How We Use Language

How We Use Language

• Establishes common ground - knowledge that the speaker(s) and listener(s) share and think or assume they share.
• Example - when you are talking to your classmate you assume he knows your professor's name
• Audience design - we tailor our speech to those around us, based on common ground
• Example - when you talk to your classmate you say "Dr. Song", but when you talk to your parent you say "my psychology professor, Dr. Song"

• Lexicon - we tend to use similar words/terms as the people around us
• Syntax - we tend to use similar word order and sentence structure as the people around us
• Rates of speech - we match our speed to that of other people in the conversation

• Priming - thinking about one topic (e.g., cheeseburger) makes you think about another (fries)

• Establishes and enlarges ingroup (group you belong to) and differentiates from outgroup (all other groups/people)
• Linguistic intergroup bias - For ingroup members we use adjectives (he is nice) to describe positive actions and verbs (he stole the candy) to describe negative actions. For outgroup members, we use verbs (he shared his snack) to describe positive actions and adjectives (he is mean) to describe negative actions.
• Adjectives imply permanence/stability. Verbs imply something is temporary or exceptional.