This chapter explores the conceptual frames of the book, drawing upon social network and complex systems science, together with concepts drawn from political science and practice theory. The crux of the argument is why people maintain networks with strangers, and how can we uncover and analyse them. A crucial point concerns the relations that sociologists have called ‘weak ties’, and how such interaction created ‘small worlds’ of social shortcuts, creating flows of information and personal contexts. I show how transport and topography conditioned communications between emporia and the wider world. This leads on to the mechanisms through which interactions with strangers were focused, creating flows of information and personal contexts that were far denser than might intuitively be presumed for such geographically far-flung connections. I outline how archaeological research can inform these issues not merely by tracing movements and interactions, but in terms of defining their scale, impact, and dynamics. These may be explored using comparative and quantitative methods, but often the decisive syntheses are obtained by the addition of contextual and qualitative observations.

The Iron Age and the Archaic period were a period of profound transformations in Sicily: Greek and Phoenician colonial settlers interacted with the Indigenous communities of the hinterland and played a key role in processes of change that also involved daily social and economic life.

This chapter presents the archaeological evidence from three settlements in western Sicily, dating from between the early Iron Age and the late Archaic period: Monte Maranfusa, in the middle Belice valley; Makella, located in the Eleuterio valley; and the small settlement on the Castello della Pietra in the lower Belice valley.

Chapter 6 addresses carriers of implicit meaning: entailments, presuppositions, and Gricean implicatures, and the organization of genre, interactional, and metapragmatic indicators in the appeals. Particular attention is paid to the information communicated by presupposition, most notably the existence of the various rights invoked by the appeals. The chapter examines the presupposition triggers active in the texts: definite noun phrases, change of state expressions, factive predicates, implicative expressions, iteratives, quantifiers, temporal adverbials, expressions of judging, comparison and contrast, non-restrictive relative clauses, and questions. It addresses issues of politeness and the threats to interactors’ positive and negative face raised by implications of responsibility for violations of human rights by appeal addressees. The chapter accounts for patterns of dialogicality in the appeals: concessions to the appeal addressees and rebuttals of those concessions; invitations to respond to the appeals; and expressions of gratitude for the addressees’ attention to the concerns of the appeals. It concludes with an analysis of metapragmatic indicators in the appeals.

This chapter explores the idea that the concept of dynamical gestalt, defined across a heterogeneous collection of interacting variables/factors/processes (including biopsychosocial factors) and distributed across different scales, can provide a level-free explanation of psychiatric disorders. In this view, all relevant factors are defined by their causal interaction, albeit at different temporal and spatial scales. Accordingly, there is no reason to think that social factors are on a higher level than neuronal processes, or that neural processes are more basic than social factors in the etiology of psychiatric disorders. In combination with the model of interventionist causality, this approach allows for the development of a productive way of explaining psychiatric disorders and for insight into therapeutic practices.

Language is the primary mode of communication for humans. However, nonverbal communication, such as gestures, eye contact, and facial expressions, also play a crucial role. In some cases, these nonverbal forms are even more important than spoken language. For example, pointing is a social behavior observed from early infancy and is documented not only in humans but also in other primates like chimpanzees. This chapter explores how Artificial Intelligence can offer a unique perspective on pointing.

This chapter explores the role of pointing when referring to (non-)local places in everyday conversations conducted in Gija, an endangered Australian Aboriginal language from the East Kimberley, Western Australia. Conversation analytic methods are supplemented by a geospatial approach, which provides a procedure for measuring the angular vectors of pointing gestures and positioning them in ‘real space’. Analyses suggest that pointing is implicated in displays of detailed geographical knowledge and knowledge of recipients’ cultural connections to country. These types of bodily and verbal displays are fitted to recounting events that transpired on local Gija country. This level of detail is not required for events that occurred in nonlocal environments. This chapter aims to expand understandings of pointing as tied to the wider ecology of speakers’ cultural and communicative contexts, and, for these speakers of Gija, as grounded in displays of knowledge of country and land associations.

