This collection finds an appropriate home in the ‘Dialogue studies’ series by John Benjamins. It offers a variety of chapters using methodologies informed by discourse and conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, (im)politeness research, evidentiality, and bilingual communication, but all share ‘the notion of dialogicity as central’ (p. ii), the overarching tenet of the above-mentioned series. Moreover, as the editors note, this book breaks new ground by advancing these interconnected subfields based on data from Slavic, rather than Western, speech communities, helping to fill a significant gap in the literature. It is also the editors' stated goal that the volume be of interest both to the broader community of Slavic linguists as well as to practitioners of one or more of the represented subfields with no knowledge of a Slavic language. In this respect it is mostly successful, although to varying degrees depending on the individual chapter (see below).

The volume is divided into five parts: Part I, ‘Multimodal, grammatical and paralinguistic resources in talk-in-interaction’; Part II, ‘Statistical analysis of Russian talk-in-interaction’; Part III, ‘Displaying and negotiating epistemic and evidential status and evaluation in interaction’; Part VI, ‘Facework and contextualization in interaction: From (im)politeness to humor’; and Part V, ‘Language alternation in face-to-face interaction of bilingual families’. These supposedly form ‘a path starting on the micro level and proceeding to the macro level’ (p. 3), but the groupings seem based more on specific theoretical frameworks and traditions (a perfectly valid organizational approach, of course) than any such progression. Parts IV and V are said to be on the macro level because ‘they indicate the relationship of the interlocutors, their social identity or the institutional frame in which the communication takes place’ (p. 3), but the chapters in the first three parts also contain one or more of these elements. This is only a minor quibble, however, for the titles of the various parts definitely do prepare the reader for what is to come.

The chapters in Part I are rooted in interactional linguistics. Lenore Grenoble's ‘Talking out of turn: (Co)-constructing Russian conversation’ investigates the conversation-building mechanisms exhibited in collaborative turn-constructional units, or ‘co-constructions’, that is, when a second speaker completes a previous speaker's conversational turn. In ‘Reanimating responsibility: The weź-V ₂(take-V₂) double imperative in Polish interaction’, Jörg Zinken demonstrates how the cited construction differs contextually from the simple imperative and other types of upgrades. Elena Grishina's ‘Eye behavior in Russian spoken interaction and its correlation with affirmation and negation’ shows how gaze behavior helps signal turn-taking and how blinking serves as ‘punctuation’ in discourse. Finally, Hanna Laitinen's ‘Hesitation markers in transitions within (story)telling sequences of Russian television shows' associates the position and distribution of hesitation markers with specific types of transitions to different parts of the narrative process. All of these chapters reach beyond the cognitive aspects of conversation construction into various pragmatic and sociocultural dimensions too numerous to detail here. An excellent example, however, is Grenoble's comparison of co-constructions in friendly family discourse to those in a political interview. While syntactically similar, in the former they serve to reinforce solidarity, while in the latter they are a means of directing the conversation in one's own favor.

The two chapters in Part II, Tatiana Sherstinova's ‘Russian everyday utterances: The top lists and some statistics' and Svetlana B. Stepanova's ‘Speech rate as a reflection of speaker's social characteristics’, lack the wider interdisciplinary focus of Part I but nevertheless provide useful data for future research, especially potential cross-cultural comparisons. The major theoretical conclusions are Sherstinova's proposal of two different speech registers based on average syllable duration and Stepanova's assertion that ‘informants with a high level of verbal competence … speak more slowly’ (p. 127). Of these, Sherstinova's is better documented. Stepanova bases her claim on evaluations by so-called ‘experts’ but offers no information about who these experts were and exactly how they judged verbal competence. One is left to wonder if this could simply be a bias for full pronunciation style over the many elisions typical of colloquial speech.

The chapters in Part III will probably be best appreciated by readers with a strong background in epistemics and evidentiality. In ‘How evaluation is transferred in oral discourse in Russian’, Nicole Richter primarily investigates prosodic cues for conveying speaker attitude and concludes that positive evaluations are associated with higher pitch levels and larger pitch intervals. Matylda Weidner's ‘“This is how I see it”: No-prefacing in Polish’ examines the use of the cited particle in the construction of doctor-patient dialogues in light of each participant's purported right or claim to the information he/she is expressing. Peter Kosta's ‘How can I lie if I am telling the truth?: The unbearable lightness of being of strong and weak modals, modal adverbs and modal particles in discourse between epistemic modality and evidentiality’ seems especially aimed at a narrow group of specialists. Although he presents a convincing case for the specific meaning(s) of the particle vrode (by) ‘like, as if’ in Russian discourse, his ultimate formulism (p. 179) will surely leave many nonepistemologists mystified.

The four chapters in Part IV are united by a broad focus on issues of face and status as revealed through discourse. In ‘Irony in the face(s) of politeness: Strategic use of verbal irony in Czech political TV debates’, Jekaterina Mažara investigates the use of irony on political talk shows for gaining the upper hand against a political opponent or even the moderator/host. Her observations will resonate with students of political discourse in any number of countries. Daniel Weiss’ ‘Parliamentary communication: The case of the Russian Gosduma’ concludes that the less ritualized communication of the Russian parliament, as opposed to elsewhere in Europe, and especially Great Britain, goes hand in hand with the Duma's relatively low importance and prestige. In ‘Impoliteness and mock-impoliteness: A descriptive analysis’, Michael Furman examines the interactions among participants (including the host) in a Russian reality TV show. He details the various ways of signaling that an overtly impolite utterance is not really meant as such. Nadine Thielemann's ‘Humor as staging an utterance’ investigates animated speech, that is, when a speaker takes on the role of some other person (real or imagined) as a means of achieving various types of humorous effects.

The two chapters in Part V, Veronika Ries’ ‘Bilingual language use in the family environment: Evidence from a telephone conversation between members of a community of speakers of German descent’ and Liliane Meyer Pitton's ‘Russian language maintenance through bedtime story reading?: Linguistic strategies and language negotiation in Russian-French speaking families in Switzerland’, bring the methodology of conversation analysis to the field of language contact/maintenance. Both convincingly show that code-switching by bilinguals is not at all haphazard, but an integral means of constructing conversation and/or negotiating the choice of language.

The chapters are all eminently readable and well edited, with only occasional solecisms in the English usage of some of the nonnative speakers. The English translations of the analyzed discourse, while also containing occasional (although minor) infelicities, certainly make the volume accessible to non-Slavic speakers. I personally found them very helpful in assimilating the two chapters on Polish, which I know only marginally, and the one on Czech, which I speak not at all. Overall, the authors and editors are to be congratulated on a fine contribution to the literature that achieves its intended goals.