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.

This chapter critically compares how the concepts of activity type and genre tend to be used within the field of pragmatics. Both concepts are broadly concerned with the way in which we categorize our experiences, and develop thereby expectations about communicative behaviour within a given context. In spite of these similarities, they have very different conceptual histories. Activity types were introduced into pragmatics by Levinson (1979), having been inspired by Wittgenstein’s (1958) notion of language games. Genres can be traced back to ancient Greek literature, and have since been applied within multiple disciplines, including art and art criticism, literary studies, rhetoric, sociology, linguistics and, more specifically, pragmatics (Bazerman, 1997; Mayes, 2003). The focus of the chapter is on mapping the development and usage of these terms within the pragmatics (or a concomitant) discipline. We also comment upon concepts that seem to share "a considerable family resemblance" (Linell, 2010: 42) with activity types and/or genres. They include footing, frames (and framing), speech events, speech activities, schemas, scripts, and prototypes.