More than half the world is bilingual or multilingual. So when growing up exposed to two (or more) languages at once, children have two systems to learn, and they must also learn when to speak each language. The choices here depend on who the addressee is, and on the setting. Exposure to the two languages may be uneven, and also vary over time, depending on who the child spends time with. Choice of language depends on common ground, on the topic, and on the language common to the child’s conversational partners. The early stages of acquisition are very similar, from perception of sounds and sound sequences to early babbling; from comprehension of words to attempts to produce them. Early vocabularies contain many doublets, freely accumulated as children learn more of each language. (This is consistent with contrast, but not with mutual exclusivity.) Language mixing tends to mirror adult usage and so varies across languages. Children attend not only to differences in the sound systems but also to structural differences of all kinds. Conversational skills develop in similar ways across languages, depending on exposure and practice, with language dominance fluctuating over one’s lifetime. Acquiring two dialects involves similar skills.

Chapter 4 examines Galen’s credentials as an ethical philosopher in the light of his recently discovered essay Avoiding Distress. It argues that his moral agenda which is expanded upon here makes him an active participant in the practical ethics of the High Roman Empire, with a more profound attentiveness to popular philosophy than is usually admitted. Galen’s dialogue with what has been termed ‘Stoic psychotherapy’ and the Platonic-Aristotelian educational model helps build up his ethical influence through an engagement with the past. On the other hand, his individual characteristics, such as the autobiographical perspective of his narrative and the intimacy established between author and addressee, render Avoiding Distress exceptional among essays (whether Greek or Latin) treating anxiety, especially when compared to the tracts on mental tranquillity written by Seneca and Plutarch. Another distinctive element of the treatise is that Galen’s self-projection as a therapist of the emotions corresponds to his role as a practising physician as regards the construction of authority and the importance of personal experience.

The prevalence of direct speech in Homeric epic plays a key role in fostering audience engagement with the poems. The speeches in the Homeric epics include some features that closely resemble those found in ordinary spoken speeches and conversations, and others that are evidently stylized for the artistic medium of oral poetry.

Chapter 7 addresses the formulation of thought from two perspectives. On the one hand, whenever we put thoughts into words, we do this for a specific purpose – typically for the benefit of an interaction partner. The first half of Chapter 7 discusses communication and dialogic interaction, where thoughts are formulated for an addressee; this affects how words are chosen, what kind of background knowledge is presumed, what style of language is adopted, etc.; also, speakers adapt to each other in the course of a dialogue. Further, dialogues follow specific structures that can be systematically accounted for. The second half of this chapter addresses the idea of cognitive strategies, which are the main target of think–aloud protocol analysis in traditional problem-solving studies. These are not intended to be primarily formulated for an addressee but instead represent the structure of cognitive processes in temporal sequence. While content analysis is the first (and often the only) crucial step for researchers in this general field, the chapter explores what kinds of insights CODA adds with its focus on linguistic features. This concludes the set of chapters addressing analysis perspectives.