LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL ACTION: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE USE

Thomas M. Holtgraves, LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL ACTION: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE USE. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002; pp. 248, $65.00 hardcover, ISBN: 0805831401; $29.95 paper, ISBN: 0805841776.

Thomas M. Holtgraves sets a noble goal for Language as Social Action. In his own words, he attempts "to provide an interdisciplinary review of language use as a human social action" (p. 1). Holtgraves approaches the subject from the perspective of a researcher examining language production and comprehension with a focus on social psychological factors. He grapples with the common frustration that "Language is truly a multidisciplinary topic; unfortunately it is not often an interdisciplinary topic" (p. 1).

In seven chapters, the book summarizes and reviews speech act theory, politeness theory, language and interpersonal perception, conversational structure, conversational perspective taking, conversational pragmatics, and cognition. These chapters offer a clear introduction to readers new to each area but are likely to be too sketchy for researchers looking for detailed treatments of the original texts associated with the theories or research foci. For example, a concept such as backchannelling is mentioned as a de facto characteristic of human language use, although the...