Vocabulary
Audience design
Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
Common ground
Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
Ingroup
Group to which a person belongs.
Lexicon
Words and expressions.
Linguistic intergroup bias
A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.
Outgroup
Group to which a person does not belong.
Priming
A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
Situation model
A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.
Social brain hypothesis
The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
Social networks
Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
Syntax
Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.