the conclusion. A classic example of this latter type is the oration of Mark Anthony on the death of Caesar where without explicitly inciting the people to revolt, he succeeded in making them do it.

Another message characteristic that has been investigated is with regard to the couching of the message in emotional appeals, emotional overtones and invoking reactions like love, loyalty, patriotism as part of the message. There are a number of studies on employing fear as an overtone. Extreme fear appears to have been occasionally found to be effective, but not always.

According to Janis effectiveness of fear appears to be associated with a number of factors. Appeals for dental care and hygiene were found to influence attitudes and behaviour relating to dental hygiene in inverse proportion to the degree of fear. This was shown by Janis and Fish back who found that the more intense the fear appeals were the less was the effectiveness.

One the other hand, association of moderate fear appears to be more effective. On the other hand studies by Levianthal and Nice and Singer on appeals in connection with traffic safety rules and traffic signal observance, showed that intensity of fear appeals had a greater effect.

By and large it appears fair to conclude that on the whole moderate fear appeals have a greater effect on more people, than extremely high fear or extremely low fear appeals Yet another finding was that messages for change of attitudes along with fear appeals were more effective when the message in the communication suggested ways to overcome the fearful situation.

Other aspects of the message including length, dramatization, medium, etc. have also been studied from the point of view of effectiveness in .bringing about changes in attitudes. The factors of primacy and recency, whether a communication received earlier or more recently is more effective has also been researched upon and the findings are far from conclusive let alone unanimous.

The contribution of each of the factors seems to depend on many other factors like nature of the content, demographic background of the audience, the perceived importance and even personality factors of the receiver. However, these studies have certainly exploded some myths like the universal effectiveness of emotional appeals, primacy, etc.

4. Receiver:

The receiver is the ultimate user of any type of communication. Communications are generally directed towards influencing the receiver, his opinions, attitudes, behaviour, etc. All receivers are not similar. There are group differences and individual differences. The susceptibility of the receiver to the influence of communications is called persuasibility which indicates the proneness of an individual to change in response to a communication.

Sensing and Brehm based on a series of studies have argued that after a certain stage, there emerges a condition which may be called ‘reactance’ marked by resistance to succumb to persuasion. This reactance can vary from simple indifference to positive hostility. This is a very important point for those who believe that mere volume and intensity of persuasive appeals can persuade anyone and everyone.

Educated and intelligent receivers are more difficult to persuade through emotional appeals. Some studies have shown that personality factors like high neuroticism make people less responsive.

On the basis of a series of studies Janis found that people who are either over assertive or very submissive, and who are more inner directed are more difficult to persuade. On the other hand, those who are moderately aggressive and not inner directed, less intelligent, etc., are more easily persuaded. People with more imagination have been found to be more susceptible.

From the point of view of the source initiating communication, it is necessary to make sure that the receiver attends and receives the communication, comprehends it and understands what he or she is supposed to do. The communication should be clear, brief, yet adequate and above all, it should be able to hold the interest of the receiver and provide the necessary directions and information for action.

If this is not done, the message may not have the intended effects. If such messages are repeated, the consequence may be the emergence of general apathy or even resistance or reactance. It is also necessary to develop what may be called a communicating culture where people get accustomed to receiving and sending communications.

This is particularly true in instances where the target audience involves groups of people, continuous communication and who differ in many respects. In most instances of communication, particularly in organizations, the source may send across a communication and expect a return communication.

This is particularly true of work situations and organisations where reciprocal and even multilateral communications are involved. Choosing the appropriate time for communication is an important factor. If an important communication is sent to a large number of people towards the end of the day when they are tired, the message may not register on many people.

A common occurrence found in Indian organisations particularly government organisations is that communications are often sent to people who are not at all concerned. If such irrelevant communications are frequently sent, then even a relevant subsequent communication is likely to be ignored. For instance, governments letters are very long and the real message comes at the end, if at all there is one.

5. Feedback:

How does one come to know that one’s communication has been effective and has achieved the desired purpose? As may be evident, the effectiveness of communication depends on a number of factors. Further the degree of effectiveness varies from time to time and situation to situation.

An important point is that on most occasions, there is a scope for improving the effectiveness of communication particularly in organisations. This depends on the existence of a system to asses the degree of effectiveness of the communication process and making attempts to improve the communication.

A basic requirement here is the need to establish a system of feedback on the responses and reactions of the receivers on various aspects of the communication processes, the message, the channel, the clarity or overloading or under-loading, etc.

In organisations where there is a continuous process of communication it becomes absolutely essential to provide for a system of feedback at regular intervals. Similarly, whenever a new process of communication is to be initiated, it is better to test the same on an experimental scale and get the feedback.

The feedback may be obtained directly from the receiver or indirectly through others who are in a position to observe the receiver’s behaviour. Sometimes feedback may not be verbal and may be non­verbal. Organisations should have a system whereby as complete a feedback as possible is obtained.

6. Boomerang Effects :

Researchers on communication effectiveness have come across an interesting phenomenon called boomerang effect. It has been noticed that very often communication results in an effect which is exactly antithetical to the intended effect. This has been named the boomerang effect.

One factor which appears to be associated with this is the occurrence of a direct interaction or confrontation with a person towards whom the receive has a negative attitude. One investigation to identify this type of effect was that of Mansion. For example, if an individual “A” is trying to persuade a group of people to change their attitude or behaviour, and if another person “B” who is unpopular with the group happens to be there, then boomerang effect may occur.

Similarly, when attempts are made to change the attitudes of people who have strong negative attitudes in a sudden manner, we may witness the emergence of boomerang effect leading to hostility and total rejection of not only their message but even the source.

7. Sleeper Effect :

Sleeper effect is said to occur when the effect of the process of communication is not evident for a long time and then suddenly becomes evident. According to Hove land this happens when comprehension and assimilation of a message takes a long time, and depends on a process of consolidation which is time-consuming. This possibility is very likely where the communication is long and complex.

The sleeper effect appears to be more likely when an individual has a base of earlier attitudes which are fairly strong and have to be reviewed in the light of the communication that has been presented. But sleeper effect has not been found to occur very frequently.

Barriers to Communication:

Why is it that communication is effective on certain occasions and not on others? There are also certain other factors which influence the effectiveness of communication. One important factor is what is known as noise. While physical noise either at the source or at the receiver’s end, certainly can affect the effectiveness of communication, the term ‘noise’ means any irrelevant stimulation present at the same time or at the time of initiation of or receiving the communication.

Thus, if somebody conveys a message to you on the telephone, while you are busy studying or discussing something important with your friends, you are in a hurry and do not wait to understand the telephonic message clearly. Noise here means anything that does not permit you to attend to and listen to the message with full concentration and understand it completely and clearly, because at the moment you are engaged in some activity which is more important.

It may be seen here that it is not merely the factor of being physically engaged in some other activity, but even the psychological factor of ‘perceived importance’ and ‘interest’ play a crucial role. Apart from this, one may mention a factor known as “frame of reference”.

The source or the initiator may ask the receiver to do something or not to do something which according to the source may be important. But the receiver may not perceive this as important. Discrepancies in any of these between the source and the receiver may make the communication ineffective.

At the end of our discussion, perhaps the reader is in a position to appreciate the complexity of the process of communication and the various factors which influence the effectiveness of communication. But in-spite of all these, people communicate with each other across distances and on many matters. It is impossible to think of a world where people do not communicate.

This is an indication of importance of communication in our lives. One cannot imagine how people can live and live together, if communication processes are not so robust and function in-spite of the fact that many factors are involved in it. It is this ability to communicate which has made it possible for human beings to control and master the environment. The reader may wonder, why is communication so important!

It is important because communication serves many functions. Some of these are:

1. It helps us to express our ideas, feelings, reactions, hopes, etc. Pure verbal language may not serve this purpose in all situations of life. For example, children may not have acquired vocabulary to express their feelings and express through body language. In fact, the pet dog communicates its feelings very effectively.

2. To transmit or convey information to others.

3. To change the attitudes, behaviours and actions of others, and respond or reciprocate in such a way as to achieve something or accomplish something, reach a goal or target.

4. To establish bonds, relationship with others in terms of authority, control, camaraderie, etc.

5. To establish order and predictability in behaviour where a number of people are involved as in the case of organisations.

6. To hold together, a society, a group, or organization’s culture and values which are essential to provide meaning and usefulness to actions of people. Communication, therefore, is another most important function which differentiates living from the non-living and human from sub-human.

Today we know that very crucial developments in science and technology are taking place in the field of communication and the importance of such developments is very obvious. If one should think of any single distinct characteristic of contemporary human society, certainly it is communication. Modern society is a communicating society, though it may not be rational as Aristotle thought or pleasure-seeking as other philosophers thought.

An important development these days is the rapid advances in communication technology. The information or message can be passed on in no time. In fact, the occurrence of event and its awareness are almost simultaneous. Further today one often finds more emphasis on communication.

A few years ago one could not have thought of a teleconference or a continuous chat with an astronaut who is orbiting in the outer space. Communication, is probably the lifeline of society. This is now more true of modern society which is increasingly becoming an information based society.

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

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Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

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How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

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Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

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Language and culture.

• Ee Lin Lee Ee Lin Lee Department of Communication Studies, Western Washington University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.26
• Published online: 07 July 2016

Language is an arbitrary and conventional symbolic resource situated within a cultural system. While it marks speakers’ different assumptions and worldviews, it also creates much tension in communication. Therefore, scholars have long sought to understand the role of language in human communication. Communication researchers, as well as those from other disciplines (e.g., linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology), draw on each other’s works to study language and culture. The interdisciplinary nature of the works results in the use of various research methods and theoretical frameworks. Therefore, the main goal of this essay is to sketch the history and evolution of the study of language and culture in the communication discipline in the United States.

Due to space constraints only select works, particularly those that are considered landmarks in the field, are highlighted here. The fundamentals of language and the development of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in leading to the formation of the language and social interaction (LSI) discipline are briefly described. The main areas of LSI study—namely language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication—are summarized. Particular attention is paid to several influential theories and analytical frameworks: the speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis. Criticisms and debates about the trends and directions of the scholarship are also examined.

• conversation analysis
• discourse analysis
• ethnography of speaking

The Fundamentals of Language

A major task of language researchers is to understand the complexities entailed in the structures of talk in order to unfold and understand sociality, including human nature, cultural values, power structure, social inequality, and so on. Researchers in language, culture, and communication study language situated in cultural nuances in order to understand language use in enhancing intergroup and intercultural dialogue. Although language enables learning and bonding, it also confuses interlocutors with contradictory yet deep and rich multi-layered meanings, such as (mis)interpretation of intentions, violation of normative conduct, and repair of conversations that have gone awry.

