THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE

This chapter analyzes alternative types of conversational action used to build social organization among girls and boys in an African-American working class neighborhood in Philadelphia. Participants work together to generate distinctive definitions of the situation appropriate to the task at hand, and the same individuals articulate talk and gender differently as they move from one activity to another. Making use of the same language system, children select alternative ways of putting these forms to use, constructing a range of diverse activites and social arrangements that can highlight either affiliation or competition.

From the perspective of ethology, Cullen (1972, p. 101) has argued that “all social life in animals depends on the coordination of interactions between them.” To achieve collaborative activity humans need to display to one another culturally meaningful behavior – articulating for their recipients what they are up to and how they expect others to respond. Sociologist Georg Simmel (1950, pp. 21–2) has stated that “if society is concerned as interaction among individuals, the description of the forms of this interaction is the task of the science of society in its strictest and most essential sense.” In that language provides the tool through which humans coordinate their behavior, then what is required for an adequate understanding of social organization is close attention to talk itself.