This is a collection of conversation analytic studies of interactions in different languages. While the investigation of talk in languages other than English has been thriving for decades, this book aims to provide a decidedly cross-cultural perspective on interaction and its study. Jack Sidnell's introduction argues that Conversation Analysis (CA) brings a new perspective to cross-cultural research, as it does not assume from the outset that interaction is shaped by and occurs only within predetermined cultural contexts. Instead, CA takes the view that participants themselves play an active role in creating context, treating only certain contextual features as relevant at any given moment.

The subsequent three parts of the book present cross-cultural research in three areas: repair, response, and action formation. In Part 2, the three chapters on repair vary widely in comparative scope. Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu's work focuses on repeats in other-initiated repair in Mandarin; Maria Egbert, Andrea Golato, & Jeffrey D. Robinson compare Was (denn)/What repair initiations in German and English; and Barbara Fox, Fay Wouk, Makoto Hayashi, Steven Fincke, Liang Tao, Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Minna Laakso, & Wilfrido Flores Hernandez compare repair initiations across seven languages, focusing on where in the word repair is initiated and how many syllables the word consists of.

Part 3, on responding, contains two pieces that focus primarily on individual languages. Anna Linström's chapter describes the use of the Swedish response token ja for nonalignment. Trine Heinemann looks at how Danish participants show that a previous question contains given information, making some comparisons with English and German. Federico Rossano, Penelope Brown, & Stephen C. Levinson investigate and compare gaze practices in three languages—Tzeltal, Italian, and Yélî Dnye—noting similarities, such as the original finding that speakers gaze more than recipients, and differences, such as the home position for the eyes when not gazing at another participant. Makoto Hayashi & Kyung-Eun Yoon compare Japanese and Korean uses of minimal-response tokens after previous acknowledgement tokens by recipients.

In Part 4, on action formation and sequencing, Marja-Leena Sorjonen & Auli Hakulinen report on agreements with assessments in Finnish. Sidnell investigates the use of if-prefaced repeats as repair initiators and second assessments in Caribbean English Creoles. Galina B. Bolden describes the use of the Russian discourse particle -to for connecting a current turn to other-than-prior talk, thus implementing delayed actions. Emanuel A. Schegloff's concluding chapter makes a strong argument for a comparative CA that approaches data from an exclusively participant-based perspective, rather than that of an outside analyst. The chapter also raises a variety of issues concerning the nature of comparative analysis itself, emphasising an etic perspective that does not “allow the terms of one culture … to set the terms for framing another” (373).

This is an inspiring collection of high quality conversation analytic research. However, while some chapters provide a culturally comparative perspective, others leave comparison mainly to the reader. Interestingly, in those chapters that compare talk across more than two languages, turn-by-turn analysis is combined with an extensive use of statistical investigation and representation. It will be interesting to see whether this line of enquiry will prevail, or whether future cross-cultural CA research will find other methods of comparison.