When people converse with one another, they are making various kinds of social moves. As we saw in the preceding chapter, this is why conversational access is so important and also why it can be problematic. In this chapter we will look in more detail at different kinds of linguistically mediated social moves, what analysts call speech acts. Speech acts are firmly embedded in social practice. Each particular utterance enters into the discourse and into the plans being developed in that interaction and, in turn, into a larger landscape of social practice, including gender practice. The work each utterance does is not a matter simply of its form, its linguistic properties. Each utterance is part of the social situation in which it occurs, and its significance unfolds in the emergent history of the discourse and interaction that it enters. We have seen that gender structures people's access to participation in situations, activities, and events, hence to their opportunity to perform particular speech acts legitimately. In this chapter, we will see how the acts themselves accomplish gender.

Talk is often thought of as quite distinct from action. “He is a man of action, not words.” “She's all talk, no action.” (The pronouns here reflect language and gender ideologies familiar to many English speakers.) A sharp dichotomy between talk and action is, however, problematic. It is true that simply to say “Let's have lunch together sometime soon” need not result in any lunchtime meeting.