Book excerpt: "Dialogue in Spanish" provides a strong theoretical and empirical foundation for the study of dialogue. This edited collection of twelve original studies contributes to a broad comprehension of dialogue in two general contexts: personal interactions among friends and family; and public speech, such as political debates, medical interviews, court translations and service encounters. The studies, written by authors from Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Venezuela, present an in-depth look at issues and elements of dialogue such as irony, narrativity, discourse markers, coherence, conflict and expectations. Background research on dialogue grounds the articles in such areas as discourse analysis, pragmatics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and linguistics. The book will prove useful to those who study conversational interaction, pragmatics, and discourse analysis as applied to various functions and contexts, and it will be of particular interest to researchers and students of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, communications and education.