Teoría de la interacción social

Language as cognition and communication

Cognition: Structures in human mind.

Communication: The way in which language serves in social interaction.

Language during childhood: We acquire language during childhood.

We acquire identity as individuals (when we refer so ourselves)

We acquire identity as social beings (when we communicate to others)

Cognitive psychology:

·         Basis of the psycholinguistic developed by Noam Chomsky.

·         Informs the social linguistic view advanced by Michael Halliday.

Language as cognition:

Transformational-Generative Grammar (Chomsky)

Chomsky is interested in understanding more about processes of the human mind, different languages but similar governed by common rules.

Languages differ from each other in surface structure, but their deep structure is the same.

This universal linguistics system is genetic endowment of all human beings, Chomsky defines it as innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD). The presence of the LAD in the human brain would explain why language development in children occurs so easily and spontaneously.

In Chomsky’s perspective, language is exclusively a cognitive abstract knowledge developing in the human mind.

Language as communication: 

Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday)

Halliday is interested in the study of language as social semiotics, a system of signs that have been developed to serve the communicative needs of people living in a social context.

Halliday intends language not as biological evolution of the human being’s brain but as a socio-cultural evolution prompted by the human being’s need to communicate with others.

Language has evolved within a specific community in such a way that it fulfils three main functions:

• ·         The ideational function, concerned with people thinking with language in order to interpret experience.
• ·         The interpersonal function, concerned with people acting with language in order to achieve interpersonal communication.
• ·         The textual function, concerned with the linguistics organization of a message.

Within each community, the semantic and syntactic code (grammatical system) allows the expression of the social behavior of people using it in various situational contexts.

Within the grammatical resources of their code, people are free to choose those structures that best convey their expressive and communicative intents.