Abstract
This Epilogue discusses the papers in the Special Issue (JLSP 40th Anniversary) in terms of the broader field of language and social psychology. It reflects on the key terms (“language” and “social psychology”) in terms of how they intersect and the relative emphasis on each in work published in JLSP. We also present an argument for increasing the consideration of context in language and social psychology research, and we distinguish between a desire to generalize versus universalize our knowledge about language and social psychological processes.
LANGUAGE (noun) 1. The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure. 2. The communicating that is done without words through, for example, nonverbal means. 3. A manner or style of expression. AND (conjunction) Coordinating. Introducing a word, phrase, clause, or sentence, which is to be taken side by side with, along with, or in addition to, that which precedes it. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (noun) The study of social interactions, including their origins and effects on individuals and groups.
Oxford English Online Dictionary
As the Journal of Language and Social Psychology marks its 40th anniversary, we reflect on what the conjunction “and” has meant over the years: What kind of connecting has “and” included and what have been the meanings of the terms it connects? In an editorial by Giles and Edwards (1982) that launched the first issue of this journal, they noted how little attention journals and texts in social psychology had given to language and communication, and, from the other disciplinary vantage, how pervasively linguistic outlets ignored social psychological matters such as motivation, social interaction, or identity. JLSP was developed to connect these important domains of life, along with their academic fields of study. In so doing, a new academic field was brought into being.
If we conceive of the research traditions that have comprised JLSP as its children, we can see differences among siblings regarding which parent each most takes after and what the traces of the less visible parent are. In addition, just as children in a family differ from each other, they are also likely to inflect the descriptions they provide of their family, its history, and its defining moments in ways that are not identical. In this Epilogue we—Jake and Karen, two additional children of the field—reflect about how we see our parent disciplines, our siblings, ourselves, and how we would like to see JLSP move forward.
Jake
The articles in this Special Issue reflect the diversity of JLSP’s content over the years and illustrate some of the interesting variability in how language is understood across the disciplines and epistemological perspectives that fill the journal’s pages. I see three metaphors for language in this collection. These metaphors illustrate the diversity in the area not just in a disciplinary sense, but also in a more fundamental sense of understanding what language is and what it does.
Language Is a Window
Our words reflect our personalities, the relationships that are important to us, and our cultural identities. As such, language serves as a window into the individual (personal), relational, and collective (group or social) identities of others. The articles in this Special Issue reflect this theme. Boyd and Schwartz (2021). discuss how specific word use is related to personality and Gallois et al. (2021) discuss how language displays our emotional experiences. Gasiorek et al. (2021) illustrate how the use of language (and dynamics in language use) reflect interpersonal relationships and orientations. Almost all the articles in one way or another discuss how language represents our cultural affiliations including, most notably, which language (code) we speak. Language, thus, provides a window into people’s identities, both personal and social. The visual “window” metaphor draws attention to the revealing properties of language, and the (often unconscious) ways that it reflects who we are.
Language Is a Tool
Developmentally, we learn language instinctively and with little effort. After the initial learning period, however, effective language use often involves effortful learning (e.g., learning to read, learning a second language) and conscious application (e.g., to generate an effective persuasive message). Al-Hoorie et al. (2021), for example, discuss indirectly some of the challenges involved in learning second languages, and indeed the challenges of those trying to teach them. Rewards come to those who master language skills—Walther and Whitty (2021) discuss the use of language for effective (and strategic) self-presentation. And of course, the flexibility and power of language permit its misuse in deceptive self-presentation (Walther & Whitty, 2021), and in intentionally causing harm to others as vividly described by Cervone et al. (2021). The mechanical “tool” metaphor draws attention to language in use: the active (and typically conscious) ways that we use our linguistic resources for personal and social goals.
Language Is a Pop Quiz
Humans are judging creatures: we continuously monitor our environments, forming opinions and evaluating targets for opportunity and threat. Language is one of those targets. As a result, we have firm opinions on “good” and “bad” language and are not afraid to generalize from our opinions about the language we hear to the speakers who produce the words (see Dragojevic et al., 2021). Such evaluations extend to entire language groups. Our perceptions of groups who speak a certain language map closely to our perceptions of the language itself. Researchers play this game too, as we seek to evaluate the relative societal strengths and weaknesses of different language groups (e.g., see Clément & Norton, 2021). The evaluative “pop quiz” metaphor is particularly focused on the receptive end of language use: what are the socio-psychological evaluations that ensue from witnessing language? How do I “score” when you hear me talking?
These three themes are certainly not new. The first issue of JLSP featured articles on accommodation reflecting interpersonal orientations (Genesee & Bourhis, 1982), developmental processes in language skill development (Hamers & Blanc, 1982), and evaluative responses to certain types of language (Ryan & Bulik, 1982). The themes intersect with each other. The fact that language reflects who we are sets the stage for it being used for self-presentation (including deceptive self-presentation), and is often the basis for its evaluative properties (“if you talk like that, you must be like that!”). Likewise, accommodation processes (e.g., Giles, 2016) both reflect the nature of people’s interpersonal orientations to one another, but also construct those orientations. We build solidarity (or establish distance) in our relationships via the linguistic adjustments we make in interaction. These themes also bridge levels of analysis. Language use reflects who individual people are, but also what cultures are (consider, for example, whether cultures typically use apologies or thanks when asking for favors: Lee et al., 2012). Language is used as a tool not only by individuals, but also by nations (e.g., in the form of language legislation: another common theme in JLSP: Bourhis et al., 2019). Amid this complexity, the continuing wonder for those of us who study language, communication, and socio-psychological processes, is people’s remarkable ability to produce messages, draw inferences and make attributions about others’ responses, and thus to keep a conversation going. This has kept me coming back to JLSP for much of its 40-year history.
