Abstract

The importance of language is increasingly acknowledged within social psychology. In this seminal book, a group of distinguished authors goes beyond general theory to address, from a research base, key issues in the interrelationship between language, interaction and social cognition. Their starting point is that the ways in which we perceive and, therefore, interact with others are structured by the language available to us, as a socially constructed system above and beyond individual minds. The relationship between language and social cognition is not, however, a fixed or unicausal one: linguistic terms are also generated in response to social and cultural development. The interplay is dialectical - a dialectic of the social. The authors explore this dialectic through such themes as: the use and power of category labels; trait-behaviour relations in social information processing; and interpersonal verbs and attribution. They examine the significance of language use in the persistence of stereotypes, and the links between syntactical reasoning processes and social cognition, as well as the impact of perspectivity. They consider the ways in which communication roles and context shape, and are shaped by, language. Language, Interaction and Social Cognition will be essential reading for all those in social psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics and communication studies concerned with the role of language in interaction and social cognition.