International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

In interpersonal situations, language can be used to convey information about one's personality, temperament, social status, group belonging, and so forth. Although many of us like to think that we interact essentially the same way to virtually every person we encounter, thanks to fairness and our integrity, this simply is not true. In most instances, it is desirable, and even necessary, to adjust our language patterns to our conversational partners, be they close friends or loathed felons. Sometimes we encode this deliberately and consciously, other times it emerges automatically and may not even be decoded overtly. Communication accommodation theory (CAT), initially known as speech accommodation theory, was first developed by Giles in 1971 so as to explain how we manage certain facets of interpersonal communication, particularly, our choice of accents and dialects. Indeed, it was originally conceptualized to mine more complex socio-psychological understanding of language choices than a mere recourse to people's socially normative dispositions ( Giles & Powesland 1975 ). Over the years, and with various colleagues, Giles has elaborated and revised the theory in varying directions (e.g., Giles et al. 1991 ) and it has, according to many commentators, assumed the status of a major socio-psychological theory of language and social interaction (e.g., Tracy & Haspel 2004 ). ... log in or subscribe to read full text