Karen
Language and social psychology (LSP) exists as an identifiable academic area, but it is not the name of a university-demarcated discipline of study. Instead, scholars who join this family are usually trained in departments of social psychology, linguistics or applied linguistics, and, particularly for those of us in the United States, in communication. I am one of those U.S. scholars educated in communication in the late 1970s and early 1980s who, in the late 1980s, discovered “language and social psychology,” including its journal, its handbooks, and conferences. The language and social psychology community was a welcoming home away from home. Although using a slightly different vocabulary than was dominant in communication, its people valued the kinds of questions and issues that had made communication study fascinating to me. In addition, it stretched my intellectual sensibilities helping me to develop more interesting, insightful research and to become less ethnocentric as a teacher and human being.
One of the features of communication studies when I was trained, that has improved but remains largely true today, is that little attention is given to the fact that communication occurs in languages other than English. While I have always been interested in language (as different styles of expression that say something about the character of individuals and groups, where the styles have interactional consequences), I had largely ignored the fact that people speak different languages. Studies of the attitudes people have toward different languages and their community of speakers (see Clément & Norton, 2021), made me aware of this dimension of my ethnocentrism and helped me rein it in. In addition, taking seriously that we live in a multilingual world reinforced the importance of discovering engaging ways to teach languages (see Al-Hoorie et al., 2021).
The world has changed in many ways since the 1980s, and this has led to the development of new LSP research foci. A first change involves the technological developments that have enabled analysis of large amounts of language—analyses that were previously impossible. Language provides clues of who people are, and as Boyd and Schwartz’s review (2021) shows, this has led to different kinds of text analysis to reveal the secrets of “verbal behavior.” While better understanding people from the language they use is a welcome new direction, I do not see verbal behavior as the best way to name what we are learning about. Such a label is a decontextualized way to refer to specific kinds of communication conduct. If, as the authors suggest, text analysis finds ways to take context seriously, I foresee valuable new kinds of insights.
A second change that has led to new LSP research is the fact that many people spend big chunks of every day online. Relationship development is done online and much of it is accomplished through subtle language strategies. As Walther and Whitty (2021) show, this has led to novel language-based ways to do intimacy and affection. People’s frequent use of online technologies for these new purposes, in turn, has generated the massive amounts of text data that are now so often being analyzed (Boyd & Schwartz, 2021)
In addition to technological change, the boundaries among groups of all types—national, ethnic, sexual identity, religious, political—have been getting sharper. This has led to a growth in the study of how emotions are managed (Gallois et al., 2021) and to the derogatory language used to express negative feelings about groups (Cervone et al., 2021). Both of these are welcome new foci.
What originally drew me to the language and social psychology community were two traditions: (1) the language attitudes research (see Dragojevic et al., 2021) and (2) the work on interactional adjustment (see Gasiorek et al., 2021). Before my PhD, I had worked as a speech and language pathologist where I was keenly aware that speaking in non-standard ways would lead to negative evaluation. The linguistic precept that all varieties of a language are equally effective had struck me as naïve, and language attitudes studies that made use of the matched guise method displayed convincingly how wrong this well-intentioned assertion was.
Core to communication studies is a belief that people are strategic and adapt their actions to an interlocutor or to an audience. Studies of interactional adjustment, initially instantiated through speech accommodation theory (Giles, 2016), offered theories and methodological practices to display this process in a persuasive manner. The extensions of the framework to particular activities (aging, police-citizen exchanges) began a research trend that this Special Issue’s authors (i.e., Al-Hoorie et al., Boyd & Schwartz; Gallois et al.; Gasiorek et al.) have underscored as a direction for future JLSP research: to take context more seriously. I agree. In fact, I would put it more strongly. As I see it, language and social psychology holds two contradictory values. A first value is for ideas and theorizing that are abstracted, and as universal as possible. A second value, one that has become increasingly prominent in recent years, is to see attention to context as crucial. Valuing the giving of attention to context means recognizing that situations shape what can and will occur and that a site will influence how actions are assessed. Attending to context is at odds with building theories that span many kinds of communicative action. To be sure, research is fundamentally about generalization, but generalizing can be done without universalizing. Developing different ways of generalizing, what I would label “implication making” is a direction that will enable language AND social psychology to hone its social usefulness.
Conclusion
JOURNAL (noun) 1. A periodical or magazine, especially one published for a special group, learned society, or profession. 2. A record, usually daily, of the proceedings and transactions of a legislative body, an organization, etc. JOURNAL (verb) to write self-examining or reflective entries, especially in school or as part of psychotherapy.
We began with definitions of language, social psychology, and the conjunction and that connects them. We close by considering the other important word in JLSP’s title: Journal. Writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing science happening in real time. For some, it is distressing to see one day’s truth be questioned the next. But this is how research works, and publications like JLSP journal (verb) the developments in our knowledge, providing a journal (noun) of the ongoing growth in our understanding. Some of the early work published in JLSP now appears perhaps quaint and outdated. That is a good thing. The astonishing growth in both the volume and sophistication of research at the intersections of language and social psychology is a testament to JLSP’s “record-keeping” in this area. The word journal shares an origin (Latin diurnus) with the word journey. We look forward to the next 40 years of JLSP’s journey.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