In a way, language not only construes our perception, but also constructs our social reality by manifesting actual social consequences. For example, the word race represents something that does not exist in physical reality, but it has real implications and consequences (e.g., discrimination, social disparity, unequal access to healthcare, etc.). Here, language allows the creation of actual and persistent perceptions (e.g., bad, inferior, non-deserving, and so on) that determine aspects of people’s lives. In fact, the role of language in influencing interlocutors’ perception and communication remains one of the most popular opening lines in empirical studies focusing on language and culture.

How Language Shapes Perception

Known as linguistic relativity, the notion that language influences our thinking about social issues derives from Edward Sapir’s works in anthropology and linguistics in the 1920s (Mandelbaum, 1963 ). Sapir studied the lexical dissections and categorization and grammatical features from the corpora obtained during his fieldwork over several decades. While studying the languages of different North American Indian tribes, including those living in Washington and Oregon in the U.S. and Vancouver in Canada, Sapir found, for example, that the Hopi language did not have lexical equivalents for the English words time, past , or the future . Therefore, he suggested that the Hopi worldview about temporal communication was different from the English worldview. In his lectures Sapir promoted the understanding of language as a system embedded in culture. Thereafter, based on Sapir’s findings, researchers studying language inferred that if there was no word for, say, you in a certain language, then speakers of that language treat you as nonexistent.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s, later suggested that language could, to some extent, determine the nature of our thinking. Known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic determinism, the notion that language is a shaper of ideas or thought inspired further empirical testing (Whorf, 1952 ). This led some researchers to conclude that speakers of different languages (e.g., Polish, Chinese, Japanese, English, etc.) see their realities differently. The investigation of the effects of languages on human behaviors, as influenced by Sapir’s and Whorf’s works, continues to be a popular topic in various academic disciplines.

During its postwar rebuilding efforts overseas in the 1930s, the U.S. government recruited linguists and anthropologists to train its personnel at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). While linguists researching the micro-level elements of languages successfully taught FSI officers how to speak different languages, anthropologists studying the macro-level components of culture (e.g., economy, government, religious, family practices, etc.) taught the officers how to communicate effectively with people from different cultures (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990 ). The research and training collaboration between linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists at FSI showed that the learning of a foreign culture was not merely about acquiring language skills or translating from one language to another, but a holistic understanding of language in a wider context.

While the teaching of foreign languages to FSI officers was efficient, teaching anthropological understanding of foreign cultures was more challenging. Moreover, during the 1940s the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and the notion that language frames people’s worldview were contested in empirical findings. About the same time, Edward Twitchell Hall, who is credited with founding the field of intercultural communication, strongly promoted his belief that effective communication between two people from different cultural backgrounds (i.e., intercultural communication) should combine verbal (i.e., speech) and nonverbal (i.e., non-linguistic) communication embedded in a cultural context (Hall, 1966 ).

Citing efficiency, researchers at the time developed language translation programs that enabled the quick learning of intercultural communication. In this approach of linguistic universalism, researchers assumed structural equivalence across languages—that word-by-word translation can foster cultural understanding (Chomsky, 1972 ). This shift of direction in academic research challenged Sapir’s proposition of the understanding of culture and communication based on common conceptual systems—the notion that meanings and values of concepts cannot be truly understood without understanding the cultural system.

Regardless of the competing viewpoints, research on how speakers of different languages operate under different language and communication systems continues to date. Researchers have also widened the scope of the language and culture program to include the study of language use and functions (i.e., communicative purposes) in and across different cultural systems. Although the translation of the linguistic corpora into the English language is commonly featured in proprietary research publications, analyzing discourse data in the native languages is preferred. Language is therefore treated as intact with the cultural system. This line of study, despite differences in methodological and theoretical frameworks, forms the basis for a specific discipline within the communication field called language and social interaction (LSI).

The LSI discipline focuses on the study of human discourse and human interaction in situatedness. Scholars pursuing this line of research seek to understand the development of speech and language processes in various settings, from small group to interpersonal, including face-to-face and those mediated by technology (see International Communication Association [ICA] and National Communication Association websites, respectively). The scholarship employs qualitative and quantitative methods and includes verbal (i.e., speech) and nonverbal communication (i.e., nonlinguistic cues) (see the ICA website ). The various methodological and theoretical frameworks used include social psychology, ethnography of speaking, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and narrative analysis. Although well-established and housed in the communication field, works in LSI are interdisciplinary.

While LSI studies also include nonverbal communication as a language system, scholarship on speech—whether naturally occurring, elicited, mediated, or written—outnumber those focusing on nonverbal communication. The paucity of nonverbal scholarship in the LSI discipline underscores the challenges of recording nonverbal communication for data analysis (Fitch & Sanders, 2005 ). Although studies pertaining to how social life is lived in situated conversation and language is used in various interactional settings dominate LSI research discourse, the study of nonverbal communication as language deserves its own coverage as a (sub)discipline. Consequently, this essay focuses on the scholarship on speech in LSI. The following sections review a selection of the LSI subdisciplines organized by research methods, or more commonly conceptualized as analytical frameworks and procedures: language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication. The review highlights a few major theories or theoretical frameworks in each subdiscipline, namely the speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis.

Language Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of language usage or talk in interaction. Researchers who study language pragmatics investigate the meanings of utterances in relation to speech situations in the specific contexts of use. Two theoretical frameworks that are commonly cited in language pragmatics are the speech act theory and Grice’s maxims of conversational implicatures, from which the influential politeness theory derives. These theoretical frameworks emerged from the examination of language independently from context, including situational factors that influence the cultural assumptions of the speaker and hearer.

Speech Act Theory

In an attempt to understand utterances in interaction, Austin ( 1962 ) explained speech acts as communicative acts in which speakers perform actions via utterances in specific contexts. Called performatives , these are illocutionary acts in which the speaker asserts a demand through utterances. Illocutionary acts contain force— that is, they allow the speaker to perform an act without necessary naming the act (e.g., apology, question, offer, refuse, thank, etc.). Austin illustrated three types of force: (a) locution , the words in the utterances; (b) illocution , the intention of the speaker; and (c) perlocution , the consequential effects of the utterance upon the thoughts, feelings, or actions on the hearer.

The speaker’s illocutionary act is said to be happy when the hearer understands the locution and illocutionary forces. In order for the speaker’s illocutionary act to be happy, the utterance has to fulfill felicity conditions. Felicitous illocutionary acts are those that meet social and cultural criteria and bring about effects on the hearer that the speaker intended (Searle, 1969 ). Thus, illocutionary acts are conventionalized messages, because their performance is an engagement in rule-governed behavior (also see Goffman, 1967 ).

Searle extended Austin’s concept of speech acts and elaborated on the speech act theory by identifying the conditions necessary for the realization of speech acts. For example, to promise, the speaker needs sincerity and intentionality; to declare the marital union of two partners, a priest or a judge has to be present. Hence the successful performance of a speech act depends on whether the constituent conditions of a particular speech act are fulfilled, or a particular speech act is realized in a contextually appropriate manner (i.e., in relation to sociocultural factors).

Searle developed a typology to categorize speech acts: (a) representatives , where the speaker says how something is, like asserting; (b) directives , the speaker tries to get the hearer to perform some future action, such as requesting and warning; (c) commissives , the speaker commits to some future course of action, such as pledging and promising; (d) expressives , the speaker articulates his or her psychological state of mind about some prior action, such as apologizing and thanking; and (e) declaratives , performatives that require non-linguist institutions, such as christening or sentencing. These conditions must be fulfilled for the speaker to effect the specific act.

The speech act theory can be used to describe utterance sequences—for example, to predict antecedents and consequents in a conversation. Thus, when a violation of the typology occurred, speech act theory successfully predicted repairs and other signs of troubles in the conversational moves. However, Searle’s taxonomy was criticized for several reasons. First, while Searle treated illocutionary acts as consisting of complete sentences in grammatical form, such acts can be very short utterances that do not follow the complete object-verb-subject structure (e.g., “Forge on!”). On the other hand, the speaker may need to utter several sentences to bring about effects on the hearer (e.g., advising). Second, Searle assumed that the felicity conditions for successful performances are universal, but later studies found that the conditions are indeed specific to the culture.

Furthermore, Searle subscribed to a linear, speaker-to-hearer view of transaction that dismissed the interactional aspect of language. The hearer’s role was minimized; specifically, the hearer’s influence on the speaker’s construction of utterances was ignored. Searle also neglected perlocutionary acts, which focus on the intention of the speaker. Instead, he focused solely on the linguistic goal of deliberate expression of an intentional state while overlooking extralinguistic cues. In short, the speech act theory could not account for intentionality and variability in discourse.

Grice’s Maxims of Implicatures

By moving beyond the linear (i.e., speaker-to-hearer) view of transaction, Grice proposed the cooperative principle ( 1989 ). He observed that interlocutors engage in collaborative efforts in social interaction in order to attain a common goal. In Grice’s view, collaborative efforts do not mean agreement; they mean that the speaker and the hearer work together in the conversation. According to the principle, participants follow four conversational maxims: quantity (be informative), quality (be truthful), relation (be relevant), and manner (be clear, be brief). Since these four maxims vary by culture, the interlocutors need to have culturally nuanced knowledge to fulfill these maxims.

According to Grice, meaning is produced in a direct way when participants adhere to the maxims. When the speaker’s intentions are conveyed clearly, the hearer should not have to interpret the speaker’s intentions. This occurs with conventional implicatures where standard word meanings are used in the interaction. However, in actual social interaction, most meanings are implied through conversational implicatures in which one or more of the conversational maxims are violated. Due to normative constraints, a speaker who says p implicates q , and the hearer would then need to infer the implied meanings; for example, what is being said and what is beyond words in a recommendation letter.

In short, Grice’s maxims of conversational implicatures are used to explain why people engage in different interpretations rather than rely on the literal meanings of utterances. The maxims attend to implied meanings that constitute a huge part of conversation and also the role of the hearer. Nonetheless, the cooperative principle was criticized for privileging the conversational conventions of middle-class English speakers. Additionally, Grice did not scrutinize strategic non-cooperation, which remains a primary source of inference in conversation (Hadi, 2013 ).

