Language and Social Interaction: Its Institutional Identity, Intellectual Landscape, and Discipline-Shifting Agenda

Abstract

Language and Social Interaction (LSI) is the intellectual home for those convinced that the smallest of language, gesture, or vocal expressions affect meaning making and can shape socially consequential outcomes. It is the residence of preference for those who believe that studying interaction in its situated and messy particularity is the best way to understand communicative life. As a division in both ICA and NCA, it is a bit of an outlier, a group whose center is not the name of a particular context of communication. Cutting against the grain-resisting commonly held beliefs or usual practices in other intellectual communities-is part of what it means to do LSI scholarship, although the communities LSI scholars argue with are quite diverse. Almost always LSI scholars have a foot, albeit sometimes only a tentative one, in some other world besides the interdisciplinary one that comprises LSI research. For those with communication pedigrees, it is most likely to be interpersonal, intercultural, group, organizational, health, or political communication. As a good number of LSI scholars come from fields other than communication, the other worlds are most likely to be sociology, linguistics, psychology, or anthropology. For many of these scholars it is the mainstream of their discipline that is the chief target of their arguments. Some of these folk build permanent homes in communication departments and like their native-born colleagues begin to engage with neighboring areas of communication study. Others spend their day-to-day lives in these other disciplines, with their intellectual foci shaped by what is routinely contested and debated in their departmental residence.This review of language and social interaction is divided into four sections. In the first section, we provide a sense of LSI as an organizational unit, tracing its history in the main communication associations and making visible how its intellectual character has changed over time. Then, we describe the major research traditions that exist in LSI and the distinctive features of each of the traditions. Because the last 7-8 years has produced a large set of LSI-focused review essays and handbooks, the third section reviews the reviews, making apparent similarities and differences among different reviews' characterizations of language and

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