Language and human sociality

The social situation that is built into human language includes only the communicating parties themselves, the reciprocal relations between them, and their mutual relations to an open-ended range of other possible objects to which they may attend. A related difference between language and other animal communication systems is that language allows for interaction which is much more fully dialogical. As pointed out by Benveniste, a related difference between human language and bee communication lies in the potential of language for relayed transmission of messages. This chapter describes a number of features of language and human social relations in abstract terms. It identifies a set of features which are common to all languages and which build into them a primordial social situation. The chapter exemplifies the way in which those features are used in discursive interaction, and the difference they make for triadic interaction when speech is involved.