ABSTRACT
This chapter is from my book Words and Minds. It is thus taken out of context (‘context’ is in fact one of the concepts I discuss in the chapter) but in this version I have tried to eliminate references to other parts of that book. I include it here for two reasons. First, unlike the other chapters, it includes examples of talk taken from social events outside the classroom, which show that the same concepts are relevant to understanding how spoken communication works in a range of settings. And secondly, the explanation it includes of how language is used for collective thinking came to underpin much of my subsequent research.
