This book analyses the communicative structure of interpersonal, or casual, conversation. The author shows how the balance of conversation can be upset by variations in the status of the participants during the conversation and how the participants frequently adopt the strategy of negatively evaluating non-present third persons to redress the balance. The repair of such interactional trouble motivates topic change and major topic movement. The author uses transcripts of actual recorded conversations thus providing extensive support for her observations and analysis. Christine Cheepen is currently a Research Fellow in Articial Intelligence at the Hatfield Polytechnic, U.K. Her abiding interest is in linguistics, - in particular the study of natural conversation, and she has recently been involved in research connected with various computational projects. She has combined these two areas of interest, and is presently working primarily on aspects of dialogue in the human/machine interface.