Rules, Social Interaction, and Language Behavior

Abstract

Social rules are manifested in different social groups in a diversity of ways. Important universals, however, make behavior in such social relationships predictable and interpretable in all societies, that is, social interaction is rule-governed. The rules of request behavior, and variables constraining those rules, exemplify an analysis of social behavior. A universal grammar of social interaction is postulated, with current work in anthropology, sociology, and ethnography providing the data for the development of such a grammar. This grammar would account for the interactional universals for all societies and interactional rules for individual societies in a fairly precise analog to linguists' rules for languages. If one accepts the proposition that teaching and learning-as types of social behavior-are governed by systems of rules and that these rules differ for different social groups, and that we do not at present know what the systems of rules are, then one must also tentatively accept the hypothesis that one of the reasons for pedagogic failure lies in the fact that we are continually putting children in situations where they are being asked to violate one set of rules in order to fulfill the demands of another.