Politeness Theory

Influenced by Grice’s maxims, Brown and Levinson ( 1987 ) proposed the politeness theory to explain the interlocutor’s observation of conversational implicatures in order to maintain the expressive order of interaction. Brown and Levinson observed politeness strategies that consistently occurred in their field data across several languages: Tzetzal and Tamil languages in Asia, and the British and American forms of English. Despite the distinctive cultures and languages, they observed outstanding parallelism in interlocutors’ use of polite language to accomplish conversational goals. Politeness is the activity performed to enhance, maintain, or protect face or the self-image of the interlocutors.

To illustrate language universality in politeness, Brown and Levinson proposed a socialized interlocutor—nicknamed a model person (MP)—as a face-bearing human with rationality and intentionality when communicating. To avoid breaching social equilibrium, the MP, whom Brown and Levinson identified as the speaker, conforms to social norms to be polite. In performing a speech act, the MP cultivates a desirable image (i.e., positive social worth), pays attention to the hearer’s responses, and ensures that nobody loses face in social interactions (e.g., feels embarrassed, humiliated, awkward, etc.).

Since face is emotionally invested (e.g., actors get upset) and sanctioned by social norms, actors are said to engage in rule-governed behavior to pay homage to their face. Due to the emotional investment, face threats are likely to occur when actors perform facework. Brown and Levinson described two basic face wants: positive face , the desire for one’s actions to be accepted by others, such as approval from others; and negative face , the desire for one’s actions to be unimpeded by others. A threat to positive face decreases approval from the hearer (e.g., acknowledging one’s vulnerability), whereas a threat to negative face restricts one’s freedom to act (e.g., requesting a favor).

According to the politeness theory, the speaker can choose whether or not to perform face-threatening acts (FTAs). When performing FTAs, the speaker will go on or off record. In going off record, the speaker uses hints or utterances that have more than one attributable intentions, so that he or she does not appear to have performed a speech act. For example, the speaker who utters “Oops, I don’t have any cash on me” to the hearer after they have dined together in a restaurant is using an off-record strategy to suggest that the hearer foot the bill. In contrast, going on record means that the speaker performs the FTA (i.e., baldly without saving face) with or without redress. With redress, the speaker indicates that he or she does not intend to violate social equilibrium by performing the FTA (see further discussion below). Without redress, the speaker directly expresses his or her desire; for instance, the speaker commands the hearer to pay for lunch by saying, “You should pay this time.”

The speaker can use either positive or negative politeness strategies when performing FTAs with redress. Positive politeness strategies are used to attend to the hearer’s positive face. For example, in the restaurant scenario, the speaker can choose to compliment the hearer in order to establish solidarity by saying, “You have always been so generous …” On the other hand, negative politeness strategies are used to avoid imposing on the hearer’s negative face. For example, by seeking permission, “Would you consider paying for lunch? I will return the favor in the future,” the speaker acknowledges that the hearer is not obligated to perform the action of footing the bill.

According to the politeness theory, the speaker wants to use the least amount of effort to maximize ends by considering the weight of performing the FTA. Brown and Levinson postulated a formula: Wx = P (S, H) + D (S, H) + R, where W stands for the weight of the FTA; P the relative power of hearer (H) over speaker (S), which is asymmetrical (e.g., if H is an authority); D the social distance between H and S, which is symmetrical (if H speaks another dialect); and R the ranking of imposition of the FTA in a particular culture. They suggested that P and D were universal with some emic correlates. Thus, in calculating Wx, S will consider the payoffs of each strategy. For example, in using positive politeness strategies, S may appear to be friendly, whereas in using an off-record strategy, S may appear manipulative by imposing on H, who gets S’s hints and then performs a future act. In using an on-record strategy, S may choose to be efficient, such as in an emergency (e.g., Ambush!).

After three decades, politeness theory remains one of the most tested theories. However, amongst its criticisms, the theory is said to account for intentional politeness, but not intentional impoliteness. The significant attention paid to the speaker’s utterances, albeit with a consideration for the hearer’s face, reveals the assumption of conversations as monologic. In some respects the theory followed the trajectory of Searle’s and Grice’s works in that the performance of utterances is conceptualized as a rational cognitive activity of the speakers. In particular, speakers are assumed to generate meanings and action, whereas hearers are treated as receivers who interpret the speech performance. Therefore, the politeness theory is unable to fully explain interactional organization in talk exchanges.

Conversation Analysis

During the 1960s, empirical science centered on the prediction of the effects of abstract ideas on communication and social life. Common predictors tested include personality types, cognition, biological sex, income level, and political stance. Social scientists who studied language commonly adhered to the quantitative paradigm; they conducted experiments, used elicited conversations, and analyzed responses containing rehearsals of recollected conversations. The study of mundane rituals, however, was not of academic concern.

Erving Goffman, a sociologist, later made a radical theoretical move that differed significantly from the mainstream empirical studies. Goffman stated that orderliness was empirically observable from everyday conversation. He argued that since socialization shapes the social actor’s competencies, conversation maintains moral codes and institutional order. In other words, sequential ordering of actions in social interaction reflects the macro social institution (e.g., politics, business, legal systems, etc.).

Goffman’s works were viewed as a paradigm shift in the social sciences. He called attention to the orderliness that is observable in ordinary conversation—an area of investigation that other scientists neglected. Furthermore, unlike the early works in language study, Goffman’s theoretical framework no longer focused solely on the performance of speakers in conversations. Instead, meaning making—that is, the examination of the participants’ understanding of one another’s conduct—took precedence. Goffman did not test his ideas, nor did he develop any set of empirical methods that allowed the testing of his ideas.

In search of an empirical analysis of conversation, Harold Garfinkel, another sociologist, expanded on Goffman’s ideas. Garfinkel ( 1967 ) proposed that ethno-methods (i.e., the study of people’s practices or methods) inform the production of culturally meaningful symbols and actions. He noted that social actors use multiple tacit methods (e.g., presuppositions, assumptions, and methods of inference) to make shared sense of their interaction. Thus, conversation is a place where participants engage in mundane reason analysis, and conversational sequential structure—the organization of social interaction—reveals membership categorization.

The subdiscipline of conversation analysis (CA) was further expanded when Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, who were later joined by Gail Jefferson, studied suicide calls made to the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide, Los Angeles (Sacks, 1984 ). They investigated how sequential structure is managed in institutional talk. Conversation analysts study conversation sequence organization, turn design, turn taking, lexical choices, the repair of difficulties in speech, and the overall conversational structure. They analyze linguistic mechanisms (e.g., grammar and syntax, lexis, intonation, prosody, etc.) in naturally occurring conversations.

Institutional talk, as examined in later CA studies, focused on those that have fewer formal constraints as institutional practices (e.g., phone calls, doctor–patient interaction, and classroom instructions), but not those that have rigid structures within formalized rituals (e.g., a religious wedding ceremony, a sermon, etc.). Institutional CA studies accelerated in the past few decades, allowing the identification of macro-level societal shifts through the management of social interaction in talk (Gee & Handford, 2012 ).

In general, CA theory postulates that talk is conducted in context. Participants’ talk and actions evoke context, and context is invoked and constructed by participants. Sequencing position in conversations reflects the participants’ understanding of the immediate preceding talk. As such, sequential structure reveals socially shared and structured procedures (Garfinkel, 1967 ). Thus, CA is the study of action, meaning, context management, and intersubjectivity.

CA is qualitative in methodology, even though later scholarship involved statistical analysis. The method is criticized for several weaknesses, among them: (a) the analysis and presentation of select segments of conversation lack rationale; (b) most CA studies are restricted to studying conversations in North America and Europe; (c) since multiple identities are at play in conversations, those that are consequential for social interaction remain ambiguous and debatable in analyses; and (d) the boundaries between pleasantries (e.g., small talk) and institutional talk are at times fuzzy in institutional CA (Have, 1990 ). Nevertheless, with a range of sub-areas quite well developed, CA is said to form its own discipline.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis (DA) is a broad term for different analytical approaches used to examine text and talk. Discourse is considered language use in general, and language is viewed as a form of action. The distinctions between the different approaches used in DA are based on the influences of the early works or traditions in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis and critical linguistics, Bakhtinian research, Foucauldian research, and even interactional sociolinguistics (Gee & Handford, 2012 ). However, the very different approaches and practices in DA have sparked disagreements among researchers about their applications and distinctions.

Data used in DA range from written to spoken, such as recorded spontaneous conversation, news articles, historical documents, transcripts from counseling sessions, clinical talk, interviews, blogs, and the like. Socio-historical contexts are often included in DA. As a tool for analyzing text and talk, DA has significantly influenced the study of language and culture. Two of the most popular DA approaches used in communication studies are Discursive Psychology (DP) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

Discursive Psychology

DP evolved in the early 1990s from Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter’s works, in which they expressed dissatisfaction with the ways psychologists treated discourse. In psychology, utterances are treated as a reflection of the speaker’s mental state. Hence, talk is considered reflective (Edwards & Potter, 2005 ). However, in DP talk is considered constructive; language use is thus viewed as a social action or function. This means that people use language to make sense of what they do in a socially meaningful world. Therefore, language is treated as a tool to get things done.

In DP, researchers study the details of what people say (e.g., descriptions, terms, lexicons, or grammar). Researchers are concerned with how these features have particular effects or bear functions, such as shifting blame, denying responsibility, and providing counterarguments. DP researchers seek to understand the interests, attitudes, and motives of the speakers, particularly, why people use language the way they do and how they manage and construct identities.

Language use in news media coverage provides a good example for DP analysis. For example, the August 2015 news coverage about corruption in Malaysian government offices supplies rich vocabularies for analyzing the speakers’ motives. Under the leadership of Bersih (an organization whose name literally translates to clean in the Malay language), an estimated half a million street demonstrators peacefully gathered in Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, for a public demonstration that lasted two days. The demonstrators demanded transparency in the country’s governance, including fair elections. They urged the Prime Minister, Najib Razak, to resign following a critical exposé published in The Wall Street Journal . The Prime Minister was reported to have transferred the equivalent of US$11 billion from a government development firm into his personal bank account (Wright & Clark, 2015 ). Prior to the Prime Minister’s counterattack, the press labeled the demonstrators rally goers . However, the Prime Minister and his acolytes in government in turn used descriptors such as criminals, crazy, unpatriotic , and shallow-minded culprits to label the demonstrators traitors to their country.

The description above shows the way the speakers used language to construct their reality and their relationship to that reality. In this case, DP researchers would analyze and illustrate how the Prime Minister and his government officials co-construct shared meanings in interaction, such as particular realities, beliefs, identities, or subjectivities. For instance, the government can be seen as attempting to exercise control over the public demonstrators (through discourse) in order to defend governmental power. Thus, by labeling the demonstrators culprits , the government asserted its identity as the authority— the elite power that runs the country and decides what goes.

