Social relations, communication, and cognition.

Andrew Lock and Kim Symes

The marking of social roles is also reflected in language forms. Many societies have different forms of male and female speech. Female forms of speech tend to be more conservative than male forms, and reflective of 'prestigious' styles used by high status groups. Status, or social power, is widely marked by particular speech-forms in socially stratified societies. Speakers also shift their speech-forms in predictable ways across different social situations, thus marking a society's construction of social contexts.

A number of indices of a society's complexity or 'differentiation' have been put forward. These indicate a trend for societies to become more complex over time; but as they become more complex their elements become less cohesively integrated. This is not a simple relationship, but one involving factors such as an individual's ability to use the resources provided by more complex social organizations to assay novel activities, and to promote the formation of subcultures. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to have low social complexity, while agricultural ones show increasing degrees of complexity. Family structures tend to be related to food-procurement strategies, being of an 'extended' type mainly in sedentary, agricultural societies. Food-accumulation practices also show a relationship to child-rearing practices, tending to emphasize compliance in agricultural societies versus assertion in hunter-gatherer ones.

Social structure, language, thought, 'individuality', and child-rearing practices are elements of human life that have been claimed as interrelated. A central notion in these interrelationships is 'shared presuppositionality'. The essential argument is that high levels of shared knowledge, such as would hold among members of small-scale, undifferentiated societies and in those where social roles are rigidly marked, reduce the need for highly explicit linguistic coding of information for effective communication. The elements of language, both grammatical and lexical, reflect social needs. Less 'elaborated' linguistic structures provide fewer resources for the handling of complex problem-solving þ the view not that language determines thought, but that it provides the equivalent of a problem-solving 'tool-kit', variously facilitating or hindering certain forms of problem formulation and solution. Both language and social structure also mediate child-rearing practices, and hence the process of cultural reproduction. These interrelations have been explored in a number of studies which stem from different theoretical stances, making the comparison of results difficult. But, while at this point in time it is not possible to specify the exact nature of these interrelationships, their broad outlines can be perceived. These suggest that claims as to the availability of complex language in Upper Palaeolithic societies may be unwarranted, as the relatively simple structure of these societies would have promoted high levels of presuppositionality among their members, enabling effective interpersonal communication to be conducted with quite restricted forms of symbolic language.