ABSTRACT
The activity of role-taking figures prominently in many dis- cussions of the communication process. For example, the role-taking process occupies a central place in the classic analyses of communication presented by Piaget (1926) and Mead (1934). More re- cently, the concept of role-taking has been employed to explain numerous communicative phenomena by writers from several different theoretical traditions, including those representing rules positions (Cushman & Craig, 1976), cognitive-developmental positions (Flavell, 1968), symbolic in- teractionist positions (Blumer, 1969), and constructivist positions (Delia, O'Keefe, & O'Keefe, in press). Although each of these theoretical view- points conceptualizes the nature of the role-taking process somewhat differently, all of them maintain that the possibility of coordinated social action depends on the individual’s capacity to “take” (i.e., imaginatively construct) the perspective of others: One must be able to represent and anticipate the other’s view of a situation in order to mesh one’s line of action with that of the other (Feffer, 1970). More specifically, it has been proposed that role-taking serves a crucial function in such diverse com- municative activities as effectively adapting the form and content of a message to an audience; managing the topic of a conversation; selecting the proper titles, honorifics, and forms of address; choosing the appropri- ate speech registers and sociolinguistic codes; and maintaining coherence in discourse (Delia & O'Keefe, 1979).
