A panel at the 1998 International Pragmatics Conference in Reims provided the impetus for the book Telephone calls: Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures, edited by Kang Kwong Luke and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou. Six of its chapters were first presented at that panel. The book covers several languages, including Cantonese, Danish, English, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, and Persian.

The introductory chapter gives an overview of research on telephone conversations, centered on studies inspired by conversation analysis. The editors start out by noting that telephone data were central in Harvey Sacks's early pioneering work. While acknowledging that “the significance of the telephone call goes well beyond the confines of the telephone line,” they observe that Sacks's initial explorations of the rules of conversational sequence were developed from observations of telephone calls (p. 4). Historically, face-to-face conversation has been the primary site for human relations and communication; however, with the emergence of new technology such as the cellular telephone, telephone calls have become “another primordial site for speech communication and fully deserve to be studied extensively and in depth” (5).

In light of the editors' mentioning the increasing importance of the cellular phone around the world, it is surprising that the empirical studies in the book appear to be based exclusively on landline calls. Also, their observation that telephone calls are dyadic events may no longer be applicable; in fact, one of the conversations analyzed in the book involves three participants. In Pavlidou's study of closings, a student from Cyprus has called her parents at home and talks to both of them (example 7, 209). The transcription suggests that both parents are on the phone with their daughter simultaneously. My own experience as someone who studied abroad is that this type of situation is common. That telephone communication services such as conference calls are now offered to private consumers is further evidence that telephone conversations no longer need to be dyadic events.

The editors outline three approaches to research on telephone conversations: the sociological, the methodological, and the intercultural. As they note, these approaches are not mutually exclusive, and the distinctions indeed sometimes seem arbitrary. Schegloff 1968 is cited as an example of a study that centered on telephone conversation as a phenomenon in its own right. However, one might argue that Schegloff's contribution was not primarily to advance our understanding of telephone conversations per se; rather, his study demonstrated how the social organization of sequences allows actors to negotiate entry into a ratified state of talk. The canonical telephone opening sequence described by Schegloff has inspired comparative studies of telephone conversation openings in other languages. One motivation for this line of research has been to explore the cultural scope of Schegloff's description of the opening sequence. Luke & Pavlidou's summary review of these studies highlights results that suggest that the organization of telephone opening is culturally variable. Findings that point to similarities in the interactional organization of opening sequences across cultures and languages are given less prominence.

The book is divided into three parts, the first of which focuses on openings of telephone calls in different languages. Yong-Yae Park's analysis of Japanese and Korean telephone conversation openings addresses self-identification sequences in relation to the presence or absence of background providers and contrastive connectives. Maria Sifianou explores whether the canonical sequence described by Schegloff is applicable to Greek telephone conversation openings. Unlike Sifianou's chapter, the study of Persian telephone conversation openings does not have an explicit comparative focus; Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm describes the linguistic resources Persian speakers use to demonstrate that they regard their co-participant as socially superior. Finally, Gitte Rasmussen & Johannes Wagner show how interactants negotiate language choice in the opening sequences of international business calls.

The second part of the book is entitled “Problem solving, topic management and closing.” Its three chapters are not as closely tied to one another as the chapters in the first section. One chapter here focuses on the initiation and introduction of first topics in Hong Kong telephone calls, and this would have fit in well with the studies presented in the first section. In particular, I thought the explicit way in which Hong Kong answerers sometimes pursued the reason for the call contrasted nicely with the orientation toward more implicit practices described in Park's studies of Japanese and Korean data. Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura's chapter is an ethnographic and discourse analytic study of Japanese business telephone conversations. There are interesting parallels between this study and those by Park and Taleghani-Nikazm. Similar to Park, who also analyzes Japanese telephone calls, Yotsukura finds that inferences play an important role in Japanese conversations. Problems were not explicitly mentioned in the beginning of calls; rather, the facts of a case were detailed in a manner that allowed the recipient to infer the nature of the problem. Like the interactants in Taleghani-Nikazm's corpus of Persian conversations, Japanese business associates deferred to one another within the opening sequence. Pavlidou examines closing sequences in Greek telephone calls between familiars. In contrast with several of the other chapters in the book, this particular study aims at building hypotheses that can describe the structure of closings at the etic rather than the emic level (203). Owing to the paucity of systematic investigations of telephone conversation closings in different languages, Pavlidou is hesitant to make conclusive arguments about cultural variability. However, she suggests that Greek conversationalists are more likely to foreground the relationship aspect of communication within the closing sequence than are members of some other linguistic communities.

The last section of the book centers on theoretical and methodological issues that arise in studies involving comparisons between languages and cultures. Unlike the other contributors, the authors of the last two chapters represent sociology rather than communication, language studies, or linguistics. Several of the empirical chapters of the book seem to promote the idea that the organization of telephone conversations is culturally variable. I was thus surprised that the variationist perspective was not represented in the last section. It would have been useful if the authors of the last two chapters had targeted their observations to the studies presented in the first two sections. Paul ten Have mentions only two of them in passing (245), and Emanuel Schegloff discusses only two of them in some detail.

The breadth of languages covered makes this book attractive to researchers and students who work on other languages than English. However, the binary comparisons to English limit some of the studies. As someone who does not understand most of the languages included in the book, I found it difficult to make observations about the data. There were nevertheless several aspects of the examples that I found intriguing. Yotsukura gives one example (example 7, 146) in which the interactants end the conversation without a goodbye sequence. Although this may not impinge on the main focus of Yotsukura's analysis of how problems are raised and negotiated, I thought it would have been interesting if she had discussed this. Identification and recognition have different implications for callers and answerers, and this point did not seem sufficiently developed in several of the studies. The person who has made the call is likely to have an idea of the limited population of potential answerers for the number dialed. This is illustrated by example three in Rasmussen & Wagner's study, in which the caller's first turn indicates that the person who answered the telephone did not belong to the expected group of answerers (113). For the answerer, on the other hand, the persons who may figure as potential callers are usually much harder to predict, and thus identification of the other party can be a much trickier matter for the answerer than it is for the caller.

Most of the work presented in the book is based on impressive data sets. For example, the findings reported in Sifianou's study were drawn from analysis of nearly 800 telephone conversation openings. However, the authors rarely show how the specific patterns and features discussed figure in the larger collections. The transcription practices used in some of the chapters make it difficult to track how the sequence unfolded in real time, as it appears that pauses and overlaps are not consistently marked. This book nevertheless highlights the challenges and rewards of exploring social activities and communicative patterns across languages and cultures and will be a valuable resource for scholars in this field.