This presentation only has the introduction of how language and being social relates to each other.

1. Language and social
man

2. Language and the environment
• Not social man is opposition to individual man, but rather the
individual in his social environment.
• The ‘environment ‘ is social as we as physical, and a state of
well-being, which depends on harmony with the environment,
demands harmony of both kinds.
• In the development of the child as a social being language has
the central role.
• Language is the main channel through which the patterns of
living are transmitted to him, through which he learns to act
as a member of a society and to adopt its culture, its modes of
thought and action, its beliefs and its values.

3. Language and the environment
• In brief, the general discussion of the relation of language to
social man and in particular language as it impinges on the
role of the teacher as a creator of social man – or at least as a
midwife in the creation process.
• In other words, Language in the total context of the
interaction between an individual and his human
environment: between one individual and others.
• It is true that the existence of language implies the existence
of social man; but this does not by itself determine the point
of vantage form which language is being approach.

5. Interorganism and
intraorganism perspective
• When we refer to social man, we mean the individual
considered as a single entry, rather than as an assemblage of
parts.
• In the first of these perspectives we are regarding the
individual as an integral whole, and looking at him from the
outside; in the second, we are focusing our attention on the
parts, and looking on the inside, into the works.
• “Language and Social Man” means language as a function of
the whole man; hence language man to man (interorganism)
or language as human behaviour.

6. Interorganism and
intraorganism perspective
• The study of Language as knowledge is an attempt to find out
what goes inside the individual’s head.
• All this can be expressed as “know how to”, as form of
knowledge: we know how to behave linguistically.
• Therefore it is possible, as is in fact quite usual in what is
nowadays called “sociolinguistics”, to look at language as a
behaviour as a type of knowledge; so that although one’s
attention is focused on the social aspects of language – on
language as communication between organisms.

7. Interorganism and
intraorganism perspective
• One is still asking what is essentially an intraorganism kind of
question: How does the individual know how to behave in this
way?
• We might refer to this as Psychosociolinguistics: it is the
external behaviour of the organism looked at from the point
of view of the internal mechanism which control it.

8. A functional approach to language
and language development
• In the psychological or psycholinguistic sphere, there are two
main types of approach to the question of language
development.
• Two types: Environmentalist and Nativist
• Environmentalist represents the ethnographic tradition which
rejects the distinction of ideal and real, defines what is
grammatical as, what is acceptable and sees language as
relations based on meaning, which meaning defined in terms
of function.
• Nativist model reflects the philosophical-logical strand in the
history of thinking about language, with its sharp distinction
between the ideal and real and its view of language as “rules”
– essentially rules of syntax.