DP researchers assume that each speaker has multiple identities, and the identities can only be performed successfully with the consent of the listeners (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998 ). The researchers also assert that the productive examination of discourse must be considered within the context of language use, such as the institutional setting and local sequential organization of talk. For example, a proper analysis of the Malaysian public demonstration above must include an understanding of the context of the public demonstrators’ dissatisfaction with governmental corruption and citizen’s demand for transparency in governance—a longstanding issue since the country’s independence from Britain. Thus, indexicality—the understanding that the meaning of a word is dependent on the context of use—is essential in DP analysis (Potter, 1996 ).

Perhaps one of the strongest criticisms of DP is the researchers’ reluctance to interpret macro-social concerns. DP researchers insist that the analysis of text and talk should depend on the context exactly as construed by the language used. This means that extratextual information should not be inserted in the analysis. Therefore, DP cannot be utilized to interrogate broader social concerns, such as politics, ideology, and power (Parker, 2015 ). As such, context is limited to and constituted by the interactional setting and functions of utterances.

DP is also criticized for casting speakers as conscious and agentic—that is, as autonomous subjects who manipulate language to do things. Speakers’ intentionality in attribution is thus considered fixed in their minds. Such an assumption in fact closely resembles that of traditional psychology—the very idea that DP researchers attempted to shift away from (Parker, 2015 ). Moreover, the analyst’s interpretation is crucial in unfolding an understanding of the discourse. The analyst’s knowledge and statuses thus influence his or her interpretation of the language used by speaker and can be a weakness if the analyst may conform to some sort of ideology that impacts data interpretation.

Critical Discourse Analysis

Of all the approaches used to study DA, CDA is one that takes a macrosocietal and political standpoint (Van Dijk, 1993 ). Critical discourse analysts examine how societal power relations are enforced, legitimated, maintained, and dominated through the use of language. The sociohistorical context of the text is emphasized. The examination of social problems requires the analyst to be well versed in multiple disciplines. Commonly, the analysts are motivated by particular political agendas or ideologies, and they seek to challenge certain ideologies (Fairclough, 2005 ). Therefore, based on, say, the motivation to fight social inequality and oppression, an analyst may seek out selected texts or talks for study. It is in CDA studies that the abuse, dominance, and unequal distribution of social goods are called into question.

Social theorists whose works are commonly cited in CDA include Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Karl Marx, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. Typical vocabulary in CDA studies includes power, dominance, hegemony, class, gender, race, discrimination, institution, reproduction , and ideology . Topics examined include gender inequality, media discourse, political discourse, racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and antiSemitism. Critical discourse analysts seek to answer questions such as: How do elite groups control public discourse? How does such discourse control the less powerful group (in terms of mind and action)? What are the social consequences of such discourse control? (Van Dijk, 1993 ). The dominant social groups in politics, media, academics, and corporations are scrutinized in terms of the way they produce and maintain the dominant ideology.

Critical discourse analysts explore three contextual levels of discourse: the macro, meso, and micro (Van Dijk, 1993 ). At the macro level, analysts focus on the understanding of relationship between the text and broader social concerns and ideologies. At the meso level, analysts examine the contexts of production and reception of the text, and the ideologies portrayed. The analysts ask questions such as: Where did the text originate? Who is (are) the author(s) and the intended audience of the text? What perspectives are being promoted? At the micro level, analysts scrutinize the forms and contents of the text through linguistic features and devices in order to reveal the speaker’s perspective or ideology. Linguistic features and components studied include direct and indirect quotations, terms used to refer to individuals or groups, sentence structure and grammar (e.g., active and passive voice), and premodifiers (e.g., non-Muslim citizens or Muslim-Chinese citizens).

While analysts frequently favor institutional texts (e.g., a journalistic report) in their analyses, everyday conversation is also included. In fact, everyday conversation is considered social group discourse that can be used to reveal societal norms and shared beliefs. According to van Dijk’s studies of racism in everyday conversation, he found that the speakers’ utterances of “I am not racist, but …” and “We are not a racist society, but …” are in fact a reproduction of institutional talk. He called this specific type of talk a double strategy of positive self-representation and negative other-denigration.

While the multidisciplinary nature of CDA seems beneficial, it is also one of its biggest criticisms. In particular, critical discourse analysts are often accused of not productively using a combination of multiple approaches. Indeed, the more linguistically-oriented studies of text and talk overlooked theories in sociology and political sciences that focus on social and power inequality issues. On the other hand, those that focus on sociology and political sciences did not rigorously engage in DA. Moreover, the relationship between discourse and action coupled with cognition remains inconclusive (Van Dijk, 1998 ).

The Ethnography of Communication

The ethnography of communication originated from ethnology in the 1800s and found a home in in anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, pioneered the ethnographic methods. He intensively recorded the methods he used in his fieldwork when studying the Trobrian Islanders of Papua New Guinea in 1914 , including intrinsic details about the people, their language, and their daily life (Murdock, 1943 ). Franz Boas, a German anthropologist who lived among the Inuit in the late 1800s, further propounded on the necessity for language training among ethnographers who wished to decode the emic (i.e., native) perspective (Muller-Wille, Gieseking, & Barr, 2011 ).

Ethnographers study social norms, meanings, and patterns of life by examining symbolic activities ranging from speech to social artifacts. By writing on culture, recording people, and natural history, ethnographers describe, analyze, and compare people from different communities. The painstaking work involved in ethnography provides rich data that are highly nuanced. Ethnographic works are said to be the portraits of social life. Oftentimes, interviews are used concurrently, along with other methods (e.g., textual analysis) to obtain community members’ interpretation and explanation of the communicative activities. Data analyses are conducted along with (i.e., not after) data recording in the field.

While an ethnographer may generate questions for investigation before entering the field, he or she must remain flexible and receptive to other important questions that may emerge on site. The focus of investigation might shift because theoretical sensitivity—the review of literature prior to fieldwork—may not sufficiently orient the ethnographer to actual interactions. This is because the behaviors and activities that the ethnographer purports to study may have changed due to cultural shift. The use of such an inductive method allows the study of language and culture without theoretical constraints.

Ethnographers may compare the behaviors cross-culturally when a sufficient number of studies of the cultures of interest become available. Since the voices of community members are given precedence, ethnographic reports rely heavily on and present people’s utterances, as well as fine details of observations. In fact, early ethnographic works in anthropology tend to exhaustively cover many life aspects about a community, though the search for nuances and painstaking details, coupled with the ethnographer’s prolonged engagement in the community, pose constraints of time and resources. However, in the 1960s, ethnography took a new turn with the greater emphasis on the study of language use.

The Ethnography of Speaking

The prominence of ethnographic studies focusing on speech in language and culture began in the 1960s with Dell Hymes’s study of language use. Hymes, who was trained in anthropology and linguistics, sought to understand speech patterns, functions, and speaking in situatedness. He departed from microlinguistics (which focuses on semantics, turn-taking, prosody, and conversational structure) to pursue a more holistic account of interaction in context. Hymes emphasized the examination of nonverbal cues, tone of conversation, evaluation of the interlocutors’ conduct, the setting of the interaction, and so forth.

Speaking is considered fundamental in understanding social reality. Hymes’s ethnography of speaking (later called ethnography of communication) is a method for analyzing communication in different cultural settings. Hymes’s ( 1972 ) SPEAKING mnemonic or schema, developed as an etic framework for the etic understanding of social interaction, provides an inductive tool for examining social and cultural elements through the means and ways of speaking. Each letter in the SPEAKING mnemonic represents a different element of a speech act: S represents the setting or scene; P , the participants and participant identities; E , the ends; A , the act sequence and act topic; K , the key or tone; I , the instrumentalities; N , the norms of interaction and interpretation; and G , the genre.

The SPEAKING mnemonic is one of the most widely used theoretical and analytic frameworks in ethnographic studies. Although Hymes developed it to study spontaneous conversation, recent communication studies has broadened the scope of the data to include textual analysis and computer-mediated communication. Such pluralities are, in fact, inherent in people’s ways of speaking and despite some criticisms (e.g., Hymes proposed using his methods to study muted groups, but researchers who wish to listen to minority voices must also learn to listen to the dominant ones), the ethnography of speaking’s theoretical framework has withstood the test of time. It was the inspiration for Gerry Philipsen’s ( 1992 ) speech codes theory—another important heuristic theory in the ethnographic study of language and culture.

Speech Codes Theory

In addition to Hymes’ ethnography of speaking, Philipsen drew from Bernstein’s coding principle ( 1971 ) to postulate his speech codes theory. Bernstein argued that different social groups manifest different communicative practices and linguistic features. These differences are influenced by and, in turn, reinforce the groups’ coding principles—the rules that govern what to say and how to say it in the right context.

According to Philipsen, people’s ways of speaking are woven with speech codes—the system of symbols, meanings, premises, and rules about communication conduct that are historically situated and socially constructed. Therefore, examining a community’s discourse can tease out people’s understanding of the self, society, and strategic action. Philipsen posited five propositions for studying the relationship between communication and culture:

People in different speech communities exhibit different ways of speaking, with different rules for communicative conduct informed by their socially constructed symbols and meanings.

Each code gives practical knowledge about the ways of being in a speech community.

People attach different cultural meanings to speech practices.

Metacommunication (i.e., talk about talk) reveals important worldviews, norms, and values of the people.

The common speech code reveals the morality of communication conduct. For example, community members’ discourse about should not s reveal the should s that they value.

Using the five propositions, Philipsen argued that the speech codes theory can reveal the ways of speaking and reinforce a group’s speech codes. Indeed, the theory has informed the vibrant scholarship on ways of speaking and meaning-making across different global cultural communities. For example, Lee and Hall’s ( 2012 ) study of Chinese Malaysian discourse of dissatisfaction and complaint-making, with and without a formal goal of resolution—called, respectively, thou soo and aih auan— unearthed previously unexplored cultural values of the speech community. Lee ( 2014 ) developed the study further to understand the assumptions of personhood among Chinese Malaysians.

Cultural Discourse Analysis

The speech codes theory also served as the foundation for the development of Donal Carbaugh’s cultural discourse analysis theory. Carbaugh, a former student of Philipsen’s, proposed the cultural discourse theory (CDT) as a way to understand culturally shaped communication practices. According to CDT, cultural discourses are constituted by cultural communication and codes. Culture is an integral part but also a product of communication practices that are highly nuanced and deeply meaningful and intelligible to cultural participants (Carbaugh, 1996 ). Cultural participants draw on diverse communication practices and thus create diversity within and across cultural communities.

