to connect people in a religious service

to connect people in a religious service. Although joint participation in any event (such as sports or theatre) may have some of the same effect as discussed by Giin Semin, the content of language and the intent of the messages in religious practice is often focused on developing and strengthening social and spiritual connections. Everyone knows someone who moved to another country, or to another part of their own country where speech patterns differ. After a period of time, in the context of novel speech patterns, some people adopt the speech patterns around them. This kind of linguistic convergence is well documented and is moderated by social factors such as the desire to be accepted or the attempt to be persuasive.’ When people talk together, one person’s speech can impact the way another person talks in order to promote social connection. Indeed, the same kind of behavioral convergence is found over the course of conversations for other kinds of non-linguistic actions as well.” Information, impact, and understanding How does language bind us together and compel us to action, thought, and feeling? When we talk, sound vibration is transmitted from mouth to ears. Facial expressions and manual gestures punctuate, illustrate, and illuminate our speech. These acoustic and visual signals travel over space and time to the eyes and ears of the audience. The impact of such communication is true action at a distance. This notion of language as action at a distance is relatively well accepted in the scientific study of language. But in research on language and communication by psycholinguists and Page | 68 linguists, the emphasis is on the information contained within an utterance and the structure and form by which this information is presented. Research questions often focus on the variety of ways the same message can be framed and how listeners interpret such messages. But little of this work addresses the impact of the message itself. The standard view of language processing is that we hear the sounds of speech (acoustic patterns) that we translate mentally into words. The meanings of these words are determined and then the meanings combined (through our knowledge of sentence structure) to result in sentence meaning. Given that a sentence typically occurs in a context of other sentences (e.g., a sermon) or in response to other speech (e.g., a conversation), this context is then used to frame and reinterpret the sentence meaning. Metaphor, irony, sarcasm, and other figures are generally thought of as being understood later in this process although in Gilpin’s chapter the immediate power of these to affect us is quite clear. Emotion and attitudes are thought of as not understood until after the linguistic message has been determined. The impact of language on attitudes through persuasion is viewed by cognitive psychology and linguistics as occurring after the message has been understood. However, this does raise the question about whether a “message” (to be understood) is simply the linguistic properties of a sentence or the impact of the linguistic form on an audience. A very different view of language might come from considering vocal communications that often have a direct impact on an audience. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021314