The social situation that is built into human language includes only the communicating parties themselves, the reciprocal relations between them, and their mutual relations to an open-ended range of other possible objects to which they may attend. A related difference between language and other animal communication systems is that language allows for interaction which is much more fully dialogical. As pointed out by Benveniste, a related difference between human language and bee communication lies in the potential of language for relayed transmission of messages. This chapter describes a number of features of language and human social relations in abstract terms. It identifies a set of features which are common to all languages and which build into them a primordial social situation. The chapter exemplifies the way in which those features are used in discursive interaction, and the difference they make for triadic interaction when speech is involved.