Review article Communication breakdown q Paul Cobley Communications, Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London EC3N 2EY, UK Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection Ruth Finnegan; Routledge, London, 2002, xvii+306 pages, ISBN 0 415 24118 9 The pivotal passage in Ruth Finnegan’s Communicating appears some way to- wards the end of the book when she writes of one aspect of her experience of fieldwork: When I worked in Limba villages in the 1960s (Finnegan 1967) I began, as many did then, by assuming that the essential reality of the stories lay in their verbal make-up; transcribing them into linear written text was thus ultimately the way to capture and study them. I only gradually be- came aware how much else was going on besides the delivery of word. Sound was, certainly, one channel. Audition was in one sense fundamen- tal, for story-telling usually happened in the dark of the evening. The sound floated through the village and attracted people to join the throng crowding outside the veranda of a hut, often the chief’s since that was the largest and best-lit. But this was not a ‘‘one-line’’ style of delivery depen- dent on one speaker alone. The sounds made by the leading narrator were partly shared, overlappingly, with his or her main supporter (the ‘‘repli- er’’) who provided auditory echoes of a small selection of the utterances, paralinguistic sounds indicating attention and respect, and extra com- ments at moments of high drama (‘‘...and all the time he didn’t know she was planning to kill him...’’). Other participants joined in the sonic occasion from time to time through murmured agreement or appreciation, q doi of original article: 10.1016/j.langcom.2003.09.01; doi to introduction: 10.1016/j.langcom. 2004.04.002. E-mail address: p.cobley@londonmet.ac.uk (P. Cobley). 0271-5309/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2004.04.001 www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom Language & Communication 24 (2004) 277–289 LANGUAGE & COMMUNICATION