ABSTRACT
Increasingly in recent years, social psychologists have come to appreciate the role that language plays in social life. For the discipline, the consequences of this developing awareness have been salutary. Language is critically implicated in many of the core phenomena social psychologists study (e.g., causal attribution, social identity, status and intimacy, and interpersonal relations, to list but a few), and taking the role of language into account has greatly enhanced our understanding of them. Moreover, because stimulus and response in social psychology are so often verbal in form, many fundamental questions of methodology turn on issues that are implicitly linguistic.
