Book Reviews 99

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, edited by H . Giles and R. St.

Clair. London, Blackwell, 1979. No. of pages: ix + 261.

This volume is the first in a new ‘Language in Society’ series in sociolinguistics,

and it attempts to demonstrate some of the contributions that social
psychological ideas and methods can make to that field. In addition to an
introductory essay on sociolinguistics and social psychology by the first editor,
there are nine rather varied papers, mainly from Americans, split i n t o four
dealing with decoding processes and five with encoding ones.

EMERGING STRATEGIES IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH,

edited by G . P. Ginsburg. London, Wiley, 1979. No. of pages: 319.

Most of these strategies have emerged from Oxford, since the book discusses in
some detail methods currently favoured by Argyle, his collaborators, and others
closely associated with them, who also make up the contributors. Between an
editor’s summary and an epilogue, there are nine chapters, each on a different
method, namely the analysis of sequences of behaviour. linguistic analysis, the
use of film and of video recordings, role-playing, analogic models,
autobiography, repertory grid techniques, and multidimensional scaling.

QUESTIONS AND POLITENESS: STRATEGIES IN SOCIAL

INTERACTION, edited by E. N. Goody. Cambridge, C.U.P., 1978. No. of
pages: vii + 324.

This eccentrically constituted volume by anthropologists and anthropological

linguists from Cambridge is of considerable potential interest to social
psychologists concerned with language. It grapples with two sets of questions;
why a given linguistic form is effective for the job for which it is employed and
why those jobs are fundamental to the nature of human communication. In
addition to a brief editor’s introduction, the volume consists of a twenty-five
page paper, Towards a Theory of Questions, a twelve-page paper, Questions of
Immediate Concern, and a two-hundred-and-sixty-page‘paper’, Universals in
Language Usage: Politeness P h e n o m e n a .

JEWISH IDENTITY: A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSEPCTIVE,

S . N . Herman, Beverly Hills, Sage, 1977. No. of pages: 263.

According to H. C. Kelman who contributes a Foreward, this book by the

Professor of Social Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ‘can best
be characterised . . . as a fusion of two essay-ne a conceptual and empirical
contribution to the social psychology of national identity, the other a normative
statement of what Jewish identity means to him and what form it ought to take.
These two essays are not presented seriatim, but are interwoven . , .’ (p. 9).