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14 - Relationships and Relating

from Part II - Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2021

By
Robert B. Arundale
Edited by
Michael Haugh ,
Dániel Z. Kádár  and
Marina Terkourafi
Michael Haugh
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Dániel Z. Kádár
Affiliation:
Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, and Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Marina Terkourafi
Affiliation:
Leiden University
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Summary

Sociologist Georg Simmel (1950) argued that human relationships are “inseparable from the immediacy of interaction.” That is, regardless of much one may cogitate about them, relationships happen between persons, forming, thriving, surviving, and dying as those persons communicate with one another. A relationship is a dynamic, on-going process of relating. Relationships and relating are thus key sociopragmatic phenomena. This chapter characterizes current conceptualizations of, and research on, relationships and relating in the sociopragmatic literature, but does so in view of a wide range of metaphors for and sociopsychological theories of relationships, and against the backdrop of the broader research literature on relating in interpersonal communication. Many of these metaphors, theories, and studies treat relationships as relatively static phenomena, existing apart from interaction, perhaps as a mental template for behavior, as a mini-culture of norms and patterns of action, or as rooted in individual identity. The chapter poses an alternative conceptualization of relating as endogenous to and as emerging in the dynamics of everyday interacting with one another.

Keywords

relationshipsinterpersonal communicationinteractionmetaphors
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics , pp. 272 - 292
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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