A Perspective on the Intersection of Social Psychology and Linguistics

Abstract

Social psychology and linguistics are two scientific disciplines that deal with human as their principle subject matter. Focusing on where these disciplines meet and how they feed each other, this paper aims to investigate the interdisciplinary contribution of social psychology and linguistics to each other. To achieve this, the contrastive analysis (CA) is applied which is composed of three steps as (1) description; (2) juxtaposition; (3) comparison (Krzeszowski, 1990). This comparative revision reveals that social psychology applies and investigates many fundamental areas in linguistics and particularly benefits from the language as data collection tool and method in the investigation to understand human behavior. Specifically, social psychology discusses the language with its communication aspect to examine and to analyze the human behavior. On the other hand, linguistics benefits from social psychology as it provides insights into the social and behavioral factors. There are some research areas and theories that these disciplines contribute to each other such as communication accommodation theory, speech act theory, expectancy theory, prejudice, politeness, patronizing speech, gender. Such a review is expected to benefit researchers by encouraging a wider view of intersection of these two disciplines and interdisciplinary critical thinking.