The central focus of the book is the identification of the ways people engage in communicative encounters to (re)constitute personal and social identities. Its aim is to identify some principal themes that have emerged from the ample research on identity in a variety of contexts. A common thread of the articles is the role of language in the construction and performance of identities. It embraces an exploration of the sociocultural environments in which human communication takes place, the interplay between these environments, and the construction and display of identities through our communicative performances. Research located in a range of literary, sociological, psychological and linguistic perspectives is used to illustrate the potential of communication in establishing a sense of identity.

This book is a collection of articles covering the theme of interaction. Interaction combines two crucial elements: the intrapersonal and the interpersonal. Accordingly, the authors approach this issue from two complementary perspectives: from the internal and external or cognitive and social perspective. The papers that take the former perspective focus on cognitive bases of interaction, on the representation of motion, on metaphor and metonymy, or gestures, perception and cognition. The topic that dominates the papers that take the social stance towards the topic of interaction is identity. By applying a variety of new analytical tools and concepts, the authors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society and institutions mould us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of these categories.

The book brings to the fore the issue of collective identity and analyzes it from the linguistic perspective. Addressing the problem, the authors demonstrate ways in which the language we use in everyday life enables us to construct and perform in a flexible and context-bound manner the sense of our belonging in a community. They offer some rich data and present strong arguments in favor of qualitative methodologies for research in the field. Drawing on numerous interactional settings, and amongst different communities, the contributors shed new light on how our language practices and non-verbal behaviors mold our collective identities.