Cultural discourse analysts study key cultural terms that are deeply meaningful to the participants; for example, oplakvane , which is a distinctive way of speaking to assert Bulgarian personhood (Carbaugh, Lie, Locmele, & Sotirova, 2012 ). Such cultural terms are an ongoing metacultural commentary that reveals implicit cultural knowledge, the taken-for-granted knowledge, such as beliefs, values, and assumptions about the self.

Three types of questions typically guide cultural discourse analysis (CuDA) are: (a) functional accomplishment (What is getting done when people communicate in this specific way?); (b) structure (How is this communicative practice conducted? What key cultural terms are used to give meaning to the participants? What deep meanings do the terms create?); and (c) sequencing or form (What is the act sequence of this communicative practice, in terms of interactional accomplishments, structural features, and sequential organization?).

The analyst approaches a CuDA project with a particular stance or mode of inquiry. Carbaugh identified five modes of inquiry that enable analysts to tease out important cultural ingredients in a topic of investigation: the theoretical, descriptive, interpretive, comparative, and critical. For example, the theoretical mode enables analysts to understand the basic communication phenomena in the speech codes of a community and therefore to refine what and how to listen for culture in their discourse before venturing into the field. The five modes chart a rough linear design; the analyst must accomplish the preceding mode before embarking on the subsequent mode. The first three modes (i.e., theoretical, descriptive, and interpretive) are mandatory in any CuDA project; however, the last two (i.e., comparative and critical) may or may not be accomplished in a single study (e.g., in an exploratory study).

Cultural discourse analysts typically use Hymes’s SPEAKING framework and Philipsen’s speech codes theory as guidelines for their subsequent analyses in the descriptive and interpretive stages. The analysis of implicit cultural meanings in CuDA can be structured using five semantic radiants or hubs: being , acting , relating , feeling , and dwelling . Using CuDA, analysts can tease out people’s understanding of who they are (being); what they are doing together (acting); how they are linked to one another (relating); their feelings about people, actions, and things (feeling); and their relationship to the world around them (dwelling). The cultural discourse analyst’s task, then, is to advance cultural propositions (i.e., statements containing the taken-for-granted knowledge) and premises (i.e., values or beliefs). These are statements that shed light on the importance of a particular communicative practice among members of a speech community (e.g., beliefs about what exists, what is proper, or what is valued).

While the theories in the ethnography of communication have gained a lot of prominence in the LSI discipline, they have also enriched it. For example, Hymes’s SPEAKING framework, Philipsen’s speech codes theory, and Carbaugh’s CDT have all added depth and rigor to LSI data analysis. Evidently, to navigate through the language and social interactions of a community to which the researcher is not an insider, he or she needs to gain communicative competence (Hymes, 1962 ). Specifically, the researcher needs to know how to communicate like the insiders in order to articulate and explain the behaviors and communicative phenomena to other outsiders. The researcher also needs to gain competence particularly in the multidisciplinary methods of LSI.

However, neither reliance on English as lingua franca for LSI research nor the practice of hiring translators are sufficient for undertaking this line of inquiry successfully. Therefore, many LSI studies recruit international scholars to participate in their research projects. While this is a common practice, especially in CuDA, the researchers’ cultural interpretations and the subsequent translation of the data into the English for publications need to be done with utmost care in order to maintain the integrity of cultural nuances. Moreover, while the scholarship has strived to give voice to muted, non-dominant groups internationally, the dearth of cross-comparative studies—a goal and a tradition of ethnography—is a great concern. In that sense the study of intercultural interaction using the ethnography of communication has not yet come of age in this increasingly globalized and complex world.

This essay outlines the history and evolution of the study of language and culture by the main areas of study in the LSI discipline. The four main areas summarized are language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication. Influential methodological and theoretical frameworks reviewed cover the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis. Finally, the essay examines major criticisms of the theories and applications, as well as possible future directions of scholarship, when and where appropriate in the discussion.

Further Reading

• Edwards, D. , & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology . London: SAGE.
• Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (4th ed.). New York: Routledge.
• Erving Goffman Archives in the Intercyberlibrary of the University of Nevada .
• Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Micro studies of the public order . New York: Basic Books.
• Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture . New York: Doubleday.
• Hymes, D. (1962). The ethnography of speaking. In T. Gladwin & W. C. Sturtevant (Eds.), Anthropology and human behavior (pp. 13–35). Washington, DC: Anthropology Society of Washington.
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3.1 Language and Meaning

Learning objectives.

• Explain how the triangle of meaning describes the symbolic nature of language.
• Distinguish between denotation and connotation.
• Discuss the function of the rules of language.
• Describe the process of language acquisition.

The relationship between language and meaning is not a straightforward one. One reason for this complicated relationship is the limitlessness of modern language systems like English (Crystal, 2005). Language is productive in the sense that there are an infinite number of utterances we can make by connecting existing words in new ways. In addition, there is no limit to a language’s vocabulary, as new words are coined daily. Of course, words aren’t the only things we need to communicate, and although verbal and nonverbal communication are closely related in terms of how we make meaning, nonverbal communication is not productive and limitless. Although we can only make a few hundred physical signs, we have about a million words in the English language. So with all this possibility, how does communication generate meaning?

You’ll recall that “generating meaning” was a central part of the definition of communication we learned earlier. We arrive at meaning through the interaction between our nervous and sensory systems and some stimulus outside of them. It is here, between what the communication models we discussed earlier labeled as encoding and decoding, that meaning is generated as sensory information is interpreted. The indirect and sometimes complicated relationship between language and meaning can lead to confusion, frustration, or even humor. We may even experience a little of all three, when we stop to think about how there are some twenty-five definitions available to tell us the meaning of word meaning ! (Crystal, 2005) Since language and symbols are the primary vehicle for our communication, it is important that we not take the components of our verbal communication for granted.

Language Is Symbolic

Our language system is primarily made up of symbols. A symbol is something that stands in for or represents something else. Symbols can be communicated verbally (speaking the word hello ), in writing (putting the letters H-E-L-L-O together), or nonverbally (waving your hand back and forth). In any case, the symbols we use stand in for something else, like a physical object or an idea; they do not actually correspond to the thing being referenced in any direct way. Unlike hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, which often did have a literal relationship between the written symbol and the object being referenced, the symbols used in modern languages look nothing like the object or idea to which they refer.

The symbols we use combine to form language systems or codes. Codes are culturally agreed on and ever-changing systems of symbols that help us organize, understand, and generate meaning (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1993). There are about 6,000 language codes used in the world, and around 40 percent of those (2,400) are only spoken and do not have a written version (Crystal, 2005). Remember that for most of human history the spoken word and nonverbal communication were the primary means of communication. Even languages with a written component didn’t see widespread literacy, or the ability to read and write, until a little over one hundred years ago.

The symbolic nature of our communication is a quality unique to humans. Since the words we use do not have to correspond directly to a “thing” in our “reality,” we can communicate in abstractions. This property of language is called displacement and specifically refers to our ability to talk about events that are removed in space or time from a speaker and situation (Crystal, 2005). Animals do communicate, but in a much simpler way that is only a reaction to stimulus. Further, animal communication is very limited and lacks the productive quality of language that we discussed earlier.

Although animals do communicate in some ways, humans’ ability to use symbols to communicate about things outside of our immediate surroundings and experience is unique.

Joshua Allen – Bark – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

As I noted in Chapter 1 “Introduction to Communication Studies” , the earliest human verbal communication was not very symbolic or abstract, as it likely mimicked sounds of animals and nature. Such a simple form of communication persisted for thousands of years, but as later humans turned to settled agriculture and populations grew, things needed to be more distinguishable. More terms (symbols) were needed to accommodate the increasing number of things like tools and ideas like crop rotation that emerged as a result of new knowledge about and experience with farming and animal domestication. There weren’t written symbols during this time, but objects were often used to represent other objects; for example, a farmer might have kept a pebble in a box to represent each chicken he owned. As further advancements made keeping track of objects-representing-objects more difficult, more abstract symbols and later written words were able to stand in for an idea or object. Despite the fact that these transitions occurred many thousands of years ago, we can trace some words that we still use today back to their much more direct and much less abstract origins.

For example, the word calculate comes from the Latin word calculus , which means “pebble.” But what does a pebble have to do with calculations? Pebbles were used, very long ago, to calculate things before we developed verbal or written numbering systems (Hayakawa & Hayakawa, 1990). As I noted earlier, a farmer may have kept, in a box, one pebble for each of his chickens. Each pebble represented one chicken, meaning that each symbol (the pebble) had a direct correlation to another thing out in the world (its chicken). This system allowed the farmer to keep track of his livestock. He could periodically verify that each pebble had a corresponding chicken. If there was a discrepancy, he would know that a chicken was lost, stolen, or killed. Later, symbols were developed that made accounting a little easier. Instead of keeping track of boxes of pebbles, the farmer could record a symbol like the word five or the numeral 15 that could stand in for five or fifteen pebbles. This demonstrates how our symbols have evolved and how some still carry that ancient history with them, even though we are unaware of it. While this evolution made communication easier in some ways, it also opened up room for misunderstanding, since the relationship between symbols and the objects or ideas they represented became less straightforward. Although the root of calculate means “pebble,” the word calculate today has at least six common definitions.

The Triangle of Meaning

The triangle of meaning is a model of communication that indicates the relationship among a thought, symbol, and referent and highlights the indirect relationship between the symbol and referent (Richards & Ogden, 1923). As you can see in Figure 3.1 “Triangle of Meaning” , the thought is the concept or idea a person references. The symbol is the word that represents the thought, and the referent is the object or idea to which the symbol refers. This model is useful for us as communicators because when we are aware of the indirect relationship between symbols and referents, we are aware of how common misunderstandings occur, as the following example illustrates: Jasper and Abby have been thinking about getting a new dog. So each of them is having a similar thought. They are each using the same symbol, the word dog , to communicate about their thought. Their referents, however, are different. Jasper is thinking about a small dog like a dachshund, and Abby is thinking about an Australian shepherd. Since the word dog doesn’t refer to one specific object in our reality, it is possible for them to have the same thought, and use the same symbol, but end up in an awkward moment when they get to the shelter and fall in love with their respective referents only to find out the other person didn’t have the same thing in mind.

Figure 3.1 Triangle of Meaning

Source: Adapted from Ivor A. Richards and Charles K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Tubner, 1923).

