Language and social psychology Edited by Howard Giles and Robert St. Clair (review)

220LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) Kripke, Saul. 1975. Outline of a theory of truth. Journal of Philosophy 72.690-716. Kuroda, S.-Y. 1974. Geach and Katz on presupposition. Foundations of Language 12.177-99. Langendoen, D. Terence, and Harris B. Savin. 1971. The projection problem for presuppositions. Studies in linguistic semantics, ed. by Charles J. Fillmore & D. Terence Langendoen, 55-62. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Martin, John. 1979. Some misconceptions in the critique of semantic presupposition. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Smullyan, Raymond. 1978. What is the name of this book? Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Soames, Scott. 1979. A projection problem for speaker presupposition. LI 10.623-66. Stalnaker, Robert. 1974. Pragmatic presuppositions. Semantics and philosophy, ed. by Michael K. Munitz & Peter K. Unger, 197-214. New York: NYU Press. Strawson, Peter F. 1964. Identifying reference and truth-values. Theoria 30.96-118. [Received 28 February 1980.] Language and social psychology. Edited by Howard Giles and Robert St. Clair. (Language in society, 1.) Baltimore: University Park Press, 1979. Pp. ix, 261. $24.50. Reviewed by Joshua Fishman, Yeshiva University This is the first volume of a new series, with Peter Trudgill as General Editor and Ralph Fasold and William Labov as Advisory Editors. The book deserves to be congratulated and to receive our best wishes, not only in its own right but on behalf of the series as a whole. The volume is introduced by Giles' preface ('Sociolinguistics and social psychology: An introductory essay', 1-20) and then divided into two parts, the first on the decoding process and the second (somewhat the longer) on encoding processes. Although Giles admits that this division of the communication process is an artificial one, he nevertheless hopes that it can serve as a first-stage approximation in advancing social-PSYCHOLOGiCAL sophistication into the more encompassing sociolinguistic enterprise. The decoding part ofthe volume deals with such language variables as accent, speech rate, pitch variety, and loudness , and the ways they influence decoders' impressions and decisions. Giles notes that the dominant members of any interaction dyad are the ones usually focused upon (the teacher rather than the pupil, the lawyer rather than the witness), and that they are usually considered in their individual, rather than group-imbedded, capacities; he hopes that the new field will overcome these two limitations in the future. The encoding part ofthe volume points to cognitive aspects of self- and other-monitoring, and focuses on affective components of speech production and acquisition. The remaining contents of the volume are as follows: John R. Edwards, 'Judgements and confidence reactions to disadvantaged speech', 22-44. Howard Giles and Philip M. Smith, 'Accommodation theory: Optimal levels of convergence', 45-65. E. Allan Lind and William M. O'Barr, 'The social significance of speech in the courtroom', 66-87. REVIEWS221 Klaus Scherer, 'Voice and speech correlates ofperceived social influence in simulatedjuries', 88-120. Charles R. Berger, 'Beyond initial interaction: Uncertainty, understanding, and the development of interpersonal relationships', 122-44. Ellen Bouchard Ryan, 'Why do low-prestige language varieties persist?', 145-57. Richard Y. Bourhis et al., 'Psycholinguistic distinctiveness: Language divergence in Belgium', 158-85. Wallace E. Lambert, 'Language as a factor in intergroup relations', 186-92. Robert C. Gardner, 'Social psychological aspects of second language acquisition', 193-220. Sociolinguists trained in linguistics, anthropology, or sociology will encounter many familiar findings in this volume (e.g., the attribution of disadvantage from speech cues induces teachers to downgrade the children concerned), but also many unfamiliar theories. However, even if cognitive uncertainty theory, attribution theory, similarity-attraction theory, gain-loss theory, and intergroup identity theory often do not yield startling new results, they may yield ways ofconfirming or refining the old, as well as welcome new emphases. With respect to the two major issues for which social psychology is deemed to have special explanatory power ('why we use speech variables for assessing others, and why we modify our speech patterns from situation to situation'), the papers in this volume tend to add more (albeit socially contextualized) psychological depth to interpretations that have been offered in the past. Such frequent phrases as 'depending on how the situation is construed by the speaker' or 'depending on what speakers...