Description:This volume has its origins in a panel entitled "Telephone Calls: Unity and Diversity in Conversational Structure Across Languages and Cultures" organized by the editors for the 6th International Pragmatics Conference in Reims in July 1998. Work was done in Chinese, Dutch, Ecuadorian Spanish, Egytian Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Japanese and Persian. While all the papers were inspired by Sacks and Schegloff's work, they did not all share the same assumptions or use the same methodology.