Being aware of this indirect relationship between symbol and referent, we can try to compensate for it by getting clarification. Some of what we learned in Chapter 2 “Communication and Perception” , about perception checking, can be useful here. Abby might ask Jasper, “What kind of dog do you have in mind?” This question would allow Jasper to describe his referent, which would allow for more shared understanding. If Jasper responds, “Well, I like short-haired dogs. And we need a dog that will work well in an apartment,” then there’s still quite a range of referents. Abby could ask questions for clarification, like “Sounds like you’re saying that a smaller dog might be better. Is that right?” Getting to a place of shared understanding can be difficult, even when we define our symbols and describe our referents.

Definitions

Definitions help us narrow the meaning of particular symbols, which also narrows a symbol’s possible referents. They also provide more words (symbols) for which we must determine a referent. If a concept is abstract and the words used to define it are also abstract, then a definition may be useless. Have you ever been caught in a verbal maze as you look up an unfamiliar word, only to find that the definition contains more unfamiliar words? Although this can be frustrating, definitions do serve a purpose.

Words have denotative and connotative meanings. Denotation refers to definitions that are accepted by the language group as a whole, or the dictionary definition of a word. For example, the denotation of the word cowboy is a man who takes care of cattle. Another denotation is a reckless and/or independent person. A more abstract word, like change , would be more difficult to understand due to the multiple denotations. Since both cowboy and change have multiple meanings, they are considered polysemic words. Monosemic words have only one use in a language, which makes their denotation more straightforward. Specialized academic or scientific words, like monosemic , are often monosemic, but there are fewer commonly used monosemic words, for example, handkerchief . As you might guess based on our discussion of the complexity of language so far, monosemic words are far outnumbered by polysemic words.

Connotation refers to definitions that are based on emotion- or experience-based associations people have with a word. To go back to our previous words, change can have positive or negative connotations depending on a person’s experiences. A person who just ended a long-term relationship may think of change as good or bad depending on what he or she thought about his or her former partner. Even monosemic words like handkerchief that only have one denotation can have multiple connotations. A handkerchief can conjure up thoughts of dainty Southern belles or disgusting snot-rags. A polysemic word like cowboy has many connotations, and philosophers of language have explored how connotations extend beyond one or two experiential or emotional meanings of a word to constitute cultural myths (Barthes, 1972). Cowboy , for example, connects to the frontier and the western history of the United States, which has mythologies associated with it that help shape the narrative of the nation. The Marlboro Man is an enduring advertising icon that draws on connotations of the cowboy to attract customers. While people who grew up with cattle or have family that ranch may have a very specific connotation of the word cowboy based on personal experience, other people’s connotations may be more influenced by popular cultural symbolism like that seen in westerns.

Language Is Learned

As we just learned, the relationship between the symbols that make up our language and their referents is arbitrary, which means they have no meaning until we assign it to them. In order to effectively use a language system, we have to learn, over time, which symbols go with which referents, since we can’t just tell by looking at the symbol. Like me, you probably learned what the word apple meant by looking at the letters A-P-P-L-E and a picture of an apple and having a teacher or caregiver help you sound out the letters until you said the whole word. Over time, we associated that combination of letters with the picture of the red delicious apple and no longer had to sound each letter out. This is a deliberate process that may seem slow in the moment, but as we will see next, our ability to acquire language is actually quite astounding. We didn’t just learn individual words and their meanings, though; we also learned rules of grammar that help us put those words into meaningful sentences.

We learn the rules of language as we learn to speak and read.

Andy Roberts – Reading – CC BY 2.0.

The Rules of Language

Any language system has to have rules to make it learnable and usable. Grammar refers to the rules that govern how words are used to make phrases and sentences. Someone would likely know what you mean by the question “Where’s the remote control?” But “The control remote where’s?” is likely to be unintelligible or at least confusing (Crystal, 2005). Knowing the rules of grammar is important in order to be able to write and speak to be understood, but knowing these rules isn’t enough to make you an effective communicator. As we will learn later, creativity and play also have a role in effective verbal communication. Even though teachers have long enforced the idea that there are right and wrong ways to write and say words, there really isn’t anything inherently right or wrong about the individual choices we make in our language use. Rather, it is our collective agreement that gives power to the rules that govern language.

Some linguists have viewed the rules of language as fairly rigid and limiting in terms of the possible meanings that we can derive from words and sentences created from within that system (de Saussure, 1974). Others have viewed these rules as more open and flexible, allowing a person to make choices to determine meaning (Eco, 1976). Still others have claimed that there is no real meaning and that possibilities for meaning are limitless (Derrida, 1978). For our purposes in this chapter, we will take the middle perspective, which allows for the possibility of individual choice but still acknowledges that there is a system of rules and logic that guides our decision making.

Looking back to our discussion of connotation, we can see how individuals play a role in how meaning and language are related, since we each bring our own emotional and experiential associations with a word that are often more meaningful than a dictionary definition. In addition, we have quite a bit of room for creativity, play, and resistance with the symbols we use. Have you ever had a secret code with a friend that only you knew? This can allow you to use a code word in a public place to get meaning across to the other person who is “in the know” without anyone else understanding the message. The fact that you can take a word, give it another meaning, have someone else agree on that meaning, and then use the word in your own fashion clearly shows that meaning is in people rather than words. As we will learn later, many slang words developed because people wanted a covert way to talk about certain topics like drugs or sex without outsiders catching on.

Language Acquisition

Language acquisition refers to the process by which we learn to understand, produce, and use words to communicate within a given language group. The way we acquire language is affected by many factors. We know that learning a language is not just about learning words. We have to learn how to correctly connect the words to what they mean in a given context and be able to order the words in such a way, within the rules of grammar for the language code we are using, that other people will be able to understand us (Hayakawa & Hayakawa, 1990). As if that didn’t seem like enough to learn, we also have to learn various conversational patterns that we regularly but often unconsciously follow to make our interactions smooth and successful. A brief overview of language acquisition from birth to adulthood offers us a look at the amazing and still somewhat mysterious relationships between our brain, eyes, ears, voice, and other physiological elements (Crystal, 2005). In terms of language acquisition, there is actually a great deal of variation between individuals due to physical and contextual differences, but this overview presumes “typical development.”

Much is being taken in during the first year of life as brain development accelerates and senses are focused and tuned. Primary caregivers are driven, almost instinctively, to begin instilling conversational abilities in babies from birth. As just about anyone who has spent time around a baby during this phase of rapid development can attest, there is a compulsion to interact with the child, which is usually entertaining for adult and baby. This compulsion isn’t random or accidental, and we would be wrong to assume that our communication is useless or just for fun. We would also be wrong to assume that language acquisition doesn’t begin until a baby says his or her first words. By the time this happens, babies have learned much, through observation and practice, about our verbal communication and interaction patterns. These key developments include the following:

• 2–4 months. Babies can respond to different tones of voice (angry, soothing, or playful).
• 6 months. Babies can associate some words, like bye-bye , with a corresponding behavior, and they begin “babbling,” which is actually practice for more intelligible speech to come.
• 8–10 months. Babies learn that pointing can attract or direct attention, and they begin to follow adult conversations, shifting eye contact from one speaker to the next.
• 1 year. Babies recognize some individual words (people’s names, no ) and basic rituals of verbal interaction such as question-pause-answer and various greetings. Shortly before or after this time, babies begin to use “melodic utterances” echoing the variety in pitch and tone in various verbal interactions such as questioning, greeting, or wanting.

By the time children are one year old, they have learned many of the patterns of speech, even though they can’t yet put them into recognizable use.

Christine Wittenmeier – Nicolas 1 Year Old 135 – CC BY 2.0.

Language acquisition after the age of two seems sluggish compared to the pace of development during the first year or so. By the end of the first year, babies have learned most of the basic phonetic components necessary for speech. The second year represents a time of intense practice—of verbal trial and error. From three to five we continue to develop our pronunciation ability, which develops enough by our teens to allow us to engage in everyday communication. Of course, our expressive repertoire, including ways of speaking and the vocabulary we use, continues to develop. A person’s life and career choices determine to a large degree how much further development occurs. But the language abilities we have acquired can decrease or disappear as a result of disease or trauma. Additionally, if such things occur early in life, or before birth, the process of language acquisition can be quite different. Barriers to speech and language acquisition are common and are the domain of a related but distinct field of study often housed in departments of communication sciences and disorders. The “Getting Real” box featured discusses this field of study and related careers.

“Getting Real”

Communication Sciences and Disorders

The field of communication sciences and disorders includes career paths in audiology and speech-language pathology—we will focus on the latter here. Individuals working in this field can work in schools, hospitals, private practice, or in academia as researchers and professors. Speech and language disorders affect millions of people. Between six and eight million people in the United States have some kind of language impairment, ranging from stuttering to lack of language comprehension to lack of language expression. [1] Speech language pathologists may work with children who have exhibited a marked slowness or gap in language acquisition or adults who have recently lost language abilities due to stroke or some other trauma or disease. Speech-language pathologists often diagnose and treat language disorders as part of a team that may include teachers, physicians, social workers, and others. The career outlook is predicted to be very strong for the next eight years as the baby boomers reach an age where age-related hearing and language impairments develop, as medical advances increase survival rates for premature babies and stroke and trauma victims, and as schools continue to grow. Speech-language pathologists often obtain graduate degrees, complete clinical experiences, and take tests for various certifications and licenses. To be successful in this field, individuals must have good interpersonal communication skills to work with a variety of clients and other service providers, above-average intellectual aptitude (particularly in science), and excellent oral and written communication skills. Typical salaries range from $58,000 a year for individuals working in elementary schools to $70,000 for those in health care settings.

• What specific communication skills do you think would be important for a speech-language pathologist and why?
• The motto for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association is “Making effective communication a human right, accessible and achievable for all.” How does this motto relate to our discussion of communication ethics so far? What kinds of things do speech-language pathologists do that fulfill that motto?

Key Takeaways

• The triangle of meaning is a model of communication that indicates the relationship among a thought, symbol, and referent, and highlights the indirect relationship between the symbol and the referent. The model explains how for any given symbol there can be many different referents, which can lead to misunderstanding.
• Denotation refers to the agreed on or dictionary definition of a word. Connotation refers to definitions that are based on emotion- or experience-based associations people have with a word.
• The rules of language help make it learnable and usable. Although the rules limit some of the uses of language, they still allow for the possibility of creativity and play.
• Language acquisition refers to the process by which we learn to understand, produce, and use words to communicate within a given language group. This process happens at an amazing speed during the first two years of life, and we attain all the linguistic information we need to participate in everyday conversations, assuming normal development, by our early teens.
• Trace the history of a word (its etymology) like we did with calculate earlier in the chapter. Discuss how the meaning of the word (the symbol) has changed as it has gotten further from its original meaning. Two interesting words to trace are hazard and phony .
• Apply the triangle of meaning to a recent message exchange you had in which differing referents led to misunderstanding. What could you have done to help prevent or correct the misunderstanding?
• Think of some words that have strong connotations for you. How does your connotation differ from the denotation? How might your connotation differ from another person’s?