This chapter explores practical strategies for sparking students’ interest and curiosity in statistics as lectures and classes commence, and for sustaining their engagement throughout the learning journey. It focuses on the benefits of capturing attention at the outset, encouraging open discussions, and creating a supportive environment where students feel confident to ask questions and seek help. By setting the scene for active participation and fostering a sense of curiosity, the chapter demonstrates how inclusive and student-centred teaching can transform statistics into a subject that feels relevant, accessible, and even enjoyable. Student perspectives highlight what truly makes a difference in their learning experience.

This chapter presents a pedagogical approach to ending lectures and classes in a way that ensures students leave the teaching rooms with clarity and no lingering questions. By encouraging reflection on the material covered, it stimulates meaningful questions and discussions. The core message – learning from mistakes – empowers students and fosters a growth mindset. This approach helps improve class and lecture attendance and promotes timely homework submissions. Student feedback demonstrates how these outcomes are consistently achieved.

The study of conversational interaction among second language (L2) learners and their interlocutors has been central to the study of second language acquisition since the beginning of the 1980s. Numerous studies have shown the facilitative role of interaction for L2 acquisition and several factors that influence the process have been identified and investigated in depth. The main aim of this chapter is to provide the reader with updated information on three particular areas in which research has grown in the past decade, namely the mediating role of individual differences in the process of interaction, interaction in technology-mediated environments and child interaction in low-input (foreign language) contexts. The first two topics are of general interest for the cognitive-interactionist framework, while the third focuses on an underresearched population about which basically no studies were published in the previous decade. The major findings in those three areas will be highlighted and lines for further research identified.

Chapter 2 focuses on offensive language, positioned at the midpoint in the spectrum discussed in the first chapter. We situate offence and the acts of causing and taking offence in the theory of (im)politeness. The chapter reviews the development of (im)politeness theory through three waves and situates the current book within this theoretical progression. In this chapter, building on the previous literature, we also propose a model of offence which distinguishes between legal and moral (interactional) transgressions. To discuss the legal side, we focus on UK law, examining the challenges surrounding the concept of grossly offensive through a discussion of several high-profile cases. We also focus on moral-order transgressions which occur when interactional norms are breached. The chapter also argues that taking offence, whether face-to-face or online, could be a strategic social action used to, among other things, assert boundaries or influence social norms. As we argue, online offence may function as a tool for collective action, for raising awareness and for promoting social change.

Research findings in linguistics have contributed to the development of the field of second language acquisition since its inception. However, it is only relatively recently that an interactional linguistics approach, conceptualizing language as a co-constructed semiotic resource and emergent phenomenon, has been utilized for research in the field. Our chapter introduces a rigorous method for the analysis of dialogic interaction (often spoken language data), called Conversation Analysis (CA), originally developed in the field of sociology. We discuss CA’s origins, core principles, and natural fit as a method for linguistic analysis. The chapter then surveys research that has used CA methods for understanding SLA including how CA methods played a role in reconceptualizing what it means to be competent in a language. Lastly, we present a short summary of one research study using CA methods, and two activities grounded in CA principles that language teachers might consider adding to their repertoire.

This chapter explores the role of law in organizational interaction. In contrast with recent work on international institutional law that seeks to overcome functionalism and make legal sense of interaction, this chapter argues that interaction among international organizations is a legally constituted phenomenon, in two specific senses. First, law constitutes the space of the interaction (that is, the ‘organizational ecosystem’). Second, law provides the background norms for organizational autonomy and the vocabulary for the decoupling of the organization’s practice and its formal goals. Such a decoupling through institutional law allows international organizations to flexibly interact with each other and adapt to external pressures. Thus, in its dual role, international law provides the building blocks of interaction, playing a crucial role before the need to ‘regulate’ interaction even appears.

We define the category of polynomial functors by introducing its morphisms, called dependent lenses or lenses for short, and we show how they model interaction protocols. We introduce several methods for working with these lenses, including visual tools such as corolla forests and polybox pictures. We explain how these lenses represent bidirectional communication between polynomials and describe how they compose. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a comprehensive understanding of how polynomial functors and their morphisms can be used to model complex interactive behaviors.