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Language, Goals and Situations

University of Giessen

The question addressed in this review paper is how our goals and the surrounding social situation influence what we say and how we say it in social interaction. It is proposed that definitional and methodological difficulties in studying social situations constitute the core problem in this domain. Various approaches to conceptualising social situations in linguistics, psychology and sociology are outlined, and recent empirical research on cognitive representations of social episodes is summarised. Selected theories linking goals and situations to language use are reviewed, and empirical research on situational variations in language behaviour is considered. It is concluded that the use of predominantly ad hoc, intuitive classifications of social situations, and the dominance of the ethno graphic method in empirical research have limited progress in this field. A social cognitive paradigm, linking cognitive representations of situations to information processing models predicting the selection of linguistic alternatives is proposed as a suitable future model for research.

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