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The four articles in this special theme issue demonstrate several important general points: that communication practice is finely and systematically structured; that structures in communication serve to identify people as members of some social categories rather than others; that movement among these categories is immanent in the movement of communication practices and structures; that relations among people are negotiated through such structuring of communication and identities; and that these patterns of practice are active in socially occasioned ways, from clinical scenes of interaction to the scenes of routine everyday life. The specific studies presented in this special theme issue explore in focused ways how communication practices are formative sites of identity work. For example, the article by Wilkinson, Gower, Beeke, and Maxim poses the questions: How do people construct turns in conversation? Do variations in the ways turns are constructed identify people at di¤ering stages of recovery? Their analyses explore various discursive practices that go into the construction of a turn-attalk, such as a search for proper wording, repairing errors, extensions to turns-in-progress, and the like. Their analyses demonstrate how variations in these practices of turn construction do indeed occur at di¤erent stages of recovery, and thus provide verbal markers of patients as more or less impaired. In other words, their study shows how communication practices such as word searches, repairs, and extensions are used to identify patients as types of people, from mild to severely impaired. I will elaborate a bit on these general points by drawing attention to each article. I will structure my remarks through six principles that are active within and across these studies. By formulating these principles, I hope to make explicit some of the connections between communication and identity generally, while focusing on those in ‘illness discourse’ in particular.1 Let us start with a first, basic principle:

Commentary. Six basic principles in the communication of social identities: The special case of discourses and illness