Social Interactional and Sociolinguistic Rules

Abstract

All social interaction involves communication; it is difficult to make an explicit differentiation between sociolinguistic and social interaction rules. For heuristic purposes, I propose a tentative distinction between: (1) social interactional rules as those governing social behavior within social structural contexts having such features as, for example, role, hierarchy, exchange requirements, etc.; and (2) sociolinguistic rules governing the use of resources of spoken and written language within sets of social structural constraints. I propose a further distinction between system-specific rules and rules which may be common to all societies (or sociolinguistic systems) and provide illustrations for each type of rule at each level of possible generality. All students of human social behavior (and probably most, if not all students of other animal social behavior) see that behavior as persistent, pattemed, non-random, rule-govemed. (Even so-called free variation is probably non-random-the rules which govern it are simply not very interesting.)' This fact lies at the roots of scholarly work in a number of disciplines in the natural and social sciences and in the humanities, whose practitioners involve themselves in research directed to the specification of the rules themselves; to a search for their sources; to understanding their acquisition by members of social groups; to a comprehension of the relations of rules across levels (viz., physiological psychological, social); to answers to questions about their stability and change. Men and women everywhere attain