4 - The social psychology of language: a short history

Summary

Social psychology requires participants to complete Optical Mark readable questionnaires made up of strongly constrained questions with multiple-choice options. These can be pushed through statistical packages such as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), with subsequent attention being paid only to associations and differences achieving some lowish level of departure from chance expectation. Speech act theory is usually dated from Austin's christening of five acts of speech or writing as performatives, utterances which achieve a non-verbal effect in the physical and social world. Communication accommodation theory (CAT) has been developed to cover an increasing range of settings, participants, ends, channels and codes, and norms of interpretation. Discursive approaches to data analysis within social psychology have become increasingly popular, particularly those drawing heavily on conversation-analytic principles. Conversation analysis offers a way of looking at the micro-organization of a conversation.