Most previous research on communicative remembering has focused on memory tasks in which participants collaborate in constructing a joint version of some past event. In contrast, research on spontaneous acts of remembering in the context of other activities not focused on creating versions of the past has been neglected. A theory-based system conceptualizing communicative remembering as a form of collaborative action is presented for identifying individual and collective acts of remembering. Individual acts of remembering are called memory utterances. A distinction is made between explicit and implicit memory utterances. Explicit memory utterances are references to past events. Implicit memory utterances are utterances in which the past is used without being the object of reference. Collective acts of remembering (collective memory processes) encompass memory utterances and other pragmatically related utterances (eliciting questions, comments, acknowledgments, etc.). Excerpts from a corpus of task-related communication are presented to illustrate these phenomena. Issues pertaining to coding are discussed in detail, and descriptive data illustrating the instrumental nature of acts of remembering in this corpus are presented.