Language [antikvár]

Preface In the 1970s a substantial number of social psychologists emerged, who individually and independently had begun active research into topics across a wide rangé of issues in the intersect of language and social behaviour. This work was marked by a distinctive methodologicai character, which became increasingly interesting to those from other disciplines, but it did not cohere conceptually into a unified social psychological paradigm. We therefore decided that the end of the decade would offer a suitable occasion for bringing together as many such research workers as we could under the aegis of the first International Conference on Social Psychology and Language, This would enable scholars from within and without social psychology to recognise the importance and potential of that perspective and to familiarise each other with their theoretical, methodologicai and empirical concerns and achievements. There was no subtle implication that there is a single, best social psychological perspective; the title of this volume acknowledges a diversity of legitimate enterprises. The lack of an established view was revealed in the letters of the many puzzled enquirers who wrote to us prior to the conference wondering what the conference was to be about. In the hope that a conference would bring greater thrust and coherence to our endeavours we organised this conference at the University of Bristol, from July l6th to 20th, 1979 > under the auspices of the Social Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. The task of selecting the topics to be represented at the conference caused us considerable concern. We wished the symposia to reflect the wide variety of social and communicative processes extant. We knew there were many viable alternative ways of categorising these. We were aware that we would be persuading people to convene the symposia. With such considerations in mind we chose nine topics: language acquisition; interpersonal communication; language and sex roles; language and social class; language and ethnicity; language and attitudes; language, personality, emotion and psychopathology; temporal aspects of speech; bilingualism, multilingualism and code switching. We were extremely fortunate in attracting eminent scholars, who had themselves worried constructively about the "whys" of sociolinguistic and communicative phenomena and made significant contributions to theory as well as to empirical knowledge: Catherine Snow, Charles Berger, Cheris Kramerae, Norbert Dittmar, Donald Taylor, Ellen Bouchard