Wittgenstein's notion of language game discussed in the last chapter points to something that is usually neglected in those studies that look at individual speech acts: talk is exchanged, it involves the alternation between different speakers. People do not just produce questions, answers, commands, promises, apologies. They jointly construct and participate in exchanges which comprise different parts and each part acquires its meaning from its location in a sequence of acts.

Take greetings, for example. We can provide a list of expressions people use in greetings. For instance, in English, people use expressions like hello, hi, how are you, see you later, have a nice day, good-bye. But to really understand how these words work, they need to be seen as part of larger units, often a sequence of two turns produced by two different speakers. In other words, they are organized in pairs. A person says something and someone else says something back. What the first party says both conditions and creates an expectation for what the second party will say. More generally, the most common type of speech in everyday life does not consist of individual words, or sentences, or long monologues, but of sequences of relatively short utterances produced by different speakers who are particularly attuned to when to speak and particularly careful at fitting what they have to say with what has just been said.