A community's system of speech situations and events constitutes the structural matrix within which speaking occurs in that community. Giving shape to these scenes as they are enacted, and underlying the dynamics of communicative activity within them, are sets of general cultural themes and social-interactional organizing principles, which may be seen from the point of view of the ethnography of speaking as the implicit or explicit community ground rules for performance. Such ground rules are only analytically separable from the speech activities themselves, and most of the papers in this volume contain information about organizing principles of this kind. The papers in this section, however, are distinguished by their principal focus on this aspect of the speech economy of particular communities (for speech economy, see Hymes, section VI).

The analysis of community ground rules for performance may serve a particularly important function for the ethnography of speaking in that such ground rules, by the generalness of their scope, often represent the means for establishing the continuity between speaking and other forms of expressive behavior. Speech activity does not necessarily constitute a discrete domain within cultures, and the analysis of general social and cultural principles governing speaking may show these to cut across a range of activities and govern other kinds of behavior besides speaking, in a way that the study of specifically speech acts, situations, and events cannot.