Face-to-face dialogue and the cospeech gestures that occur within it are social as well as cognitive. Cospeech gestures are microsocial. Some of these gestures provide information that directly advances the topic of a dialogue. Others inform addressee about the state of the dialogue at that moment. Efron distinguished between objective and logical-discursive gestures. McNeill distinguished between propositional gestures and beats. Bavelas et al. distinguished between topical and interactive functions of gestures. Gerwing documented changes in form that marked gestures that were part of common ground. Seyfeddinipur identified discursive and meta-discursive gestures. Kendon described a variety of social, pragmatic gestures. Holler and Wilkin showed that mimicking a gesture conveyed understanding of that gesture. Galati and Brennan noted metanarrative functions of gestures. Kok et al. separated semantic and metacommunicative gestures. We focus on Clark’s distinction between track 1 and track 2 functions in dialogue. Track 1 conveys the basic communicative acts (i.e. topical content) whereas track 2 conveys the metacommunicative acts that ensure successful communication.

Chapter 7 argues that law-abiding firms’ concerns for reputation generate discursive resources, which contribute to workers’ expectations of success. Unlike collective action for legal rights, interest-based protests rarely use disruptive tactics that physically expand the scope of conflict. Instead, workers use publicity tactics to attract the attention of third-party allies who exercise direct influence over the target firm’s policies. The main channel examined in this chapter is media exposure. It shows that workers at law-abiding firms have more discursive resources due to their firms newsworthiness and thus are more prone to expect that their protests would succeed. This shows that even in the more favorable environment for atomized protests, not all workers have the resources to engage in collective action. By limiting social mobilization, the regime has been able to manage the frequency and nature of atomized protests. At the same time, workers with the resources to engage in atomized protests are much less likely to hold the central government responsible for the situation they are in.

Despite the centrality of the notion of identity to human communication and within discourse studies and sociolinguistics, a critical mass of identity-related work within different sub-fields of pragmatics is still lagging behind. As a result, this chapter is partly a review of existing work and partly programmatic. We specifically argue that the notion of identity is crucial to the postulates of some of the major approaches that have constituted the bases of sociopragmatics, namely speech act and politeness theories as well as some of their most common applications, interlanguage and inter/cross-cultural pragmatics and, more recently, the pragmatics of social media. However, as these theories and their applications have developed mostly in a top-down fashion (i.e. based on categorizations and taxonomies) and as they have largely been non-discursive (utterance based) in orientation, identity has more often than not been treated as a given, as structurally pre-allocated properties rather than as co-constructed and discursively achieved.As sociopragmatics is embracing discursive and interactional perspectives on its mainstay concerns (esp. politeness), we show the need for identity construction -- always at the heart of discourse(s) -- to take centre stage along with associated processes of agency in the study of situated practices.