ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some existing contributions to sociolinguistic theory from social psychology. It discusses the social-psychological contribution to sociolinguistic theory through a process of formulation and formalisation of existing theoretical ideas and their progressive integration with each other. In a number of theoretical publications, Howard Giles and colleagues have been developing speech accommodation theory. Social-psychological writing on intergroup relations has highlighted the importance of specifically intergroup processes, emergent from the intergroup context itself, as they affect the experience and actions of individual group members. Social psychology’s key theoretical contribution to sociolinguistics has been to elucidate the psychological complexities underlying the distributions of linguistic markers according to setting, participants, goals and other social factors which D. Hymes and others have placed on the taxonomic agenda. Speech is involved in encounter definition by creating some of the data on which definitional models are built, and also as a medium through which they are negotiated and expressed.
