State of the Art THREE LANGUAGE VARIABLES IN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH : INTENSITY , IMMEDIACY , AND DIVERSITY

A digital system such as language uniquely sustains propositional thought (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). For conceiving and then communicating a connection between, say, mass and energy or mice and men, a picture finally is not worth a thousand words. However, language expresses more than ideas. Effortlessly, automatically, receivers infer from speakers’ language styles their attitudes, moods, and affiliations. Some evidence indicates that language in the form of connected discourse is an especially potent determinant of receivers’ inferences about source (Triandis, Loh, & Levin, 1966). Communication scholars have not neglected this nonpropositional, affective, analogic dimension of language. How will listeners rate the character of sources speaking French Canadian compared with those speaking English Canadian (Taylor & Gardner, 1969)? Will language high in intensity produce more attitude change than less intense language (Bowers, 1963)? Will low vocabulary diversity produce relatively negative judgments of source competence (Bradac, Konsky, & Davies, 1976)? Unfortunately, most such studies are not noteworthy for their theoretical grounding (cf. Giles & Powesland, 1975, p. S), and they have resulted in little more than a proliferation of unintegrated data. Communication research has available only a catalog of discrete, perhaps useful, but isolated and unpatterned findings. To assist theory construction, we have reviewed a large body of empirical research on three important language variables in a search for pattern. In this paper we discuss the nature of language variables, offer 26 generalizations, each of which is supported by one or more studies, derive implications from these generalizations and consider possibilities for future work in this area.