Part 2 Social Psycholinguistics

So far we have been talking about speech activity and linguistic consciousness in general, referring to some averaged native speaker. Such a generalization makes it possible to identify and describe the universal laws of generation, perception and understanding of speech, to which all speakers obey. However, psycholinguistics does not have the right to confine itself to the study of the general properties of the linguistic personality: abstract psychologism takes it away from an understanding of the nature of real speech communication. Meanwhile, people are different from each other, including in their speech actions. We can easily recognize relatives and friends by voice, even when we communicate with them by phone. Carefully listening to the speech of an unfamiliar interlocutor, watching him in different communicative situations, we can make a portrait of a language personality. Man's speech is his business card. It carries information about the most diverse personality traits of the speaker: his origin, age, profession, education, intelligence, etc. The linguistic personality manifests itself in verbal behavior. The content of the term “speech behavior” is broader than the concept of “speech activity”, because it includes, in addition, (E. D. Polivanov’s term) the communicative actions and reactions of the speaker / writer.

The study of the linguistic personality implies the consideration of each native speaker as a unique object of consideration. However, in real communication, we are constantly confronted with difficulties in determining the characteristics of the speech manner of a particular rank and file, so to speak, of a person. Such problems are particularly acute for criminologists, who, according to their linguistic characteristics, should establish the authorship of one or another text. The solution of the issues of autorology turns out to be not a simple matter, because in every linguistic person the individual is dialectically connected with the collective, social.

When pretending to language exclusivity, people in similar communicative situations often behave amazingly alike. This is due to the fact that the speakers at each moment of their speech biography demonstrate the peculiarities of group speech behavior. A native speaker focuses in on himself

features of "collective linguistic personalities." For example, he can simultaneously act as a citizen’s language personality, a language student’s language personality, a twenty-year-old youth language person, etc. “A Man Speaking” appears as a multifaceted, multidimensional object of research, whose originality is determined by a unique combination of social and psychological characteristics . Therefore, the study of linguistic personality first of all needs to identify the grounds for classification, to identify the types and varieties of people's speech behavior.

The outlined range of problems is the content of one of the private psycholinguistics - social psycholinguistics . It is about her that will be discussed in this section.