Introduction

Comparison of the various ways in which people talk in different sociocultural and linguistic communities can easily lead to two, apparently contradictory, conclusions. On the one hand, the diversity of conduct is striking. People speak different languages, they are oriented to markedly different sociocultural norms of posture and tone, they inhabit very different social (as well as economic, political, etc.) worlds and thus find occasion to talk in vastly different “contexts.” One need only compare, for instance, the Mayan villagers of Tenejapa with Yélî Dnye speaking Rossel Islanders to see this diversity (as Rossano, Brown and Levinson do in this volume). On the other hand, the commonalities are what are remarkable. Everywhere turns-at-talk are constructed and opportunities to speak distributed, courses of action are launched and co-ordinatively managed, troubles of speaking, hearing and understanding are located and their repair attempted. These commonalities suggest that, for all the diversity we see, people everywhere encounter the same sorts of organizational problems and make use of the same basic abilities in their solutions to them – a capacity for reading other's intentions, anticipating and projecting actions, calculating inferences and processing information available to them (see Levinson 2006, Schegloff 2006).

If these abilities and problems appear universal and generic, the particular ways in which they are implemented or solved is anything but. After all, whatever happens in interaction happens through the medium of some specific set of locally available semiotic resources.