Abstract
Reviewed by: Shulamith Kreitler, School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology represents a valiant attempt to combine the two major disciplines of the human sciences – language and social psychology. The goal of the editor would be attained if the book contributed to rendering language an inseparable domain of social psychology. For this purpose, the different chapters in the book deal with various themes that are of essential and mostly evident importance for social psychology. Each of the 30 chapters of the book deals with a specific well-defined theme. The first four chapters deal with the role of various linguistic characteristics, such as accent (Chapter 1), contextualizing (Chapter 3) or grammatical differences (Chapter 4) in regard to defining, identifying and expressing identity, mainly social, cultural and gender-related.
The next five chapters deal with various aspects of using language in conversation. The emphasis is on the mechanisms that enable conversation, such as embedding and perspective pairs (Chapter 5), actual and misleading perspective taking (Chapter 6), cognitive mechanisms enabling coordination in dialogue (Chapter 8) and expressions of interrelatedness of sentences in discourse (Chapter 9). In this context, Chapter 8 deals with nonverbal communication by means of hands and face that may be considered as helping conversational coordination through language.
The third set of five chapters focuses on the contribution of language to interpersonal relations in the general sense of the term. The major themes are stereotypes (Chapter 10), persuasion (Chapter 11), creation and maintenance of relations (Chapter 12) and computer-analyzed communication strategies and styles as indicators of personality (Chapter 13) and of social processes (Chapter 14). The next set of five chapters deals with the contribution of language to processes that may be considered as intrapersonal, namely, making sense of the communication of the other (Chapter 15), attribution processes (Chapter 16), storytelling (Chapter 17), emotions (Chapter 18) and a specific discursive-based approach to conversation analysis (Chapter 19).
The fifth set of chapters deals with different aspects of meaning, as manifested in language. The presented themes are an action-based approach to meaning (Chapter 20), indirect expressions of meaning (Chapter 21), ambiguity (Chapter 22), language comprehension analyzed in terms of electrophysiological techniques (Chapter 23), and the meaning of logical terms, specifically quantifiers and connectives as used in discourse (Chapter 24).
The final set of six chapters is devoted to various specific applications of language in diverse fields, such as education, law, data collection, conflict resolution and electronic communication technologies.
The detailed listing of the themes of the various chapters illustrates the broad range of the contents of the handbook, which is indeed impressive. Notably, each of the chapters presents a well-based review of research relevant for its focal theme, with a certain extent of theoretical background. However, in some cases it would have been beneficial if more of the theoretical underpinnings were considered.
The chapters are grouped in the handbook into six parts. This classification often seems problematic. Some of the chapters do not fit well into the allocated part (e.g., Chapter 13 about language as a marker of personality could fit better in Part 4 rather than Part 3; Chapter 19 about conversation analysis would fit better into Part 3 rather than Part 4). The chapters in Part 6 have indeed very little in common and seem to present themes that could not be allocated in other parts.
The listing of the themes in the 30 chapters also suggests some of the problems of this handbook. Despite the fact that the coverage is indeed extraordinary, some themes are missing or not sufficiently presented. For example, one would expect a broader discussion of the development of language, the linguistic aspects of language and the issues concerning the nature and functions of meaning. These comments suggest that the book is not about language but about a specific approach to language as a “social activity” (see p.1). It is not so much about “the reciprocal relationship between language and social psychology” (p.1), but rather about the contributions of language to social psychology. It answers the question “What can language do for social psychology?” but not the complementary one “What can social psychology do for language?” that is implied in the book’s title and could also be of great interest.
Having identified the possible borderlines of the handbook's contents there remain only praises for the extraordinary scholarly level of most chapters, the clarity of presentation and the innovative approach to many of the themes (e.g., emotional experiences). The highlighting of the role of language in regard to social issues is so well elaborated in breadth and depth that it is likely that social psychology will not be the same after this handbook. Henceforth, it will indeed be difficult if not impossible to overlook linguistic aspects in handling some of the traditional issues in social psychology, such as attribution, stereotypes or gender differences, as well as some relatively new issues, such as technologically assisted or computer-mediated communication.