The social nature of speech

Introduction

In this chapter we shall focus on what we have been referring to as ‘speech’ – that is, shorter or longer strings of linguistic items uttered on particular occasions for particular purposes. We shall ignore various kinds of spoken texts, in order to concentrate on what is called face-to-face interaction – in other words, what happens when we talk to someone else who is facing us. Although we shall exclude all kinds of important but impersonal communication such as the mass media, this still leaves a wide range of activities: conversations, quarrels, jokes, committee meetings, interviews, seductions, introductions, lessons, teasing, chit-chat and a host of others.

One of the main questions we must again ask concerns the balance between the social and the individual. For language, our knowledge of linguistic items and their meanings, the balance is in favour of the social, since we learn our language by listening to others, although each individual's language is unique because of our different individual experiences. What about the balance in the case of speech? Ferdinand de Saussure claimed that speech was totally individual, in that it depended only on the ‘will of the speaker’ (1916/1959: 19), and conversely that language was entirely social, being identical from one member of a speech community to another. He was clearly wrong about language, but was he any nearer to the truth about speech? We shall see that he was not.