Barthes, R., Mythologies (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1972).

Crystal, D., How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2005), 8–9.

de Saussure, F., Course in General Linguistics , trans. Wade Baskin (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974).

Derrida, J., Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978).

Eco, U., A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976).

Hayakawa, S. I. and Alan R. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action , 5th ed. (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1990), 87.

Leeds-Hurwitz, W., Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993), 53.

Richards, I. A. and Charles K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Tubner, 1923).

• American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.asha.org/careers/professions/default-overview.htm . ↵

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Linguistics and communication

Keith Allan MLitt, PhD (Edinburgh), FAHA. Emeritus Professor, Monash University and Honorary professor at University of Queensland. Research interests focus mainly on aspects of meaning in language, with a secondary interest in the history and philosophy of linguistics. He has published on the topics of censorship, discourse analysis, dysphemism, euphemism, grammaticalization, jargon, language policy, linguistic metatheory, morphology, politeness, pragmatics, prosody, psycholinguistics, semantics, sociolinguistics, speech act theory, syntax, and taboo. Homepage: http://users.monash.edu.au/∼kallan/homepage.html .

This essay begins by identifying what communication is and what linguistics is in order to establish the relationship between them. The characterization of linguistics leads to discussion of the nature of language and of the relationship between a theory of language, i. e., linguistic theory, and the object language it models. This, in turn, leads to a review of speculations on the origins of human language with a view to identifying the motivation for its creation and its primary function. After considering a host of data, it becomes clear that, contrary to some approaches, the primary function of human language is to function as a vehicle of communication. Thus, linguistics studies what for humans is their primary vehicle of communication.

About the author

Acknowledgments.

I have benefitted greatly from the comments of several friends on earlier versions of this essay. I should like to thank Barry Blake, Mike Balint, Alessandro Capone, Pedro Chamizo, Adam Głaz, Istvan Kecskes, Finex Ndhlovu, Mohammad Salmani Nodoushan, and Roberto Sileo, for their helpful comments. I did not always take their advice, so all remaining infelicities are mine alone.

Allan, Keith. 1986/2014. Linguistic meaning . 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [Reprint edn, Beijing: World Publishing Corporation, 1991. Reissued in one volume as Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics Volume 8, 2014]. Search in Google Scholar

Allan, Keith. 2001. Natural language semantics . Oxford & Malden MA: Blackwell. Search in Google Scholar

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This essay begins by identifying what communication is and what linguistics is in order to establish the relationship between them. The characterization of linguistics leads to discussion of the nature of language and of the relationship between a theory of language, i. e., linguistic theory, and the object language it models. This, in turn, leads to a review of speculations on the origins of human language with a view to identifying the motivation for its creation and its primary function. After considering a host of data, it becomes clear that, contrary to some approaches, the primary function of human language is to function as a vehicle of communication. Thus, linguistics studies what for humans is their primary vehicle of communication.

• human beings
• linguistic theory
• social interactive behavior
• the origins of language
• the relation of theory to data

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T1 - Linguistics and communication

AU - Allan, Keith

N2 - This essay begins by identifying what communication is and what linguistics is in order to establish the relationship between them. The characterization of linguistics leads to discussion of the nature of language and of the relationship between a theory of language, i. e., linguistic theory, and the object language it models. This, in turn, leads to a review of speculations on the origins of human language with a view to identifying the motivation for its creation and its primary function. After considering a host of data, it becomes clear that, contrary to some approaches, the primary function of human language is to function as a vehicle of communication. Thus, linguistics studies what for humans is their primary vehicle of communication.

AB - This essay begins by identifying what communication is and what linguistics is in order to establish the relationship between them. The characterization of linguistics leads to discussion of the nature of language and of the relationship between a theory of language, i. e., linguistic theory, and the object language it models. This, in turn, leads to a review of speculations on the origins of human language with a view to identifying the motivation for its creation and its primary function. After considering a host of data, it becomes clear that, contrary to some approaches, the primary function of human language is to function as a vehicle of communication. Thus, linguistics studies what for humans is their primary vehicle of communication.

KW - human beings

KW - language

KW - linguistic theory

KW - message

KW - social interactive behavior

KW - the origins of language

KW - the relation of theory to data

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85091738102&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1515/ip-2020-3002

DO - 10.1515/ip-2020-3002

M3 - Review Article

AN - SCOPUS:85091738102

SN - 1612-295X

JO - Intercultural Pragmatics

JF - Intercultural Pragmatics

Language vs. Communication: They’re Not the Same Thing

In many cases, the words “language” and “communication” are used interchangeably. However, there is a distinct dichotomy between the two terms — language vs. communication.

Language – the principal method of human communication, consisting of words used in a structured and conventional way and conveyed by speech, writing, or gesture.

Communication – the imparting or exchanging of information or news.

Every living thing communicates in some way:

Fish jump, sometimes for sheer joy.

Dogs bark, cats meow, and cows moo.

Birds sing their cadences to communicate a variety of purposes.

And yet, we do not say they are engaging in language communication.

These noises or other interactions communicate. Yet that is not language communication.

Language is the highest form of intelligent interaction — and is reserved for higher-order beings of our universe, namely humans. No other living thing communicates verbally and further, reduces that verbal communication to written form as well.

To understand this idea further, let’s continue to discuss the definitions.

Language vs. Communication

The definition of language.

Language is a distinctly human activity that aids in the transmission of feelings and thoughts from one person to another. It is how we express what we think or feel through sounds and/or symbols (spoken or written words), signs, posture, and gestures that convey a certain meaning.

Among people, language is the primary means of communication. It is through language communication, spoken or written, that we can share our ideas, opinions, views, and emotions with another person.

The purpose of language is to make sense of complex and abstract thought. Various languages are used by people residing in different areas or belonging to different communities.

Over time, languages have been passed down verbally through generations and eventually reduced to some form of written record. Language, as a tool, primarily occurs in auditory channels and is open to dynamic change.

The Definition of Communication

Where language is a tool , communication is an experience .

Communication is described as, “an act of interchanging ideas, information, or messages from one person or place to another, via words or signs which are understood to both parties.” It’s a crucial activity for any group of beings because it is how members of the group cooperate together.

Communication is necessary for any group to function effectively. It is, at its core, a two-way activity, consisting of seven major elements :

A message is encoded and then sent from one individual (sender) to another (receiver), through a channel. That message is then decoded and given feedback if communicated effectively.

Today, there are a variety of communication channels available: face-to-face, phone calls, Facetime, Zoom, emails, social media, brochures, advertisements, television, signs, fliers, reports, and more.

Communication can be classified as:

• Visual (charts, graphs, etc.)

Language vs. Communication: Key Differences

Below are the primary differences between language and communication. Note the relationship between the two, regardless of differences.

• Language is a system of communication that relies on verbal or non-verbal codes to transfer information. Communication is a way of interchanging messages or information between two or more people , focusing on the message.
• Language is a tool of communication. Communication is a process of transferring messages.
• Language changes dynamically, as new words can be created. Communication is considered static, as its basic steps remain unchanged.
• The basics of communication do not change. However, new words are added to the dictionary of language almost daily.

Language vs. Communication: Working Together

Communicating with others is a basic human need. Healthy living involves interacting and engaging with others. And our primary means of doing so is through shared language.

As we obtain the capability of communicating across languages, we achieve interaction at the global level. It is not language vs. communication; it is language and communication.

Shared language is critical to such vital functions as business and education. We are living today in an interconnected global community, where communicating through shared language is increasingly possible.

A good analogy of the relationship between language and communication is to look at communication as the car, and language as the road. The car of communication can go down another road (another language), or even go off-roading.

Relationships thrive through communication, regardless of the shared language. Therefore, it is up to businesses and organizations to communicate with their target audiences in the correct shared language.

International Language Services has been providing companies and organizations with top-quality, reliable translations for over 35 years. We employ native-speaking translators in a wide variety of languages with the goal of communicating effectively and efficiently. If you’re ready to begin a new technical translation services project, contact us today .

©2024 International Language Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1-800-225-8964 

• Key Differences

Know the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Language and Communication

In the process of communication, language plays an important part. Indeed, all the living beings in this world communicate in their own language. These two terms are so closely intertwined that people cannot easily recognise their difference and end up using them synonymously. But, in reality, there exist a fine line of difference between language and communication.

Content: Language Vs Communication

Comparison chart.

Definition of Language

Language is described as a tool which helps in the transmission of feelings and thoughts, from one person to another. It is the means of expression of what a person feels or thinks, through arbitrarily produced symbols or sounds, such as words (spoken or written), signs, sounds, gesture, posture, etc., that convey a certain meaning.

Language is sole medium of communication between two persons, through which they can share their views, ideas, opinions and emotions with one another. It is aimed at making sense of complex and abstract thought and that also without any confusion. As a system of communication, different languages are used by people residing in different areas or belonging to a different community.

Definition of Communication

Communication is described as an act of interchanging ideas, information or message from one person or place to another, via words or signs which are understood to both the parties. Communication is vital for the organisation because it is a principle means by which organisational members work with each other. It flows in various directions, such as upward, downward, horizontal or diagonal.

Communication is a pervasive process, i.e. it is needed in all the levels and types of the organisation. It is a two way activity, which consists of seven major elements, i.e. sender, encoding, message, channel, receiver, decoding and feedback. Getting feedback, in the process of communication is as much important as sending the message, because only then the process will be completed. There are two channels of communication, which are:

• Formal Communication
• Informal Communication

Further, communication can be classified as:

• Oral Communication
• Written Communication
• Non-verbal communication

Key Differences Between Language and Communication

The points given below presents the differences between language and communication in detail:

• The system of communication which relies on the verbal or non-verbal codes, used in transferring information, is called Language. The way of interchanging message or information between two or more people is called communication.
• A language is a tool of communication, while communication is the process of transferring message to one another.
• Language focuses on the signs, symbols and words. Communication lays emphasis on the message.
• Before the invention of written words, language was confined to the auditory channels. However, it can occur in visual, tactile and other sensory channels too. On the other hand, communication occurs in all the sensory channels.
• The basics of communication do not change at all. Conversely, daily new words are added to the dictionary of the language, so it changes every day.

