Language and Social Interaction

Overview

As a field of communication study, LSI came together formally over roughly 3 decades beginning [Page 843]in the 1960s. The result is the confluence of research interests from multiple disciplines, the creation of professional organizations, and the publication of comprehensive treatises on the field’s concepts, theories, methods, and research reports. One way to describe LSI, then, is as the ongoing organizing of research from a collection of distinctive research perspectives, all of which closely examine the use of language in everyday social circumstances.

Assumptions, Terms, and Concepts

LSI researchers take for granted that everyday instances in which people communicate with one another, for all the social purposes they do so, are both remarkable and telling. Everyday communication is remarkable because of the almost incomprehensibly vast array of ways people communicate with one another. Forms and types of communicative activities are radically varied across situations, societies, and cultures. Everyday communication is also telling because careful inspection of everyday instances of communication can reveal a great deal about the structure and forms of communication and the functions and meanings of those structures and forms. Comparative and detailed examination of everyday communication can provide insights about, among other things, prototypical or patterned communication practices, notions of persons and identities of people, the nature of social relationships, appropriate and effective (or inappropriate and ineffective) communication in particular social circumstances, and the closely linked interplay of culture and communication.

LSI research primarily, but not exclusively, privileges communication that is naturally occurring. LSI researchers engage in a variety of data collection and analysis techniques attempting to notice and describe how people engage in communication in their everyday personal, professional, and community interactions. Thus, two thematic questions LSI researchers might ask of these situations are: How are people active, through communication, in the co-creation of these situations? And, how do people make sense of the scenarios and scenes within which they are participating? For example, an LSI researcher examining transportation planning at a public meeting might notice and describe the types of communicative forms deployed in these meetings, including discussion of an agenda, presentations by technical experts, public speeches by citizens, and voting practices and procedures. Referring to these questions, an LSI researcher might make claims about how these activities give shape to the public meeting as a particular kind of communicative scene, how these forms of communication are not just what happens in a public meeting, but are active in the creation of the public meeting. In addition, the researcher might examine how individuals in the meeting used these forms for particular persuasive purposes and to influence the outcomes of the meeting. For instance, a citizen might give a persuasive speech about how a planned bus route does not meet the needs of the community. Such naturally occurring talk might seem mundane and unimportant, but to an LSI researcher, such activities are rich sites for revealing how people use language (and communication) in their everyday lives.

...