ABSTRACT
We live in a world where words have taken over from physical or nonverbal forms of communication. With words, information about human interaction and other events is communicated and stored. Words have become the currency of an information culture that has grown increasingly incapable of dealing with nonverbal action. Indeed, humanity was on the way toward losing its reliance on nonverbal communication the moment that it realized that words could capture more complex forms of reality and abstract these forms in a more economical manner. With words, people engage in social interaction, and through a better understanding of words and their use people can begin to appreciate communication as joint action. Many actions essentially involve communication and are produced by using language. It is therefore not unreasonable to expect that the study of language and its use can contribute to an informative appreciation of not only the communicative processes that drive joint action or symbolic communication but also of the psychological processes (cognitive, motivational, emotional). The present chapter is intended as an attempt and a contribution to elucidate the interface between symbolic communication as mediated by language and cognition.
