Language Within Language: Immediacy, a Channel in Verbal Communication: By Morton Wiener and Albert Mehrabian. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968. 214 pp.

This book reflects part of a research effort focusing on extralinguistic aspects of human communication that in recent decades has become increasingly important. It is commonly believed that

these aspects of communication often represent more direct expressions of affect than the verbal content. In their historical overview, the authors emphasize the significance of the researches of, among others, Birdwhistell, Dollard and Mowrer, E. T. Hall, Mahl, and G. A. Miller. A few psychoanalysts are also mentioned, mainly Braatøy, Felix Deutsch, and Wilhelm Reich.

The various aspects of communication are referred to as communication channels. Phenomena serving as more or less disparate channels are verbal content, the distribution of words of different classes in a message, tonal quality, interruptions, and other nonverbal attributes of speech, facial expressions, posture, and gestures. To these Wiener and Mehrabian add yet another channel, the immediacy channel, as they call it. Degrees of immediacy (or of nonimmediacy) are ascribed to a communication if this communication in a particular indirect manner expresses some such feelings or attitudes as separation or involvement, identity or nonidentity, etc. Generally speaking, immediacy refers to a relationship between a communicator and his addressee, a communicator and the object of his communication, or a communicator and the communication itself. To qualify as expressions of immediacy (or of nonimmediacy) the feelings or attitudes in question must be expressed by the choice of one rather than another of a number of expressions that content-wise are more or less equivalent. For example, if somebody refers to a specified group of people as 'those people' he shows a greater degree of separation from them than if he refers to them as 'these people'. The former expression, accordingly, communicates a greater degree of nonimmediacy than the latter.

Fully aware of the difficult problems that their study involves, Wiene