Statham analyses dialogue in a sequence from the TV series The Sopranos. He illustrates the complexity of communication by analysing how textual features work together with camera perspective, shot, gaze and action to orchestrate a character’s realisation of betrayal.

This chapter exposes the received dyadic model of communication and then critically analyzes the presumptions of the model. This reductive model, which views communication as evolving from a basic unit of face-to-face dialogue between two people, has dominated understanding of communication from ancient dialectic to today’s speech act theory, conversation analysis, and argumentation theory – the disciplines discussed in the chapter. While the dyadic reduction has a long, important history in theorizing argumentation and communication – a history that is briefly recounted, going back to the dialectical roots of argumentation theory – the principle of reduction becomes unjustified reductionism that bypasses polylogical realities of argumentation and communication.

This chapter addresses the notion of participation by examining it at four different angles of view which we label, in order of roughly widening scope, utterance, talk, event and interaction. We start with the narrowest scope, involving the simplest possible notions of participant role – that of a producer and a receiver. Then, employing and stretching Goffman's notions of footing, production format and participation framework, we gradually widen the scope, putting an ever-increasing amount of flesh on, breaking down into various constituent parts and even questioning the integrity of these bare bones. At the widest scope, there comes a point when the bare bones seem to dissolve, and yet participation with interpersonal and interactive consequences can still be discerned. After proceeding to some considerations of participation in technology-mediated communication, we conclude with some suggestions concerning approaches to the identification of participant roles in the analysis of interaction.

Using as an example an exchange between Donald Trump and FBI director James Comey in the Oval Office in February 2017, this chapter revisits in a post-structuralist perspective canonical concepts from pragmatics and sociolinguistics , such as Austin’s performative, Searle’s speech act, Goffman’s participation framework and Brown and Levinson's concept of politeness through facework. It shows the workings of symbolic power in the most mundane interaction rituals. It introduces the notion of institution, not only in the form of particular organizations such as the Government, the Family, the Army, or the Church, but also any durable social relation which endows individuals with power, status and resources of various kinds, for example, membership in a club, association, corporation or online community, but also more unspoken relations of wealth, race, ethnicity or gender that represent institutionalized forms of symbolic power. These institutions give people authority, legitimacy and the right to speak and be listened to. Communicative practice is therefore not just the ability to speak correctly and appropriately, but an individual and institutional struggle to be heard and taken seriously.

This chapter offers a language socialization view on everyday experiences with food in an ethnically diverse kindergarten classroom in Copenhagen, Denmark. It examines discursive encounters that take place between teachers and children during the social activity of lunch, focused primarily on rye bread. It analyzes the ways in which teachers, children, and parents are positioned, using Goffman’s (1981) “production format,” in order to understand how teachers and children occupy different speaker positions, and how teachers attempt to socialize parents through the children. It also looks at the discursive practice of accounts, or social actions expected and presented in the case of unexpected and (often) dispreferred actions (e.g., not bringing Rye bread in one’s lunchbox). It shows how the children presented accounts in numerous cases, yet these were often treated as illegitimate by teachers. The chapter adds to research on food socialization in classrooms under conditions of migration by focusing on the vital role of language and demonstrating the difficulties that emerge when (what is seen as) non-compatible food understandings meet in classrooms.

This chapter explores the contrapuntal nature of school and peer socialization among honors eleventh graders and their teacher in a US high school classroom as they negotiate expertise and identities over a lesson, across changing speech events and participation frameworks. The analysis shows how certain epistemic stance markers ratify or challenge peers’ knowledge and display flexible and relative understandings of expertise across shifting participation frameworks, and how students’ engagement with course material involves simultaneous identity displays to peers. Paradoxically, these identity displays, while done in ways that may index counterpositions to the teacher, also serve as points of classroom engagement. The analysis deconstructs the distinction between “unofficial” peer socialization and “official” academic learning, illuminating how an experienced teacher and gifted teens build classroom community and learning through contrapuntal discourse that accomplishes both goals. The findings suggest that teachers and administrators concerned with classroom management might do well to consider building this contrapuntal rhythm, rather than muting students’ contribution to it.