This book seeks to develop interpretive sociolinguistic approaches to the analysis of real time processes in face to face encounters. It grew out of approximately ten years of field studies of verbal communication in India, Europe and the United States, originally intended to answer questions and test hypotheses arising from earlier ethnographic work on the realization of social categories in language (Blom & Gumperz 1972, Gumperz 1972). Detailed observation of verbal strategies revealed that an individual's choice of speech style has symbolic value and interpretive consequences that cannot be explained simply by correlating the incidence of linguistic variants with independently determined social and contextual categories. Sociolinguistic variables are themselves constitutive of social reality and can be treated as part of a more general class of indexical signs which guide and channel the interpretation of intent. The discussion of these indexical signs, of their relation to traditionally studied aspects of grammar and of what they tell us about the nature of misunderstanding in human society is the main subject of the book.

Much of the material presented here has appeared in a preliminary form elsewhere, but it has been extensively revised and rearranged to fit into a more general argument. Portions of chapter 2 first appeared as Working Paper No. 33, Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica, Universitá di Urbino, Urbino, Italy. A preliminary version of chapter 3 appeared in C. Molony, H. Zobl & W. Stolting (eds.) German in Contact with Other Languages (Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag, 1977), and of chapter 4 in Papers in Language and Context, Working Paper No. 46, Language Behavior Research Laboratory, University of California.