ABSTRACT
Take a walk today down a street in any large urban center, anywhere in the world, and you will encounter multiple ways of speaking and dressing, gesturing and greeting, expressing sadness or joy, love or hate—in short, massive communicative diversity. How do we learn to get along in this complex communicative milieu? How do people who walk down the same street and who share a common humanity but express themselves radically differently live together without continual conflict and chaos? This book addresses these questions by describing the communicative repertoires through which, in dialogue with others, we express who we are and find common ground. Each chapter describes and illustrates communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about—not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories, the names and nicknames we coin, the mass media references we make—and how these resources combine in infinitely varied ways when people interact.