So with the above explanation, it is quite clear that communication has a wider scope than language, as the former covers the latter. Language is the essence of communication, without which, it cannot exist.

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Communication Challenges in Intercultural Interactions Essay

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Introduction

Communication barriers in intercultural interactions, high anxiety.

In the present age, young people have difficulties socializing with people from other cultures who they meet at school and the workplace because of communication obstacles. If people can acknowledge and appreciate other communities, they can be able to associate well with people from diverse cultures. People need to overcome communication barriers in intercultural interactions so that they can improve their relationships. In addition, about fifty percent of the American population will be people of color due to immigration by the year 2050. Therefore, there is a great need to learn the lifestyles of different communities so that the challenges of communication barriers are solved.

People have different views concerning intercultural communication. Some individuals believe that more interaction between communities of diverse nations would lead to a better understanding between the different cultures. Despite this, there are numerous challenges that exist in intercultural communication (Dupraw & Axner, n.d.). Dupraw and Axner (n.d.) believe that interaction with other people does not necessarily depict communication. Ingram (n.d.) observes that communication barriers across communities have prevailed because people are not informed that they exist in the first place. This essay aims to show that communication in intercultural interactions is hindered by the communication style, body language, stereotypes, the tendency to evaluate, high anxiety, and differences in ways of completing tasks.

Communication style

Language is a major communication barrier. Barna (n.d.) asserts that people experience challenges with terminologies, grammar, phrases, slang, and the accent in a foreign language. The worst-case scenario is when a person holds on or borrows the meaning of a word in a different community without considering its linguistic context. It may cause a misunderstanding in the whole statement, thereby inciting a different reaction compared to the expected reaction.

Body language

Body language is also very influential in any communication process. Knowing the language of a foreign nation is not enough to communicate effectively (Dupraw & Axner, n.d.). Failing to understand the common nonverbal signs, such as gestures and the tone of voice is a major communication obstacle. It is also more challenging to understand nonverbal symbols that are further from consciousness, such as the management of time, spacial relationships, and acceptable gestures of formality. To solve this, visitors in a foreign country need to know about the nonverbal signs associated with the culture they are interacting. They also need to know what each sign is attributed to because they may be interpreted differently. Thus, the wrong interpretation can lead to miscommunication.

Stereotypes

Understanding stereotypes can also make intercultural communication easier. Stereotypes are oversimplified concepts that give the society a basis from which to understand the surroundings (Barna, n.d.). Stereotypes are obstacles in communication because they hinder objective viewing of a cause. Unfortunately, they are challenges that cannot be solved through telling facts. For example, people with an African descent are associated with fried foods and loud music. Such stereotypes help people from other communities understand how to deal with people of the African descent.

The tendency to evaluate

Another obstacle to communication is the tendency to misjudge the arguments and deeds of others, instead of trying to understand their opinions and feelings. Judging one’s actions as good prohibits the unbiased attention required to understand the perception and behavior patterns of other people (Dupraw & Axner, n.d.). Other behaviors that do not conform to the personal behavior cultured will then be perceived as wrong. Communication is, thus, disrupted severely when feelings and emotions are implicated in a situation where much of listening and empathizing is required.

Anxiety caused by the new environment and the new culture can build up communication barriers in intercultural communication. The aspect of high anxiety is common with Outlanders because of the uncertainty of the new environment (Barna, n.d.). Moreover, cultural differences between nations cause more anxiety because individuals do not know how they should respond to other cultures or how people in the host country will respond to their lifestyle. People are also anxious when communicating with foreigners because they cannot sustain the normal flow of speech. The citizen of the host country is also tensed by the foreigner’s scrutiny and, probably, negative responses. The foreigner’s confidence is destroyed when he starts withdrawing from others and showing hostility. These behaviors have a negative impact on effective communication.

Ways of completing tasks

The different ways of completing tasks can ignite arguments in intercultural communications. Different cultures use varying methods in completing tasks because of the differences in resources, opinions on the benefits associated with the task, and the significance of teamwork when accomplishing a specific task (Dupraw & Axner, n.d.). For example, Asians may first work on strengthening the team and then completing the task later, while the Americans may opt to accomplish the task first and then build relationships later. Such differences can lead to poor communication if they are not understood and appreciated.

Personal experience

I have experienced a communication breakdown with a Chinese student who did not understand English. When he spoke, it was very difficult to understand what he meant because his pronunciation of most words was incorrect. This led to a misinterpretation of the whole conversation. He was irritated because he did not get the response he needed. He was forced to write down what he meant to say to solve his challenge in the language.

Various obstacles can cut off communication in a multicultural setting. These obstacles can be nonverbal or verbal signs. Communication obstacles include communication style, body language, high anxiety, stereotype, tendency to evaluate, ways of completing tasks, and nonverbal signs such as gestures, posture, and management of time. Therefore, people need to understand the culture and communication process of each culture in order to overcome the communication breakdown in a cultural setting.

Barna, L. (n.d). Intercultural communication stumbling blocks. Portland, OR: Portland University. Web.

Dupraw, M., & Axner, M. (n.d.). Working on common cross-cultural challenge. New York, NY: AMPU. Web.

Ingram, P. (n.d.). An overview of diversity awareness. State College, PA: Penn State University. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, June 7). Communication Challenges in Intercultural Interactions. https://ivypanda.com/essays/communication-challenges-in-intercultural-interactions/

"Communication Challenges in Intercultural Interactions." IvyPanda , 7 June 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/communication-challenges-in-intercultural-interactions/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Communication Challenges in Intercultural Interactions'. 7 June.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Communication Challenges in Intercultural Interactions." June 7, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/communication-challenges-in-intercultural-interactions/.

1. IvyPanda . "Communication Challenges in Intercultural Interactions." June 7, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/communication-challenges-in-intercultural-interactions/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Communication Challenges in Intercultural Interactions." June 7, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/communication-challenges-in-intercultural-interactions/.

• DOI: 10.35508/cmj.v10i2.9095
• Corpus ID: 260467621

The Relationship Between Parents' Communication With Students Towards Emotional Intelligence In The First Year Of The Faculty Of Medicine Undana

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Building Strong Parent-Teacher Relationships in the 2024-2025 School Year

08/12/24 | by Jody Campbell-Ingellis, M.Ed.

Effective communication and collaboration between parents and teachers can be a cornerstone for student success and lead to a great school year both academically and socially. As the 2024-2025 school year begins, it’s essential to focus on building strong, positive relationships with parents to support students’ growth and learning. 

Why Parent-Teacher Relationships Matter 

Research consistently shows that students benefit significantly when parents and teachers work together. Positive parent-teacher relationships lead to improved academic performance, better behavior, and enhanced social skills, according to Pepperdine University . When parents are engaged, they provide valuable support that extends the learning environment beyond the classroom. 

Start with Positive Communication 

One of the most effective ways to establish a strong foundation is to start with positive communication. Consistently sharing good news about students can create a positive rapport with parents. For instance, a brief email or a quick note about a student’s achievement — large or small — can go a long way in building trust. This practice also sets a positive tone for future interactions, making it easier to address any concerns that may come up later. 

Include Student Voices 

Incorporating student work and voices into communications can increase parent engagement. Parents are more likely to read newsletters and classroom updates if they include student-created content, such as artwork, poetry, or quotes from class discussions. Highlighting students’ contributions not only engages parents but also provides them with a well-deserved sense of pride and accomplishment in students. 

Meet Parents on Neutral Ground 

Recognize that not all parents feel comfortable in a classroom setting. For some, negative memories from their own school experiences may create anxiety. To alleviate this, seek opportunities to connect with parents in neutral, informal settings. This could be during school events, extracurricular activities, or even brief chats during pick-up and drop-off times. These interactions can help break down barriers and create a more relaxed environment for building strong, successful relationships. 

Use Clear and Accessible Language 

Educational jargon can be a barrier to effective communication. Teachers should strive to use clear and simple language when communicating with parents. Avoiding technical terms or explaining them can help ensure that all parents, regardless of their background, understand the information being shared. This clarity fosters better understanding and collaboration, which can ultimately benefit students. 

Approach Conversations with Empathy 

When discussing sensitive topics, it’s crucial to approach conversations with empathy and an open mind. Assume the best intentions from parents and focus on working together to support their students. Being prepared and thoughtful in these conversations can prevent misunderstandings and build mutual respect. 

Be Authentic 

Authenticity is key to building trust. Sharing a bit about yourself, your interests, and your teaching philosophy can help make you more relatable in the eyes of parents. When teachers are seen as approachable, parents are more likely to engage and collaborate. For example, sharing personal anecdotes or interests can create common ground and open the door for deeper conversations. 

Practical Strategies for the School Year 

Combining these tips for creating strong parent-teacher relationships with other approaches can help lead to sustained success for students. Consider the below strategies to facilitate conversations and understanding with parents: 

• Regular check-ins: Establish a routine for regular communication with parents. This could be through newsletters, emails, or phone calls. Consistency helps keep parents informed and engaged. 
• Parent workshops: Host workshops or informational sessions that help parents understand the curriculum, teaching methods, and ways they can support their child’s learning at home. 
• ClassDojo : Allows teachers to text parents, assign homework, and share files 
• Seesaw : Allows teachers to share photos, videos, links, and files with parents in private messages (a personal favorite!) 
• BloomZ : Allows teachers to communicate with parents via email, text, or the app 
• TalkingPoints: Allows teachers to send messages and photos to individuals, small groups, or the entire community 
• Create a welcoming environment: Make the school environment welcoming and inclusive. Simple gestures like greeting parents warmly, offering refreshments at meetings, and providing comfortable seating can make a big difference. 
• Encourage volunteer opportunities: Invite parents to volunteer in the classroom or at school events. This not only helps the school but also allows parents to feel more connected and involved in their child’s education. 

Start Strong and Use Your Resources for a Great School Year 

Building strong parent-teacher relationships requires effort, empathy, and clear communication. By starting the school year with a focus on positivity, inclusivity, and collaboration, teachers can create a supportive network that enhances student success. As the new school year approaches, let’s commit to fostering meaningful connections with parents to help create a thriving learning environment for all students. 

Moreland University offers resources and support for educators at every stage of their career. With our dedicated faculty, accelerated 100% online programs, and global cohort model, we help teachers achieve more at every stage of their career.

Whether you’re looking to enhance your classroom strategies, pursue advanced degrees, or engage in professional development, Moreland University can guide you every step of the way. Explore our TEACH-NOW Teacher Preparation Certificate Program and master’s degrees to find your right-fit program and uplevel your career.  

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