ABSTRACT
The five subfields we identified are Language Pragmatics, Conversation Analysis, Language and Social Psychology, Discourse Analysis, and the Ethnography of Communication. They have in common an interest in the meaningfulness of what persons say, in particular circumstances, to particular others. They differ in terms of what they take into account as having an influence on the meaningfulness of such situated (contextualized) talk. The above ordering of the subfields (and the corresponding order of sections of the handbook) is based on how extensively, from least to most, the analytic work of each subfield goes beyond the form and content of the talk itself, and takes into account such additional matters as the social identities and relations of speakers and hearers, the organization of the interaction in progress, participants' psychological states, participants' cultural identities, and the activity or business at hand in which participants are jointly engaged.
